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Agreement displacement in Basque : principles, parameters, and syntax-morphology interaction| old_uid | 2331 |
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| title | Agreement displacement in Basque : principles, parameters, and syntax-morphology interaction |
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| start_date | 2007/03/05 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | The talk discusses the role of syntax and morphology in agreement intervention(blocking of canonical target-controller relations in agreement) and
agreementdisplacement (non-canonical target-controller pairing in agreement), focusing on the Person Case Constraint (PCC) in Basque. The PCC occurs blocks person Agree between the absolutive Case/Agree locus v and 1st/2nd person absolutive subject, in the presence of a dative experiencer (*v-DAT-1/2:SU vs. v-1/2SU).
I introduce a novel phenomenon, "absolutive displacement", whereby some speakers allow the subject to become ergative in all and only PCC contexts. It
is argued that the raising allows a new person Agree relation between ergative Case/Agree locus T and the subject when the latter raises to satisfy
the EPP. In this new relation between T and SU, the dative can no longer intervene (T-1/2:SU v-DAT-trace(SU)). The circumvention of the PCC is subject to syntactic conditions and has repercussions beyond agreement, namely in the case system.
In this, absolutive displacement behaves like other agreement displacements that have a known syntactic effect (e.g. inverse in Algonquian). Like them, it contributes to syntactic theory: it exemplifies an expected but putatively lacking derivation that escapes a constraint banning a local representation.
At the same time, other agreement displacement, it is subject to essentially arbitrary conditions on morphophonological spell-out varying from idiolect to idiolect, conditions that have been the basis of advocating a purely morphological treatment of agreement displacement. At this point of tension in the system arise questions about the knowledge by syntax about the morpho-lexical properties of vocabulary items and their "morphological" combinations, as filters of narrow syntax spell-out or as narrow-syntactic triggers. |
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| responsibles | Aroui |
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