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Concept
Polypersonal agreement
Summary
In linguistics, polypersonal agreement or polypersonalism is the agreement of a verb with more than one of its arguments (usually up to four). Polypersonalism is a morphological feature of a language, and languages that display it are called polypersonal languages.
In non-polypersonal languages, the verb either shows no agreement at all or agrees with the primary argument (in English, the subject). In a language with polypersonal agreement, the verb has agreement morphemes that may indicate (as applicable) the subject, the direct object, the indirect or secondary object, the beneficiary of the verb action, etc. This polypersonal marking may be compulsory or optional (the latter meaning that some agreement morphemes can be elided if the full argument is expressed).
Polysynthesis often includes polypersonalism, which in turn is a form of head-marking. Polypersonalism has also been correlated with ergativity.
Examples of languages with polypersonal agreement are the Bantu languages, Basque, Georgian, Hadza, Magahi, to a lesser extent Hungarian (see definite conjugation), as well as most polysynthetic languages, like Mohawk, Inuktitut and many other Native American and Australian languages.
In Georgian, the verb consists of a root and several optional affixes. The subject and object markers might appear as suffixes or prefixes, according to the verb class, the person and number, the tense and aspect of the verb, etc.; they also interact with each other phonologically. The polypersonal verbal system of Georgian allows the verb compound to convey the meanings of subject, direct object, indirect object, genitive, locative and causative meanings. As examples of the extremely complicated Georgian verb morphology, these are some simple polypersonal verbs (hyphens indicate morpheme boundaries):
ვხედავ v-khed-av 'I see him'
გმალავენ g-mal-av-en 'they hide you (sing. or pl.)'
გიმალავენ g-i-mal-av-en 'they hide it from you (sing. or pl.
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