The pragmatic principles of agreement in Bajjika verbs

This article describes verb-agreement in Bajjika, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language, and explains the pragmatic principles that determine the agreement. Bajjika has one of the most complex and indeed uncommon agreement patterns in Indo-Aryan languages. The entities encoded in the verb are person, honorific degree, spatial distance, and gender, not all equally encoded. The verb allows nominative as well as non-nominative (double) participants and non-participants to be simultaneously encoded in the paradigm. The double agreements pose severe analytical constraints as the agreement is unusually sensitive to social factors. The agreement consistently interacts with the social hierarchy that forms the foundation of the speech community. Besides, the absence of uniformity in marking person poses constraints on the predictability of agreement and its subsequent interpretation. In the process of describing Bajjika verb-agreement and the underlying principles, this study examines the relevance of Bickel et al.’s (1999) proposal for interpreting the agreement paradigms, thus providing fresh data to empirically and conceptually further understand verb-agreement and the extent to which this phenomenon can be tied to factors relevant to tenor relation. The study concludes that while face is useful in explaining Bajjika agreement paradigms, the scale of empathy proposed by Bickel et al. is irrelevant to account for data from Bajjika.

► The paper studies verb-agreement in Bajjika. ► This is the first detailed description of the paradigms of Bajjika verb-agreement and their social implications. ► It is shown that Bajjika has very complex and rather uncommon patterns of verb-agreement. ► Bajjika allows to encode in its verb multiple participants and non-participants. ► The principles underlying the verb-agreement are social factors.