Common Contracts

Merge versus Long Distance Agree: the case of complementizer agreement

Complementizer Agreement • January 31st, 2002

• Contract Type
  Complementizer Agreement
• Filed
  January 31st, 2002

Complementizer agreement (CA) in Dutch dialects shows that checking under direct Merge between a head and its complement can trigger richer morphological agreement than checking under Long Distance Agree. Theoretically, our proposal extends claims made in Chomsky (2001a-b) in that not only spec,head- but also head,compl.-relations are privileged checking configurations. Empirically, our analysis is the first to account for the distributional generalisation made by Hoekstra & Smits (1998) and data that proved problematic for previous accounts.