Agreement and its failures / Omer Preminger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Preminger, Omer, 1976- author.

Series:

Linguistic inquiry monographs ; 68.

Linguistic inquiry monographs ; 68

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Grammar, Comparative and general--Agreement.

Grammar, Comparative and general.

Grammar, Comparative and general--Case.

Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax.

Physical Description:

xvi, 291 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2014]

Summary:

In this book. Omer Preminger investigates how the obligatory nature of predicate argument agreement is enforced by the grammar. Preminger argues that an empirically adequate theory of predicate-argument agreement requires recourse to an operation whose obligatoriness is a grammatical primitive, not reducible to representational properties, but whose successful culmination is not enforced by the grammar. Preminger's argument counters contemporary approaches that find the obligatorniess of predicate-argument agreement enforced through representational means. The most prominent of these is Chomsky's "interpretability" based proposal, in which the obligatoriness of predicate-argument agreement is enforced through derivational time bombs. Preminger presents an empirical argument against contemporary approaches that seek to derive the obligatory nature of predicate-argument agreement exclusively from derivational time bombs. He offers instead an alternative account based on the notion of obligatory operations better suited to the facts. The crucial data involves utterances that inescapably involve attempted-but-failed agreement and are nonetheless fully grammatical. Preminger combines a detailed empirical investigation of agreement phenomena in the Kichean (Mayan) languages. Zulu (Bantu), Basque, Icelandic, and French with an extensive and rigorous theoretical exploration of the far-reaching consequences of these data. The result is a novel proposal that has profound implications for the formalism that the theory of grammar uses to derive obligatory processes and properties. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Introduction 1

2 Modeling the Obligatoriness of φ-Agreement 5

2.1 A Working Definition of Agreement 5

2.2 Three Models for the Obligatoriness of Agreement 6

2.3 Failed Agreement, and Why We Should Be Interested in It 12

3 Agreement in the Kichean Agent-Focus Construction: The Facts 15

3.1 Some Basic Facts about Kichean and Agent-Focus 15

3.2 Agreement in Kichean Agent-Focus 18

3.3 The Agent-Focus Person Restriction 22

3.4 The Morphophonology of Kichean Agreement Markers 24

4 A Derivational Account of Absolutive Agreement in Kichean 29

4.1 Background: The Person Case Constraint, and Béjar and Rezac's (2003) Account of It 31

4.2 Relativized Probing 39

4.3 On the Featural Coarseness of Clitic Doubling 50

4.4 Applying Béjar and Rezac's (2003) Account to Kichean 54

4.5 Some Alternative Analyses and Their Drawbacks 67

4.6 Absolutive Agreement in Regular Transitives and Intransitives 75

Appendix: Evidence from Tzotzil for the Separability of Person and Number in Mayan 79

5 Derivational Time-Bombs: Inadequate for Deriving the Obligatoriness of φ-Agreement 85

5.1 Failed Number Agreement in Kichean Agent-Focus 86

5.2 Failed Person Agreement in Kichean Agent-Focus 92

5.3 If Not Derivational Time-Bombs, Then What? On Obligatory Operations and Violable Constraints 95

Appendix: How Did We Get Here? A Historical Interlude 100

6 Two More Case Studies in Failed Agreement 103

6.1 The Conjoint/Disjoint Alternation and Nominal Augment Morphology in Zulu 103

6.2 Basque Unergatives 111

7 On "Salience" Hierarchies and Scales 123

7.1 Against "Salience" Hierarchies/Scales in the Account of Kichean Agent-Focus 124

7.2 An Argument from Zulu against "Salience" in Kichean Agent-Focus 127

7.3 Discussion 127

8 Datives, Defective Intervention, and Case Discrimination 129

8.1 The Inability of Datives to Value Features on a φ-Probe 130

8.2 The Dative Paradox: Datives as "Defective" Interveners 131

8.3 Existing Treatments of the Dative Paradox 134

8.4 Intervention as Failed Agreement 157

8.5 Against a Violable-Constraints Alternative 170

8.6 Summary 174

9 Where's φ? In syntax 177

9.1 The Argument for Morphological Case and φ-Agreement as Postsyntactic Operations 178

9.2 The Missing Evidence: Non-Quirky-Subject Languages 182

9.3 Case Competition in Syntax 186

9.4 Summary 208

Appendix: Case Assignment and Case Discrimination in the Kichean Agent-Focus Construction 210

10 Extensions and Outlook 215

10.1 The Logic of φ-Agreement as an Exemplar of Syntactic Computation 215

10.2 Outlook: What Is Left for "Uninterpretable Features"? 233

11 Conclusion 239.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780262027403

0262027402

9780262526173

0262526174

OCLC:

864366369