Referential markers and agreement markers in Functional Discourse Grammar

Abstract

It follows from the ordering principles that are applied in Functional Discourse Grammar that the positional possibilities of markers of agreement and those of crossreference are different. Markers of crossreference are predicted to occur closer to the verb stem, while markers of agreement would occupy peripheral positions. This paper tests these predictions using data from a variety of languages, and shows that for these languages the predictions indeed hold true. In demonstrating this, the paper furthermore proposes a new treatment for markers of agreement/crossreference in languages in which these optionally co-occur with a corresponding noun phrase. These markers are on a language-specific basis classified as either Contextual Agreement Markers or as Appositional Referential Markers.