Cleft constructions in Tamil and Anti-agreement
Nagarajan Selvanathan
October 2017 

Anti-agreement (AA, Ouhalla 1993 and since) is usually characterized as involving phi-agreement with T and A-to-A' movement. In this paper, I discuss Tamil AA which involves a nominalizing N and A’-to-A’- movement. Based on this and other data, I then argue that an adequate AA theory needs to be able to make reference to specific phi-probing heads. I evaluate current theories of AA paying special attention to Baier (2017b, 2017c)’s morphological account of AA. I propose that this theory requires morphology to have information that the syntactic component does not have even in a feature-sharing approach to AGREE (Frampton & Gutmann 2000). As such I argue that AA is decided in the syntax and occurs when a head fails to copy any of the features of a potential goal including any phi-features that may be needed for valuation. I formalize this account in OT, following Erlewine (2016) and show how it can be extended to account for what Baier (2017c) calls partial AA.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003681 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Ms
keywords:	cleft, anti-agreement, agreement, syntax, a-bar movement, tamil, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [September 2017]
Downloaded:	1248 times

 

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