Tvica in Linguistics Thurs. 4/30, at 12:20

Seid Tvica, (University of Amsterdam) will give a talk this Thursday, April 30, at 12:20 in ILC: N451. A title and abstract follows.

Rich Agreement Hypothesis beyond Indo-European

It is well-established in the literature that many Germanic and Romance languages differ in the placement of adverbs, appearing either before or after the finite verb. This typological distinction is standardly accounted for via v-to-I movement, arguably triggered by the subject agreement features that are assumed to be located at I (cf. Roberts 1985; Kosmeijer 1986; Rohrbacher 1994; Vikner 1995;Bobaljik and Thráinsson 1998; Koeneman and Zeijlstra 2014, among many others). The observed correlation between the properties of agreement morphology and verb movement gave rise to the so-called “rich agreement hypothesis” (RAH) which, in its strong version, states thatin controlled environments the finite verb moves to a vP-external position if and only if the agreement morphology is rich (cf. Koenemanand Zeijlstra 2014). Building on the work done so far in this talk, I present the results of a typological investigation of RAH, showing that RAH holds across many languages, well beyond the Indo-European family. In particular, I will discuss verb movement in three unrelated non-Indo-European languages.