Agreement Impoverishment under Subject Inversion -
 

A Crosslinguistic Analysis







Vieri Samek-Lodovici



University College London











  In principle optimality theory makes it possible for a single 
 

set of universal constraints to entail universal generalizations while
 

at the same time deriving language specific properties such as the 
 

distinct lexical inventories associated with specific phenomena across
 

different languages. 



  This works exploits this property of OT to derive aspects of 
 

crosslinguistic agreement inventories for Iš - namely what features of 
 

Iš may agree with a subject when this takes different positions within
 

the clause - while at the same time entailing the universal 
 

generalization that agreement under a spec-head configuration, 
 

i.e. strictly within the local IP phrase and with no inroads into its 
 

VP-complement, is never poorer than that occurring within the clause 
 

extended projection, such as agreement between Iš and c-commanded 
 

subjects within the VP-complement.



  Agreement is claimed to be a property of syntactic domains, encoded 
 

in the constraints AGR and EXT-AGR. These require agreement to occur 
 

strictly within the local projection of an agreement head, or, respectively,
 

within the larger extended projection of the same head. They interact 
 

with NO-FEATS, which militates against any morphologically expressed 
 

agreement feature. Thanks to their 'telescopic' properties
 

-EXT-AGR being satisfied whenever AGR is- the overall OT interaction 
 

entails the generalization on agreement impoverishment, while the rank
 

of NO-FEATS in each possible constraint hierarchy determines what 
 

features may express agreement in the associated language.
 

  The paper also includes discussion and evidence for the generalization
 

on agreement impoverishment, as well as a comparison with alternative 
 

minimalist approaches to the same phenomenon. A version of this work is
 

to appear in a special issue of Linguistische Berichte.
 





Keywords: 	agreement impoverishment, subject inversion, 
 

				agreement inventory







Author's institution: Italian Department, University College London