Common Contracts

Leftover Agreement: Spelling out Kartvelian number

Leftover Agreement • February 15th, 2020

• Contract Type
  Leftover Agreement
• Filed
  February 15th, 2020

Introduction: We show that in Kartvelian languages (Georgian, Laz, Megrelian, Svan) whether a higher number probe agrees or not depends on the exponent used by a lower probe. Only the unexponed (= leftover ) features of the lower probe can get agreed with by the higher probe. We call such agreement Leftover Agreement (LA), and argue that it lends new support to an architecture that cyclically interleaves syntax and Spell-Out (Calabrese & Pescarini 2014, Martinovi´c 2019, a.o.). Background: Kartvelian verbs have three agreement slots. We assume the first slot (g- in (1)) corresponds to a v -probe, the second (-da) to a T-probe, and the third (-t ) to a higher Agr-probe.