Hyperactivity and Hyperagreement in Bantu

By Vicki Carstens. 2011

87 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Many Bantu languages exhibit A-movements and patterns of iterating agreement that are disallowed in Indo-European languages. In Minimalist theory, both agreement and movement are constrained by an Activity requirement stipulating that goals in Agree relations must have an unchecked uninterpretable feature. For Indo-European DPs the sole Activity feature in A-relations is Case; but I argue here that grammatical gender, a component of Bantu noun class, is uninterpretable too. Case and nominal gender differ in that the latter enters the syntax already valued. Assuming goal deactivation is a consequence of syntactic valuation, we derive the result that gender is an infinitely reusable Activity feature. Adjunction of Bantu N to D makes gender visible to all clause-level probes, and Bantu DPs are therefore able to A-move more freely than their Indo-European counterparts and to value iterating agreement. The proposals provide a unitary explanation for the existence in Bantu of Subject Object Reversal, locative inversion controlling subject agreement, hyper-raising, concord, left-edge agreement with operators, and multiple subject agreement. The syntax of gender argues that uninterpretable features need not be deleted from a syntactic object bound for the Conceptual–Intentional interface.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5d3c101d7be66c018d6cfe18d8e5454fa7a555a8

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In Language and Linguistics

1. Ruth Kramer
2. Vicki Carstens
3. Gabi Danon
4. M. Diercks

Citations in the corpus

• Delayed Valuation: A Reanalysis of Goal Features, “Upward” Complementizer Agreement, and the Mechanics of Case (2016, background): “…for a rejoinder, analyzing adnominal modifiers as XPs. Note also the absence of “deactivation” since agreement here does not involve Case features; see §3.6.4 and Carstens 2010, 2011a. 2010, 2011 I propose that concord is a subcase of agreement and that a unified theory is possible and desirable.”
• A Split Analysis of Plurality: Number in Amharic (2016, background): “(Crucially, I adopt a framework where unvalued features, not uninterpretable ones, cause a crash; see Legate 2002, Epstein, Kitahara, and Seely 2010, Carstens 2011.”