Against PersonP

Abstract

Emphatic verb doubling, developed as a diagnostic of T-to-C movement in Classical Hebrew, demonstrates that discontinuous agreement is not a consequence of movement to between hypothetical Person and Number phrases.

Predicate doubling and parallel chains

“…The phenomenon described here goes beyond Russian and Gungbe as it has been reported in the literature to occur in Hebrew and Yiddish as well(e.g., Landau, 2006;Harbour, 2007Harbour, , 2008. That typologically different languages with very different morphological properties (e.g., isolating, agglutinating) systematically exhibit this restriction supports the view developed here that the phenomenon is syntactic.13 This observation strongly recallsAbels'(2001) formulation about Russian that ''if a Base Line Sentence has only one exponent of both lexical content of the verb and tense information, then doubling takes place.…”

“…Put another way, the doublet supports the tense morpheme under T. This analysis appears compatible with the fact that the fronted copy is non-finite, while the IPinternal one is finite. Landau (2006:56) adopts a similar view for predicate doubling in Hebrew, which appears to be conditioned by the stray affix filter (SAF): ''the need to spell out tense and agreement features'' (see also Harbour, 2007).…”

“…Issues under (ii) have been dealt with in the literature in great detail by several authors (e.g., Pesetsky, 1998;Boškovič, 2001;Nunes, 2004;Landau, 2006;Harbour, 2007) and will not interest us here. With regard to (i), on the other hand, the set of data often used to illustrate this point includes, among other phenomena, wh-doubling, clitic doubling, adverb doubling, and predicate fronting with doubling, generally known as 'predicate cleft', and referred to here as predicate fronting with doubling.…”

On homophony and methodology in morphology

“…(Readers interested more in broad argument than technical details might, initially, skim or skip this section.) First, I adopt the view of discontinuous agreement argued for by Harbour (2007Harbour ( , 2008. In sum, the phi-features person, number and gender are taken to form a subtree in the syntax, with person structurally higher than the other two.…”

Interleaving Syntax and Postsyntax: Spellout before Syntactic Movement

“…In section 3 I first briefly discuss the two cases already mentioned in the literature for which this analysis best explains the data: Friulian cliticization, as analyzed by Calabrese & Pescarini (), and Extraordinary Left‐Branch Extraction in Slavic. I then show how this analysis can also be applied to the data from Classical Hebrew that, according to Harbour (), challenge the PersonP Hypothesis. All examples in section 3 show only the feeding relation between postsyntactic merger and head movement.…”