Agreement, Dominance and Doubling : the morphosyntax of DP

Schoorlemmer, E. (2009)

Doctoral Thesis

This thesis investigates doubling and agreement in Romance and Germanic nominal constituents. In Swedish, Norwegian, and Faroese, the definite article is doubled in case an adjective modifies the noun. This doubling is known as double definiteness. This thesis proposes that double definiteness is the result of an intriguing interaction between syntax and morphology. The absence of double definiteness in other Germanic languages is attributed to morphological variation. The thesis mainly, however, deals with the distinction between strong and weak adjectival inflection in Germanic and its absence in the Romance. This thesis proposes that agreement on attributive adjectives is always licensed indirectly, through the help of a mediating element. In the case of Germanic weak adjectival inflection, this mediating element is partially deactivated for independent reasons. In the case of Germanic strong adjectival inflection as well as Romance adjectival inflection, this mediating element is however always fully active. On the theoretical level, this thesis proposes that the syntactic configuration in which agreement can occur is best defined in terms of dominance. It is argued that a definition in terms of dominance is both theoretically simpler as well as empirically more adequate than a definition in terms of c-command.

• Agreement
• Adjectives
• Article Doubling
• Germanic
• Romance
• Strong-weak adjectival inflection
• Dominance
• Structural condition on Agree
• Minimalism
• Distributed Morphology

• All authors: Schoorlemmer, E.
• Supervisor: Rooryck, J.E.C.V.; Cheng, L.L.
• Committee: Cheng, L.L.-S; Pesetsky, D.; Barbiers, L.C.J.; D'hulst, Y.A.O.; D'Alessandro, R.
• Qualification: Doctor (dr.)
• Awarding Institution: Leiden Univ Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University
• Date: 2009-09-03
• Title of host publication: LOT dissertation series
• Publisher: Utrecht: LOT
• ISBN (print): 9789078328940
• Name: 225
• Court: LUCL