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.

The Anaphor Agreement Effect is not about featural deficiency: Evidence from Avar

“…Given that these nominalisations, which are too 'low' to be able to host negation, still display φ-agreement with the absolutive argument, it follows that φ-agreement in Avar must obtain low. Given the presence of an external argument in Avar infinitival clauses and low nominalisations, signalling the presence of v, I contend that v is the locus of φ-agreement in Avar as has also been proposed for several related languages (see Gagliardi et al 2014 for Lak andTsez, andPolinsky 2016;Polinsky, Radkevich & Chumakina 2017 for Archi). Low nominalisations will then be vP-nominalisations formed, on this view, by the nominalising functional head n taking the vP as a complement, as sketched in (7).…”

“…There is, thus, no evidence that Archi (and probably also Ingush, which, as Forker (2012) shows, patterns with Archi with respect to agreement in biabsolutive constructions) only has T as the φ-probe. On the other hand, Polinsky (2016) and especially Polinsky, Radkevich & Chumakina (2017) provide detailed and intricate arguments, partially overlapping with mine for Avar, for vP as the locus of agreement in Archi. Since Murugesan (2019) does not engage with those arguments and his own argument is faulty, I conclude that Murugesan (2019) must err about Archi and Ingush, which, together with Avar, instantiate the problematic Pattern Ā falsifying Murugesan's φ-deficiency theory.…”

“…3 Space limitations preclude me from expanding on the mechanisms underlying case assignment in Avar and choosing between the options currently available. The assignment of ergative and absolutive case in Northeast Caucasian languages has been formalised in terms of [erg] and [abs] features on v (Gagliardi et al 2014;Polinsky 2016;Polinsky, Radkevich & Chumakina 2017), as well as configurationally (Rudnev 2019).…”

Person agreement with inherent case DPs in Chirag Dargwa

“…Unlike gender-number agreement on verbs, which occurs on v before the lexical subject receives nominative case in Spec,TP, CP-adjoined adverbs are merged after the non-absolutive subject receives structural nominative case and thus becomes visible not only to the person probe on T, but also to all agreement probes above it, including CP-adjoined adverbs. Whether this evidence is admissible depends very much on how gender-number agreement with the adverbs is actually derived (see Polinsky et al 2017 for analysis of non-verbal agreement in Archi and Rudnev 2020 for a discussion of non-verbal agreement in Avar), an issue I have to leave outside the scope of the present discussion.…”

Ergativity in Tabasaran: A Reply to Woolford 2015

“…Unlike in nominative-accusative languages, where the subject gets its case assigned by T 0 , previous work on some Nakh-Daghestanian languages, such as Tsez, Archi, and Lak (Polinsky 2003(Polinsky , 2015(Polinsky , 2016Polinsky and Potsdam 2001;Polinsky et al, 2017;Gagliardi et al 2014) Like finite clauses, a nominalized transitive clause has no counterpart with the subject in a case other than ergative. In (16a), for example, the nominalized clause with the transitive verb u‹CL›χ-'save' preserves the regular ergative-absolutive case marking pattern, even though it lexicalizes a structure smaller than the finite clause.…”