C-Agree is local subject-verb agreement in Kipsigis
Imke Driemel, Maria Kouneli
February 2024 

Upwards-oriented complementizer agreement raises questions about the directionality and locality of agreement. Based on novel data from original fieldwork, we argue that what has been described as an agreeing ‘say’-based complementizer in Kipsigis (Diercks & Rao 2019, Diercks et al. 2020) is the lexical verb ‘say’, and what looks like C-Agree is in fact agreement between this verb and its locally introduced (often covert) subject. Our analysis highlights that ‘say’-based complementizers might be of category V, and not C, in more languages than previously thought (Koopman 1984, Koopman & Sportiche 1989, Major & Torrence 2020), which means that some instances of what has been described as C-Agree may instantiate standard verbal agreement.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005661 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	to appear in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
keywords:	`say’-based complementation, complementizer agreement, nilotic, contentful eventualities, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v3 [August 2023] v2 [April 2022] v1 [December 2020]
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