Astrid van Alem (Universiteit Leiden)

Complementizer agreement is clitic doubling: a uniform analysis of intervention effects

It is well known that many non-standard West-Germanic languages have Complementizer Agreement (CA): not only the verb, but also the complementizer agrees with the subject. This phenomenon has led to a debate in the literature about whether CA is pure syntactic agreement (e.g. Van Koppen 2005) or a PF phenomenon (e.g. Ackema & Neeleman 2004, Fuss 2014, Weisser 2019). The battleground are cases where an element (usually a focus particle) intervenes between the complementizer and the subject, since this may lead to an anti-agreement effect. In this talk I will discuss variation in the anti-agreement effect under intervention in Frisian, Limburgian, and Bavarian. I argue, based on novel and under-studied data, that neither the syntactic nor the PF approach to CA is correct. Instead, I will argue that the CA morpheme is a doubled clitic, making use of diagnostics from the recent debate about the status of object agreement vs. object clitic doubling.

To account for the anti-agreement effect, I follow Van Craenenbroeck & van Koppen’s (2008) account of clitic doubling in Dutch dialects, combined with Dechaine & Wiltschko’s (2002) decomposition of pronouns. I show that the clitic is of varying structural size across the varieties under discussion. This will account for the variation with respect to the anti-agreement effect. Thus, the clitic doubling analysis allows us to maintain that CA is a uniform phenomenon, contra Van Koppen 2017.