The role of agreement in romance nominal projections

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of agreement in nominal constructions in three modern Romance languages. Special attention is paid to the structural configuration required for agreement as well as to the relationship between agreement and case. Chapter one presents an overview of the data and main proposals. Chapter two reviews some of the most influential work on agreement, mainly within generative grammar but also within other frameworks, such as Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Some important generalisations regarding the nature of agreement are drawn from these studies. The internal structure of DP is investigated in chapter three; drawing on work by Cinque (1991,1992) and others, I suggest that there exists noun movement in Romance and that APs are located in Spec(NP). I also present evidence for the functional projection NumP, intermediate between D and NP. The structural mechanism at work in these nominal structures is also characterised in chapter three. I propose, following Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist Programme, that this internal agreement be analysed as feature matching in a Spec-Head configuration. Finally, the last part of the dissertation explores the relationship between case and agreement and the role of agreement within Romance DPs. Basing my proposal on the study of a group of locative elements in Spanish, I argue that Romance nominal agreement is a manisfestation of case marking and that, it is only when this internal agreement is not possible that a case assignment mechanism (de/di insertion) comes into play as a less economical means of case marking. Chapter five is a summary of the main findings of the dissertation