Abstract
The article argues that the syntactic behavior of non-absolutive subjects of finite clauses in the Nakh-Daghestanian language Chirag Dargwa is a result of their interaction with two different functional heads in a clause: v and T. Discussing empirical data from Chirag, I present the puzzling behavior of person agreement, which shows selective sensitivity to arguments in the ergative, dative, and genitive cases. The primary evidence comes from the periphrastic causative, which displays some typologically unusual properties in case marking and agreement. I show that the ability to trigger person agreement is not an intrinsic property of ergative, dative, and genitive DPs in Chirag, but rather is endowed to the highest DP in T’s c-command domain over the course of the derivation. I propose that all non-absolutive subjects start out as DPs assigned inherent case and a theta-role by v, and that T further assigns structural nominative case to the DP in Spec,vP, thus making it accessible to φ-probes.
Highlights
The relationship between case and agreement is notoriously complicated
That we have reviewed patterns of subject case marking and established that case-marked subjects are structurally more prominent than other clausal arguments,7 we turn to patterns of person agreement in Chirag
Person agreement in Chirag involves four components: (i) absolutive arguments are visible to the person probe regardless of their grammatical function/structural position, (ii) subjects in the ergative, dative, and genitive cases are visible to the person probe, (iii) the person probe resides on T, and (iv) the person probe is relativized to [[person] participant]
Summary
The relationship between case and agreement is notoriously complicated. The standard Minimalist wisdom has it that both phenomena are a reflection of the probe–goal relation established between two structural loci in phrase structure—the probe residing on a clausal functional head that needs to value certain φ-features and the goal DP having the necessary φ-features—by means of the operation Agree (Chomsky 2000, 2001). The probe scans its c-command domain in search of a suitable goal and, when this is found, establishes an Agree relation with it, whereby the functional head receives valued φ-features from the goal and simultaneously assigns case to it. Case is thought of as a result of the need of the functional head to acquire agreement features
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