Directionality of feature valuation: a view from Avar

Павел Руднев выступил с докладом на семинаре лингвистической лаборатории

Руднев Павел Владимирович

Международная лаборатория языковой конвергенции: Ведущий научный сотрудник

Given the central spot afforded to unvalued features in current minimalist theorizing, the directionality of feature valuation is the subject of a lively debate in the syntactic literature. The traditional conception of upward valuation, whereby the unvalued probe inherits features from a valued goal in its c-command domain (Chomsky 2000, 2001, Carstens & Diercks 2013, Preminger 2013), has to compete with downward valuation (Zeijlstra 2012), Hybrid Agree (Zeijlstra & Bjorkman to appear), bidirectional Agree (Baker 2008), amongst others.  
This talk discusses, using data from Avar, a crosslinguistically rare phenomenon of adposition agreement, whereby certain adverbs, postpositions and locative-marked noun phrases undergo agreement with an absolutive argument. I show that the agreement morphology on agreeing adpositions is a result of agreement rather than concord, and  explore the consequences of adposition agreement in Avar for upward and downward valuation. I conclude that the traditional conception of upward valuation is both conceptually and empirically superior to its alternatives.