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AGR in Languages Without Person and Number Agreement: The Case of the Clausal Determiner in Haitian and Fon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Claire Lefebvre
Claire Lefebvre*
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal
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Extract

In recent literature on the decomposition of INFL (Pollock 1989), it has been proposed that the features of agreement morphology (henceforth the Ф features), and the features of Tense, each head a separate projection, AGR and T, respectively. There are languages which do not exhibit agreement in Ф features. This raises the question as to whether these languages have a functional category AGR. Kornfilt (1989), for example, shows that in contrast to Modern Turkish, Old Turkish does not exhibit agreement phenomena in person and number. She proposes that the difference between the two grammars be expressed in terms of the presence of AGR in the former and the absence of this projection in the latter. Similarly, on the basis of the fact that Haitian Creole lacks agreement in person and number, Ritter (1991b) suggests that Haitian Creole lacks the functional category AGR. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is ample motivation for positing AGR as a syntactic category in Haitian and in Fon.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 37 , Issue 2: Numéro Spécial Functional Categories , June 1992 , pp. 137 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1992

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References

1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at UQAM, at MIT and at the CLA. I thank the participants at these meetings for their comments. I thank my Haitian informants Jean-Robert Placide and Ange-Marie Clerjeune and my Fon informants Irénée Fandoh an and Maxime DaCruz for providing me with the data discussed here. I am grateful to the Groupe de recherche sur la genèse du créole haïtien (UQAM) for comments on talks related to the topic discussed in this paper. Many thanks to Denis Bouchard, Anne-Marie Brousseau, Elizabeth Cowper, Mohamed Guerssel, Ken Hale, Richard Larson, John Lumsden, Diane Massam, Elizabeth Ritter, Ur Schlonsky and Lisa Travis for their useful comments on an earlier version. Thanks to Monique Poulin for her help in formatting the manuscript. This work was done within the context of the Haitian project at UQAM, which is financed by grants from CRSH, FCAR and PAFAC (UQAM).

2 In all the examples in this article, “H” indicates an example in Haitian, “F” indicates an example in Fon.

3 Speakers vary with respect to this filter. For some Haitian speakers the filter applies to any two contiguous determiners (cf. Lefebvre 1982). For others, the filter applies when two contiguous determiners appear with the same number specification and fails to apply when determiners appear with different number specifications (cf. Lumsden 1989). Finally, for another group of speakers, the filter applies only when the determiners have the same phonological shape. While no extensive study of this phenomenon in Fon has been conducted, initial data suggest that there is variation in Fon as well.

4 Following Ritter (this volume) I assume that DET takes NUM(ber)P as its complement and that the surface order Det-PL, is obtained by head movement.

5 In the examples, the DP which is pertinent to agreement is underlined. The clausal determiner appears in italics.

6 In Haitian, negation is expressed with the adverbial pa which I assume is similar to má in Fon. There is no lexical negation particle corresponding to Fon kún which suggests that the head of NEGP is phonologically null. I assume that empty heads have to be licensed (e.g., Travis 1988) and that Spec-Head agreement is a way of achieving this licensing (cf. Cowper, this volume). Hence, the empty head of NEGP is licensed by the presence of pa in Spec of NEGP. I thus assume that the structure of the Haitian clause is parallel to the structure proposed for Fon.

7 In the examples, the portion of the clause which is assumed to be part of shared knowledge is underlined.

8 Number is not involved in agreement. The clausal determiner is never plural, even with a [+plural] specifier. The fact that plurality is not involved in Spec-Head agreement in Haitian and Fon follows from Ritter’s (1991b) proposal that NUM(ber)P is a different projection from DP. In these languages, number is a feature of the head of NUMP, not DP.

9 I assume that empty heads must be licensed (Travis 1988; Baker 1988) possibly by Spec-Head agreement (Cowper, this volume). Hence, an empty head AGR has to be licensed by a DP in Spec of its projection. Since agreement in deixis involves delimiting arguments and the head of the AGR projection, the position will be licensed only when the clause contains a delimiting argument. Consequently, when a clause contains no delimiting arguments, AGRO will not be licensed and the AGR projection will not appear in the structure.

10 The clausal determiner may also occur with ergative verbs. Since the discussion of these facts entails an analysis of the ergative verbs, I do not discuss them.