Agreement and person in anti-agreement
Many languages display correlations between subject-verb agreement and subject extraction that have come to be known as anti-agreement effects. This paper explores an anti-agreement effect found in many Bantu languages whereby a third person singular human subject triggers a unique verbal agreement marker when the subject is extracted. It is argued that co-variation of certain morphological properties of constructions with subject extraction points to an agreement relation between C and T underlying the anti-agreement effect, a conclusion that converges with proposals from Richards (2001) and Boeckx (2003) about the nature of extraction. I also argue that although this agreement relationship involves full sets of phi-features, the differing values acquired by the feature [person] in the nominal and verbal domains often makes it appear as if [person] is uniquely affected in anti-agreement contexts. Finally, I argue that variation in how anti-agreement is spelled out in a language is determined by morphological quirks of the language, especially the organization of its agreement paradigm. I illustrate this latter point using the framework of distributed morphology.
anti-agreement bantu distributed morphology phi features