Information structure conditions on the agreement controller in Dargwa

Much of the current debate on the syntax of Dargwa is centered around the problem of gender agreement on auxiliaries. This type of agreement is exceptional in that it is not exclusively controlled by the absolutive argument, but can be alternatively controlled by either subject or object in transitive clauses (like person agreement). In this paper, I investigate discourse conditions on the choice of agreement controller in Kubachi Dargwa, and provide some new data from Ashti Dargwa that clarify the status of the agreement controller. I show that while the hypothesis that the controller of gender agreement is topical is generally correct in the case of agent agreement, it does not apply to patient agreement, where the topicality of both core arguments is roughly equal. On the syntactic side, agreement with the patient seems to promote it to syntactic pivot status. This suggests an analysis along the lines of Falk (2006), treating Dargwa as a language where core arguments can receive pivot status independently of their grammatical function.