| description | Jan-Wouter Zwart. 2006. Complementizer agreement and dependency marking typology. Leiden Working Papers in Linguistics 3.2, 53-72. |
| type | Working papers article. |
| ID | 2006a | 125 | September 29, 2005 |
| origin | Paper presented at the Agreement workshop after Marjo van Koppen's defense, Leiden, April 15, 2005, and written up for the proceedings of that workshop in LWPL. Retraction of my earlier analysis of complementizer agreement, now viewed in the context of a more general theory of dependency marking, underlying the Dependency in Universal Grammar project. |
| keywords | agreement; dependency; head-marking; dependent-marking; complementizer agreement |
| summary | The paper considers the status of complementizer agreement from a theoretical and typological point of view. Theoretically, the phenomenon is strange because no semantic or syntactic relation between the complementizer and the subject seems to be underlying it. A probe-goal analysis is rejected, as it would require positing ad hoc agreement features in C. Typologically, it looks like complementizer agreement would be a rare instance of 'nondependent-marking'. The paper concludes that complementizer agreement should not be described in the terms employed for subject-verb agreement, but should instead be analyzed as the result of analogical change, as proposed by Goeman (2000) and Kathol (2001). |
| related |
full text Presentations: Tromsø 02/2006; Leiden 04/2005; Harvard 11/2003 Abstracts: GLOW 1992 Publications: Local agreement, Agreement and remnant movement, Morphosyntax of verb movement, Subject agreement on complementizers, Clues from dialect syntax, Dutch syntax, Verb movement and complementizer agreement Unpublished: 69 |