Closest conjunct agreement is an illusion

摘要

Much recent work on closest conjunct agreement has argued that Agree must be sensitive to linear order. In this paper, we argue that the closest' aspect of this phenomenon is in fact illusory. What may, at first glance, seem like linearly-conditioned agreement can instead be analyzed as the result of different derivations inside the conjunct phrase. Thus, agreement with a single conjunct is in fact agreement with a conjunct phrase which has inherited the features of only one of its conjuncts. Furthermore, the assumption that a given order of operations inside the conjunct phrase is maintained at later cycles of the derivation makes correct predictions about the possibility for each pattern to occur either pre- or postverbally. Thus, we arrive at a principled analysis of conjunct agreement, which derives only the attested patterns in Serbo-Croatian and rules out ungrammatical structures without recourse to linear order.