Common Contracts

Object agreement in South Caucasian via the Principle of Minimal Compliance

Object Agreement • August 2nd, 2020

• Contract Type
  Object Agreement
• Filed
  August 2nd, 2020

Overview • The Principle of Minimal Compliance (PMC; Richards 1997, 1998) allows a syntactic constraint to be ignored just in case it had been complied with at a previous stage in the derivation. This paper explores a prediction of the PMC — that a high φ-probe like T0 may interact with the object (thereby violating standard locality conditions on Agree) just in case a previous φ-probe interacts with the subject — and argues that this prediction is borne out in the South Caucasian languages. Combined with a post-syntactic filtering mechanism that compares derivations with identical numerations, this approach captures key generalizations about South Caucasian agreement and offers better empirical coverage than alternatives (e.g., Béjar & Rezac 2009).