Subject-Object Concord in Coahuilteco

Abstract

clausal arguments, show person agreement with the subject NP of their clause. Coahuilteco is typologically SOV, with modifiers and determiners/relators following the noun in that order. Subject concord is marked by personal suffixes on the determiner/relator, or alternatively by person-marked particles or auxiliaries. The system serves to bracket constructions and permit tracking of subject scope (or verb dependency relations), fulfilling some of the same functions as switch-reference. An unusual and possibly unique syntactic feature found in Coahuilteco, an extinct Indian language of southern Texas,' is the marking of OBJECT NOUN PHRASES (and other oblique NP's) for agreement with SUBJECT NOUN PHRASES of sentences. In a recent survey of agreement phenomena in the languages of the world, Moravcsik (1978:363) listed fourteen pairs of constituents between which agreement might obtain, none of which was subject and object. The scope of agreement which a noun imposes on other constituents of the sentence ordinarily does not extend beyond the phrase of which it is the head, the verb with which it is associated, or certain nominal or adjectival predicatives (the only exceptions to this limitation of scope being anaphoric pronominalization, reflexivization, and deletion of identical NP arguments within the same clause or conjoined or subordinated clauses). So far as is known, then, the formal marking of subject agreement on object NP's has not been previously reported. Coahuilteco first gained prominence in American Indian linguistics when Sapir 1920, building on Swanton 1915 and on Dixon & Kroeber 1919, linked it (and other languages of southern Texas) with the Hokan languages of California in a Hokan-Coahuiltecan grouping, which Sapir subsequently (1929) made part of his Hokan-Siouan phylum. The latter is no longer generally accepted as a valid grouping by linguists, and the Hokan-Coahuiltecan grouping must be considered questionable (see Bright 1956 for an early critique). The unity of the respective components themselves has even been questioned; and Coahuilteco is now considered an isolate (Goddard 1979), making it one of the few low-level groupings of American Indian languages which has been revised since Powell 1891.