The morphosyntax of allocutive agreement in Tamil

In this paper I examine allocutive agreement in Tamil, a phenomenon in which
an agreement suffix attached to the verb or other clause-final element indexes fea-
tures not of any argument, but of the addressee of the speech act. I report in detail
on the morphophonology, syntactic distribution and discourse use of this agree-
ment, supplementing the basic facts reported by Amritavalli (1991) with several ad-
ditional crucial details, and compare the Tamil data with what has been reported for
other languages, especially Basque and Japanese. I then discuss the consequences
of Tamil allocutive agreement for the theoretical treatment of how discourse infor-
mation interacts with the morphosyntax, leading to a preliminary analysis of the
patterns I find. The Tamil data presented in the paper provide interesting insights
into the structural representation of the addressee and into how allocutive agree-
ment is derived, in particular from how the relevant suffix is ordered relative to
other verbal material.