Anti-Agreement [PhD thesis]
Nico Baier
September 2018 

(NOTE: The most recent version of this file only fixes an issue with typesetting a previous version which caused some pages to go missing.) In this dissertation, I investigate the sensitivity of φ-agreement to features typically associated with Ā-extraction, including those related to wh-questioning, relativization, focus and topicalization. This phenomenon has been referred to as anti-agreement (Ouhalla 1993) or wh-agreement (Chung and Georgopoulos 1988; Georgopoulos 1991; Chung 1994) in the literature. While anti-agreement is commonly held to result from constraints on the Ā-movement of agreeing DPs, I argue that it reduces to an instance of wh-agreement, or the appearance of particular morphological forms in the presence of Ā-features. I develop a unified account of these Ā-sensitive φ-agreement effects in which they arise from the ability of φ-probes to copy both φ-features and Ā-features in the syntax, coupled with postsyntactic morphological operations that manipulate feature bundles containing both [φ] and [Ā]. Thus, the link between anti-agreement and Ā-movement is illusory. Because Ā-movement is derived by the presence of certain Ā-features on the moving DP, anti-agreement will most often coincide with Ā-movement. But there are places where this correlation comes apart. All that is necessary for the emergence of anti-agreement is the presence of an Ā-feature on a DP that controls φ-agreement. The empirical foundation of the work is a typological survey of Ā-sensitive φ-agreement effects in 63 genetically and geographically diverse languages. This study is the largest of its kind to examine these effects, and brings to light new generalizations both about the syntax of Ā-sensitive φ-agreement effects and the behavior of φ-features in the presence of Ā-features.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004151 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	PhD dissertation, UC Berkeley
keywords:	agreement, anti-agreement, wh-agreement, a'-movement, extraction, impoverishment, dm, phi-features, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v7 [August 2018] v6 [September 2018] v5 [September 2018] v4 [September 2018] v3 [August 2018] v2 [August 2018] v1 [August 2018]
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