The Linguistics Colloquium Series Presents:

Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst)

The location of agreement in the grammar has been the topic of considerable recent discussion. Bobaljik 2008 has argued that agreement is a post-syntactic process, other approaches (Boskovic 2009 and Chomsky 1999) locate it entirely within the syntactic system. More recently the data from agreement with conjoined noun phrases has played an important role in this debate; in this domain we find closest conjunct agreement, a phenomenon whose seeming sensitivity to linear proximity indicates a post-syntactic component to agreement (Marusic et al. 2006). We analyze a novel set of data from Hindi-Urdu that shows that a proper analysis of agreement requires reference to both a pre-spellout syntactic and a post-syntactic component. Hindi-Urdu is a language with both subject and object agreement and we show that while subject agreement is calculated in the pre-spellout syntactic component, the resolution of object agreement takes place in the post-syntactic component.

This presentation represents joint work with Martin Walkow.