Christopher Becker has filed his dissertation, Clausal and Nominal Agreement in Russian: A Unified Approach, thereby completing all the requirements for his Ph.D. in Linguistics.
Congratulations, Christopher!
ABSTRACT
This dissertation unifies, in different respects, the formal and theoretical analysis of morphosyntactic agreement patterns, both those internal to the clause and internal to the noun phrase, focusing empirically on the syntax of Russian. Specifically, I develop a Minimalist analysis modifying the Agree and Probe-Goals approaches and show that many long-standing issues regarding agreement of formal features and Case can be accounted for without resort to certain stipulations and unclarities. In particular, I propose that clausal agreement reflects the features of the constituents of a subject DP (determiner phrase) and propose locality constraints on this agreement operation. Such a unified account of clausal and nominal feature agreement has been lacking in many proposals that consider the data in only one, or the other, domain.
Within the clausal domain, I examine copular structures in Russian, and propose modifications to the Probe-Goal hypothesis to account for the issues these structures present. Specifically, I demonstrate that DPs in copular structures can bear agreement features and Case independent of each other and I argue that the syntactic head that enters into agreement with the subject is unable to agree with the post-copular nominal. I account for Case variation of the post-copular nominal by positing two distinct Case-licensing heads, one that values nominative Case and one that values instrumental.
Within the nominal domain, I demonstrate that the uniformity of agreement features and Case on determiners, adjectives, and nouns in Russian can be accounted for if the inflectional head of the clause enters into simultaneous agreement relations with each head of the nominal domain – the multiple goal approach to agreement. This formulation of the Probe-Goal hypothesis allows for agreement between the inflectional head of the clause and the subject, and accounts for multiple and uniform occurrence of agreement features and Case within the subject. Regarding numeral phrases, I demonstrate the locality effects of the multiple goal approach to agreement, and account for disparate features and Case marking within these phrases.
This dissertation contributes to the theoretical understanding of agreement phenomena in morphologically rich agreement languages such as Russian and less inflected agreement languages such as English.
