Form Copy, Agree and Clitics

Abstract

Here it is proposed that Form Copy (Chomsky, Noam, T. Daniel Seely, Robert C. Berwick, Sandiway Fong, M. A. C. Huybregts, Hisatsugu Kitahara, Andrew McInnerney, Yushi Sugimoto. 2023. Merge and the strong minimalist thesis. In Cambridge elements. Cambridge University Press), applied to features, can derive a very simple form of Agree without the need for the distinction between interpretable and uninterpretable features or the Activity Condition. Furthermore, since Roberts (Roberts, Ian. 2010. Agreement and head movement: Clitics and defective goals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) derives head-movement from Agree, Form Copy can be similarly extended in such a way as to derive the effects of head-movement. This conclusion holds independently of whether head-movement is a purely morphophonological operation or whether there are narrow-syntactic cases. It is also shown how an account of cliticisation, both proclisis and enclisis, can be derived, updating the proposals in Roberts (Roberts, Ian. 2010. Agreement and head movement: Clitics and defective goals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) in terms of Form Copy.