Distributed Morphology Today: Morphemes for Morris Halle

10. Agreement in Two Steps (at Least)

10 10.1 Agreement Asymmetries In many languages the elements of a DP agree with a head noun (nominal concord). This is illustrated in (1) with an example from Spanish, where there is gender and number concord with the head noun, which appears in boldface. (1) Estas pequeñas casas abandonadas this.fem.pl small.fem.pl house.fem.pl abandoned.fem.pl ‘these small abandoned houses’ However, concord seems to fail in many languages for some positions, a phenomenon that has been called lazy concord (see Haiman and Benincà 1992; Rasom 2008). In most cases, lazy concord affects prenominal elements, not postnominal ones, as the example in (2) from MoroccanArabic illustrates (data from Shlonsky 2004). As (2a) shows, demonstratives in postnominal position agree in gender and number with the noun, in boldface; in (2b) the demonstratives in prenominal positions are bare forms. (2) a. l wәld had-a l bәnt had-i lǝ wlad had-u the boy this.masc.sg the girl this.fem.sg the children this.masc.pl ‘this boy’ ‘this girl’ ‘these boys’ b. had l wәld had l bәnt had lǝ wlad this the boy this the girl this the boys ‘this boy’ ‘this girl’ ‘these boys’ Some other languages that exhibit prenominal-postnominal asymmetries are Abkhaz (Hewitt 1979), with number concord postnominally but a bare form prenominally; Central Ladin (Rasom 2008), with feminine plural concord postnominally but only feminine concord prenominally; or Asturian Agreement in Two Steps (at Least) Eulàlia Bonet 168 Chapter 10 (Fernández-Ordóñez 2007), with mass concord postnominally but gender concord prenominally. Agreement asymmetries have also been observed at the clause level (clausal agreement). In these cases the order subject-verb often causes full agreement while with postverbal subjects lazy agreement is found. An example appears in (3), from Standard Arabic (Aoun, Benmamoun, and Sportiche 1994). In (3a) the order S–V causes gender and number agreement on the verb, while in (3b) the order V–S causes only gender agreement on the verb; the subject appears in boldface. (3) a. ʔal-ʔawlaad-u naam-uu the-children.nom slept.3.masc.pl ‘the children slept’ b. Naam-a l-ʔawlaad-u (*naam-uu l-ʔawlaad-u) slept.3.masc.sg the-children.nom ‘the children slept’ More examples and a typology of agreement asymmetries with postverbal subjects can be found in Samek-Lodovici 2002. Similar asymmetries have been observed in language acquisition (see, for instance, Franck, Lassi, Frauenfelder, and Rizzi 2006).1 Agreement asymmetries at the clause level and at the DP level show a clear parallelism: more stable agreement is found when the trigger of agreement precedes the element(s) it agrees with; less stable agreement is found when the trigger follows the target(s). This is schematically shown in (4), where the trigger appears in boldface. Throughout this chapter, the term modifier is used informally to refer to any element that can enter into an agreement relation with the noun within the DP.2 (4) a. More stable agreement Clause level: subject verb DP level: noun modifier b. Less stable agreement Clause level: verb subject DP level: modifier noun 10.2 Previous Analyses of the Asymmetries Several accounts exist of agreement asymmetries within the clause or within the DP, and in some cases the suggestion is made that the mechanism that causes DP and clausal asymmetries is the same. Franck et al. (2006), following work in Guasti and Rizzi 2002, suggest that, at the clause level, full agreement between a preverbal subject and the verb is the result of features being checked twice, through Agree and Move (which gives rise to a spec-head configura- Agreement in Two Steps (at Least) 169 tion); the weakness found with postverbal subjects is due to features being checked only once, through Agree. Shlonsky (2004) and Nevins (2011a) claim that these two different mechanisms for agreement are the source of the asymmetries within the DP, the harder issue being how to relate postnominal concord to a spec-head relation. For Shlonsky (2004) full concord within the DP is achieved indirectly. The head X in (5), which has the NP as its complement , has semantic features associated with its specifier (AP), but it also has phi-features that trigger the movement of the NP to the specifier position of the AgrXP projected by the raised head X (see Shlonsky 2004 for details); spec...