Spans in South Caucasian agreement Revisiting the pieces of inflection

摘要

I argue that a range of morphological phenomena sensitive to features of multiple arguments in Georgian (South Caucasian)-including Anti-Superiority ef- fects (Bejar2003), and omnivorous number effects (Nevins2011) - receive a unified account if spellout targets contiguous spans of maximally simple heads, in a fixed hierarchy. I introduce new data from a related language, Laz, and show that a close comparison of the two languages reveals that (i) number agreement is expressed om- nivorously only if the prefix is not sensitive to number, and that (ii) this number expression covaries with Tense only if the subject is third person. I argue that both Anti-Superiority and the facts about number expression should be interpreted as fu- sional morphology being limited to third person contexts, and that a principled expla- nation for such an asymmetry can be provided, if first and second person structurally contain third person, and the matching of exponents with syntactic structure is gov- erned by Overspecification (Starke2009), such that a lexicalized span is a candidate of spellout for its sub-spans.