The 2025-2026 Linguistics Colloquium series concludes on Monday, May 4, with a talk by Emily Clem (UC San Diego) titled "Even dependent case is Agree." The talk will take place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom from 3:10-4:30pm, and the abstract is as follows:
Many early generative approaches to case assignment took case to be the result of the same type of dependency-forming operation that results in morphological agreement (in Minimalism, the operation Agree). Under this type of approach, a functional head (probe) establishes a dependency with a nominal (goal), resulting in case being assigned to that nominal. But this view has been challenged, and to a large degree abandoned, in recent years in favor of configurational approaches to case assignment. Under configurational case approaches, it is a structural configuration (specifically, c-command) between two nominals that results in case being assigned to one of those nominals via configurational case rules. This type of configurational approach can derive so-called “dependent” case patterns, where the presence of morphological case on one nominal reflects – or is dependent on – the presence of another nominal in the structure.
In this talk, I explore crosslinguistic data from multiple dependent case patterns and argue that, even in these types of patterns that are taken to be evidence par excellence for configurational approaches to case assignment, we still see the hallmarks of Agree. Specifically, I demonstrate that case assignment is sensitive to: 1) structural locality to specific functional heads rather than other nominals, 2) c-command between functional heads and nominals rather than between nominals, and 3) hierarchy effects that indicate one-to-many probe-goal mappings. By reducing dependent case assignment to an instance of the independently warranted operation Agree, we are able to eliminate the need for configurational case rules from the grammar, resulting in a more parsimonious theory.
