This article analyzes addressee agreement (allocutive agreement) in Magahi, an Eastern Indo‐Aryan language. Magahi finite verbs encode the honorificity (social status) of the addressee, in addition to encoding the person and honorificity of the subject. Magahi addressee agreement is special in two respects. First, it is associated with finiteness: it is available in all finite clauses, main and embedded. Second, addressee agreement and subject honorification combine features for spellout, indicating that heads involved in both phenomena are syntactically adjacent. I claim that the covert syntactically expressed representation of the addressee, which undergoes addressee agreement, is relatively low in the clause structure: it is a coordinate of FinP, the layer just above TP. I further propose that the functional head associated with Magahi addressee agreement is the Fin head. The proposal diverges from previous analyses, in which the locus of addressee agreement is the highest projection of a clause (Speech Act Phrase or Context Phrase), found primarily in root clauses. This study implies that the addressee is syntactically present in every finite clause. Crosslinguistic differences (e.g., root–embedded asymmetries) depend on what syntactic category acts as a probe in a language.

The Magahi language is rich in honorification morphology: it has three versions of ‘you’ (nonhonorific, honorific, and high honorific) and makes honorific distinctions for third person nominals as well as second person nominals. This work uses these empirical riches to develop a formal syntactic theory of honorific marking. It argues that Magahi’s honorific distinctions can be decomposed into two binary features, [+/–HON] and [+/–HIGH]. These features are specified on an Hon head that is part of the extended projection of any nominal phrase in Magahi; from there they can be copied onto verbal functional heads by Agree. It goes on to argue that Hon heads in Magahi bear a first person designated index that specifies the individual with respect to which the social standing of the person referred to by the nominal inside HonP is evaluated. This first person index is used to account for the intricate ways in which honorific marking interacts with indexical shift in Magahi.

This paper enumerates SigTyP 2020 Shared Task on the prediction of typological features as performed by the KMI-Panlingua-IITKGP team. The task entailed the prediction of missing values in a particular language, provided, the name of the language family, its genus, location (in terms of latitude and longitude coordinates and name of the country where it is spoken) and a set of feature-value pair are available. As part of fulfillment of the aforementioned task, the team submitted 3 kinds of system -2 rule-based and one hybrid system. Of these 3, one rule-based system generated the best performance on the test set. All the systems were 'constrained' in the sense that no additional dataset or information, other than those provided by the organisers, was used for developing the systems.

In this paper, we give a description of one of the varieties of Eastern Hindi spoken in thecentral, Magahi-speaking parts of Bihar (the variety spoken in and around the capital city ofPatna) and present the case for it being a mixed language. Based on extensive empiricalevidence, we conclude that Eastern Hindi is a conventionalised/plain mixed language(following the classification given in Bakkar (2000) and Matras and Bakker(2003)) which hascome into being because of contact between the official Hindi and Magahi spoken in theregion.

No abstract