Against Upwards Agree
Pavel Rudnev
December 2020
 

Bjorkman & Zeijlstra (2019) claim that agreement with the absolutive argument in ergative-absolutive languages follows naturally in an Upwards-Agree system supplemented by the relation of Accessibility if φ-agreement is parasitic on structural case assigned to the absolutive noun phrase either by T° or by v°. By drawing evidence from two distantly related East Caucasian languages—Chirag and Avar—the present article argues that this theory is both too strong and too weak. I then show that the problematical facts are trivially analysable with standard Agree (Chomsky 2000 et seq.).
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/005656
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: to appear in The Linguistic Review
keywords: agreement, case, binding, checking, valuation, ergativity, east caucasian, morphology, syntax
Downloaded:426 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]