Unifying first and last conjunct agreement

Abstract

The paper investigates first and last conjunct agreement in Serbo-Croatian, the latter being a rather rare phenomenon for head initial languages. The paper gives a uniform account of first and last conjunct agreement based on the operation Agree (Chomsky 2000). The account captures both the contexts where first and last conjunct agreement exhibit parallel behavior and the contexts where the parallelism between the two breaks down. The analysis also captures interaction between gender and number agreement. Given the complexity of the first/last conjunct agreement paradigm in Serbo-Croatian, to the extent that it is successful the analysis presented in the paper provides strong evidence in favor of the operation Agree in general, as well as the particular approach to Agree adopted in the paper. The system developed in the paper allows one instance of uninterpretable features, namely valued uninterpretable features, not to undergo feature checking and does not require uninterpretable features in general to undergo feature checking with interpretable features, differing in these respects from Chomsky (2000, 2001a) and Pesetsky and Torrego (2007).