All proceedings
Enter a document #:
Enter search terms:

Info for readers Info for authors Info for editors Info for libraries Order form Shopping cart

Share Paper 3678

Low Nominative Agreement in Uab Meto
Tyler Lemon
600-608 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

Many languages in the world have nominative-accusative alignment in verb agreement and case marking, meaning that intransitive and transitive subjects are marked with nominative case to the exclusion of objects, and verbs preferentially agree with these nominative subjects. These languages are typically analyzed as having a phi-probe on T for nominative subject agreement (Woolford 2010; Legate 2014; Coon 2017). This paper proposes that nominative agreement can be lower than T by providing an analysis of the verbal agreement system of Uab Meto (Austronesian: Indonesia/Timor-Leste), drawing on both novel data from primary fieldwork and on data from previous literature (Steinhauer 1993, 1996; Edwards 2020). Uab Meto has verb agreement and case marking in a nominative-accusative alignment, but its agreement is below TAM elements and negation, though still higher than V, v, and Voice. This paper proposes that agreement is located on an Agr head immediately above VoiceP that agrees with the closest DP in its c-command domain. Each verb has its own Agr probe above it, leading to the possibility of verbs in the same clause agreeing with different arguments, including embedded verbs agreeing with accusative DPs in some cases. Uab Meto affirms the prediction of Minimalism (Chomsky 2000) and Distributed Morphology (Choi & Harley 2019) that a phi-probe does not need to be on a particular head at a particular height in the clause; nominative agreement can be obtained with a phi-probe anywhere above the Merge site of external arguments. Moreover, the possibility of agreement with accusative DPs in certain syntactic configurations shows that subject agreement and case assignment do not necessarily go hand in hand. Each Agr head agrees with the closest DP in its c-command domain, but these DPs receive case through other means.

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