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  • The syntax of agreement and concord
  • Stephen Wechsler
The syntax of agreement and concord. By Mark C. Baker. (Cambridge studies in linguistics 115.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 273. ISBN 9780521671569. $43.99.

Over a period of two decades, Mark Baker produced a remarkable series of books, each of them an ambitious crosslinguistic study of a different facet of syntax: grammatical function changing operations (Baker 1988), noun and pronoun incorporation (Baker 1996), and word classes (Baker 2003). In The syntax of agreement and concord (SAC), B takes on the syntactic distribution of person, number, and gender features (phi-features) in grammatical agreement. As in the earlier studies, B proposes a unified theory and supports it with data from a vast array of languages. B’s work is unusual in its combination of depth of analysis and the breadth of languages covered. Working within his own variant of Noam Chomsky’s minimalist program, but also using typological research methods, B finds deep formal similarities lurking beneath the apparent diversity of languages, and develops formal syntactic models from which those generalizations can be deduced. Like an intrepid scholarly explorer traveling by dog sled on one page and by canoe on the next, B traverses a varied, often difficult, linguistic terrain in order to test his hypotheses. The book will help to define the field in the coming years. It is required reading for scholars of grammatical agreement, and high on the suggested reading list for any syntactician.

In Ch. 1, ‘Introduction: Category distinctions as a window on the theory of agreement’, B begins with Stassen’s (1997) agreement universal: person agreement favors verbs over other categories. In Spanish, for example, verbs agree in person and number, while adjectives agree in number and gender, but not person (ex. 23, p. 22).

  1. 1.

    1. a. (Nosotras) com-emos las manzanas.

      we.f.pl  eat-1pl.S  the apples

    2. b. (Nosotras) somos  gord-as. (*gord-amos)

      we.f.pl  are.1pl.S  fat.f.pl  fat-1pl

Many languages are like Spanish; in others, both verbs and predicate adjectives agree in person with their subjects (see 5). According to Stassen (1997), the reverse of Spanish, where person agreement is marked on adjectives but not verbs, is unattested. B asks why this asymmetry should exist.

The answer B offers is based on the supposition that the person feature is subject to a special structural locality condition. Taking Chomsky’s (1986) spec-head agreement as a precedent, but applying it only to person agreement, B posits that a target may agree in person with a first- or second-person controller only if the controller occupies the target’s specifier or complement position:

  1. 2. The structural condition on person agreement (SCOPA): A functional category F can bear the features +1 or +2 if and only if a projection of F merges with an NP that has that feature, and F is taken as the label for the resulting phrase. (52)

Building on his 2003 theory of syntactic categories, B assumes that verbs, but not adjectives or nouns, project a specifier position in the functional shell over their maximal projections, as shown schematically in 3 and 4 below (53). The verb’s subject is generated in the specifier of VP, and then moves to the specifier of the TP (tense phrase) above it, shown as FVP in 3. FV bears the features of first person, feminine, plural [1Fpl]. SCOPA allows for the first-person feature (+1) on FV because its projection ‘merges with an NP that has that feature’ and F is the label for the resulting phrase FVP. [End Page 873]

  1. 3.

In contrast, the functional shell projected over an adjective phrase, notated as FAP in 4, lacks a specifier position. So a predicate phrase, perhaps headed by a copula, is needed in order to provide a home for the subject of an AP. In that configuration an FA marked for person violates SCOPA since FAP does not merge with an NP with the person feature. So, there can be no person agreement, indicated by [*1] in 4.

  1. 4.

Thus, B reduces...

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