Copying and Resolution in South Slavic and South Bantu Conjunct Agreement
Andrew Ira Nevins
October 2017
 

The purpose of this paper is to develop a theory of resolution of gender values in conjunct agreement, ultimately couched in a theory of copying and nondistinctness. Ideally, as the resolution mechanism is implemented in terms of an agreement mechanism initiated within the &P, it should draw on tools of feature-based computation found elsewhere in the grammar. However, &P-internal agreement is unique within the grammar in that the two participating goals (namely, each conjunct) are equidistant from the &P head in question (assuming it is specified as needing to probe twice). As a result, existing mechanisms such as Multiple Agree (Hiraiwa, 2001, Anagnostopoulou, 2005), which are based on one goal being hierarchically higher than the other, and employed in accounts such as the Person-Case Constraint, are inapplicable. Instead, the closest grammatical parallels to an agreement mechanism with equidistant goals are found in phonology, and it will be proposed that precisely such a mechanism is shared in these two domains, even though they instantiate distinct modules of the grammar. As such, the analysis offered in this paper instantiates a case of Crossmodular Structural Parallelism, a hypothesis about the reuse of operations such as featural agreement, featural deletion, and feature co-occurrence constraints across domains of morphosyntactic and phonological features, and one that has been a fruitful part of linguistic theory throughout the work of Andrea Calabrese (e.g. Calabrese 1998) and many works inspired by it.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/003589
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: In Petrosino & Cerrone (eds.) 'Beyond the Veil of Maya'
keywords: conjunct agreement, slavic, default vs resolution, bantu, concord/index, crossmodular structural parallelism, animacy/humanness, morphology, syntax
previous versions: v1 [July 2017]
Downloaded:625 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]