Archi

Abstract

Abstract Imagine how the discipline of linguistics would be if expert practitioners of different theories met in a collaborative setting to tackle the same challenging data—to test the limits of their model’s infrastructure and examine how the concrete predictions of their theories differ about the same data. This book represents the result of attempting to achieve this for syntactic theory, using data from Archi (Nakh–Daghestanian, Lezgic), an endangered language with an extremely complex agreement system. We undertake a controlled evaluation of three widely practised syntactic theories, through detailed examination of the theoretical principles underlying the mechanisms that model agreement. Our objective is to assess the tractability and predictive power of these leading models of syntax—Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), and Minimalism—using a complete set of data on an agreement system from a language that has not hitherto been analysed in these frameworks.

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