The morphosyntax of imperative agreement in Amharic

Abstract

Discontinuous agreement has been the focus of considerable research, especially within the Afroasiatic language family. However, most previous work has focused on how discontinuous agreement is generated and has relied on data from verbs with relatively basic tense, aspect and mood. In this paper, I investigate a different kind of discontinuous agreement puzzle in an atypical kind of verb, namely, why and how the agreement prefix (but not the agreement suffix) is lacking from imperative verbs in Amharic. I argue that the agreement prefix undergoes morphological haplology because it repeats the second person features found in the imperative head. I then demonstrate how a haplology approach decides between two different analyses of discontinuous agreement: it furnishes evidence against a Linearization analysis (Harbour 2008a, 2016, this issue) and in favor of a Metathesis analysis (Hewett 2022, this issue). Overall, this paper develops a novel approach to imperative inflection, supports a Metathesis approach to discontinuous agreement, and advances our understanding of morphological haplology.