Mark your calendar to come and join us this Thursday for a Ling-lunch talk by:
Omer Preminger (MIT)
“Basque Ling-Lunch Redux.”
WHEN: Feb 14, 12:30
WHERE: 32-D461
ABSTRACT:
Part II of the Basque Ling-Lunch series will begin with a recap of Episode One
- attendance of previous talk will not be assumed! - where it was shown that
apparent cases of Long-Distance Agreement (LDA) in dialectal Basque do not in
fact constitute a case of true LDA (construed as agreement that spans across
the boundaries of established locality domains). I provide evidence that the
cases in question fall into one of two categories: either (i) the apparent
LDA relation is comprised of two separate agreement relations, “stacked” on
top of one another, each of which is perfectly well-behaved with respect to
the relevant locality restrictions; or (ii) the agreement relation in question
spans the boundaries of neither DP nor CP, and is thus typologically
unexceptional.
In this brand new episode, I turn to the distinction between Agree (conceived
of as a relation between a probing head and a goal) and clitic-doubling
(conceived of as the generating of a clitic which is matched in phi-features
with a full argument DP). Certain asymmetries in the reach of so-called LDA
when targeting dative noun-phrases and targeting absolutive ones suggest that
absolutive agreement is an instance of Agree proper, whereas the dative (and
ergative) exponents on the auxiliary are the result of clitic-doubling. In
the climactic finale, I present an independent diagnostic for distinguishing
Agree from clitic-doubling: when so-called LDA fails to obtain, the
agreement-bearing form of the auxiliary is obviously ruled out; the question is
whether what shows up is default agreement on the corresponding exponent, or
rather an auxiliary form that lacks the relevant exponent altogether. I show
that precisely in those relations hypothesized here to be Agree relations,
failure of the relation results in default agreement-whereas in those
relations hypothesized here to be clitic-doubling, failure results in the
wholesale absence of the relevant exponent.