{"id":9835,"date":"2017-04-24T06:07:16","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T10:07:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=9835"},"modified":"2017-04-24T07:56:03","modified_gmt":"2017-04-24T11:56:03","slug":"syntax-square-425-nick-longenbaugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2017\/04\/24\/syntax-square-425-nick-longenbaugh\/","title":{"rendered":"Syntax Square 4\/25 - Nick Longenbaugh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaker:<\/strong> Nick Longenbaugh<\/a> (MIT)
\nTitle:<\/strong> Towards a unified treatment of the ?-Agree\/Move correlation
\nDate\/Time:<\/strong> Tuesday April 25, 1-2pm
\nLocation:<\/strong> 32-D461
\n Abstract:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

The past two decades have seen an explosion of research into the cross-linguistic manifestation of ?-Agreement and the basic principles at stake in its operation. Much of the original impetus for this investigation came from a desire to understand the precise correlation between ?-Agree and movement. If anything, however, ensuing discoveries have muddied the waters in this domain. While it is almost universally acknowledged that ?-Agree and Move are related (see van Urk 2015 for discussion and a formalization of this link), there has been a steady retreat from the strong position of the early 1990s that ?-Agree is parasitic on movement.<\/p>\n

(1) Specifier-head agreement<\/strong> (Kayne 1989): If AgrX is an agreement head and DP a phrase bearing ?-features, morphological agreement obtains only if the following structural configuration obtains: [AgrXP DP [AgrXP AgrX […DP…]]]<\/p>\n

A principle like (1) is especially successful for capturing agreement phenomena in the vP domain, e.g., past-participle agreement (PPA) in Romance and Scandinavian (Kayne 1985, 1989a; Christensen and Taraldsen 1989), but a wealth of cross-linguistic data (in at least Tsez (Polinsky and Potsdam 2001; English (Chomsky 2000, 2001), Icelandic (Sigur\u00f0sson 1996, 2008; Boeckx 2010), Hindi-Urdu (Boeckx 2004; Bhatt 2005), Basque (Etxepare 2006; Preminger 2009)) supports a “long-distance” ?-Agree operation, as in Chomsky 2000, 2001.<\/p>\n

(2) Agree<\/em><\/strong> (Chomsky 2000, 2001): An Agree relation obtains between a head H and a phrase XP, provided:
\n(i) Matching: XP bears valued features that are a superset of the unvalued features on H
\n(ii) Locality: There is no YP asymmetrically c-commanding XP that satisfies matching<\/p>\n

Given that (2) formally dissociates Agree and Move, the link so commonly observed between them must be added back in, a task that usually falls to ad-hoc \u0093EPP\u0094 features, either stipulated to be present on heads or probes themselves. This state of affairs leaves unanswered a number of fundamental questions, both theoretical and technical: How do we handle cases like PPA and other apparent instances of Spec-Head agreement? Can we predict which probes trigger movement, or must this be stipulated in an ad-hoc, language specific way? Most crucially, why should Agree and Move ever be correlated in the first place?<\/em><\/p>\n

It is to these questions that this talk will be addressed. Beginning with a case study of PPA, I argue for the conclusion that every ?-probe has the postulated “EPP-property,\u0094 so that ?-Agree must trigger movement unless independent factors intervene to block it. This allows us to remove “EPP\u0094 as a feature of heads or probes, and to predict straightforwardly whether ?-Agree triggers movement. I then explore two consequences of this proposal. The first is that those \u0093null subject\u0094 languages where T has ?-probe have both the traditional EPP (T must project a specifier) and null expletives (following Chomsky\u0092s 1981 proposal), a result I argue for on independent grounds following Bresnan & Kanerva (1989) and Sheehan (2010). The second is a new theory of expletive there<\/em> that treats it as a semantically vacuous oblique pronoun. By analogy to the behavior of oblique pronouns in Icelandic and cross-linguistically, I show this treatment better captures the distribution of there in English and cross-linguistically with fewer stipulations than competing treatments.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaker: Nick Longenbaugh (MIT) Title: Towards a unified treatment of the ?-Agree\/Move correlation Date\/Time: Tuesday April 25, 1-2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: The past two decades have seen an explosion of research into the cross-linguistic manifestation of ?-Agreement and the basic principles at stake in its operation. Much of the original impetus for this investigation came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9835"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9867,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9835\/revisions\/9867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}