Object agreement and grammatical functions: A re-evaluation

• Main Author: Smith, Peter W.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Language Science Press 2019
• Subjects: khanty
• Online Access: https://zenodo.org/record/3541749; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3541749

This paper discusses object agreement in the Uralic language Khanty (also known as Ostyak). The availability of object agreement in this language has been linked (Dalrymple & Nikolaeva 2011) to the grammatical function that the object bears, an analysis that if correct, would provide a strong argument in favour of the presence of grammatical functions in Universal Grammar. I provide a critical re-evaluation of the object agreement data, and show that they can be equally handled in a con- figurational account. This paper has further consequences for what constitutes a spell-out domain. Following Baker (2015) I argue that differential object marking properties can come about due to the position of the object and what counts as a spell-out domain in that language, which is determined by the strength of the lower phase head v.