Phi-features and the Modular Architecture of - UMR 7023 - CNRS

There are more robust cases of apparent sensitivity of agreement to linear order,
notably in first-conjunct agreement by preceding targets versus last- or wholeconjunct
agreement by following ones, as in (81). However, some have elegant
syntactic treatments using c-command rather than linearity, e.g. Munn (1999), van
Koppen (2005), and Bošković (2009), while others may involve adjacent elements
in a small domain, Benmamoun, Bhatia and Polinsky (2009). If there is a morphological
mechanism of phi-concord over phrase-structurally unbounded distances, it
must remain so delimited as not to create undesirable opaque agreement and cliticization
and synthetic-analytic alternations over such distances.
(81) … de-s [doow en ich] ôs treff-e
if-2SG you(SG) and I us meet-PL
…that you and I will meet
(Telegen Dutch, van Koppen 2005: 40)
The second caveat comes from the nature of grammaticality judgments and the
linguistic domains on which they bear. Synthetic-analytic alternations may illustrate
the issue. Some analysts attribute to the same mechanism the 'blocking' of
*more small by smaller and of #the day before today by yesterday (Di Sciullo and
Williams 1986: 13, Andrews 1990b: 521, Williams 1997, 2007). For others, these
have a wholly unlike status, and arise from unrelated mechanisms in different domains,
morphological (non-)generation versus pragmatic (non-)felicity (Poser
1992: 123-5, Embick and Marantz 2008: 15 note 8; cf. Legate 1999, Nunberg
2002: 268ff., Langendoen 2002: 631). The latter is the view adopted here. It leads
to the correlations of properties discussed above, including of morphophonological
conditioning and phrase-structurally small domains. The alternative former
view leads to a generalized blocking principle covering domains from the 'lexical'
blocking of went -- *goed, through classical synthetic-analytic alternations, to syntactic
pronoun-anaphora alternations, and finally the pragmatic blocking illustrated
by yesterday above (Williams 1997, 2007, Kiparsky 2005). The disagreement
is about where judgments carve nature at the joints.
The same issue recurs for the clitic phenomena discussed earlier for (62) and
seen again in (82). In some French varieties, a 3PL.ACC clitic is deleted in a
3PL.DAT 3.ACC cluster, but it continues to behave as if present for binding,
floating quantifier licensing, and participle agreement. In these varieties, such examples
are usually judged as perfect. However, (linguist) speakers may report
them more difficult to parse than with an overt clitic, according to the contextual
facility of recovering the silent clitic's referent. Thus 3PL.ACC clitic deletion is
easy in (62)b, Elle [n']a plus de conseillèresi a proposer: elle lesi/∅i lui (toutesi) a
déjà présentées 'She has no more counsellorsi to propose: she has already introduced
themi/∅i to him', but difficult than overt 3PL.ACC les if conseillères 'counsellors'
is replaced by rencards 'meetings', which forces one to infer some contextually
plausible theme of 'introduce' like 'counsellors'. Elements that depend on the
clitic's phi-features like floating quantifiers and participle agreement accentuate
these preferences for some. As with the blocking of the day before today by yes-
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