Abstract
This article discusses the mechanism of feature sharing in the analysis of agreement across theories. We argue that there are agreement phenomena that require an agreement mechanism which is both symmetric and feature sharing. Our main argument relies on a Latin nominalized clause construction which has until now remained ill understood. We show that this construction requires a feature sharing and symmetrical approach to agreement. We also show that phenomena in Tsez and in Algonquian that have so far been described in terms of long distance agreement lend themselves to a treatment in terms of feature sharing, and we look at the consequences for the theory of agreement. We show that there are also cases of agreement which resist a feature-sharing treatment. This means that we cannot pin down a single agree mechanism. Some agreement phenomena require feature sharing, others do not, and yet others are incompatible with feature sharing.
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Notes
To make the examples easier to read, information that can be expressed in the translation of the word is not repeated in the glosses, e.g. there is no gloss for number on nouns. The following glosses are used in the paper: 1—first person; 3—third person; i–iv—noun class i–iv; abl—ablative; abs—absolutive; acc—accusative; caus—causative; comp—complementizer; conj—conjunct; dat—dative; def—definite; dir—direct; emph—emphatic; erg—ergative; f—feminine; gen—genitive; ic—initial change; impf—imperfect; incl—inclusive; inf—infinitive; loc—locative; m—masculine; n—neuter; neg—negation; nmlz—nominalization; nom—nominative obj—object; obl—oblique; pass—passive; pfv—perfective; pl—plural; pres—present; prf—perfect; pst—past; ptcp—participle; refl—reflexive; sbjv—subjunctive; SecObj—second object; sg—singular; subj—subject; ta—transitive animate; ti—transitive inanimate; trans—transitive.
A similar point was made by Barlow (1992).
Alternatively, a reviewer suggests that las could be an underspecified default spellout of a first person transitive D element. For our purposes here, we do not need to dwell on such responses to the analysis in Ackema and Neeleman (2013), as the issue is orthogonal to our discussion.
As a reviewer notes, this analysis predicts that mujeres could also occur with a second person verb and this prediction is borne out.
See e.g. Dalrymple and Kaplan (2000) for a more sophisticated treatment using set-valued features where the third person is the empty set.
In derivational theories, especially when making use of covert or string-vacuous movement, the question will also arise whether agreement is upwards or downwards. We do not need to take a position in this debate here (see e.g. Zeijlstra 2012 and Preminger 2013), as our goal is simply to illustrate the general workings of the theory.
As we also saw above, this solution is criticized in Ackema and Neeleman (2013). We present it here for expository purposes only.
Similar enough for our purposes, that is. There are two main differences: First, the relevant notion of syntactic locus is different in the two theories. As we just saw, Minimalism typically represents agreement features in the tree structure, whereas LFG situates them in a feature structure, an attribute-value matrix which in graph-theoretical terms is a directed, possibly cyclic graph, not a tree. Second, one could argue that agreement features are not entirely absent from the target locus in standard Minimalism, since they are present as uninterpretable features, as shown in the lefthand side of (9). However, in the end result of the derivation (the righthand side of (9)) they disappear, and hence they cannot act as controllers in another agreement relation at the same time.
The situation with case is different from that of number and gender, since case has no semantics. However, case features are typically still interpreted on the controller only in the sense that they specify the controller’s function, not that of the target.
A reviewer objects that it is not the case that ‘morphological identity of exponents is a crucial factor for feature sharing, and that lack of such identity interferes with feature sharing’. We agree, but this is not the force of Kathol’s argument. Rather, the point is that whenever there is formal identity of exponents, feature sharing theories can assume that the exponents are in fact the same. A non-feature sharing theory, on the other hand, will have to conclude that the two surface-identical exponents are in fact different and only one of them expresses an interpretable feature (in Minimalist terms), or contributes information directly about the word it attaches too (in LFG terms).
The use of cycles of feature-sharing Agree to pass information up the tree in Pesetsky and Torrego (2007) is similar, but as we noted above this is a theory-internal use of Agree in Minimalism, not connected with what is usually understood as agreement.
As far as we can tell from the written text, that is. But it is likely that attributive participles, unlike free predicates, formed constituents with their nouns. This constituency could have been marked prosodically, but such evidence is of course no longer available to us.
The Roman calendar counted the years from the foundation of Rome in (allegedly) 753 BCE.
The two variants in (37) differ in that the first uses a finite complement clause introduced by the complementizer quod, whereas the second uses a nonfinite accusative with infinitive structure (literally, ‘For the dictator to have been killed seemed the most glorious deed’). Both are rendered most naturally in English with a that-clause.
Notice that, at least on LFG assumptions, the resolution of the coordinate number value to plural is entirely internal to the coordination and therefore orthogonal to the question of how agreement should be modelled. Single conjunct agreement does not seem to be attested with dominant participles, but could in principle be captured in exactly the same way as other instances of single conjunct predicate-argument agreement.
As already mentioned, there are several other variants of agreement with feature sharing in the minimalist literature. We cannot go through them all here, and choose to focus on Ackema and Neeleman (2013) as a recent and well worked-out, representative theory.
In LFG too, it has been proposed to model agreement in a separate structure (Falk 2006).
We have replaced their DP with NP. Nothing hinges on this.
Nothing hinges on the analysis in Haug and Nikitina (2012): it would be possible to dissociate adjunct structures from ordinary subject-predicate structures and treat them with an equation (↑ agr) = (adj ∈ ↑) agr. This would be a structure-specific rule associated with adjunction structures rather than with particular lexical entries.
Note however that finite subordinate clauses in subject position behave differently from dominant participles. We return briefly to this in Sect. 6.1.
A reviewer points out it is unclear what exactly the connection is between operator positions and long distance agreement. This is true, but it is equally problematic for a functional and a configurational approach to operators: the configurational approach has the advantage that the operator position is closer in tree-geometric terms to the agreement target, but the disadvantage that the controller does not in fact always appear in this position. The functional approach to operators has the advantage of not predicting contrary to the surface facts that the controller must be in the periphery of the embedded clause, but the corresponding disadvantage that the controller is not closer to its target. So far feature sharing agreement has not been particularly well studied empirically. In the light of the evidence for interaction between information structure and (object) agreement amassed by Dalrymple and Nikolaeva (2011) we would not find it surprising if some of these interactions involve feature sharing.
Their only explicit claim is that agreement is symmetric, but their implementation of symmetry also incorporates feature sharing in the core syntax.
A reviewer suggests that NPs with possessive pronouns (77) show that agreement cannot always be feature sharing.
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(i)
The features person 1 and number pl are index features related to the reference of noster ‘our’. But there is no agreement in index features in (76), so the question of feature sharing does not arise. What (76) shows is simply that index and concord features can diverge.
-
(i)
HPSG is similar in this respect, so these observations hold for that framework too.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Oleg Belyaev, Grev Corbett, Mary Dalrymple, Michael Daniel, Marius Jøhndal, Louisa Sadler, associate editor Ad Neeleman and NLLT reviewers for valuable feedback on the research reported in this paper.
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Haug, D.T.T., Nikitina, T. Feature sharing in agreement. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 34, 865–910 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9321-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9321-9