Portmanteau Honorificity Agreement in Maithili

Abstract

The Darbhanga dialect of Maithili shows multiple agreement that results in a portmanteau morpheme. However, multiple agreement is also restricted by two factors –1st person and 3rd person non-honorific objects fail to trigger agreement on the verb. Object agreement is also not allowed in the presence of allocutive agreement. This paper accounts for these facts by proposing that honorificity agreement is a result of the operator-variable binding by the context (c) head in the left periphery. Honorificity licensing also interacts with honorificity-based differential object agreement. Additionally, the c head can encode the honorificity values of only two elements at any given point in time.