Desalegn Workneh

In this paper, I argue that agreement and case are assigned in different ways across various causee and other internal arguments. I show that agreement is a relativized system where the presence of one argument DPx higher than the other DPy inhibits the relation of the latter with the verb. Case, on the other hand, is argued to be insensitive to the presence of intervening arguments DP. Case is a fixed relationship between the case assigning head and the DP in its specifier. I explain this distinctions by assuming different orders of syntactic operations. Case is assigned early in the syntactic derivation–probably just after Merge. But, Agree relations are established pretty late in the derivation. As such other syntactic derivation such as Movement (topicalization) affect the nature of Agree relations between two syntactic objects.

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Authors:
Workneh, Desalegn (University of Tromsø)