Linguistics Colloquium: "What the Ende verb agrees with"

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We will be joined by Kate Lindsey, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Boston University, with her talk "What the Ende verb agrees with: distributed exponence, animacy, and verbal number in a Papuan language"

In Ende (Pahoturi River; Western Province, Papua New Guinea), four separate pieces of a single verb orient to objects: a tense prefix, an object prefix, the verb stem, and a pluractional suffix. In ordinary transitive clauses, all four converge on the same argument and accord with one another. However, ditransitives provide some interesting contrasts. Two of the four track an animacy hierarchy and switch from the recipient to the theme when the theme outranks it; the other two track number instead (one is sensitive to duals, the other to plurals). The result is a verb in which one exponent agrees with the theme while another, in the same word, agrees with the recipient, and in which all three of Dryer's ditransitive alignment types surface within a single paradigm. In my talk, I will show how I documented the Ende verb using narrative elicitation and a staged video stimulus set, and explain how Ende verbs agree.