Weisser (2019) reanalyzes the Breton rannig, Busan Korean interrogative complementizer alternations, and West-Germanic complementizer agreement as allomorphy instead of agreement, and proposes a set of diagnostics to distinguish allomorphy from agreement. While the cases for Breton and Busan Korean are convincing and the results coherent, West-Germanic complementizer agreement diverges in several respects. In this squib, I review the three case studies and show that the argument for analyzing West-Germanic complementizer agreement as allomorphy does not hold up. In addition, I discuss three new data points on complementizer agreement that cannot be analyzed with a PF account. Accepting that complementizer agreement is not allomorphy allows us to revise the diagnostics to distinguish allomorphy from agreement to a stricter set.

It is often assumed that imperatives contain a covert imperative licenser, such as an imperative operator. The purpose of the operator is to bind the imperative subject, and thereby derive a number of the syntactic properties of imperatives. In this paper, I show, based on variation in V2 imperatives in varieties of Dutch and German, that if there is an alternative way of licensing the imperative subject, presence of an imperative operator is not necessary. I put forth the novel observation that V2 imperatives are only allowed in varieties that have verbal umlaut. I argue that verbal umlaut corresponds to a syntactic encoding of person features on the imperative verb, which can bind the imperative subject. This voids the need for an imperative operator in SpecCP, and gives way to V2 imperatives in V2 languages like Dutch and German. The implication is that a covert imperative licenser is a last resort mechanism, rather than an inherent part of imperatives clauses.

A recurring question in relation to first conjunct agreement concerns the underlying structure of the coordination: is first conjunct agreement the result of agreement with the first conjunct of a nominal coordination, or is it the result of agreement with the subject of a clausal first conjunct, that undergoes ellipsis and movement to make it look like a nominal conjunct? In this paper, I argue that several instances of first conjunct complementiser agreement should be analysed as resulting from clausal coordination and Right Node Raising. I show that this approach accounts for the following observations. In Frisian, the complementiser can show first conjunct agreement, but the verb cannot. Also in Frisian, first conjunct complementiser agreement triggers a two-event reading of the sentence. In Polish, last conjunct agreement on the verb is possible only in the context of first conjunct agreement on the complementiser. These observations cannot be accounted for under approaches that assume only nominal coordination, or resolution of agreement at PF. I also discuss coordinator agreement in Tegelen Dutch, and show that it provides further support for the existence of clausal coordination as an underlying structure of a superficial coordination of nouns. The analysis means that first conjunct agreement can be the result of different underlying syntactic structures, that should be distinguished empirically and theoretically.

This paper proposes a novel analysis of the exceptional agreement patterns in pronominal het 'it'-clefts with the order het-copula-pronoun in Dutch. We argue that the complex interaction in clefts between case, agreement and word order can be explained from the radical featural defectivity of het 'it': het 'it' has a third person (3P) feature, but no case, number, strength and gender features. We show that het 'it' is different from all personal pronouns in the major dialect groups of Dutch in that it never shows any case distinction. The absence of case on het 'it' makes it possible and necessary for the pronoun to occur in the nominative in a cleft. Similarly, the absence of number in the feature specification of het 'it' makes plural agreement with the pronoun possible and necessary in clefts. Finally, we show that Standard Dutch has two subgrammars, one of which has the additional requirement that the finite copula agree in person with both het 'it' and the pronoun.

Children acquiring a non-negative concord language like English or German have been found to consistently interpret sentences with two negative elements in a negative concord manner as conveying a single semantic negation. Corpus-based investigations for English and German show that children also produce sentences with two negative elements but only a single negation meaning. As any approach to negative concord and negative indefinites needs to account for both the typological variation and the child data, we revisit the three most current syntactic Agree-based analyses, as well as a movement-based approach and show that they either have difficulties with the child data or face challenges in the adult language variation or both. As a consequence, we develop a novel analysis of negative concord and negative indefinites which relies on purely morphological operations applying to hierarchical semantic representations within a version of the Meaning First architecture of grammar. We will argue that the typological variation between the main three different types of languages as well as the children’s non adult-like behaviour fall out from this in a straightforward fashion while the downsides of the Agree- and the movement-based accounts are avoided.