Current wisdom has it that syntactic agreement between one head and multiple dependents (Multiple Agree) is possible and perhaps empirically required. In this talk, I will consider data from West Flemish that bear on this issue and argue that such agreement does not exist. I will then address the question of why grammars forbid such multiple agreement. I will scrutinize two hypotheses, an intervention hypothesis and a cycliclity hypothesis, and argue that the cyclicity hypothesis is the better one.

This lecture is part of the Linguistic Department’s Winter colloquium series as well as their Syntax job search.