The Development of Dative Agreement in Berber: Beyond Nominal Hierarchies

International audienceDiachronically, agreement commonly emerges from clitic doubling, which in turn derives from topic shift constructions (Givon 1976) – a grammaticalisation pathway termed the Agreement Cycle. For accusatives, at the intermediate stages of this development, doubling constitutes a form of Differential Object Marking, and passes towards agreement as the conditions for its use are relaxed to cover larger sections of the Definiteness and Animacy Scales. Berber shows widespread dative doubling with substantial variation across languages in the conditioning factors, which in one case has developed into inflectional dative agreement. Examination of a corpus covering 18 Berber varieties suggests that low Definiteness/Animacy datives are less likely to be doubled. However, since most datives are both definite and animate, these factors account for very little of the observed variation. Much more can be accounted for by an unexpected factor: the choice of verb. “Say” consistently shows much higher frequencies of doubling, usually nearly 100%. This observation can be explained on the hypothesis that doubling derives from afterthoughts, not from topic dislocation