United Cyclic Agree
Squid Tamar-Mattis
March 2024
 

The operation Agree has been defined in many different ways for different purposes. This presents a problem for minimalist syntax, since no one form of Agree can explain all of the relevant generalizations. It becomes especially problematic when multiple versions of Agree must exist simultaneously on the same probe in order to explain different phenomena. This article examines two such phenomena in Basque finite verb agreement: ergative displacement and the Strong Person-Case Constraint, and the theories that account for them: Cyclic Agree (BĂ©jar and Rezac 2009) and Feature Gluttony (Coon and Keine 2021). A combined approach called United Cyclic Agree is proposed, which captures the advantages of both theories without generating any new erroneous predictions. In this theory, all of the segments in a probe continue probing in successive cycles until they all have matching goals or there is nowhere left to probe.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/007961
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America
keywords: agreement, person-case constraint, basque, feature gluttony, cyclic agree, morphology, syntax
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