Jorge ROSES LABRADA: "Extended subject agreement on the Piaroa verb and its origin"
Animate subjects are usually cross-referenced on the Piaroa verb by means of a set of word-final suffixes. In future verb forms, however, subjects are additionally cross-referenced using either a set of prefixes or a set of inner suffixes that immediately follow the root. This realization of subject marking by more than one morpheme constitutes an example of extended--in the sense of Matthews (1972)--agreement, a phenomenon that is cross-linguistically rare. In this talk, I attempt to show how this pattern of extended subject agreement results from a diachronic change whereby a non-verbal predication construction entered the verbal predication domain and came to replace the inherited subject marking strategy (i.e., two sets of affixes, one set prefixal, the other suffixal) in all tenses except for the future.