Subject agreement suspension in main and relative clauses: is it really a unified phenomenon?
Creators: name: Iemmolo, Giorgio
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020

description: This paper discusses the phenomenon of subject agreement suspension (henceforth, SAS), defined as the suspension of agreement with forms that in other morphosyntactic environments show agreement. Subject agreement suspension is known under the label of "Anti-agreement" in the generative literature (cf. Baker 2008, Brandi and Cordin 1989, Ouhalla 1993, among others), where it has been analysed as the suspension of subject agreement in contexts of local subject extraction, namely: 1. wh-words in subject function 2. subject relative clauses and clefts 3. inverted subjects A typical example of SAS comes from Florentine (Indo-European, Romance), where subject agreement is suspended with postverbal subjects and in subject relative clauses introduced by the invariable relativiser che, where there should be plural agreement on the verb. The aim of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis, based on sample of 57 languages, of subject agreement suspension and evaluate current theoretical proposals against the data presented in this paper. I first illustrate the various syntactic environments in which subject agreement suspension appears. I then argue that subject agreement suspension is not a unitary phenomenon due to local subject extraction, but rather the manifestation of different formal and functional principles which only superficially show synchronic structural similarities. Two main morphosyntactic environments are identified. On the one hand, there is a first group of constructions where SAS is triggered by the information structural properties of the subject NP, usually focus or introduction of a new participant. In these cases, SAS appears when the subject is in a position generally exploited for focal or newly-introduced subjects, such as the postverbal position in Florentine. The second group of construction comprises subject relative clauses and clefts. In this case, two different groups are identified. In the first group, SAS is triggered by the fact that the verb either agrees with the invariable relativiser, which bears third person singular (masculine) default features. In the second subgroup of languages, I show that we are not dealing with SAS, since relative clauses and clefts employ a dedicated deranked verb form is used which cannot occur in independent declarative clauses, and cannot occur with person, gender, and number markers. An example of this pattern comes from Jamsay (Dogon). The verb shows SAS with focal subjects, as well as with subject relative clauses, where a participial verb form is used, . SAS with focal subjects is realised via the omission of the person marker on the verb and the use of low tones. In subject relative clauses, the verb takes a special participial form to which suffixes indicating humanness and number, also used on nouns and adjectives, are attached. An apparent counterexample to the analysis proposed in this paper is constituted by languages where SAS occurs both in main clauses and relative clauses with the same morphological makeup. An example of such a language is Breton, where SAS is found with sentence-initial focused constituents, as well as with wh-subjects, subject relative clauses, and clefts (Borsley and Stephens 1989). In these cases, I argue that SAS in main clauses is due to the origin of the construction rather than to extraction. In fact, these focus constructions historically derive from former clefts, which were in turn built on relative clauses, following the well-known grammaticalisation path REL &gt; CLEFT &gt; FOCUS (Heine and Reh 1984: 177). Subject relative clauses in Breton showed agreement with an invariable relativiser a, which bore third person singular features (Fleuriot 1964), as in the Florentine case discussed above. When cleft constructions became grammaticalised as focus constructions, the original agreement pattern was retained, thus explaining the synchronic similarity between SAS in main and relative clauses attested in some languages (cf. also Harris and Campbell 1995: 152–162 for similar considerations).