Berkeley Papers in Formal Linguistics

Articles

• Current models of Agree

  • Deal, Amy Rose

  This paper is an opinionated survey of issues and perspectives in current models of Agree, understood as a single abstract grammatical operation common to all syntactic long-distance dependencies. I begin with a brief introduction to Chomsky's 2000, 2001 foundational work on Agree. I then review three strands of literature that have in notable ways chipped away at the conceptual foundations of that work in the course of improving the cross-linguistic empirical adequacy of the theory. These center on valuation and relativized probing, in section 3; defaults and failure to value, in section 4; and the question of whether goals must be made “active” by uninterpretable features, in section 5. In section 6, I review an ongoing debate about the directionality of Agree in light of the issues raised for uninterpretable features in sections 3-5. The paper concludes with a presentation of what I see as a way forward for the theory of Agree: the interaction/satisfaction theory, which provides a new conceptual grounding for Agree that in various respects makes sense of the empirical landscape uncovered by the past two decades of intensive research on this topic.

• Latent High Tones in Limba (Thɔnkɔ Dialect), Sierra Leone

  • Hyman, Larry M.;
  • Kamara, Daniel Ibrahim

  This paper presents an analysis of the rather unusual tone system of the almost totally undocumented Thɔnkɔ /t̪ɔŋkɔ/ dialect of Limba, a Niger-Congo language of Sierra Leone (and slight overlap into Guinée). As we will show, most words are all low tone in their citation form, but exhibit a wide range of tonal contrasts with different high tones popping up when words occur in context. We will illustrate, step by step, how the observed facts justify the proposed contrastive underlying forms and reveal tonal alternations which are best treated with such abstract representations. To show the opaqueness of the widespread tonal neutralization within the system which results from Final High Lowering (FHL), we begin with the interaction of nouns and their adnominal modifiers and then turn to the verb phrase and the clause. We show that the L% boundary tone triggering FHL occurs at the end of declarative and imperative utterances as well as yes-no questions but, interestingly, not at the end of WH questions.

• Formalizing two types of mixed A/Ā movement

  • Scott, Tessa

  Many scholars have argued that some instances of Ā movement include an interaction with some A feature, e.g., D (Aldridge 2004, 2008; Bossi and Diercks 2019; Coon, Baier, and Levin 2021; Branan and Erlewine 2024) or ϕ (van Urk 2015, Colley and Privoznov 2020). However, the interaction between the A and Ā features is not the same in every case. Assuming that Ā movement is predicated on an Agree relationship, I analyze two types of mixed A/Ā Agreement. In the first type, one probe searches for the A and Ā features conjunctively, such that both features must be found together. With novel fieldwork data, I illustrate that this pattern is found in Ndengeleko (Bantu). The conjunctive pattern is challenging to capture from a standard, two-probe perspective on mixed positions (following Chomsky 2001). Building on work on probes’ satisfaction conditions (Deal 2015, 2021), I show that the Ndengeleko pattern is best captured by a probe with a conjunctive satisfaction condition. In the second type of A/Ā movement, one syntactic head happens to host two probes (one A and one Ā). This pattern is found in Kipsigis (Bossi and Diercks 2019). The notion of conjunctive satisfaction allows us to capture agreement patterns that target two features, which extends beyond mixed A/Ā agreement. What emerges is a typology of mixed Agree operations in which features can be sought conjunctively, disjunctively, or independently. The empirical landscape places both conjunctive and disjunctive satisfaction as central to the Agree operation.