Fixing LFG to Account for Direct-Inverse Agreement: The Case of Plains Cree

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to explain verbal agreement in Plains Cree (Algonquian), in which verb forms always agree with the most prominent argument with respect to person and other referential features, but adopt either direct or inverse morphology depending on which is the GF of the most prominent. Following Alsina & Vigo (2014), we adopt the AGR(EEMENT) bundle to represent person and other agreement features. We claim that direct agreement is an instance of subject agreement in this person-governed agreement system and that inverse agreement is an instance of object agreement. The complex facts of inflectional verbal morphology in Plains Cree argue for an approach to morphology in which inflectional affixes are the realization of the information found in the word-level f-structure.