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  • Agreeing Adpositions in Avar and the Directionality-of-Valuation Debate
  • Pavel Rudnev

Given the central spot afforded to unvalued features in current theorizing, the directionality of feature valuation is the subject of a lively debate in the syntactic literature. The traditional conception of upward valuation, whereby the unvalued probe inherits features from a valued goal in its c-command domain (Chomsky 2000, 2001, Carstens and Diercks 2013, Preminger 2013), has to compete with downward valuation (Zeijlstra 2012), Hybrid Agree (Bjorkman and Zeijlstra 2019), and bidirectional Agree (Baker 2008), among others.

Here, using data from Avar, I discuss the crosslinguistically rare phenomenon of adposition agreement, whereby certain adverbs, post-positions, and locative case forms undergo agreement with an absolutive argument. I set the stage by sketching the mechanism of case assignment and argument-predicate agreement in Avar (section 1) and introducing the phenomenon of adposition agreement (section 2). I then show that the agreement morphology on agreeing adpositions is a result of agreement rather than concord (section 3). In sections 4–5, I explore the consequences of adposition agreement in Avar for upward and downward valuation, concluding that upward valuation is better equipped to account for the observed patterns. In section 6, I summarize the results of the discussion.

1 Argument-Predicate Agreement in Avar

All agreement in Avar is noun class agreement: traditionally, four noun classes—masculine (m), feminine (f), neuter (n), and plural (pl)—are identified.1 Not all verbs spell out agreement but if a verb does, it agrees in noun class with its absolutive arguments in all clause types, as shown for a finite clause in (1a), an infinitival clause in (1b), and [End Page 829] a low nominalization in (1c), where the agreeing transitive verb cmič- ‘sell’ takes on the neuter agreement prefix b–, coreferencing the noun class feature of the absolutive object DP mašina ‘car.abs’.2

(1)


  

In addition to the verb displaying identical agreement in both finite and nonfinite clauses, case marking on the arguments is also identical: in (1a), (1b), and (1c), the external argument wasas ‘son’ invariably carries ergative marking, whereas the internal argument appears unmarked.

The same uniform case marking and agreement patterns obtain in intransitive clauses, as shown in (2), for finite, infinitival, and nominalized clauses.

(2)


  

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I conclude from the identity of patterns of agreement and case assignment across finite and nonfinite clauses that high functional heads such as T are not implicated in negotiating either case or agreement, as has also been proposed for several related languages (see Gagliardi et al. 2014 for Lak and Tsez, Polinsky 2016 for Archi).

Two more sets of facts speak in favor of treating infinitival clauses like (1b) and low nominalizations like (1c) as vPs, and therefore divorcing case and agreement from the presence of T in the syntactic structure. First, neither clause type is compatible with clausal negation (Rudnev 2015:chap. 2), which signals their small size. In particular, I follow Wurmbrand (2001) in interpreting the incompatibility with clausal negation displayed by the infinitival and nominalized clauses in Avar as a hallmark of restructuring. Given the presence of the external argument, however, I depart from Wurmbrand (2001) and claim that the restructuring domain in Avar is vP rather than VP.

Second, nominalizations consist of a verbal root and a thematic vowel, and contain no tense-marking morphology. Avar infinitives, in turn, morphologically derive from nominalizations (cf. b–ič-i ‘selling’ and b–ič-i-ze ‘to sell’ in (1)) and serve as complements of the causativization head (Rudnev 2015:18). Given standard assumptions about causativization, those complements are more likely to be vP-sized than fully clausal. Therefore, I contend that the relevant domain for case assignment and agreement in Avar is vP.

With regard to structural relations between a verb’s arguments, existing work on Avar and related languages (Gagliardi et al. 2014, Rudnev 2015, Polinsky 2016, Polinsky, Radkevich, and Chumakina 2017, Ganenkov 2019) is unanimous in claiming that the ergative argument in transitive clauses asymmetrically c-commands the absolutive one, displaying the characteristics of a prototypical subject in nominative-accusative languages. More specifically, the ergative can bind the absolutive but the converse does...

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