Allocutive agreement


In linguistics, allocutive agreement refers to a morphological feature in which the gender of an addressee is marked overtly in an utterance using fully grammaticalized markers even if the addressee is not referred to in the utterance. The term was first used by Louis Lucien Bonaparte in 1862.

Basque

In Basque, allocutive forms are required in the verb forms of a main clause when the speaker uses the familiar pronoun hi "thou". This is distinct from grammatical gender as it does not involve marking nouns for gender; it is also distinct from gender-specific pronouns, such as English "he/she" or Japanese and . In Basque, allocutive agreement involves the grammatical marking of the gender of the addressee in the verb form itself.
Grammatically this is done by introducing an additional person marker in the verb form :
versus

Beja

Beja, a Cushitic language, has allocutive forms, marking the gender of a masculine addressee with the clitic =a and with =i for feminine addressees: