Rich Agreement Hypothesis Research Articles

On the Rich Agreement Hypothesis and varieties of embedded V2

AbstractThis paper addresses the controversy between Koeneman & Zeijlstra (K&Z) (2014) and Heycock & Sundquist (2017) concerning the viability of K&Z’s strong version of the Rich Agreement Hypothesis in the light of apparent counterexamples from the diachrony of Danish. It makes the general point that establishing whether or not cases of putative V-to-I movement in subordinate clauses can be reanalyzed as V-to-C, i.e. as embedded Verb Second (EV2), depends on the EV2-type of a language. The empirical discussion concerns appositive relatives and conditional protases, with V-to-C in the former being in principle compatible with ‘narrow’ nEV2 as displayed by Modern Mainland Scandinavian languages, and V-to-C in the latter with Old Norse-style ‘broad’ bEV2. It is concluded that the critical stages of Danish need to be scrutinized more closely before the above dispute can be settled.

풍부한 일치가정과 범주지정매개변인

This paper offers a novel explanation in terms of the category specification parameter to the well-known Rich Agreement Hypothesis (RAH) that “rich” agreement causes V-to-I movement. In this paper we propose a new way of explaining the RAH by the so-called “category specification parameter” which states that T and V are specified or are not specified to category in syntax. In rich agreement languages, the finite verb which is merged as an inflected form has to move to T because T, which is specified to category, requires a full lexical category to be merged. On the other hand, in poor agreement languages like English the finite verb merged as a root in syntax cannot move to T because T is not specified to category. Thus it is concluded that the RAH does not have to be stipulated but can be derived from the category specification parameter in syntax.

Don’t Rush to Rehabilitate: A Remark on Koeneman and Zeijlstra 2014

Koeneman and Zeijlstra (2014) aim to rehabilitate the strong version of the Rich Agreement Hypothesis (RAH), according to which there is a bidirectional implication between “rich” agreement morphology in the verbal system and movement of the finite verb to a functional head above vP but below the C system (V-to-I movement). We show that one of the clearest empirical arguments raised in the literature against the strong RAH—the persistence of V-to-I movement in Early Modern Danish—is not addressed by any of the counterarguments raised by Koeneman and Zeijlstra and therefore still stands as evidence against the rehabilitated generalization and theory.

Parameters of Poor Pronoun Systems

The world’s smallest pronoun systems can eschew any of the following contrasts: (a) author-nonauthor, (b) participant-nonparticipant, (c) singular-nonsingular. This supports the view that features are mutually independent parameters ( Harbour 2011a , 2014a , 2016 ), but is problematic for Koeneman and Zeijlstra’s (2014) reworking of the Rich Agreement Hypothesis, which is predicated on the claim that (a)–(c) are universally obligatory. The facts necessitate revision of Koeneman and Zeijlstra’s proposal.

Verb‐second in embedded clauses in Faroese

AbstractThere has been considerable controversy in the linguistic literature about the nature of Vfin‐Adv (V2) order in subject‐initial embedded clauses in Faroese: Is it the result of a V‐to‐T movement, as is typically assumed for Icelandic, or is it a root phenomenon, i.e. V‐to‐C movement, as usually assumed for the standard Mainland Scandinavian languages. Heycock et al. (2012) argue that both kinds of Vfin‐Adv order can be found in Faroese embedded clauses and this paper provides further evidence for that claim. On the assumption that V‐to‐T is still a possibility in Faroese, some versions of the so‐called Rich Agreement Hypothesis (e.g. Bobaljik & Thráinsson 1998) predict that transitive expletives should also be possible in Faroese. This prediction is borne out. However, contrary to predictions regarding direct connection between verbal inflection on the one hand and verb movement and transitive expletive constructions on the other hand, it is demonstrated that speakers who distinguish tense and agreement morphemes most clearly in their speech are neither more likely to accept transitive expletives nor V2‐orders in various types of embedded clauses than speakers who do not distinguish tense and agreement morphemes as clearly. It is maintained that while Vfin‐Adv is on its way out in Faroese, presumably because of diminishing morphological support and partially ambiguous syntactic evidence, the language has not yet reached the Mainland Scandinavian state in this respect.

Revisiting the loss of verb movement in the history of English

Most of the discussions of the loss of verb movement in the history of English have focused on data related to the rise of do-support. In this paper, we extend the empirical basis to evidence from adverb placement. Our analysis of the distribution of finite main verbs with respect to adverbs in a range of prose texts in the history of English shows that the decline of V-movement in English starts in the middle of the 15th century and that verb movement past adverbs is lost to a large extent around the middle of the 16th century. These observations differ considerably from what data involving the sentential negator not indicate. According to that evidence, the loss of verb movement is a rather long process starting in the 16th century and coming to completion over 200 years later. In order to reconcile the conflicting diachronic evidence from adverb placement and the syntax of negation, we propose that the loss of verb movement in English is not a single event but occurs sequentially. In a first phase, verb movement to T is lost while movement to a lower inflectional head is maintained. In a second phase, verb movement starts being lost completely. We show that the Rich Agreement Hypothesis, which has been very prominent in accounts of variation with respect to verb movement, cannot capture these developments in a satisfactory way. Instead, it is verbal morphology more generally that will be argued to play a role in connection with the occurrence of verb movement. However, we do not postulate a strong correlation between morphology and syntax and propose that the loss of verb movement in English is the result of a combination of factors: changes in the verbal morphosyntax (loss of subjunctive, rise of periphrastic forms), an acquisitional bias towards simpler structures, the decline of the subject-verb inversion grammar found in early English, and effects of dialect contact.

Poor pronoun systems and what they teach us

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>The world’s smallest pronoun systems can eschew any of the following contrasts: (i) author–nonauthor, (ii) participant–nonparticipant, (iii) singular–nonsingular. This supports the view that features are mutually independent parameters (Harbour 2011a, 2014a, 2014b), but is problematic for Koeneman and Zeijlstra’s (2014) recent reworking of the Rich Agreement Hypothesis, which is predicated on the claim that (i)–(iii) are universally obligatory. </span></p></div></div></div>

The Rich Agreement Hypothesis Rehabilitated

The generalization that V-to-I movement is conditioned by rich subject agreement on the finite verb (the Rich Agreement Hypothesis) has long been taken to indicate a tight connection between syntax and morphology. Recently, the hypothesis has been questioned on both empirical and theoretical grounds. Here, we demonstrate that the empirical arguments against this hypothesis are incorrect and that it therefore must be rehabilitated in its strongest form. Theoretically, we argue that the correlation between syntax and morphology is not direct (morphology does not drive syntax) but follows from principles of language acquisition: only if language learners are confronted with particular morphological contrasts do they postulate the presence of corresponding formal features that in turn drive syntactic operations.

How variational acquisition drives syntactic change

Although language acquisition is frequently invoked as a cause of syntactic change, there has been relatively little work applying a formal model of acquisition to an actual case of language change and testing its predictions empirically. Here we test the model of Yang (Language Variation and Change 12: 231–250, 2000) on the historical case of the loss of verb movement to Tense (V-to-T) in Faroese and Mainland Scandinavian, using quantitative data from a number of corpora. We show that the model straightforwardly predicts the historical data, given minimal and uncontroversial assumptions about Scandinavian syntax. In contrast to a number of previous attempts to explain this repeated pattern of change, it is not necessary to appeal to any bias against learning structures involving V-to-T—a welcome result, given current evidence from acquisition. The newer V-in-situ parameter setting overcomes the original V-to-T grammar because it is more learnable in a language that also has embedded verb-second (EV2). Finally, we argue that the course of the diachronic change is evidence against a strong version of the “Rich Agreement Hypothesis” (RAH), but that under this account the stability of V-to-T in Icelandic provides evidence for the weaker version (cf. Bobaljik, Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 6: 129–167, 2002).

The Rich Agreement Hypothesis and the Loss of Verb Second in English

The Rich Agreement Hypothesis and the Loss of Verb Second in English

The syntax/morphology interface in Spanish L2 acquisition: Focus on quantified DPs

AbstractThis article examines whether L2 acquisition of morphology and syntax develops independently (the Separation Hypothesis) or not (the Rich Agreement Hypothesis), focusing on the acquisition of Number specification on certain Spanish quantifiers by French speakers. In Spanish, some quantifiers are specified for Number and directly precede the head noun, in contrast to their French counterparts where a dummy prepositiondemust appear inside the DP. Results from a grammaticality judgement task and a production task show that intermediate and advanced learners perform poorly on plural inflection with some quantifiers, and reject the use ofde. This suggests that they have acquired Number specification on these quantifiers, which allows Case marking on the following noun, but do not produce the appropriate morphology. These results support the Separation Hypothesis, but not the Rich Agreement Hypothesis.

The syntax/morphology interface in Spanish L2 acquisition: Focus on quantified DPs

This article examines whether L2 acquisition of morphology and syntax develops independently (the Separation Hypothesis) or not (the Rich Agreement Hypothesis), focusing on the acquisition of Number specification on certain Spanish quantifiers by French speakers. In Spanish, some quantifiers are specified for Number and directly precede the head noun, in contrast to their French counterpartswhere a dummy preposition de must appear inside the DP. Results from a grammaticality judgement task and a production task show that intermediate and advanced learners perform poorly on plural inflection with some quantifiers, and reject the use of de. This suggests that they have acquired Number specification on these quantifiers, which allows Case marking on the following noun, but do not produce the appropriate morphology. These results support the Separation Hypothesis, but not the Rich Agreement Hypothesis.

The Rich Agreement Hypothesis and Early Modern Danish embedded-clause word order

This article attempts to shed light on the issue of a possible link between the loss of ‘rich’ subject-verb agreement and the loss of verb raising in embedded clauses in earlier stages of the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Different versions of this so-called ‘Rich Agreement Hypothesis’ are compared in light of new diachronic data from the history of Danish. Examples of word order variation with and without verb raising over sentential adverbials were collected from a corpus of twelve sets of texts written in the Early Modern Danish period (ca. 1500–1700). Empirical results indicate that distinctions in person agreement in the verbal inflectional paradigm disappeared nearly 250 years before a significant decline in the frequency of verb raising. In order to explain a possible trigger for this change, the article closely examines the impact of structurally ambiguous word order and syntactic – not morphological – clues during acquisition.

Realizing Germanic Inflection: Why Morphology Does Not Drive Syntax

This paper examines and evaluates what may be called the "Rich Agreement Hypothesis" (RAH) in the domain of verb movement asymmetries in Germanic. The most prominent current accounts (e.g., Rohrbacher's 1999 Morphology-Driven Syntax) require inspection of the internal make-up of paradigms and take overt morphological variation to be the cause of syntactic variation. A survey of the literature shows that these proposals are empirically untenable in their strong (bi-conditional) form; there are numerous cases of syntactic variation attested in the absence of corresponding morphological variation. The strongest sustainable descriptive generalization is a one-way implication from rich morphology to verb movement. Though this has been noted before, its implications have not been adequately discussed. While morphology-driven approaches could have explained a strong RAH; when faced with the weaker, one-way implication they can provide no account of why that correlation should hold, and are thus at best incomplete. That is, they provide no insight as to why there are no languages with rich morphology, but in which the finite verb remains in the VP. The particular correlations that are attested, and in particular the absence of a certain class of languages, do however follow from a theory which takes morphology to be not the cause, but rather a reflection, of syntactic structure, in line with common theorizing in morphology. The inflection-movement correlations that do exist therefore challenge rather than supporting morphology-driven approaches to morphosyntax.