Agreeing Adpositions in Avar and The Directionality-of-Valuation Debate

Abstract

Given the central spot afforded to unvalued features in current theorizing, the directionality of feature valuation is the subject of a lively debate in the syntactic literature. The traditional conception of upward valuation, whereby the unvalued probe inherits features from a valued goal in its c-command domain ( Chomsky 2000 , 2001 , Carstens and Diercks 2013 , Preminger 2013 ), has to compete with downward valuation ( Zeijlstra 2012 ), Hybrid Agree ( Bjorkman and Zeijlstra 2019 ), and bidirectional Agree ( Baker 2008 ), among others. Here, using data from Avar, I discuss the crosslinguistically rare phenomenon of adposition agreement, whereby certain adverbs, postpositions, and locative case forms undergo agreement with an absolutive argument. I set the stage by sketching the mechanism of case assignment and argument-predicate agreement in Avar ( section 1 ) and introducing the phenomenon of adposition agreement ( section 2 ). I then show that the agreement morphology on agreeing adpositions is a result of agreement rather than concord ( section 3 ). In sections 4 – 5 , I explore the consequences of adposition agreement in Avar for upward and downward valuation, concluding that upward valuation is better equipped to account for the observed patterns. In section 6 , I summarize the results of the discussion.

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