Coon and Keine 2021: feature gluttony #

Coon and Keine argue that hierarchy effects, the Person Case Constraint on clitic clusters, the person restriction on Icelandic dative-nominative agreement and the person and number restrictions on German assumed-identity copulas, come not from failed Agree but from too much of it. A probe is a hierarchy of segments, each of which agrees on its own with the closest accessible DP bearing it and copies that DP's whole geometry back, so when the lower of two DPs bears segments the higher lacks, distinct segments agree with distinct DPs and the probe is gluttonous, which happens in inverse configurations only. Gluttony is harmless in itself: a clitic-doubling probe crashes because every DP it agreed with must cliticize and binary Merge cannot move two heads at once, while an agreement probe crashes only if the values it carries demand different Vocabulary items, so syncretism or the absence of an item lets a gluttonous probe converge. Articulating the person probe further along the speaker and addressee leaves of the person geometry derives the Weak, Ultrastrong and Me-First constraints, datives that expose their person node alone turn the Weak pattern into the Strong one, and since a nonfinite clause has no probe and a PP, a strong pronoun or absolutive displacement leaves no second goal, the absence of the effects there follows without the caveats a Person Licensing Condition needs.

Implementation notes #

Goals are position-indexed so that two DPs with the same features stay distinct, and a segment's Agree is the relativized search of the probe substrate over that list, so the two-goal characterization of gluttony rests on the substrate's search. Person geometries are the branching geometry of the cyclic-Agree substrate and number the two-segment geometry of the paper; the model pairs a number probe with every person probe, one direction of the paper's probe-specification hierarchy. A K-encapsulated dative exposes its person node and no number: the paper leaves the dative's number open in a footnote and says a quirky DP externally bears at most a person feature, and the choice is what puts the nominative's number in the context the paper's diagrams caption. The crash of a gluttonous clitic-doubling probe is taken as the paper argues it, from its cliticization requirement, binary Merge and a Markovian derivation, rather than derived. A paradigm holds the forms the paper glosses, with German present bin added since the past-tense improvement the paper reports presupposes it, and is undefined in number contexts the paper does not gloss, so that an unglossed cell cannot converge by accident; the item a value demands is the score selection of the exponence substrate with the segment count as specificity, and a value demanding no item, the Kichean singular, competes with nothing. The person-case-constraint grammars of the substrate parametrize the descriptive table the probes derive; the Ultrastrong probe parts from that parametrization at 2 > 2 and the Me-First probe from the table itself at 1 > 1, a cell the paper does not remark on. The comparison with the Person Licensing Condition is the paper's own argument from probeless clauses, and the restricted condition keeps the escape through a Case-valuing head that the substrate formalization of the original condition has. Examples the paper records without an account, the Icelandic copulas, default agreement, participle agreement and the expletive, carry no configuration and enter no theorem.

TODO #

Fission and portmanteau realization of a gluttonous agreement probe (§5.2) are not modelled.

Coon and Keine 2021: feature gluttony #

Implementation notes #

TODO #

References #

Goals and their visible geometries #

Segment-based Agree and gluttony (14)–(16) #

The Person Case Constraint from probe articulation (§3) #

Against licensing (§2.3) #

Number and clitic doubling (§3.4.3, §4.1.3) #

Gluttony and Vocabulary insertion (§4, §5.2) #

The paper's examples #