The Role of Agreement in Non-finite Predication

Download or read book The Role of Agreement in Non-finite Predication written by Gréte Dalmi and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comparative syntactic study claims that agreement is the most central functional category responsible for licensing predication in finite, non-finite and small clauses alike. Intriguing syntactic phenomena like Icelandic infinitival predicates taking non-nominative (quirky) subjects; "psych-impersonal" and "modal" predicates in Italian, Hungarian and Russian; meteorological predicates, existential clauses, post-verbal and null subjects in the so-called" null-subject" VSO languages can all be better analyzed through a concept of predication that is closely related to AGRP, manifesting subject-verb agreement. The overt agreement marking in Hungarian and Portuguese infinitival clauses further strengthens this view. "Obviation" and "control "subjunctive clauses in the Balkan languages, Welsh finite and non-finite infinitival clauses as well as case-marked secondary predicates in Icelandic, Slovak, Hungarian, Russian and Finnish also lend support to an analysis where the []pred] feature is checked in AGRP.