Cyclic Agree

Abstract

International audienceWe propose that agreement displacement phenomena sensitive to person hierarchies arise from the mechanism of Agree operating on articulated -feature structures in a cyclic syntax. Cyclicity and locality derive a preference for agreement control by the internal argument. Articulation of the probe determines (a) when the agreement controller cyclically displaces to the external argument and (b) differences in crosslinguistic sensitivity to person hierarchies. The system characterizes two classes of derivations corresponding empirically to direct and inverse contexts, and predicts the existence and nature of repair strategies in the latter. The properties of agreement displacement thus reduce to properties of syntactic dependency formation by Agree

Differential objects and other structural objects

“…16 This modification has two main consequences: i) not all features of a DP need to be licensed in the same way; ii) a DP may contain more than one feature that requires licensing. Thus, the same DP can be subject to more than one licensing operation such as all the relevant features can get valued (see also Béjar and Rezac 2009). Regarding the implementation of licensing itself, we use here the basics of the Agree operation in minimalist syntax (following Chomsky 2001, et subseq.…”

Cliticization feeds agreement: a view from Quechua

“…The fact that these are ruled out could simply follow from the strong version of the Person Case Constraint, which amongst other things bans combinations of [+Participant] clitics. The same constraint, however it is to be accounted for (see for various approaches Anagnostopoulou 2003Anagnostopoulou , 2006Béjar and Rezac 2009;Bonet 1991;amongst others), is also operative in French, Italian, and Modern Greek amongst other languages. Given this possibility, the data in (11) cannot form the basis of an argument against the clitic analysis.…”

The Syntax of simple and compound tenses in Ndebele

“…In section 3, I detail the mechanics of periphrasis in general terms, arguing that auxiliary insertion can be understood in terms of independently motivated syntactic operations: c-selection formalized as Agree (Svenonius, 1994;Cowper, 2010) and the Cyclic Agree view of agreement (Béjar & Rezac, 2009). In section 4, I apply this mechanism to the overflow pattern of periphrasis in Ndebele, deriving the overflow in tense features (Perfect and Prospective tenses).…”