The Syntax of Case and Agreement: its Relationship to Morphology and Argument Structure

326 Pages·2005·1.72 MB·English

The Syntax of Case and Agreement: its Relationship to Morphology and
Argument Structure

By

Vita G. Markman

A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Program in Linguistics
written under the direction of
Professor Mark Baker
and approved by
Professor Mark Baker
Professor Viviane Deprez
Professor Ken Safir
Professor Carson Schutze
New Brunswick, New Jersey

October 2005
© 2005
Vita G. Markman
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION

The Syntax of Case and Agreement: its Relationship to Morphology and Argument
Structure

by VITA G. MARKMAN

Dissertation Director
Professor Mark Baker

In this thesis I argue for a non-arbitrary relationship between the syntax of case and
agreement and its morphological realization, as reflected in the following linguistic universals:
1. If a language overtly case-marks the subject, it overtly marks the object; 2.If a language has
overt object agreement, it has overt subject agreement (Moravcik 1974, Comrie 1988,
Lehmann 1982). The goal of this thesis is to explain the nature of the morphology-syntax
connection the above universals embody and explore the consequences it has for syntactic
theory, grammars of individual languages, and for UG.
In this dissertation I depart from the Universal Approach (e.g. Chomsky 1981, Rouveret
and Vergnaud 1980, and later in Chomsky 1995, 2000, Harley 1995, Sigurdsson 2003 inter
alia) that treats case and agreement as universal properties of language and their overt
realization as arbitrary and language specific. Building on a proposal presented in Pesetsky and
Torrego 2001 that features are interpretable but may become uninterpetable if placed on a
wrong head, I argue that case and agreement features are misplaced interpretable features used
by languages to create PF-records of thematic relations. I further argue that misplaced features
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are not universal: in the absence of case and agreement features PF-records of thematic
relations are preserved via rigid word order.
I further demonstrate that restrictions on feature misplacement together with the inherent
properties of misplaced features and the syntactic configurations in which misplaced features
are valued account for the above universals, derive a constrained cross-linguistic case and
agreement typology, and has consequences for (non)-configurationality. In particular, I argue
that languages without case features but with agreement features will be non-configurational,
languages that have both case and agreement features may allow but not require NP
dislocation, and finally languages that lack case and agreement features will have rigid word
order. This is the topic of Chapter 4. In this thesis I also address (quirky) dative subjects
(Chapter 2), infinitives (Chapter 3), and ergativity (Chapter 5).

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DEDICATION

To All My Parents

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost I would like to thank my advisor, Mark Baker, without whom this work
would certainly not be possible. What I can fit into a paragraph in the acknowledgments to my
thesis would never be enough to adequately express my gratitude to you. Your book on Lexical
Categories instilled in me a desire to write a dissertation in syntax. Thank you for being my
inspiration and my role model. Thank you for your intellectual input, for the time you have
devoted to me. Thank you for having faith in me and for your understanding, both on a personal
and a professional level. To me, you are and always will be an example of a great teacher, a
caring mentor and a brilliant researcher. I am honored to be your student. Thank you.
I owe many thanks to Ken Safir and Viviane Deprez who took their time to comment on my
work throughout the two years that I have worked on this project. Thank you for your patience,
your time, your input and your guidance. Thank you to Carson Schutze, for taking the time to be
my external committee member, for meeting with me and providing detailed and thought-through
comments. You all made a great committee together and I value and appreciate your help! I
thank you all for the time and effort you have invested in me.
I am also very grateful to other faculty members at the Rutgers Linguistics Department
who significantly contributed to my education. Thank you to, Veneeta Dayal, Bruce Tesar, Maria
Bittner and Matthew Stone for being my professors, my teachers, my mentors. I would also like
to thank Anna Szabolsci and Richard Kayne who were my first professors of linguistics. Because
of you I was able to fulfill my dream of getting into Rutgers which was and remains my first
choice graduate school. Thank you for the encouragement you have given me, for your help and
support.
I would like to thank all the students at the Rutgers Linguistics Department for being a
part of this great community and making my time here so much fun. I would like to thank Seye
Adesola, Slavica Kochovska, Jessica Rett, Seung Hun, Beto Ellias-Ulloa, Natalia Kariaeva and
all the members of our Syntax Group *STaR for offering valuable input on my presentations.
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Thank you for being my classmates and my friends. Special thanks go to Anubha Kothari for
providing judgments on Hindi and to Xiao Li for the judgments on Chinese. Thank you Anubha
and Xiao for being my patient and helpful informants.
I would like to thank the Rutgers Linguistics Department as a community for helping me
get this far. Thank you all for being my colleagues, my mentors, and my friends. You are a great
department and I feel privileged to be a part of you. A special thanks goes to Joanna Stoher who
has been and continues to be the best office manager in the world. Thank you, Joanna, for all
your invaluable help, your infinite patience and understanding.
I also owe many thanks to the students and faculty at the Department of Linguistics at
UCLA where I spent the Fall 2004 quarter as a visiting student. Special thanks go to Tim Stowell
who welcomed me to the department and allowed me to use its numerous resources. Thank you to
Hilda Koopman and Anoop Mahajan for teaching an incredibly stimulating seminar on Quirky
Subjects.
No words would be enough to express the gratitude I feel towards my family, especially
to all my parents: Gary, Lyuda, Sasha and Arkadij, my sister Ilona and my brother Denis. I feel
especially grateful to my Mom, who unfortunately is not here to share with me this joyful and
important occasion, but who is forever in my heart. My dear parents, my debt to all of you is the
greatest. Gary, you raised me. You instilled in me the very values that drove me to pursue higher
education, and in particular, obtain a doctoral degree. You have taught me to appreciate and seek
knowledge, to strive for self-improvement and take joy in creative intellectual pursuits. The
impact you have had on my life truly cannot be measured. For this and for much more I am
infinitely thankful to you. My dear Sasha and Arkadij, your house I have been calling ‘home’ for
over 10 years now. Thank you for your warmth, for your welcome, for your kindness for your
moral support. Thank you all for being my family. Always.
I owe many thanks to all my friends outside of the department. In particular, to my
precious little girl Sophie for her brilliant mind and her kind soul. The help and support you have
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offered and continue to offer me is invaluable. Thank you for the stimulating discussions about
linguistics and about life…Thank you for proofreading my papers, handouts, and abstracts
countless times. Thank you for listening to my practice talks. Thank you for taking an insane
amount of time to help me do the editing and formatting revisions for my thesis. If I were to name
one person outside of my committee who had a direct impact on making this thesis possible, it
would be you. It is you. Thank you my dear for keeping me from going nuts, for being my best
friend and my confidante.
My dear friends Felix, Ella M., Ella A. Olja, Yasha, Alik, Robert, Josh, Sam, and Asya,
all of you have helped me enormously in your own way. My dear Ellas, when I am around you I
rest mentally and emotionally. I thank you both for that. Felix, thank you for being an incredibly
kind and sensitive person, a great friend, and for being so much fun to hang out with. Alik, you
have taught me to appreciate excellent music. This thesis was written while listening to Chet
Baker, Bill Evans, John Coltrane and Jim Hall, to name a few. Thank you for introducing me to
these great musicians and for teaching me to love jazz.
I would like to extend my thanks to the members of the Argentine Tango Community in
New York and Los Angeles for making it possible for me to forget about syntax and my
dissertation when I needed to.
Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my friend and dance partner Alex. You
are the soul of tango. Thank you for your kindness, for your incredible patience, for your support
and understanding, for giving me the strength to go on. Thank you for your smile, for your dance
and for the magic of you. You fill my days with joy and laughter and light. I cannot tell you how
grateful I am to you for that.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ii
Dedication iv
Acknowledgements v

1 Introduction: Case, Agreement and the Universal Approach 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Universals of case and agreement 10
1.3 Theoretical Framework 14
1.4 Restrictions on feature misplacement 30
1.5 Conclusion 32

2 Dative Subjects 37
2 1 Introduction 37
2.2 Dative Subjects 39
2.3 Adverbial vs. verbal experiencers 52
2.4 Intransitive dative subject constructions 66
2.5 Transitive dative subject constructions 70
2.6 The nature of EvP 84
2.7 Conclusion 98

3 Infinitives 101
3.1 Introduction 101
3.2 Against the [+/- tense] distinction in infinitives 104
3.3 Proposal 109
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3.4 Raising and ECM 113
3.5 Control 131
3.6 What ‘For’? 151
3.7 Expletives 160
3.8 Conclusion 164

4 Ways of Feature Misplacement 169

4.1 Introduction 169
4.2 Mohawk vs. Nahuatl 173
4.3 Bantu 186
4.4 Indo-European Languages 204
5.5 Japanese 222
5.6 Haitian Creole, Chinese 231
5.7 Conclusion 246

5 Remarks on Ergativity 250
5.1 Introduction 250
5.2 Ergativity: a proposal 251
5.3 Agreement with the absolutive object only 263
5.4 Agreement with both subject and object 265
5.5 Ergative languages without agreement 268
5.6 Ergativity and the universals of case and agreement 271
5.7 Conclusion 275
Conclusion 276

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