Standard Arabic subject-verb agreement asymmetry revisited in an Agree-based minimalist syntax

This paper provides a syntactic analysis of the classical subject-verb agreement asymmetry (SVAA) in Standard Arabic (SA) in terms of a minimalist approach to syntactic derivations in which the role of the operation Agree is central (Chomsky 2000, 2001a,b). It is argued here that the SV-VS word order alternation in SA is not due to the presence versus absence of subject movement to SpecTP, but is instead a consequence of two different base-generated structural representations. As a consequence of this analysis, the full-versus-partial agreement asymmetry is shown to follow not from a Spec-head analysis as previously proposed (Mohammad 1990, 2000; Aoun et al 1994), but rather from the standard assumption that pro in null subject languages has to be identified by rich agreement at the interface. The proposed analysis not only accounts for the basic facts of the SVAA, but also for a set of semantic, syntactic, and Case facts in the language, as well as facts of default agreement with seem-type verbs and verbs of modality.

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