Hierarchy Effects in Kiranti and Broader Algic

Many grammatical processes reflect prominence hierarchies of morphosyntactic categories, such as 1st 2nd 3rd person or animate inanimate. This project focusses on two espe-cially striking hierarchy effects in polysynthetic multiargument agreement: Direction marking, i.e. affixal marking which indicates whether subject or object of a predicate are higher with respect to a specific hierarchy, and hierarchy-based competition (HBC), where similar hierar-chies determine whether verb agreement is governed by the subject or the object for a specific combination of features. The main goal of the project is to broaden the empirical and theo-retical understanding of these two phenomena by in-depth studies of two language families which show them in many different varieties: Algic and Kiranti. The project focusses on pat-terns which have been largely ignored in the literature and on the morphological details of microvariation in this domain. Following the basic tenets of Optimality Theory, it is assumed that a substantial part of this variation is due to different rankings of constraints which are themselves universal. Microvariation thus promises to provide us with crucial diagnostics for the formal nature of these effects. Since verbal inflectional paradigms are the major empirical basis of the project, a main methodological goal of the project is to develop methods of storin