Seminar in Syntax

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In the past thirty years of syntactic research, much attention has been paid to the main theoretical questions, and key empirical phenomena, that straddle the boundary between morphology and syntax. This course is an in-depth look at the highly influential Agree relation (Chomsky 2000, 2001), exploring the many ways it has been defined in recent (morpho)syntactic literature and investigating how its different versions fit onto specific syntactic agreement phenomena. We contrast two fundamental positions: a classic view in which Agree is central to displacement phenomena and a more radical view which limits Agree to agreement phenomena more narrowly. To this end, we will deconstruct the key components of the Agree relation including directionality, minimality, locality, the featural structure of probes and goals, and (non-)obligatoriness, among other topics. We will also try to determine the empirical range of Agree by taking a close look at less canonical instances of agreement including anti-agreement, wh-agreement, cliticization, non-phi-based agreement in general, and DP-internal agreement. Throughout, the emphasis will be on examining a maximally broad set of cross-linguistic data, with the goal of drawing wide-ranging empirical generalizations about agreement and movement patterns. The overarching aim is to distill the key insights from the very rich literature on Agree in order to nail down its proper place in the grammar (tied to movement phenomena or not) and in the treatment of morphosyntactic agreement phenomena in natural language.