Invisible inanimates and the syntax of pronominal prefixes in Northern Iroquoian

Northern Iroquoian languages are famous for the complexities of their agreement systems, realized through three sets of ‘pronominal prefixes’. Drawing on new and existing material from Kanien’kéha (Mohawk), this article proposes a formal model that captures the range of empirical patterns using standard assumptions about argument structure and agreement, combined with the proposal that inanimate nominals have no person, number, or gender (φ) features and are thus invisible to the agreement system. This result is important in light of the fact that Kanien’kéha and its close relative Oneida have been the subject of proposals for major parametric variation among human languages. In The polysynthesis parameter , Baker (1996) draws primarily on Kanien’kéha, arguing that a macroparameter relating to the realization of agreement morphology is responsible for a range of morphosyntactic phenomena in Kanien’kéha and other polysynthetic languages. Koenig and Michelson (2015) examine agreement puzzles in Oneida and argue for a different type of macroparameter: that Northern Iroquoian languages differ from other languages in lacking a level of argument structure and local syntactic selection altogether. In this article, I argue that the core empirical patterns can be captured through the proposal that inanimate nominals are featureless, and that reference to hierarchical structure is necessary to capture the full range of facts. The absence of φ-features on inanimates in turn has implications both for the typology of nominal features and for the Polysynthesis Parameter, a parameter that requires all arguments in polysynthetic languages to be morphologically referenced on the verb.