Abstract for Omer Preminger's talk

Breaking Agreements: Distinguishing Agreement and Clitic-Doubling by Their Failures
Omer Preminger (MIT)
April 15, 2008 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Across many languages and constructions, it is common to come across sentences in which a verbal argument is represented twice – once by a full noun-phrase, and once by a phonologically small morpheme that is matched in phi-features:

(1) host+[agreement-morpheme] . . . . . . [full noun-phrase]

The linguistic literature of the past few decades has identified two kinds of operations that can give rise to this state of affairs: agreement (as in, e.g., Chomsky 2000, 2001), and clitic-doubling (as in, e.g., Anagnostopoulou 2003).

In this paper, I propose a novel way to distinguish between agreement and clitic-doubling. The innovation lies in examining what happens when the relation in question fails to obtain:

(2) Proposed diagnostic:
Given a scenario where the relation R between an agreement-morpheme M and target noun-phrase X is broken – but the result is still a grammatical utterance – the proposed diagnostic supplies a conclusion about R as follows:
if M shows up with default phi-features (rather than the features of X) -> R is agreement
if M disappears entirely -> R is clitic-doubling

The workings of the proposed diagnostic are demonstrated using a family of constructions in dialectal Basque (Etxepare 2005). Besides supporting the proposed diagnostic, the analysis of Basque also provides an ancillary result, which would otherwise be unavailable, regarding the typological status of the Basque agreement system.