Celtic Agreement, The Avoid Pronoun Principle and Binding Theory

Abstract

Agreement in Breton exhibits two major features which are striking. First, both verbs and prepositions are inflected for agreement. Second, verbs and prepositions fail to inflect for person and number when they appear with an expressed subject or prepositional object respectively. On the surface, agreement in Breton appears to be an elaborate, language specific affair, but in the second section of this chapter I argue that the distribution of agreement in Breton can be seen to follow from UG if we recognize two AGRs in this language, an overt and a null AGR. The former is associated with phonologically overt (or synthetic) inflection, while the latter occurs as the phonologically null (or analytic) agreement. The distribution of these two AGR element can be attributed to the Avoid Pronoun Principle, which treats the overt inflection as a pronominal to be avoided. Breton is special only in that it inflects prepositions as well as verbs, and makes use of two AGR elements.