Agreement in Gujarati

This thesis is concerned with the analysis of agreement morphology in Gujarati, an Indo-Aryan language, spoken primarily in the state of Gujarat located on the west coast of India, where it is also the language of the state. The orientation of this analysis is typological, now often called “Basic Linguistic Theory” (Dixon 1997). First, it identifies three agreement features in the language: gender, number and person and describes how those features are organized. Then, it describes the nature of agreement controllers in relation to simple words, compound words and coordinate phrases. After distinguishing among endocentric, coordinative and exocentric compound nouns, it argues that only endocentric and coordinative compounds participate as agreement controller. Within coordinative compounds also it makes a distinction between distributive and aggregative coordinate compounds and shows how they participate in agreement. While analyzing coordinate phrases and their behavior in agreement morphology, this thesis shows how such controllers compute agreement features and how that computation control agreement on the targets. The thesis also discusses how disjunctive phrases act as controllers and how they behave in agreement. Further, the thesis discusses the nature of agreement targets in relation to simple words, compound words and coordinate phrases. It argues that from the three types of compound words, only exocentric, which lacks head, act as targets. Additionally, it also analyzes the way coordinate phrases participate in agreement. Here, it focuses also on compound words. Agreement controllers and targets are also shared across various phrases. This thesis describes them in detail. The thesis also focuses on the analysis two agreement domains: NP-internal and verbal agreement. Consider the role of pragmatics in agreement, the thesis also analysis how pragmatics influences agreement. Here it concentrates on deictic expressions, various expressive forms and the words used in metaphorical sense. Finally, it contrasts the properties of agreement morphology of the language with the canonical properties of agreement established by Corbett (2001) and argues that agreement in Gujarati is canonical