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Share Paper 3586

Agreement with Deficient Pronouns in Laki: A Syntactic Repair to a Clitic Cluster Restriction
Sahar Taghipour and Arsalan Kahnemuyipour
417-426 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

The alignment in Laki (Northwestern Iranian) follows a split ergative alignment. We argue that this split arises due to the presence of a single locus of Agreement on T in past intransitive and present clauses, versus two loci of Agreement on T and v in past transitive clauses. In past transitive clauses, when there is no accessible argument due to locality, the Agreement on T is realized as default. We suggest that the accessibility of an argument for T agreement in past transitive clauses depends on a PF constraint that bans the adjacency of two clitics. This proposal raises interesting questions about the nature of PF constraints and their interaction with syntax.

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