Tier-based strict locality and the typology of agreement

Abstract

This paper presents a subregular analysis of syntactic agreement patterns modeled using command strings over Minimalist Grammar (MG) dependency trees (Graf and Shafiei 2019), incorporating a novel MG treatment of agreement. Phenomena of interest include relativized minimality and its exceptions, direction of feature transmission, and configurations involving chains of agreeing elements. Such patterns are shown to fall within the class of tier-based strictly 2-local (TSL-2) languages, which has previously been argued to subsume the majority of long-distance syntactic phenomena, as well as those in phonology and morphology (Graf 2022a). This characterization places a tight upper bound on the range of configurations that are predicted to occur while providing parameters for variation which closely match the observed typology.