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Share Paper 3551

Leftover Agreement: Spelling Out Kartvelian Number
Tatiana Bondarenko and Stanislao Zompì
65-73 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

This paper examines a pattern of number agreement in the four Kartvelian languages (Georgian, Laz, Megrelian, Svan), in which the spell-out of a lower agreement probe affects agreement on a higher agreement probe. Specifically, the higher probe shows plural agreement if the lower probe does not lexicalize a plural feature, and does not show plural agreement if the lower probe lexicalizes a plural feature. Departing from morphological accounts of Kartvelian number agreement present in the literature (Halle & Marantz 1993, Lomashvili & Harley 2011, Blix 2020, a.o.), the authors argue that this interaction between the two probes is syntactic in nature and arises due to what they call Leftover Agreement -- agreement by a higher probe with the unlexicalized features of a lower probe. The authors argue that their account provides evidence for a certain kind of interleaving of syntax and spell-out, and motivates an architecture in which Vocabulary Insertion is only partially replacive: exponents replace only those features that their specification matches exactly.

Published in

Proceedings of the 38th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Rachel Soo, Una Y. Chow, and Sander Nederveen
Table of contents
Printed edition: $425.00