Agreement: Interactions with Case and Raising

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to describe verbal agreement in languages like Icelandic in which the finite verb agrees with the nominative SUBJ, if there is one; otherwise, it agrees with a nominative OBJ; otherwise, it shows 3rd person singular features in the default gender (neuter in Icelandic). Special attention is paid to agreement in raising constructions, the raising verb may agree with the nominative OBJ of its infinitival complement. Similar facts occur in English locative inversion (Bresnan, 1994). These facts support the claim that verbs do not specify the Person-Number-Gender (PNG) features of any particular GF in their lexical entries. Instead, they specify the clausal PNG features as the feature structure AGR(EEMENT), which is unified with the AGR of the appropriate GF satisfying a set of OT constraints (as in Alsina & Vigo, 2014).