Studies on Agreement

295 Pages·2006·1.39 MB·English

by  João Costa

<DOCINFOAUTHOR""TITLE"StudiesonAgreement"SUBJECT"LinguistikAktuell/LinguisticsToday,Volume86"KEYWORDS""SIZEHEIGHT"240"WIDTH"160"VOFFSET"4">
StudiesonAgreement
LinguistikAktuell/LinguisticsToday
LinguistikAktuell/LinguisticsToday(LA)providesaplatformfororiginalmonographstudies
intosynchronicanddiachroniclinguistics.StudiesinLAconfrontempiricalandtheoretical
problemsasthesearecurrentlydiscussedinsyntax,semantics,morphology,phonology,and
systematicpragmaticswiththeaimtoestablishrobustempiricalgeneralizationswithina
universalisticperspective.
SeriesEditors
WernerAbraham EllyvanGelderen
UniversityofVienna ArizonaStateUniversity
AdvisoryEditorialBoard
CedricBoeckx IanRoberts
HarvardUniversity CambridgeUniversity
GuglielmoCinque KenSafir
UniversityofVenice RutgersUniversity,NewBrunswickNJ
GüntherGrewendorf LisadeMenaTravis
J.W.Goethe-University,Frankfurt McGillUniversity
LilianeHaegeman StenVikner
UniversityofLille,France UniversityofAarhus
HubertHaider C.Jan-WouterZwart
UniversityofSalzburg UniversityofGroningen
ChristerPlatzack
UniversityofLund
Volume86
StudiesonAgreement
EditedbyJoãoCostaandMariaCristinaFigueiredoSilva
Studies on Agreement
Editedby
João Costa
Maria Cristina Figueiredo Silva
FCSH-UniversidadeNovadeLisboa
JohnBenjaminsPublishingCompany
Amsterdam(cid:1)/(cid:1)Philadelphia
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LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
StudiesonAgreement /editedbyJoãoCostaandMariaCristinaFigueiredo
Silva.
p. cm.(LinguistikAktuell/LinguisticsToday,issn0166–0829;v.86)
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindexes.
1.Grammar,Comparativeandgeneral--Agreement.I.Costa,João,
1972-II.Silva,MariaCristinaFigueiredo,1961-III.Linguistikaktuell;Bd.
86.
P299.A35S78 2006
415--dc22 2005054716
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©2006–JohnBenjaminsB.V.
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JB[v.20020404] Prn:28/02/2006;15:04 F:LA86CO.tex / p.1(46-94)
Table of contents
Introduction 1
JoãoCostaandMariaCristinaFigueiredoSilva
CapeverdeanDP-internalnumberagreement:Additionalarguments
foradistributedmorphologyapproach 11
AnaCastroandFernandaPratas
NominalandverbalagreementinPortuguese:Anargumentfor
DistributedMorphology 25
JoãoCostaandMariaCristinaFigueiredoSilva
Prolepticagreementasagooddesignproperty 47
NorbertCorver
Anti-agreement:Featuresandlocality 75
AnikoCsirmaz
TheacquisitionofthestandardEPPinDutchandFrench 99
JacquelinevanKampen
Anewviewonfirstconjunctagreement:EvidencefromDutchdialects 121
MarjovanKoppen
Agreement:The(uniqueandlocal)syntacticandmorphological
licenserofsubjectCase 141
JaklinKornfilt
Probes:LackofagreementinRomance 173
GuidoMenschingandEva-MariaRemberger
Syntacticagreementacrosslanguagemodalities:AmericanSignLanguage 203
CarolNeidleandRobertG.Lee
Ontherelationof[gender]Agreement:EvidencefromFriulian 223
SandraPaoli
JB[v.20020404] Prn:28/02/2006;15:04 F:LA86CO.tex / p.2(94-102)
 Tableofcontents
The(dis)associationofTense,phi-featuresEPPandnominative
Case:CasestudiesfromRomanceandGreek 243
IoannaSitaridou
Head-LevelandChain-Levelconstraintsonspellout 261
JochenTrommer
Index 283
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Introduction
JoãoCostaandMariaCristinaFigueiredoSilva
. Thestatusofagreement
Everyoneapproachingsyntaxlearnsthattherecanbemanifestationsofagree-
mentbetweendifferentsyntacticelementsinagivenlanguage.Typically,verbs
agreewithoneormoreoftheirarguments(seeBéjar2003forareviewofagree-
mentpatterns,andSigurðsson2004foradiscussionofagreementpatternsin
Germanic).Justtoobserveasimplemanifestationofagreement,considerthe
Englishsentencein(1):
(1) John{loves/*love}Mary.
Theverbin(1)mustbearthe3rdpersonsingularending,becauseofthepres-
enceofthe3rdpersonsingularsubject.Thisillustratesoneofthemostsalient
propertiesofagreement:itisaredundantfeatureinthelanguages,sinceitre-
peatsinformationexpressedinsomeothercategory,notcontributingthusfor
the interpretation of the sentence. Its existence, therefore, is not justified by
semantics;itisjustaformaldevice.
Agreementis, par excellence, an interface phenomenon,since it isa mor-
phological manifestation of a syntactic relation. For this reason, it becomes
legitimate to ask how much of the agreement relations must be established
in syntax proper, and how much has to be seen just as a morphological re-
flex of a syntactic relation, for which syntax proper has no significant ex-
planationtooffer.
Throughoutthisintroduction,we aimatprovidingthereaderwithsome
backgroundonthetheoreticalstatusofagreementintherecentsyntacticliter-
ature,andtodiscusssomeoftheopenissuestobedealtwith.
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 JoãoCostaandMariaCristinaFigueiredoSilva
. Thetheoreticalstatusofagreement
Thereisavastamountofliteratureonagreement.1 Wewouldliketoempha-
size two major theoretical trends on the analysis of agreement that emerged
during the last decade: agreement as the overt manifestation of a functional
head(startingwithPollock’s1989work)andagreementasanindirectreflexof
alocalsyntacticrelation(Chomsky2001).
. Agreementandfunctionalheads
Awell-knowncorrelatebetweenmorphologyandsyntaxisthatlanguageswith
richmorphology2haveovertV-to-Imovement,displayingV-Adv-Oorders,as
illustratedin(2)forFrench:
(2) Jean embrasse souvent Marie.
Jean kisses often Marie
‘JeanoftenkissesMary’
This correlation between morphology and syntactic movement makes some
sense,assumingthatthetargetofmovementistheIhead,arguablythelocusof
informationconcerninginflectionalfeatures.Thereishoweverlessconsensus
as to what the precise content of I is: is this a head containing abstract fea-
tures or are the tense and agreement morphemes generated in this position,
affixationbeingestablishedthroughsyntacticmovement?Thisisanimportant
questionfortheanalysisofagreement,sinceifmorphemesaretheinstantiation
ofsyntacticheads,thesyntax-morphologyconnectionisquitedirect.
Thelackofconsensusonthisissuehastodowiththefactthatforcertain
verbal forms it is not obvious how to segment verbal stem and morphemes,
to make sure that affixation is syntactic. Likewise, languages with poor mor-
phology such as English posit a problem to such approaches, because there
is no verb movement, but yet there are some morphemes. Recent advances
in the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993) offer
some solutions for this problem,since in this model, each morpheme corre-
spondstoasyntactic slot,butaffixationmaybe establishedindependentlyof
verbmovement.
Theobservationthatverbmovementcorrelateswithtenseandagreement
morphologyand the positional needfor two independentheads between CP
and VP led Pollock (1989) to label such heads T and Agr. Fromthis veryin-
fluential work, many scholars worked on the idea that agreement is a direct
manifestation of the syntactic category Agr. Since, in some languages, there
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Introduction 
is overtobject agreement,andassuming that Case is uniformlyassigned in a
Spec-headconfiguration,Chomsky(1993),followingKayne(1989),proposed
asplitbetweenAgrS(ubject)andAgrO(bject).AccordingtoChomskyandthe
followersof this idea, these two heads are responsibleforCase licensing, and
agreementisestablishedwheneveranXPandaheadenteraSpec-headrelation
inthedomainofthesecategories.
It is important to note that, under this set of assumptions, agreement
doesnotnecessarilyappearovertlywhenevertherelevantconfigurationoccurs.
In the framework of Chomsky (1993), agreement is a collection of abstract
(phi-)featurespresentontheAgrheadsandontheelementssurfacingattheir
specifier positions, and there may or there may be not an overt correlate of
suchfeatures.
This view on agreementraises a set of problems,partly acknowledgedin
Chomsky(1995):
a) Agrheadsdifferfromotherfunctionalheadsinthattheydonotcontribute
to the interpretation of the sentence. Since the spirit of the Minimalist
Programistoeliminatefromsyntaxproperallinformationthatdoesnot
contributetotheinterpretationofthestructure,doesitmakesensetoposit
theexistenceofAgrfunctionalcategories?
b) IsCaseapropertyassociatedwithAgrorwithT?IfTistheheadresponsi-
bleforlicensingCase,isitlegitimatetoassociateCasewithAgreement?3
c) Agreementisfoundindomainsforwhich itisnotobviousthatthereare
Spec-head relations being established. For instances, in the DP-domain,
determinersand nouns agree, adjectives and nouns agree. Although it is
possible topropose analysesin which these elementsenterSpec-head re-
lations (see e.g. Cinque 1994 for adjectives), it is less clear that there are
Agr-headsinalldomainsinwhichAgreementisfound.
d) Moreover,theproposalisweakenedbycasesinwhichthereisovertagree-
ment between elements, in the lack of Spec-head relations and in the
absence of evidence for stipulating that such Spec-head relations are es-
tablished covertly. The following sentence from European Portuguese il-
lustratessuchacontext:
(3) Ninguém provavelmente leu o livro.
Nobody probably read the book
“Probably,nobodyreadthebook”
In (3), the subject andthe verbare not in aSpec-head relation,since the ad-
verbintervenes.AccordingtoCosta(1996),thesubjectininSpec,Agr,andthe