Agreement between arguments? Not really

Abstract

This chapter presents novel data from the Nakh-Dagestanian language Archi illustrating a typologically unusual phenomenon of apparent agreement between first person pronouns and absolutive-marked arguments. Apart from their typological significance, these facts challenge current approaches to agreement, which hold that Agree relations can be established only between heads and phrases. The chapter shows that Archi agreeing pronouns do not constitute a uniform class, but subdivide into simple weak pronouns and complex forms composed of a pronoun and a focus marker. Weak pronouns lack [CL] feature specification ([øCL]), and must therefore copy a class feature from the closest v to avoid violating the constraint that all DPs must be specified for [CL]. As a result, the apparent agreement between arguments can be reduced to the unsurprising agreement between the absolutive DP and a series of verbal heads, some of them morphologically null.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 85 citations exist upstream.