Speaker: Omer Preminger
Title: Failure to Agree is Not a Failure: phi-agreement and (un)grammaticality
Time: Thurs 4/23, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Based on the patterns of phi-agreement with post-verbal subjects in Hebrew, I argue against the idea that failure to establish a phi-agreement relation between a phi-probe and its putative target (e.g., due to intervention) results in ungrammaticality, or a “crash”; at the same time, I argue that phi-agreement also cannot be optional.
At first glance, these claims—-that phi-agreement is neither optional, nor does its failure result in ungrammaticality—-might seem contradictory. However, I argue that there is a third possibility, which is in fact the only one that can account for the data under consideration: phi-agreement must be attempted by every phi-probe; but if it fails (e.g., due to the presence of an intervener), its failure is systematically tolerated.
Interestingly, this mirrors the behavior of the ruled-based systems of early generative grammar, where rules were composed of a Structural Description (SD) and a Structural Change (SC). In these terms, the effects of phi-agreement, as far as valuing the features on the phi-probe, could be thought of as the SC; the locality conditions associated with phi-agreement (incl. intervention) could be thought of as the SD.
Finally, I note that these result are in conflict with the idea that Case arises as a result of phi-agreement (e.g., as a result of valuing a full phi-set on a probe; Chomsky 2000, et seq.); I show independent evidence—-from empirical domains outside of the ones discussed above—-that a theory claiming that Case is dependent on phi-agreement is untenable.