Agreement and syncretism in Esahie

This paper investigates the inflectional system of the nominal domain in Esahie (Central-Tano, Kwa, Niger-Congo) by focusing on agreement and syncretism. It offers a comprehensive description of these inflectional phenomena in an attempt to test and account for the strength of the inflectional system of an otherwise underdescribed language. It shows among other things that morpho-syntactic features including number, person, animacy, and case, all enter the Esahie agreement system in various contexts. Adopting Corbett’s (2006) criteria for canonicity of agreement, this work demonstrates that, in Esahie, DP-internal agreement is more canonical than anaphora agreement. A general paucity of inflection marking is argued to account for the several instances of syncretism in Esahie. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that syncretism is pervasive in the pronominal system of Esahie. Collected largely through elicitation from native speakers, the Esahie data discussed in this work provides empirical support for the irreducibility hypothesis proposed by Stump (2016). Hence, on the theoretical level, this work argues for adopting a paradigm-based approach to inflectional morphology over a morpheme-based approach to inflectional morphology.