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Theta-roles and Agreement
초록
Most of the current syntactic theories distinguish between theta(θ)-role assignment and syntactic agreement (e.g. feature valuation and feature checking). θ-role assignment has been viewed as a process independent from agreement despite the idea that they both take place in syntax (Chomsky 1981). This paper provides an analysis that unifies the two. Specifically, θ-role assignment boils down to agreement. I adopt Clem’s (2023) analysis of cyclic expansion. The empirical coverage of this work involves natural languages in general. Among other things, this work focuses on the agreement mechanism of how theme, agent, goal, beneficiary, causee, and posessor θ-roles are realized on nominal arguments. A theoretical implication that grows out of this discussion is that downward probing is a natural way of characterizing agreement (see Preminger 2014, Polinsky & Preminger 2019, Clem 2023 among others). This work also maintains parsimony in that two independent-looking operations actually boil down to a single underlying mechanism.