Person[abs]: person agreement with the absolutive argument
Person[abs]
Finite verbs in many Indo-European languages agree in person and number with their subject.
In Basque (a polypersonal language), certain verbs overtly mark agreement with up to three arguments: one in the absolutive case, one in ergative and one in dative. Thus in dakarkiogu “we bring it to him/her”, akar is the stem (ekarri = “bring”), d stands for “it” (absolutive argument is the direct object of transitive verbs), ki stands for the dative case, o stands for “he” and gu stands for “we” (ergative argument is the subject of transitive verbs).
Person[abs]is the person of the absolutive argument of the verb. The corresponding feature in Interset 2.041 is calledabsperson.Person[erg]is the person of the ergative argument of the verb. The corresponding feature in Interset 2.041 is calledergperson.Person[dat]is the person of the dative argument of the verb. The corresponding feature in Interset 2.041 is calleddatperson.
One may want to use just Person instead of Person[abs].
However, there are two issues with that (at least in Basque).
First, the absolutive argument is not always the subject. For transitive verbs, it is the object, so the parallelism with nominative-accusative languages would be weak anyway.
Second, we cannot avoid Number[abs] (both Number and Number[abs] can occur at one word)
and thus we keep Person[abs] to demonstrate that it is the same layer of agreement for both the features.
1: first person absolutive argument
Examples: [eu] dakarkiogu Person[erg]=1
2: second person absolutive argument
Examples: [eu] dakarkiozu Person[erg]=2
3: third person absolutive argument
Examples: [eu] dakarkiogu Person[abs]=3|Person[dat]=3