Familiar Definite Marking in Magahi

Abstract

This paper investigates the nominal suffix -waa in Magahi, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language. Existing accounts of -waa vary from analyzing it semantically in terms of familiarity and non-honorificity (Alok 2022), diminutivity (Atreya & Sinha 2020), or definiteness (Kumar 2020) and syntactically in terms of whether it projects a head in the nominal spine (Kumar 2020) or not (Alok 2012, 2022). I argue that -waa is a familiar definite marker, similar to the German strong article (Schwarz 2009) and Akan familiar article (Arkoh & Matthewson 2013), with additional presuppositions of non-uniqueness (Owusu 2022) and non-honorificity. Additionally, I argue that -waa can either be generated as the definite allomorph of the general classifier (Kumar 2020) and undergo CLF to D movement, or be be base generated in D (Simpson 2005).