Arabic agree, silent pronouns, and reciprocals

Various grammatical phenomena have been analyzed so far as essentially formal, or interfacing with PF syntax. Verb subject agreement asymmetries, subject pronoun deficiency (or ‘Pro drop‘), and morpho-syntactic variation in reciprocal expressions in Arabic have been treated as such. The article investigates how important properties of these phenomena can be more successfully treated in a fine-grained semantic syntax. The analysis is based on the semantic interpretability of features (typically Number), found in Agree configurations, in line with Minimalist approaches.

Published online: 21 December 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.317.05fas