Feature Gluttony and The Syntax of Hierarchy Effects

Jessica Coon is Associate Professor of Linguistics at McGill University and holds the Canada Research Chair in Syntax and Indigenous Languages. Her research focuses on topics in syntactic theory, with a special focus on languages of the Mayan family. In addition to theoretical work, she leads collaborative language documentation and revitalization projects with indigenous communities in Canada and Latin America.  In summer 2015 she worked as the scientific consultant for the film Arrival, which stars Amy Adams as a linguistic fieldworker who is recruited by the military to decipher the language of the recently-arrived Heptapods. Since the film, Dr. Coon has helped create a public dialogue about linguistics and endangered languages through interviews and written work in outlets including Wired Magazine, The Washington Post, and CBC’s The Current.

Dr. Coon’s talk will offer a new take on a family of hierarchy effect-inducing configurations, including (i) PCC effects (Anagnostopoulou 2005) and (ii) dative-nominative configurations (Sigurdsson and Holmberg 2008). We draw on the iterative search component of Cyclic Agree (Béjar and Rezac 2009), according to which an articulated probe continues probing if at least some features are left unvalued after an Agree relation (also Deal 2015). Béjar and Rezac (2009) and many related accounts seek to derive hierarchy effects from an underapplication of Agree and concomitant failures of nominal licensing. By contrast, we argue that hierarchy effects are the result of an overapplication of Agree. We propose that in these structures, a probe participates in more than one valuation relation, “biting off more than it can chew”––a configuration that we refer to as feature gluttony. The coexistence of multiple values on a single probe can then create conflicting requirements for subsequent operations, leading to a crash. Important motivation for this account comes from the fact that hierarchy effects commonly disappear in the absence of agreement, along with differences in rescue strategies for hierarchy-violating configurations.