Realizing Germanic Inflection: Why Morphology Does Not Drive Syntax

Abstract This paper examines and evaluates what may be called the “Rich Agreement Hypothesis” (RAH) in the domain of verb movement asymmetries in Germanic. The most prominent current accounts (e.g., Rohrbacher’s 1999 Morphology-Driven Syntax) require inspection of the internal make-up of paradigms and take overt morphological variation to be the cause of syntactic variation. A survey of the literature shows that these proposals are empirically untenable in their strong (bi-conditional) form; there are numerous cases of syntactic variation attested in the absence of corresponding morphological... Mehr ...