Clausal and Nominal Agreement in Russian

This book unifies the analysis of morphosyntactic
agreement patterns of the clause and the noun phrase,
focusing empirically on the syntax of Russian. Here,
the author develops a Minimalist analysis modifying
the Agree and Probe-Goal approach and shows that many
long-standing issues regarding agreement of formal
features and Case can be accounted for without resort
to certain stipulations. In particular, this book
proposes that clausal agreement reflects the
features of the constituents of a subject noun
phrase and proposes locality constraints on this
agreement operation. Such a unified account of
clausal and nominal feature agreement has been
lacking in many proposals that consider the data in
only one, or the other, domain. This book
contributes to the theoretical understanding of
agreement phenomena in both morphologically rich
agreement languages such as Russian and less
inflected languages such as English.

Autorentext
Christopher Becker received his Ph.D. in Linguistics and Slavic Languages from the University of Michigan in 2008. His primary research interests include syntactic agreement, case licensing, and the structure of the nominal domain.

Klappentext
This book unifies the analysis of morphosyntactic agreement patterns of the clause and the noun phrase, focusing empirically on the syntax of Russian. Here, the author develops a Minimalist analysis modifying the Agree and Probe-Goal approach and shows that many long-standing issues regarding agreement of formal features and Case can be accounted for without resort to certain stipulations. In particular, this book proposes that clausal agreement reflects the features of the constituents of a subject noun phrase and proposes locality constraints on this agreement operation. Such a unified account of clausal and nominal feature agreement has been lacking in many proposals that consider the data in only one, or the other, domain. This book contributes to the theoretical understanding of agreement phenomena in both morphologically rich agreement languages such as Russian and less inflected languages such as English.