Abstract
Subject-verb agreement in φ-features has been treated as a relation between the subject and some functional category in the clausal spine (Infl, Agr, T). I argue that such severing of the Phi-probe from the verb is problematic for agreement patterns in Bantu languages and argue for a tighter connection between them. The crucial argument is the lack of consistent association of functional heads with agreement features, observed e.g. in compound tenses and aspectual-verb constructions in Bantu languages. The number and positions of Phi-probes in clausal structure are derived from the number and size of head-chains containing a verb.
Highlights
The so called subject-verb agreement has been for a long time analyzed as a relation between the subject and some functional head in the clausal spine (for example Infl0/T0 (Chomsky, 1981) or AgrS0 (Pollock, 1989))
Even though the Infl-origin approach is widely accepted and certainly not unmotivated, I argue in this paper that it faces a major difficulty in accounting for subject agreement in Bantu languages
This can be seen in multi-verb constructions, such as compound tenses and aspectual verb constructions, where a single functional head, e.g. Asp, agrees with the subject in one syntactic context but not in another
Summary
The so called subject-verb agreement has been for a long time analyzed as a relation between the subject and some functional head in the clausal spine (for example Infl0/T0 (Chomsky, 1981) or AgrS0 (Pollock, 1989)). As we see in (7), there is no auxiliary verb, and the main verb (preceded by the perfect aspect prefix) is marked with a single subject agreement prefix This distribution of default auxiliaries (called the overflow pattern of auxiliary use in Bjorkman (2011)), is characterized by the lack of consistent association of periphrastic expression with a specific inflectional head.. That the extra agreement probe in compound tenses is not introduced by a specific aspectual head (as predicted by the Infl-origin approach), as its appearance does not correlate with the presence of that head in the structure. Instead, it correlates directly with the number of verbs
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