Congratulations to John David Storment on his successful doctoral dissertation defense at Stony Brook University. John David was one of our undergrads in the Department of Linguistics at NYU. See the picture below.
Projecting (your) voice: A theory of inversion and defective circumvention
This dissertation revolves around a colloquial agreement alternation observed in several classes of English sentences with postverbal thematic subjects.
(1) a. There {was/were} no seats left c. What I love most {are/is} your outfits
b. “Moo!” {go/goes} the cows” d. In{walk/walks} several bad pirates
Using a maximally simple formulation of Agree that effectively reduces to minimal Search, I show that the aforementioned agreement alternations are derivable from a single set of syntactic operations through an optional process which I dub defective circumvention, in which a probe can conditionally Agree past a featurally deficient goal and undergo sequential multiple Agree with more than one goal, given that the features of the two goals are featurally compatible with one another.
The sentences in (1) involve A-movement of an internal argument over an argument that was externally merged in a higher position, as evidenced by the effect that the internal argument in this position has on agreement. Given the understood uniformity of the projection of arguments, as well as the locality and strict minimality of this formulation of Agree, a mechanism is needed to affect the accessibility of arguments for the creation of A-dependencies such as Agree.
As such, I demonstrate that these constructions necessarily involve inversion via smuggling, in which the internal argument is smuggled to a position above the higher argument, facilitated by phrasal movement of a verbal projection containing the internal argument, which is empirically supported by the distribution of non-argument VP internal elements in these inversion constructions. An operation such as smuggling is necessary to obviate the minimality violation that would normally occur in A-moving an internal argument over an external argument. I further show that VP smuggling of arguments is characteristic of voice constructions. Voice, then, is what allows for inversion to take place and ultimately what allows for the agreement alternation facilitated by defective circumvention.
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