Abstract
This is a linguistics article about Estonian (and broadly, other Finno-Ugric languages) written in the framework of generative grammar, and more specifically, a Minimalism/Distributed Morphology hybrid.
Highlights
In the canonical case of subject-verb agreement, there is one instance of subject agreement in person and number on the finite verb
Morphological forms are supplied a er syntactic operations at a step known as Vocabulary Insertion, which is taken to occur as part of the interface responsible for phonetic and phonological form (PF)
Estonian is a member of the largest group of languages in the sample (36.7%), whose negative imperatives utilize a special form of negation
Summary
In the canonical case of subject-verb agreement, there is one instance of subject agreement in person and number (herea er: φ-features) on the finite verb. Under standard Minimalist conceptions, this kind of agreement is formalized as an Agree relation (between the subject and the verb, loosely speaking) in the syntax correlating with one agreement marker in the morphology This one-to-one relationship between syntactic agreement relation and morphological exponence of agreement does not always obtain in Estonian. Examples such as affirmative clauses in Estonian are the canonical case, a one-to-one correspondence between syntactic and morphological agreement. For Estonian, negated indicatives would have no agreement—neither syntactic, nor morphological—and negated imperatives would have two instances of syntactic agreement that correspond to two morphological exponents of agreement.
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