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Share Paper 3733

Person and Licensing in Georgian: Puzzles for Cyclic Agree
Susana Bejar and Milan Rezac
77-86 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

Cyclic Agree and the Person Licensing Condition predict ungrammaticality for a wide range of argument combinations in Georgian, incorrectly, though both have been used to explain core argument agreement in the language. This problem is defused by positing a high π-probe on T, in addition to a previously proposed low articulated probe on v. The higher π-probe is independently observable as added verbal morphology: a suffix-ablaut system. The high π-probe is obligatory and this creates interactions between agreement loci as a result of general mechanisms (probe unification). A comparison between Georgian and Basque reveals systematic differences attributable to a contrast in the distribution of obligatory probes: the Georgian π-probe on T is obligatory, while in Basque it is added to satisfy the PLC. This explains a difference between the languages with respect to alignment: intransitive S in Basque is consistently tracked by inflection characteristic of the v probe, while intransitive S in Georgian is consistently tracked by inflection characteristic of the T probe. Details of the interactions between agreement loci support a view of cyclicity where syntactic operations apply freely up to convergence, suggesting that cyclicity follows from Minimal Search or No-Tampering rather than Earliness.

Published in

Proceedings of the 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Nikolas Webster, Yağmur Kiper, Richard Wang, and Sichen Larry Lyu
Table of contents
Printed edition: $545.00