Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Syntax Square 3/29 - Kenyon Branan

Speaker: Kenyon Branan (MIT)
Title: Real object agreement in Tigre
Date: Tuesday, March 29th
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm
Place: 32-D461

Whenever the phi-features of an argument are cross-referenced by a morpheme in the verbal complex, the question arises: is this morpheme an agreement morpheme, or is it a doubled clitic. Recently, instances of object cross-referencing have been argued to be clitic doubling (Woolford 2008, Preminger 2009, Nevins 2011, Kramer 2014), raising the question of whether or not languages ever allow for true object agreement. I’ll argue, based on a variety of diagnostics, that object cross-referencing in Tigre appears to be a real instance of Agree.