Unifying subject agreement across clause types in Estonian
Abstract
Estonian negated indicative clauses show no agreement, whereas Estonian negated imperative clauses show agreement twice: once on the main verb and once on the negation word ära. This contrasts with affirmative clauses, where agreement appears only once. I propose a unified syntax for agreement across these clausal types, arguing that the there is one head which bears a φ-feature probe in all Estonian sentences. There is no agreement in negated indicatives because this head has only one suitable vocabulary item in this context: ei. Doubled agreement arises due to a rule of post- syntactic Feature Copying in imperative contexts. I argue that this analysis is superior to an analysis making use of multiple φ-feature probes in the syntax, as such analyses struggle to account for the optionality of doubling in first-person plural contexts. The proposed analysis makes predictions about the kinds of marking possible in negated imperatives, which appear to be borne out in related Uralic languages. This investigation supports a view of the morphosyntax of agreement whereby the syntax and morphology of agreement overlap but do not coincide.
Citation
Norris, Mark. 2016. Unifying subject agreement across clause types in Estonian. Finno-Ugric Languages and Linguistics 5(1), 3–37.
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