Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

The Syntax of Valuation in Auxiliary-participle Constructions

by Susi Wurmbrand

This paper proposes that syntactic dependencies are established through Reverse Agree, a feature valuation dependency in which unvalued features are licensed (i.e., valued) by the closest c-commanding element with the appropriate valued feature. I illustrate that this view, in contrast to standard Agree or licensing under specifier-head agreement, provides a unified account of the morphological and syntactic properties of a series of Germanic parasitic participle constructions, which, so far, have been assumed to be unrelated.