Speaker: Adam Przepiórkowski (Warsaw / MIT)
Title: Concord as Insatiable Agree
Time: Thursday, April 24th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: The aim of this talk is to present an analysis of concord – nominal agreement in case and phi features – as insatiable Agree (e.g., Deal 2023, 2024; Clem and Deal 2024). On this approach, typical modifiers do not agree with nominal heads directly but are flagged with the relevant features by a higher functional head (e.g., D or K). This provides an immediate account of some otherwise puzzling facts about the number of exponed cases in overt case-stacking languages (e.g., as discussed in Richards 2013 and Pesetsky 2013 with respect to Lardil) and allows for a straightforward analysis of heterogeneous case patterns in Slavic and Finnic. I will argue that this approach to concord is theoretically superior to the current alternatives (Norris 2014, 2018; Bayırlı 2017), which require ad-hoc feature percolation principles. Moreover, given an appropriate rule of exponence of stacked feature bundles, it is immune to Norris’s 2018 Estonian challenge for case-stacking approaches to nominal concord. Empirically, this approach predicts some of the typological generalizations discussed in Bayırlı 2017 (when a language has both phi features and case, it may exhibit concord in phi features alone, but not in case alone) and naturally accounts for cross-linguistic observations in Norris 2018.
A draft manuscript on which this talk is based is available at https://tinyurl.com/4k97try2; at one point the slides will appear there as well. (There’ll be no paper handouts.)