Definiteness agreement with PP modifiers

DP complements of prepositions in Modern Hebrew often bear morphosyntactic definiteness marking that is triggered by the definiteness value of the noun modified by the PP. Although reminiscent of definiteness agreement with attributive APs, the agreement observed with PPs is not always obligatory. This article argues that what distinguishes modifiers that display obligatory definiteness agreement is that they denote properties. I propose that the morphosyntactic definiteness feature of property-denoting modifiers is uninterpretable and therefore it must be checked by agreement. Checking is made possible by the fact that pps in Hebrew have the structure of a construct state, where definiteness features spread from an embedded DP to a higher projection.

Published online: 19 December 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.134.06def