Agreement and Its Failures - 9780262526173

In this book, Omer Preminger investigates how the obligatory nature ofpredicate-argument agreement is enforced by the grammar. Preminger argues that an empiricallyadequate theory of predicate-argument agreement requires recourse to an operation, whoseobligatoriness is a grammatical primitive not reducible to representational properties, but whosesuccessful culmination is not enforced by the grammar.

Preminger's argumentcounters contemporary approaches that find the obligatoriness of predicate-argument agreementenforced through representational means. The most prominent of these is Chomsky's"interpretability"-based proposal, in which the obligatoriness of predicate-argumentagreement is enforced through derivational time bombs. Preminger presents an empirical argumentagainst contemporary approaches that seek to derive the obligatory nature of predicate-argumentagreement exclusively from derivational time bombs. He offers instead analternative account based on the notion of obligatory operations better suited tothe facts. The crucial data involves utterances that inescapably involve attempted-but-failedagreement and are nonetheless fully grammatical. Preminger combines a detailed empiricalinvestigation of agreement phenomena in the Kichean (Mayan) languages, Zulu (Bantu), Basque,Icelandic, and French with an extensive and rigorous theoretical exploration of the far-reachingconsequences of these data. The result is a novel proposal that has profound implications for theformalism that the theory of grammar uses to derive obligatory processes and properties.