Agree as information transmission over dependencies

Abstract

In contemporary Minimalism agreement is the result of a syntactic operation. In contrast to Merge, Agree does not build structure, its role being to transmit morphological features from one head to another. We provide an alternative perspective on agreement in a Minimalist idiom, one that cuts the ontological pie in a different way. Syntax has as its only operation Merge, and agreement, now divorced from syntax, transfers purely morphological information from head to head along channels established via syntactic feature checking. Separating agreement from structure building seems to enable more elegant descriptions of even complicated agreement phenomena.

Evaluating syntactic proposals using minimalist grammars and minimum description length

“…There-insertion in English: Ermolaeva and Kobele (2022) use an MG-like formalism to compare various analyses of expletive-there constructions in English, describing their differences in terms of syntactic dependencies; MDL could translate these differences into quantitative terms. The high-origin account, where there merges directly into the [ 107 ] specifier of TP (Chomsky 2000), requires fewer LIs and syntactic features to encode than one where there merges low and moves to its surface position (Deal 2009;Alexiadou and Schäfer 2011) or starts out in a constituent with its associate (Basilico 1997;Sabel 2000).…”