Common Contracts

Title: Indirect Agree in Lubukusu complementizer agreement

May 5th, 2020

• Filed
  May 5th, 2020

This paper introduces a new complementizer agreement relation to the theoretical literature from Lubukusu (Bantu, Kenya), in which a declarative-embedding complementizer agrees in an upward orientation with the subject of its selecting clause. The agreement relation is extensively documented in a wide variety of syntactic contexts including ditransitives, causatives, passives, and multiple embeddings, establishing the empirical generalization that the complementizer agrees with the most local superordinate subject. The paper proposes that this agreement relation is not a direct Agree relation, but is instead the result of local agreement between the complementizer and a null subject-oriented anaphor (whose antecedent is necessarily the superordinate subject). This is termed an Indirect Agree relation, defined as instances of agreement between a head and an agreement trigger are mediated by a different syntactic element (a null anaphor, in this case). A variety of evidence is given in s