In the previous post we saw that agreement between determiners and nouns was naturally described in terms of dependencies between lexical items. While the more well-studied case of subject verb agreement in English was treated in terms of agreement over movement dependencies, here we treated agreement in the DP in terms of merge dependencies. This fits much better with the canonical analyses of these constructions, which do not appeal to movement at all.

Agreement in English is fairly un-interesting; there is just not that much of it. Subject-verb agreement is the most frequent kind, and our model of this agreement as being mediated by the k feature of the AgrS head is pretty adequate. There are two other loci of agreement in English which are not as obviously amenable to a treatment in terms of movement: Determiner-Noun number agreement This big bad wolf These big bad wolves Most stylish pants \(\mbox{}^{\ast}\)Most stylish pant Every large group \(\mbox{}^{\ast}\)Every large groups Expletive there There seems to have been believed to be a problem There seem to have been believed to be problems We focus here on the first case, and will deal with the second in an upcoming post.

Although our presentation of our theory of syntax has hopped from one side of the representational/derivational divide to the other, our (often implicit) conception of how morphology and syntax interact has remained constant. The job of syntax is to define a set of well formed structures, whether by assembling them out of smaller pieces (i.e. derivationally) or by imposing constraints that well-formed structures must satisfy (i.e. representationally). Given such a structure, we identify the spans it contains, and ship them off to the morphology to interpret.

We have been adopting a very neutral stance toward the syntax-morphology interface. Our lexica1 consist not only of lexical items (i.e. lexemes with associated feature bundles), but also of what I have been calling ‘morphological equations’ that specify how to pronounce complex heads. Some examples of morphological equations are as follows: \(\textit{been} = \textsf{PERF}\oplus\textsf{be}\) \(\textit{eaten} = \textsf{PASS}\oplus\textsf{eat}\) \(\textit{eaten} = \textsf{PERF}\oplus\neg\textsf{PROG}\oplus\textsf{v}\oplus\textsf{ACT}\oplus\textsf{eat}\) These equations link pronounced forms (on the left) to sequences of lexical items (on the right).

One way in which our current analysis differs from standard practice in minimalism is that we do not have any operation of agreement. Empirically, given the restricted set of sentences we looked at, this has not been a problem (all of our DPs are third person singular). Once we expand our grammar in an apparently minimal way so as to allow for more variety in DPs, the emprical shortcomings of our analysis manifest.