The morphosyntax of allocutive agreement in Tamil

In this paper I examine allocutive agreement in Tamil, a phenomenon in which an agreement suffix attached to the verb or other clause-final element indexes fea- tures not of any argument, but of the addressee of the speech act. I report in detail on the morphophonology, syntactic distribution and discourse use of this agree- ment, supplementing the basic facts reported by Amritavalli (1991) with several ad- ditional crucial details, and compare the Tamil data with what has been reported for other languages, especially Basque and Japanese. I then discuss the consequences of Tamil allocutive agreement for the theoretical treatment of how discourse infor- mation interacts with the morphosyntax, leading to a preliminary analysis of the patterns I find. The Tamil data presented in the paper provide interesting insights into the structural representation of the addressee and into how allocutive agree- ment is derived, in particular from how the relevant suffix is ordered relative to other verbal material