Chapter 2 - Animacy and Agreement Restriction in Persian

Summary

Introduction

The main purpose of this chapter is to study the restriction that animacy induces on verbal agreement in Persian. Namely, plural inanimate subjects may appear with the 3^rd person singular/default morphology with no Number agreement as in (39).

(39) in shaye?e-ha mærdom ra [be khænde andakht-Ø]

this rumour-pl people Acc. to laughter dropped-3sg

These rumours made people laugh

In (39), the compound verb be khænde andakht, appears with the 3^rd person singular morphology while the plural inanimate subject shaye?e-ha (rumours) is in plural form. To capture the verbal agreement restriction, I propose that agreement is obtained in syntax for both animate and inanimate subjects and that one of the core operations of Distributed Morphology, Impoverishment, is responsible for the restriction on subject-verb agreement in the case of plural inanimate subjects.

The restriction that animacy induces on the number agreement in Persian is somehow reminiscent of other verbal restrictions in the literature including the following:

• •Person restrictions in Icelandic that affect nominatives in the presence of quirky dative subjects (ZMT 1985, Sigurðsson 1992-2002, Anagnostopoulou 2003, Stepanov 2003, Boeckx 2000, among others).

• •The Person Case Constraint, (PCC) that affects accusative morphological markers in ditransitives with datives. It occurs in a large variety of languages (Bonet 1994, Anagnostopoulou 2003).

• •Person Restrictions on nominatives in quirky constructions in Spanish (Rivero 2004- 2005).

Most of the above studies have suggested syntactic approaches to capture the agreement restriction. However, there is a recent body of literature arguing that theΦ-restrictions do not reside in syntax, but occur in post-syntactic morphology. For instance, Boeckx (2000) and Rivero (2004-2005) argue that morphology is at the core of the person restrictions in Icelandic and Spanish, and suggest morphological accounts for such restrictions. In the following sections, I first provide a summary of the syntactic and morphological accounts of the Φ- restrictions in the literature and then propose a morphological account for the Φ-restriction found in Persian in the case of inanimate subjects.

Restrictions: Syntactic vs. Morphological Accounts

In this section, I discuss several restrictions on verbal agreement including the 3^rd person restriction in Icelandic in the presence of quirky subjects and Spanish quirky restriction; I also provide a summary of the syntactic and morphological treatments proposed for them.