Unagreement and how morphology sees syntax

Alsina i Keith, Àlex

Unagreement and how morphology sees syntax

License

Citation

Alsina A. Unagreement and how morphology sees syntax. In: Butt M, Findlay JY, Toivonen I, editors. Proceedings of the 29th International Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference (LFG24); 2024 Aug 21-3; Accra, Ghana. [unknow]: LFG; 2024. p. 24-44.

Abstract

The phenomenon of unagreement, found in Spanish, Catalan, and Greek, among other languages, poses four theoretical problems: 1) how to account for an apparent mismatch between trigger and target in an agreement relation; 2) how to account for the fact that not all languages have this phenomenon; 3) how to account for variation in the NPs that trigger unagreement within a given language and across languages; 4) how to account for the correlation between the presence or absence of unagreement and the type of adnominal pronoun construction (APC) allowed in the language. The analysis assumes a lexicalist unencapsulated view of the relationship between syntax and inflectional morphology, which implies that agreement is a strictly morphological phenomenon. The fundamental idea is that some determiners in some languages do not specify person information. This implies that a phrase headed by such a determiner is compatible with any person feature.