Abstract
This paper capitalizes on the difference between person complementarity (e.g. PCC effects) and omnivorous number (e.g. the fact that a single plural marker can be used to cross-reference more than one plural argument) by proposing that the same syntactic mechanism of Multiple Agree is responsible for both. The widely divergent surface difference results from the fact that person features are fully binary, whereas number features are syntactically privative. Additionally, arguments drawn from a variety of verbal cross-referencing morphemes implicating phi-interactions between subject and object support the claim that these elements are clitics, necessitating a principled morphosyntactic difference between clitics and other DPs undergoing object shift, and revisitation of the clitic-affix distinction.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adger, David, and Daniel Harbour. 2007. Syntax and syncretisms of the Person Case Constraint. Syntax 10.1: 2–37.
Anagnostopoulou, Elena. 2003. The syntax of ditransitives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Arregi, Karlos, and Andrew Nevins. 2007. Obliteration vs. impoverishment in the Basque g-/z-constraint. In The proceedings of the Penn linguistics colloquium 30, eds. Tatjana Scheffler, Joshua Tauberer, Aviad Eilam, and Laia Mayol, 1–14 (also available at http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000280). U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 13.1.
Baker, Mark. 2008. The syntax of agreement and concord. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baker, Mark. 2011. When agreement is for number and gender but not person. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 29(4), this issue.
Barrie, Michael. 2005. ϕ-features in the Onandaga agreement paradigm. In Proceedings of the annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association.
Béjar, Susana, and Milan Rezac. 2003. Person licensing and the derivation of PCC effects. In Romance linguistics: Theory and acquisition, eds. Yves Roberge and Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux, 49–62. Elmsford: John Benjamins.
Béjar, Susana, and Milan Rezac. 2009. Cyclic agree. Linguistic Inquiry 40: 35–73.
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo, and John Payne. 2008. There are no clitics. In Morphology and its interfaces, eds. Alexandra Galani, Glyn Hicks, and George Tsoulas, 57–96. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bock, Kay, and Erica Middleton. 2011. Reaching agreement. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 29(4), this issue.
Boeckx, Cedric, and Angel Gallego. 2008. Clitic climbing by long-distance agree. Presented at GLOW 2008.
Bonet, Eulàlia. 1991. Morphology after syntax: Pronominal clitics in Romance. Doctoral Dissertation, MIT.
Bonet, Eulàlia. 1995. Feature structure of Romance clitics. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 13: 607–647.
Cardinaletti, Anna, and Lori Repetti. 2008. Preverbal and postverbal subject clitics in Northern Italian dialects: Phonology, syntax and cross-linguistic variation. Linguistic Inquiry 39: 523–563.
Cardinaletti, Anna, and Michal Starke. 1999. The typology of structural deficiency: A case study of the three classes of pronouns. In Clitics in the languages of Europe, ed. van Riemsdijk, Henk, 145–233. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik, eds. Roger Martin, David Michaels, and Juan Uriagereka, 89–155. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Ken Hale: A life in language, ed. Michael Kenstowicz, 1–52. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Corbett, Greville. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
D’Alessandro, Roberta, and Ian Roberts. 2010. Past participle agreement in Abruzzese: Split auxiliary selection and the null-subject parameter. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. 28: 41–72.
Déchaine, Rose-Marie, and Martina Wiltschko. 2002. Decomposing pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 33: 409–442.
den Dikken, Marcel. 2001. “Pluringulars”, pronouns, and quirky agreement. The Linguistic Review 18: 19–41.
Duranti, Alessandro. 1979. Object clitic pronouns in Bantu and the topicality hierarchy. Studies in African Linguistics 10: 31–45.
Eberhard, K. 1997. The marked effect of number on subject-verb agreement. Journal of Memory and Language 36: 147–164.
Fayol, Michel, Pierre Largy, and Patrick Lemaire. 1994. When cognitive overload enhances subject-verb agreement errors: A study in French written language. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 47.2: 437–464.
Franck, Julie, Glenda Lassi, Ulrich Frauenfelder, and Luigi Rizzi. 2006. Agreement and movement: A syntactic analysis of attraction. Cognition 101: 173–216.
Franks, Steven, and Catherine Rudin. 2005. Bulgarian clitics as K0 heads. In Formal approaches to Slavic linguistics: The South Carolina meeting, eds. Steven Franks, Frank Gladney, and Mila Tasseva-Kurktchieva, 106–118. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications.
Fuss, Eric. 2005. The rise of agreement. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gruber, Bettina. 2008. Complementiser agreement—New evidence from the Upper Austrian variant of Gmunden. Master’s thesis, University of Vienna.
Haegeman, Liliane. 2006. Thinking syntactically. Oxford: Blackwell.
Halle, Morris. 1995. Feature geometry and feature spreading. Linguistic Inquiry 26.1: 1–46.
Halle, Morris, and Alec Marantz. 1994. Some key features of distributed morphology. In MITWPL 21: Papers on phonology and morphology, eds. Andrew Carnie and Heidi Harley, 275–288. Cambridge: MITWPL.
Harbour, Daniel. 2007. Morphosemantic number: From Kiowa noun classes to UG number features. Dordrecht: Springer.
Harley, Heidi, and Elizabeth Ritter. 2002. Person and number in pronouns: A feature-geometric analysis. Language 78.3: 482–526.
Harris, Alice. 1981. Georgian syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harris, Alice. 2002. Endoclitics and the origins of Udi morphosyntax. London: Oxford University Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. Explaining the ditransitive person case constraint: A usage-based approach. Constructions 2. www.constructions-online.de/articles/35.
Heath, Jeffrey. 1998. Pragmatic skewing in 1 ↔ 2 pronominal combinations in native American languages. International Journal of American Linguistics 64: 83–104.
Holmberg, Anders, and Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir. 2004. Agreement and movement in Icelandic raising constructions. Lingua 114: 651–673.
Hook, Peter, and V.K. Kaul. 1987. Case alternation, transitionality and the adoption of direct objects in Kashmiri. Indian Linguistics 48: 52–69.
Hyman, Larry. 1976. Phonologization. In Linguistic studies offered to Joseph Greenberg, vol. 2, ed. Alphonse Juilland, 407–418. Saratoga: Anma Libri.
Kallulli, Dalina. 2000. Direct object clitic doubling in Albanian and Greek. In Clitic phenomena in European languages, eds. Frits Beukema and Marcel den Dikken, 209–248. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kayne, Richard. 1975. French syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kayne, Richard. 1989. Facets of Romance past participle agreement. In Dialect variation and the theory of grammar, ed. Paola Benincà, 85–103. Dordrecht: Foris.
Kramer, Ruth. 2010. Object markers in Amharic. Handout from a talk given at the 41st annual conference on African linguistics.
Lapointe, Steven. 1996. Comments on Cho and Sells. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 5: 73–100.
Launey, Michel. 1981. Introduction à la langue et à la littérature aztèques. Tome 1: Grammaire. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Manzini, Rita, and Leonardo Savoia. 2007. A unification of morphology and syntax. London: Routledge.
Matushansky, Ora. 2006. Head movement in linguistic theory. Linguistic Inquiry 37: 69–109.
McCloskey, James, and Kenneth Hale. 2003. On the syntax of person-number inflection in modern Irish. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 1: 487–533.
Merchant, Jason. 2011. Aleut Case Matters. In Pragmatics and autolexical grammar: In honor of Jerry Sadock, eds. Yuasa Etsuyo, Tista Bagchi, and Katharine P. Beals, 193–210. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Miller, Philip, and Ivan Sag. 1997. French clitic movement without clitics or movement. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 15: 573–639.
Nevins, Andrew. 2007. The Representation of third person and its consequences for person-case effects. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 25: 273–313.
Nevins, Andrew. 2011. Phonologically conditioned allomorph selection. In The Blackwell companion to phonology, eds. Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, and Keren Rice, 2357–2382. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nevins, Andrew, Brian Dillon, Shiti Malhotra, and Colin Phillips. 2007. The role of feature-number and feature-type in processing Hindi verb agreement violations. Brain Research 1164: 81–94.
Nevins, Andrew, and Filomena Sandalo. 2011. Markedness and morphotactics in Kadiwéu [+participant] agreement. Morphology 21: 351–378.
Nevins, Andrew, and Oana Savescu. 2010. An apparent number case constraint in Romanian: The role of syncretism. In Romance linguistics 2008, eds. Karlos Arregi, Zsuzsanna Fagyal, Silvina Montrul, and Annie Tremblay, 185–200. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Perlmutter, David. 1971. Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Preminger, Omer. 2009. Breaking agreements: Distinguishing agreement and clitic doubling by their failures. Linguistic Inquiry 40: 619–666.
Pylkkänen, Liina. 2008. Introducing arguments. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rackowski, Andrea, and Norvin Richards. 2005. Phase edge and extraction: A Tagalog case study. Linguistic Inquiry 36.4: 565–599.
Reid, Wallis. 2011. The communicative function of English verbal number. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 29(4), this issue.
Rezac, Milan. 2009. On the unifiability of repairs of the person case constraint: French, Basque, Georgian, and Chinook. In Festschrift for Beñat Oyharçabal, eds. Ricardo Etxepare, Ricardo Gómez, and Joseba A. Lakarra. Vols. 1–2 of Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca “Julio de Urquijo” XLIII, 769–790.
Rezac, Milan. 2011. Phi-features and the modular architecture of language. Berlin: Springer.
Richards, Norvin. 1997. What moves where when in which language? Doctoral Dissertation, MIT.
Richards, Norvin. 2004. Against bans on lowering. Linguistic Inquiry 35.3: 453–463.
Rivero, María Luisa. 2008. Oblique subjects and person restrictions in Spanish: A morphological approach. In Agreement restrictions, eds. Susann Fischer, Roberta D’Alessandro, and Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson, 215–250. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Roberts, Ian. 2010. Agreement and head movement. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rodrigues, Cilene. 2004. Impoverished morphology and A-movement out of case domains. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland.
Schütze, Carson T. 1997. INFL in child and adult language: Agreement, case, and licensing. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Hierarchy of features and ergativity. In Grammatical categories in Australian languages, ed. R.M.W. Dixon, 112–171. New Jersey: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra and Humanities Press.
Steriade, Donca. 1995. Underspecification and markedness. In The handbook of phonological theory, ed. John Goldsmith, 114–174. Oxford: Blackwell.
Suñer, Margarita. 1988. The role of agreement in clitic-doubled constructions. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 6: 391–434.
Suñer, Margarita. 2000. Object-shift: Comparing a Romance language to Germanic. Probus 12: 261–289.
Torrego, Esther. 1992. Case and agreement structure. Ms., University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Trommer, Jochen. 2010. A postsyntactic morphome cookbook. Paper presented at the Perspectives on the Morphome workshop, Coimbra, October 2010.
Trubetzkoy, Nikolai. 1969. Principles of phonology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Uriagereka, Juan. 1995. Aspects of the syntax of clitic placement in Western Romance. Linguistic Inquiry 25: 79–123.
Valentine, Randolph. 2001. Nishnaabemwin reference grammar. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Vikner, Sten. 1997. V-to-I movement and inflectional for person in all tenses. In The new comparative syntax, ed. Liliane Haegeman, 189–213. Harlow: Longman.
Walkow, Martin. 2010. A unified analysis of the person case constraint and 3–3-effects in Barceloní Catalan. In The proceedings of NELS 40, eds. Seda Kan, Claire Moore-Cantwell, and Robert Staubs. Amherst: GLSA.
Williams, Edwin. 2003. Representation theory. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Woolford, Ellen. 2010. Active-stative agreement in Lakota. Ms., UMass Amherst. Available at http://people.umass.edu/ellenw/.
Zribi-Hertz, Anne, and Lamine Diagne. 2002. Clitic placement after syntax: Evidence from Wolof person and locative markers. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 20: 823–884.
Zwicky, Arnold, and Geoffrey Pullum. 1983. Cliticization vs. inflection: English n’t. Language 59: 502–513.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This paper was presented at the LSA 2008 Meeting, at the University of Toronto, and at the University of Cambridge.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Nevins, A. Multiple agree with clitics: person complementarity vs. omnivorous number. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 29, 939–971 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-011-9150-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-011-9150-4