Johns Hopkins University – Homewood Campus – (410-516-5250/office phone)
Thursday, November 10, 2005 - 3:30 p.m.
University of Connecticut
“Agreement as a post-syntactic operation. ”
This paper develops an argument that agreement (in particular NP-predicate agreement) is a morphological and not a syntactic phenomenon. Narrowly, I argue against the proposition that the configurational/positional licensing of NPs (what was considered to be the domain of Case theory in the LGB framework of the 1980s) involves checking/matching/valuing of phi-features (person, number, gender) in the syntax. To the extent that verbs show morphological agreement with an NP, the copying or sharing of features occurs in the morphology, after the syntax. The evidence is drawn in part from a reconsideration of implicational universals regarding NP-accessibility for agreement.