Common Contracts
1 similar Definiteness Agreement contracts
Definiteness Agreement with PP ModifiersDefiniteness Agreement • June 22nd, 2008
DP complements of prepositions in Modern Hebrew often bear morphosyntactic definiteness marking that is triggered by the definite- ness value of the noun modified by the PP. Although reminiscent of definiteness agreement with attributive APs, the agreement observed with PPs is not always obligatory. This article argues that what dis- tinguishes modifiers that display obligatory definiteness agreement is that they denote properties. I propose that the morphosyntactic defi- niteness feature of property-denoting modifiers is uninterpretable and therefore it must be checked by agreement. Checking is made possible by the fact that PPs in Hebrew have the structure of a construct state, where definiteness features ‘spread’ from an embedded DP to a higher projection.
