Singular tum is not plural: a Distributed Morphology analysis of Hindi verb agreement

Abstract

Hindi has a three-way honorificity contrast in the second person: low tuu vs. mid tum vs. honorific aap, and a two-way contrast between non-honorific and honorific DPs in the third person. Honorific DPs are said to be formally plural as they always trigger plural agreement, regardless of semantic number. In this context, I consider the formal number features associated with the non-honorific pronoun tum. Prior work has claimed that like honorific DPs, tum always bears formal plural features. This is motivated by the fact that in many cases, tum takes apparent plural morphology, regardless of semantic number. However, Bhatt & Keine (2018) note a puzzling exception to this generalization: tum takes the feminine singular affix -ii when semantically singular, and the feminine plural affix -i?i? when semantically plural. I account for this puzzle by assuming that only DPs that are honorific or semantically plural bear the formal plural feature. Since tum is not honorific, it does not bear this feature when it is semantically singular. I show that apparent plural morphology associated with tum can be accounted for if we assume this morphology is actually underspecified for number. The analysis is couched within a Distributed Morphology framework.