Title

<kunio@hawaii.edu>

 Ibaraki University

Case-Sensitive Agreement on Conjunction in Lamaholot

Lamaholot (Eastern Indonesia) is quite rich in agreement. In addition to verbs and adjectives, agreement is observed on adverbs, numerals, a preposition, and even on the conjunction ('and'). Adverbial agreement is typologically uncommon but is observed sporadically. Agreement on numerals and prepositions is extremely rare, and to my knowledge no language in the world is reported to have agreement on conjunction. What makes this conjunctive agreement more intriguing is that it shows subject/ object asymmetry: agreement is obligatory in subjects but is optional in objects. After eliminating the relevance of grammatical relations and topicality, I argue that the agreement asymmetry is due to the markedness of Case: Accusative is more marked than Nominative. This analysis is motivated by the behavior of Genitive, which is overtly marked and behaves like Accusative in terms of agreement. The analysis supports a recently advanced hypothesis that there is a close connection between Case and agreement. It also extends Harley and Ritter's (2002) feature geometry for pronouns to the effect that Case feature dominates phi-features.