Walkow, Martin
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Publication Asymmetries in Conjunct Agreement(2011-01-01) Bhatt, Rajesh; Walkow, MartinHindi-Urdu displays an asymmetry with respect to the availability of Closest Conjunct Agreement. It is available only to objects and not to subjects. Agreement with subjects is always agreement with the full conjunct. We argue that this asymmetry in Conjunct Agreement is related to another asymmetry between subject and object agreement in Indo-Aryan languages: object agreement never involves person. We derive these properties of object agreement from the fact that object agreement is an instance of dissociated agreement, agreement that takes place independent of case-licensing. As a result when the probe (T) accesses the direct object goal, the person features of the goal have already been deactivated by the case-licenser (v) and T must look inside the DP at the phi-P, where only gender and number features are available. This yields the absence of person features in object agreement. With subjects, T is both the case-licensor and phi-agreement trigger. Hence the person features of the subject are visible to T. By a similar logic, the features of conjoined objects are not visible to the probe and a subpart must be identified whose features are visible. The identification of the subpart is subject to linearity considerations and we present a mechanism that allows for this. The resulting proposal sheds light on the distribution of features within the DP and the proper analysis of dissociated agreement. It is also a first step towards an integration of linearization and structural considerations in the treatment of agreement.Publication Locating Variation in Person Restrictions(2013-01-28) Walkow, MartinPerson based restrictions on combination of two internal argument clitics known as the Person Case Constraint (PCC) show two types of variation: (i) Different languages and different groups of speakers within one language allow differ combinations of person on the two internal argument clitics, and (ii) languages differ on which of the two arguments is realized differently when cliticization of both is blocked by the PCC. Two types of proposals exist within the larger literature on person based restrictions for how the first type of variation arises. Multiple Agree analyses locate the variation in the parametrization of the operation Agree. Cyclic Agree analyses on the other hand locate the variation in the properties of the functional lexicon, specifically the feature content of the probe and its syntactic position. Case studies of Central Catalan and Classical Arabic demonstrate here that a Cyclic Agree analysis using different feature specifications on the probe can account for variation of the first type between the Strong PCC and the Ultrastrong PCC within each of the the two languages. Cyclic Agree thus offers a unified analysis of such variation in the PCC and in person restrictions between subjects and objects where it was originally proposed (Bejar & Rezac 2009). The second type of variation is shown to arise from the different underlying structures that cause PCC in Central Catalan and Classical Arabic. A Cyclic Agree analysis offers a way of understanding this variation in terms of the different positions of the probes, different locality patterns of Agree as a function thereof and the presence of other processes of movement and Agree. The alternative strategies used when the PCC blocks cliticization are argued to follow from independent derivational processes, rather than a Last Resort mechanism. The analysis of the PCC is also shown to extend to restrictions on combinations of third person pronouns that are not typically analyzed in the PCC literature. Cyclic Agree thus accounts for some of the variation of the first type, plus the second type and restrictions on combinations of third person pronouns.