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- Title
Agreement in Ibibio: From Every Head to Every Head.
- Authors
Baker, Mark; Willie, Willie Udo
- Abstract
The Ibibio language has the special property that agreement with a single grammatical subject can appear multiple times in the same clause. After showing that this is a general phenomenon in the language, we argue that every verbal functional head in Ibibio—Aspect, Auxiliary, Mood, and Participle, as well as Tense—acts as a probe, capable of initiating an Agree relationship. Furthermore, a close comparison of agreement in indicative, subjunctive, negative, and infinitival clauses shows that these functional heads do not agree with the subject directly; rather each agrees with the next highest functional head within the extended projection. The facts of Ibibio thus point toward a version of Chomsky’s theory of Agree in which any functional head can be the probe in an agreement relation, and any functional head can be the goal in such a relation.
- Subjects
IBIBIO language; TENSE (Grammar); CLAUSES (Grammar); VERBS; LANGUAGE &; languages
- Publication
Syntax, 2010, Vol 13, Issue 2, p99
- ISSN
1368-0005
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1467-9612.2009.00133.x