Jul 202014
I’ve posted the handout for a talk I gave at McGill University back in 2012, “Partial agreement and the direction of valuation.”
The talk shows why the cross-linguistically common asymmetry between (richer) agreement in SV structures and (poorer) agreement in VS structures – e.g. in Romance and in Semitic – does not constitute an argument in favor of Spec-Head agreement (nor in favor of “downward valuation” more generally). I show that this pattern falls out naturally from the theory of partial agreement outlined in my 2011 NLLT paper.
Download the handout here, or go to the talks & handouts page.