Furthest conjunct agreement in Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

Agreement with coordination has been a topic of much discussion in the syntactic literature for decades. This is due to its significance in deepening our understanding of key issues, such as the way primitive syntactic operations such as Merge and Agree operate and interact with hierarchical/linear distance, the location of agreement in the grammar, and whether or not narrow syntax, just like the PF, has access to linear order when valuing agreement. This paper empirically and theoretically contributes to the growing body of literature on the topic by investigating agreement with preverbal and sandwiched coordinate phrases in Jordanian Arabic. A special focus will be directed to furthest conjunct agreement, agreement with the first conjunct in preverbal position, since it challenges the mainstream generalization that conjunct agreement occurs with the closest conjunct. The paper reports on a series of four large-scale experiments on Jordanian Arabic and shows that agreement in these domains comes in various forms. Building on Citko (2018), I propose an analysis of the facts that overcomes the problems faced by previous work and that provides support to a new perspective on the computation of agreement, by distinguishing multiple simultaneous Agree that gives rise to resolved agreement from multiple nonsimultaneous Agree, where agreement may be distributed between narrow syntax and the PF.