Case as an Anaphor Agreement Effect: Evidence from Inuktitut
Michelle Yuan
August 2021 

The Anaphor Agreement Effect (AAE) is the cross-linguistic inability for anaphors to co-vary with phi-agreement (Rizzi 1990, Woolford 1999), with languages making use of a variety of strategies that conspire to circumvent this effect. In this short paper, I identify and confirm a prediction arising from two previous observations by Woolford (1999) concerning the scope of the AAE, based on new evidence from Inuktitut (Eastern Canadian Inuit). I propose that anaphors in Inuktitut are lexically specified as projecting additional syntactic structure, spelled out as oblique case morphology; because phi-Agree in Inuktitut may only target ERG and ABS arguments, encountering an anaphor inevitably leads to failed Agree in the sense of Preminger (2011, 2014). I moreover argue that this exact AAE pattern is previously unattested, yet is predicted to arise given the range of existing strategies. Finally, this paper provides evidence against previous detransitivization-based approaches to reflexivity in Inuktitut (e.g. Bok-Bennema 1991).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005346 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Linguistic Inquiry [https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00443]
keywords:	case, agreement, anaphor agreement effect, syntax, inuktitut, inuit, syntax
previous versions:	v4 [March 2021] v3 [October 2020] v2 [August 2020] v1 [August 2020]
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