Abstract for Susana Huidobro's talk

Dative Inversion predicates: Agreement, syntactic positions, and locality
Susana Huidobro (Stony Brook)
March 14, 2006 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

This talk deals with an interesting asymmetry in agreement relations in Spanish and other Romance languages, that is, whereas preverbal subjects fully agree with the verb, postverbal subjects may or may not exhibit a full verbal agreement relation. Specifically, I investigate why default agreement with postverbal subjects is forced upon the verb in some cases and it is not in others. Three are the instances in which default agreement may occur in spoken Spanish, namely, existential predicates, dative inversion predicates, and disjunctive subjects. Interesting is the case of Dative Inversion Constructions since not in all instances default agreement is allowed. It is allowed in the case of existential verbs such as faltar 'to miss/lack' but not in the case of psychological verbs such as gustar 'to like'.

(1) a. Me gustan/*a los libros b. Me faltan/a los libros

cl1st-dat like-pl/sg the books cl1st-dat lack-pl/sg the books

'I like books' 'I'm missing the books'

I propose that only the operation Agree put forward in Chomsky (2001) is responsible for agreement relations either under internal merging in preverbal subject constructions or under c-command in constructions in which the subject occurs postverbally. Prima facie evidence of the latter has been drawn from agreeing existential bare nouns in Spanish. In regard to the occurrence of default agreement, I claim that it is the internal merging of a clitic with the auxiliary/verb head what blocks full agreement with the postverbal subject.