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Agreements that occur mainly in the main clause

  • Shigeru Miyagawa✝
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Main Clause Phenomena
This chapter is in the book Main Clause Phenomena

Abstract

Most agreement systems target a grammatical entity within the sentence, typically the subject but in some cases the object or the dative. There is another kind of agreement found in languages such as Souletin, a Basque dialect, that targets the hearer. I will look at this type of so-called allocutive agreement and pursue two main issues. First, although it targets the hearer, the form of the agreement is the same as the regular phi-feature agreement used for subject/object. This means that the allocutive agreement must be part of a probe-goal relation, leading to the question, where is the goal? I argue that something like Ross’s Performative Analysis furnishes the second-person goal. Second, the distribution of the allocutive agreement is essentially the same as the politeness marking on the verb in Japanese, which leads to the hypothesis that, despite Japanese being characterized as a typical agreementless language, the politeness marker is, in fact, an implementation of second-person agreement. Moreover, this allocutive agreement in Japanese has a distribution that limits it to the root clause as originally conceived by Emonds (1969).

Abstract

Most agreement systems target a grammatical entity within the sentence, typically the subject but in some cases the object or the dative. There is another kind of agreement found in languages such as Souletin, a Basque dialect, that targets the hearer. I will look at this type of so-called allocutive agreement and pursue two main issues. First, although it targets the hearer, the form of the agreement is the same as the regular phi-feature agreement used for subject/object. This means that the allocutive agreement must be part of a probe-goal relation, leading to the question, where is the goal? I argue that something like Ross’s Performative Analysis furnishes the second-person goal. Second, the distribution of the allocutive agreement is essentially the same as the politeness marking on the verb in Japanese, which leads to the hypothesis that, despite Japanese being characterized as a typical agreementless language, the politeness marker is, in fact, an implementation of second-person agreement. Moreover, this allocutive agreement in Japanese has a distribution that limits it to the root clause as originally conceived by Emonds (1969).

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction
  4. Main Clause Phenomena and the privilege of the root 1
  5. PART I. Explaining Main Clause Phenomena: The bigger picture
  6. Augmented structure preservation and the Tensed S Constraint 23
  7. Root transformations & quantificational structure 47
  8. Agreements that occur mainly in the main clause 79
  9. The syntax of MCP 113
  10. Towards an interface definition of root phenomena* 135
  11. Explaining matrix/subordinate domain discrepancies 159
  12. Parenthetical main clauses – or not? 177
  13. PART II. The Phenomena
  14. A. Particles and agreement markers
  15. Topic particle stranding and the structure of CP 205
  16. Splitting up force 229
  17. The syntactic position of Polish by and Main Clause Phenomena 257
  18. B. Complementizers and verb-second
  19. A main clause complementizer 279
  20. The status of complementizers in the left periphery 297
  21. Minimality and embedded V2 in Scandinavian 319
  22. Against a uniform treatment of second position effects as force markers 345
  23. C. Adverbial clauses
  24. The syntax-discourse interface in adverbial clauses 365
  25. Subjunctive mood, epistemic modality and Main Clause Phenomena in the analysis of adverbial clauses 385
  26. On two types of adverbial clauses allowing root-phenomena 405
  27. Index 431
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.190.04miy

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction
  4. Main Clause Phenomena and the privilege of the root 1
  5. PART I. Explaining Main Clause Phenomena: The bigger picture
  6. Augmented structure preservation and the Tensed S Constraint 23
  7. Root transformations & quantificational structure 47
  8. Agreements that occur mainly in the main clause 79
  9. The syntax of MCP 113
  10. Towards an interface definition of root phenomena* 135
  11. Explaining matrix/subordinate domain discrepancies 159
  12. Parenthetical main clauses – or not? 177
  13. PART II. The Phenomena
  14. A. Particles and agreement markers
  15. Topic particle stranding and the structure of CP 205
  16. Splitting up force 229
  17. The syntactic position of Polish by and Main Clause Phenomena 257
  18. B. Complementizers and verb-second
  19. A main clause complementizer 279
  20. The status of complementizers in the left periphery 297
  21. Minimality and embedded V2 in Scandinavian 319
  22. Against a uniform treatment of second position effects as force markers 345
  23. C. Adverbial clauses
  24. The syntax-discourse interface in adverbial clauses 365
  25. Subjunctive mood, epistemic modality and Main Clause Phenomena in the analysis of adverbial clauses 385
  26. On two types of adverbial clauses allowing root-phenomena 405
  27. Index 431
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