Maung verbal agreement revisited: A response to Donohue (1998)*

Abstract

Donohue's (1998) recent unarticle developed an Optimality Theory analysis of the verb prefix ordering of the general tense form of Maung, a non‐Pama Nyungan language of northern Australia. However, that analysis, with constraints based on grammatical relations and alignment categories, required one of the prefixes to be considered as an exception; it was treated as an absolutive prefix despite being formally and functionally an accusative prefix. An alternative Optimality Theory analysis, based on syntactic function and person, is developed which avoids the necessity of treating any form as exceptional. Donohue's (1998) analysis also oversimplified the Maung data, claiming that the complications arose from morphophonemic rules. In fact, some of the prefix forms cannot be developed in Donohue's analysis via morphophonemic rules, regardless of how complex these rules are. However, an analysis of these forms is possible, using ideas from Correspondence Theory. In particular, the tools available within this theory make it possible to explain the phenomenon of ‘floating number’ in Maung, where a verb takes, for example, a first person plural prefix, even though the argument in question is notionally first person singular.