• DOI:10.1023/A:1010757806504
• Corpus ID: 29405608

Long-Distance Agreement And Topic In Tsez

@article{Polinsky2001LongDistanceAA,
  title={Long-Distance Agreement And Topic In Tsez},
  author={Maria Polinsky and Eric Potsdam},
  journal={Natural Language \& Linguistic Theory},
  year={2001},
  volume={19},
  pages={583-646}
}

• M. Polinsky, Eric Potsdam
• Published 1 August 2001
• Linguistics
• Natural Language & Linguistic Theory

This paper presents and analyzes a unique pattern of long-distance agreement (LDA) in the Nakh-Daghestanian language Tsez, spoken in the Caucasus. The phenomenon, in which a verb may agree with a constituent inside its clausalcomplement, poses a serious challenge to theories of agreement locality. In anumber of formal syntactic theories, agreement between a head and an argumentreflects some very local clause-mate configuration, often specifier-head. Wedemonstrate that this is inadequate for a satisfactory analysis of LDA and wepropose an alternative that appeals to a less local configuration resemblinghead government. Crucial to our analysis of LDA is the generalization that LDAis triggered by a constituent which must be a topic. We argue that the agreementtrigger moves covertly to an A' topic position within its own clause where it is in a local agreement configuration with the verb. Independent evidence forcovert movement and the existence of configurations which block LDA support theanalysis. The primary conclusion is that syntactic agreement cannot be reducedto a specifier-head configuration in all cases. The theory must allow a lesslocal configuration in which the target simply governs the agreement trigger.