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Share Paper 3626

Rethinking Best Match Using Movement
Andrew A. Hedding
156-165 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

Though syntactic Agreement is generally assumed to be local, there are many morphological agreement patterns which are sensitive to person hierarchies. A strand of previous work has analyzed patterns of this type using a constraint—Best Match—which forces a probe to Agree with the goal that will value the highest number of its features (e.g., Oxford, 2019). This paper proposes a reformulation of Best Match that leverages the decomposition of Agreement into two component operations: Match and Value (Chomsky, 2000). Match is stricly local and identifies goals which can value the probe; Valuation occurs late and copies features onto the probe from the matched goal which will value the most features of the probe. The proposal is motivated and demonstrated using a pattern of A-bar movement in Mixtec: though both wh-words and foci must move to the clausal periphery, wh-words will always move across a more local focus. The paper analogizes this effect to more familiar person hierarchy effects within the A-domain, and argues that analyzing movement, in addition to morphological agreement, helps advance understanding of the precise mechanisms of Agreement.

Published in

Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Robert Autry, Gabriela de la Cruz, Luis A. Irizarry Figueroa, Kristina Mihajlovic, Tianyi Ni, Ryan Smith, and Heidi Harley
Table of contents
Printed edition: $645.00