Andrew Ira Nevins

The Locus of Ergative Case Assignment: Evidence from Scope

The apparently symmetrical patterns of A/S vs. O and A vs. S/O systems of case opposition often tempt an explanation of ergative as a structural (as opposed to inherent) case. In one class of such implementations, agent and object case are determined by distinct, cross-linguistically universal sources (e.g., T(ense) and v), and the two types of case opposition result from parameters determining whether case on intransitive subjects aligns with objects or agents. This intuition has been formalized both in terms of global case-realization principles within GB – be it via dependence (Marantz 1991) or competition (Bittner & Hale 1996) – and, within the spirit of the minimalist program, in terms of whether A-case or O-case is obligatory (Bobaljik 1993; Laka 1993, 2000). In sum, all of the above proposals agree that the ergative is a structural case differing from nominative only in terms of (a) morphology and (b) whether intransitive subjects align with it. Thus, they all predict that the syntactic behavior of nominative and ergative subjects should be largely parallel. Indeed, to date, no difference in subjecthood properties such as control or binding have been found in “morphologically ergative” languages. Moreover, there is no difference in the A’-status of ergative and nominative subjects (as diagnosed by the nonexistence

Agreement and Clitic Restrictions in Basque

The -features of ergative, absolutive, and dative arguments interact in various ways in the clitic and agreement system of the Basque finite auxiliary. In this paper, we discuss the syntax and morphology of agreement realization in a detailed study of the Bizkaian variety of Zamudio. Our main objective is to argue that the proper treatment of Basque verbal morphology must take into account both syntactic and postsyntactic principles and operations. That is, neither a strictly syntactic nor a strictly morphological account does justice to the clitic combination and agreement restriction effects. Rather, as certain processes refer to hierarchical structure and doubly-filled projections, and others refer to locality constraints on agreement at a distance, yet others refer to linear edge properties of morphophonological sensitivity and deletion of featural combinations, the division of labor for building and realizing the agreement morphology must be distributed, as delineated in the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, 1994, and much subsequent work). Crucial to the discussion will be the claim that, contrary to the dominant viewpoint in the literature, the morphemes attached to the auxiliary that are often identified as agreement are actually clitics that double the ergative, absolutive, and dative arguments. Such a view is supported by the reanalysis it enables for the Person Case Constraint (PCC) in Basque, as well as providing a principled account for the distribution of plural enclisis. Importantly, however, we argue that the auxiliary does manifest a single instance of syntactic Agree, with the absolutive argument. We show that this Agree operation may be subject to defective intervention in the context of dative arguments, leading to lack of agreement. The resulting model illustrates a dissociation in the effects of dative arguments on absolutive encoding, with distinct mechanisms for competition in clitic positions and locality-based agreement intervention. Previous work on Basque verbal morphology addressing these issues in the generative framework typically does not concentrate on any local varieties of the language (though see Rezac 2006). However, we believe that sig-

Chapter 3 Underlying representations that do not minimize grammatical violations

In this paper we review evidence from a variety of sources, including deneutralization studies, that indicate that the choice of underlying representations is governed by causal reasoning, statistical inference, orthographic knowledge, and hypercorrection, but rarely, if ever, by a principle of minimizing faithfulness violations.