Anaphora vs. Agreement: investigating the Anaphor Agreement Effect
Final Report Abstract
Rizzi (1997) famously observed that in Italian and Icelandic, anaphors cannot directly trigger agreement on their clausemate verbs. Since Rizzi’s original observation, the AAE has been shown to be attested in a wide range of languages with different types of anaphora and varying patterns of agreement. This has lead to the descriptive generalization: Anaphors may not trigger covarying φ-agreement. Although current Minimalist theories of anaphora implement anaphoric dependencies via an Agree operation in the syntax, few of them have dealt with the AAE directly. For one, at the start of this project it has still be unclear whether the AAE holds universally, or whether it is rather a linguistic tendency. Also, it had not been properly investigated what the consequences are of the AAE for theories of anaphora and agreement. For this reason, in our project we addressed the following research questions: • Is the AAE a linguistic universal or not? • How can the AAE be theoretically explained? • What does the AAE tell us about the nature of anaphors in general? • What does the AAE tell us about the nature of (verbal) agreement in general? This project has addressed all these four questions. The first conclusion is that the AAE is not a universal but a strong tendency, as exceptions to it have been attested in languages like Gujarati, Shona and Archi. This has lead by an epxlanation of the AAE in terms of derivational timing: only if anaphors are licensed by their local antencedents can they value agreement markers and vioalate the AAE. In addition, it has been observed that anahors are not only deficient in terms of so-called φ-features (i.e., person, number and gender features, but also in terms of so-called [ID]-features that encode referiential dependencies. In short, in various grammatical constructions, anaphors behave on a par with 1st and 2nd person pronouns, which are also referentially dependent on the (grammatical) context they appear in. The outcomes of our reserach have lead to a detailed investigation of the nature of anaphora crosslinguistically, informed by properties of the AAE, as well as asymmetries in person and animacy restrictions anaphors and antecedent and a formal taxonomy of anaphora regulated in terms of grammatical person and perspective. Finally, the research has lead to a confirmation that licensing of featural dependencies may indeed apply in a downward fashion (i.e., the dependent should be structurally lower than its licenser) and that, despite claims to the contrary, this also applies in the domain of φ-agreement. The outcomes have significantly added to our understanding of anaphors, agreement and the relation between them, and have paved the way for future research on interactions between anaphora, agreement as well as other types of syntactic dependencies.
Publications
- 2018. Perspective is syntactic: evidence from anaphora. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3: 128. 1-40
S. Sundaresan
(See online at https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.81) - 2018. Romance reflexives, past participle agreement and the PCC. In S. Hucklebridge & M. Nelson. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society. Vol. 3. Amherst: GSLA. 1-14
L. Raynaud
- 2019. Checking up on (Phi-)Agree. Linguistic Inquiry 50: 527-569
B. Bjorkman & H. Zeijlstra
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00319) - 2019. Predicting the Anaphor Agreement Effect and its Violations. PhD Dissertation, Leipzig University
J. Murugesan
- 2020. Distinct featural classes of anaphor in an enriched person system. In P. Smith, J. Mursell & K. Hartmann (eds.), Agree to Agree: Agreement in the Minimalist Programme. Berlin: Language Science Press. 391-424
S. Sundaresan
(See online at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3541767) - 2020. Labeling, selection, and feature checking.’ In P. Smith, J. Mursell & K. Hartmann (eds.), Agree to Agree: Agreement in the Minimalist Programme. Berlin: Language Science Press. 137-174
H. Zeijlstra
(See online at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3541745) - 2020. The (in)compatibility of anaphora and agreement. In B. Dash & G. Kaur (eds.), Proceedings of Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages 8
J. Murugesan
- 2020. The features of binding and person licensing. PhD Dissertation, University of Göttingen
L. Raynaud
(See online at https://doi.org/10.53846/goediss-9361)
