Abstract for Natalia Kariaeva's talk

Case, Agreement, and Instrumental Predicates in East Slavic Languages
Natalia Kariaeva (Rutgers)
March 27, 2007 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

[This talk is the result of a collaboration with Mark Baker] We propose an extended case condition on agreement, claiming that a head can agree with an NP if the head values the case of the NP (as usual) or if the NP values the case feature of the agreeing head. This helps to bring agreement on adjectives, determiners, and participles under the same theory as agreement on verbs. We then face a salient problem for this extended case condition: the fact that instrumental predicates in East Slavic languages agree with their subjects in number and gender but not in case. We suggest that these instrumental predicates actually agree with a caseless PRO, so that these constructions provide indirect support for the extended case condition.