Current Projects

Breaking Agreements:
distinguishing Agreement and Clitic-Doubling by Their Failures

1. download handout
   

2. download draft of paper
   

In this paper, I propose a novel way to distinguish between agreement and clitic-doubling. The innovation lies in examining what happens when the relation in question fails to obtain.

1. Given a scenario where the relation R between an agreement-morpheme M and target noun-phrase X is broken—but the result is still a grammatical utterance—the proposed diagnostic supplies a conclusion about R as follows:
   

2. •if M shows up with default phi-features (rather than the features of X) → R is agreement
   

3. •if M disappears entirely → R is clitic-doubling
   

The workings of the proposed diagnostic are demonstrated using a family of constructions in dialectal Basque (Etxepare 2005). Besides supporting the proposed diagnostic, the analysis of Basque also provides an ancillary result regarding the typological status of the Basque agreement system.

Everything is Subjunctive

1. download squib
   

In this squib, I examine so-called “imperative” forms in English (where the relevant forms are essentially bare, non-agreeing verbs) and in colloquial Hebrew (where the relevant forms are identical to 2nd‑person future-tense forms), and propose that in both cases, these are actually subjunctive verb-forms - placing them on a par with languages discussed by Han (2001), Rivero & Terzi (1995), and Zeijlstra (2006, 2007), in which the subjunctive is deployed in lieu of negated imperatives (due to the morpho-syntactic impossibility to get the imperative illocutionary-force feature out of the scope of negation). In English and Hebrew, however, the subjunctive is deployed not only in the presence of negation, but across-the-board. This, I propose, is a result of the complete unavailability of the morphological imperative paradigm - a conjecture which is independently supported, for the case of Hebrew, by diachronic evidence.

This accounts for the lack of agreement (i.e., the -s suffix) in English imperatives even with 3rd‑person singular subjects (since the same subjects also fail to trigger agreement-morphology in “true” subjunctive contexts in English), as well as the use of future-tense verb-forms in colloquial Hebrew (since these are the forms that Hebrew uses in “true” subjunctive contexts).