Person restrictions in non-canonical agreement patterns in Spanish

Abstract

In this paper we present empirical evidence for the existence of person restrictions across five constructions which exhibit non-canonical agreement patterns in Spanish. We account for these data by adopting a Multiple Agree approach à la Anagnostopoulou (2005, 2017) and D’Alessandro (2007) where T/INFL can agree with two different elements as long as there is no person feature incompatibility. We also show that there are person restrictions in non-canonical agreement constructions with parecer in Spanish (contra Mare and Pato, 2018), once we set aside the “look-like” interpretation of parecer. In addition, we provide empirical evidence for the claim that usted(es) behaves as an “imposter” as expected by Collins and Ordóñez (2021) analysis.