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The Domain of Agreement

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Abstract

In certain types of infinitival complementation constructions in three quite dissimilar languages (German, Japanese, and Itelmen) expected interpretations curiously, but systematically, fail to arise. The missing interpretations are precisely those that would be expected if Agree – the establishment of licensing relations without movement – were possible; this is shown by comparison to minimally different constructions that establish both the existence of the Agree operation and the independent possibility of the interpretations in question. The account we are led to suggests that locality domains are not absolute but are relativized in two ways: firstly, Agree and A-movement respect different (if overlapping) locality conditions, and secondly, whether or not a given projection constitutes a domain boundary depends partly on its syntactic context. At the core of the paper is the proposed generalization that A-movement is forced, and cannot reconstruct, exactly when a DP originates in a lower agreement domain than its licensor.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, 337 Mansfield Rd, U-1145, Storrs, CT, 06269, USA

    Jonathan David Bobaljik & Susi Wurmbrand

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  1. Jonathan David Bobaljik
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  2. Susi Wurmbrand
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Correspondence to Jonathan David Bobaljik.

Additional information

For helpful comments and discussions on this material we thank Elena Anagnostopoulou, Benjamin Bruening, Željko Bošković, Christine Czinglar, Kleanthes Grohmann, Winnie Lechner, Julie Legate, Friedrich Neubarth, Masashi Nomura, David Pesetsky, Martin Prinzhorn, Norvin Richards, Mamoru Saito, Uli Sauerland, Yael Sharvit, Arnim von Stechow, Tomokazu Takehisa, Martina Wiltschko, Kazuko Yatsushiro, and the anonymous reviewers. Various stages of this project have been presented at WCCFL 20 (USC), PLC 25 (Penn), ConSole X (Leiden), NELS 33 (MIT), Österreichische Linguistiktagung (Innsbruck), GLOW 24 (Braga) and 26 (Lund), CUNY, Harvard, Tübingen, McGill, NYU, SUNY Stony Brook, U Conn and U Mass (Amherst); audience feedback has been very helpful. For the ltelmen sections, we are grateful to the members of the ltelmen community who shared their language (and their homes) with us, especially: N.I. Chatkina, A.D. Ivashova, and N.S. Jaganova. Funding for this research was provided by research grants from SSHRC, FCAR/FQRSC and McGill University.

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Bobaljik, J.D., Wurmbrand, S. The Domain of Agreement. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 23, 809–865 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-004-3792-4

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