Missing inflectional features and missing exponents in DP-internal agreement asymmetries

Eulàlia Bonet

doi:10.5334/gjgl.579

Abstract

This paper focuses on different types of agreement asymmetries within the DP in which postnominal modifiers exhibit full agreement while in prenominal modifiers agreement can fail in different ways. The main lines of the optimality-theoretic proposal in Bonet, Lloret &amp; Mascaró (2015) are followed, but it is shown, through a comparison of two Northern Italian varieties, that their constraint set cannot account for varieties of Friulian, where the plural exponent fails to surface in plural contexts. It is argued that one of their constraints must be split into two separate ones, a strictly phonological constraint, Max(segment), on the one hand, and, on the other, a constraint on exponence, Max-M[F], proposed by Wolf (2008).

Highlights

While in many Romance languages there is generally full agreement in gender and n umber within the DP, some varieties show agreement asymmetries, under specific conditions
Following previous work by Bonet et al (2015), hereafter BLM2015, it aims to show that agreement in the nominal domain is not solely the result of purely syntactic mechanisms, but is conditioned by morphological and phonological factors as well; on the other hand, with evidence coming from Northern-Italian Romance varieties, it is argued that the asymmetries can arise as the result of defective morphosyntactic feature spreading and due to failure of exponence of the relevant features, and this requires a modification of one of the constraints in BLM2015.1
The constraint Max(segment) is violated twice by candidate (15d) for different reasons: the noun violates it because the input has a final s that is missing in the output; and the demonstrative violates it because the morphosyntactic feature [plural] of the output does not appear with the corresponding exponent, s

Summary

Introduction

While in many Romance languages there is generally full agreement in gender and n umber within the DP, some varieties show agreement asymmetries, under specific conditions. The example in (1), corresponding to the Cazet subvariety of Fassan Ladin (Rasom 2008), shows feminine plural agreement on the noun and postnominal modifiers, while only feminine agreement is present in prenominal elements. The example in (2), from North-Eastern Central (NEC) Catalan, shows, to Fassan Ladin, failure of plural agreement in prenominal position; in this case, the noun is masculine.

BLM2015’s approach to the asymmetries

Spanish gender asymmetries

Further issues and concluding remarks