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Cherlon Ussery in Syntax Reading Group

This week's syntax reading group — the final one of the semester — will feature Cherlon Ussery reporting on some of her current research: 'Case and agreement as different components of the grammar'. The meeting is today (May 1), 8:00 pm, at Amy Rose's place. It is likely to also feature some manner of delectable refreshments. Abstract below.

[Thanks Annahita!]

Abstract

This thesis utilizes case and agreement phenomena to explore the nature of the
syntactic operation Agree, as proposed by Chomsky (2000). By case, I mean what
is standardly assumed - Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Absolutive, Ergative,
etc. By agreement, I am referring to the morphological realization of phi
features (person, number, gender) of one item on another item. Usually agreement
refers to a verb displaying the phi features of one or more nominals. These
nominals may or may not be an argument of the verb. I examine this type of
agreement, as well as agreement between subjects and secondary predicates.

The fundamental questions I ask are: Where and how are decisions about case and
agreement made? Are these decisions made in the syntactic component of the
grammar, with the morphology being simply a reflection of syntactic processes,
or are there separate processes that occur only in the morphology? The standard
assumption is that Agree is responsible for both case and agreement. However,
recent work has challenged the idea that both case and agreement are handled in
the syntax. For instance, McFadden (2004, 2006) proposes that case is assigned
post-syntactically via a morphological algorithm. Bobaljik (2006) also assumes
that case is assigned post-syntactically and goes a step further by proposing
that the agreement is also determined strictly in the morphology. Bobaljik's key
insight is that agreement tracks case - i.e., only DPs with certain case values
can trigger agreement.

This thesis evaluates proposals in which both case and agreement are determined
in the syntax, via Agree, as well as proposals in which both case and agreement
are determined post-syntactically in the morphology. I show that forcing both
case and agreement into the syntax leads to unnecessarily complicated structures
while forcing both case and agreement into the morphology fails to capture the
fact that agreement is often - but not always - dependent on case.

I argue that case is indeed part of the narrow syntax and is assigned via Agree.
However, I follow Bobaljik's proposal that agreement is a post-syntactic
phenomenon and occurs in the morphology. Situating case and agreement in
different components of the grammar nicely captures the dependency found in some
constructions. This approach has the added benefit of accounting for
constructions in which case and agreement come apart. For instance, in some
constructions, a verb only optionally displays agreement with a particular noun.
However, the case borne by that noun is not optional. The crux of the proposal
is as follows: case is assigned in the syntax via Agree; the morphology has
access both to the syntactic structure and to the output of the case assignment
process, various morphological principles determine whether a DP that bears a
particular case will trigger agreement. Placing case and agreement in different
modules of the grammar allows for a stricter, narrower syntax, while also
capturing a dependency that holds in some constructions and an optionality that
holds in other constructions.

May 1, 2008 12:04 AM | 06:15 (2008-05-01) , syntax reading group