BURUSHASKI
SUMMARY
In Burushaski, possessors of direct objects and (some) intransitive subjects, i.e. absolutive arguments, can control the agreement prefix on the predicate which otherwise cross-references the host of the possessor. The possibility of agreement is restricted by grammatical function (or case), and according to Willson (1996) by lexical items as well. Agreement can be in person, number, and gender.
In addition, a part-whole relation between the subject of a syntactically subordinate non-finite clause and the superordinate subject can license the use of a same-subject (SS) converb that is otherwise restricted to contexts in which the two subjects are coreferential.
LANGUAGE PROFILE
EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF PIPS
- When expressed as an NP, prominent possessors appear to occupy the same syntactic position as other possessors within the NP.
- Such prominent possessors have oblique/genitive case-marking independently of the possessed noun's grammatical function, indicating dependency within the noun phrase.
- Prominent possessor may also be expressed by possessive morphology on the possessed noun alone, and in such cases the expression of the possessor is internal to the same phrase as the possessed.
KEY SOURCES
Anderson, Gregory D. S. and Randall Eggert. 2001. A typology of verb agreement in Burushaski, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 24(2): 235-254.
Tikkanen, Bertil. 1995. Burushaski converbs in their areal context, in Martin Haspelmath & Ekkehart König (eds), Converbs in cross-linguistic perspective, 487-528. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Willson, Stephen R. 1996. Verb agreement and case marking in Burushaski, Working Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics 40: 1-71.
