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Abstract: Despite exhibiting a high degree of uniformity, Bantu languages display a surprising amount of variation in extraction contexts, particularly with regard to agreement patterns. This paper examines this variation, focusing first on Bantu OVS relatives and topicalization structures in which the raised operator triggers morphological subject agreement on the verb. After critiquing accounts by and others, this paper proposes an analysis of OVS structures in which the establishment of agreement relations is delayed until the end of the derivation. I then take this account of OVS as the basis for discussing variation in the agreement properties of operator constructions across Bantu languages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper develops a new perspective on the question of what type of verb movement the modern Celtic languages display, V to I movement or V to C movement. Under the standard assumption that the subject remains relatively low in these languages compared to Germanic languages, this category fails to be a diagnostic, since both verb movement operations cross the subject. The analysis presented here starts from the theory of verb movement developed in Koeneman (2000), which argues that the verb does not move to prefabricated functional head positions but moves in order to project one or more of its functional features (tense and agreement). It is shown how this theory offers a better understanding of verb movement (parameters) than mainstream approaches. After developing a concrete proposal for verb movement variation in Germanic, the paper tries to extend this analysis to the Celtic languages, so that a uniform analysis of verb movement (variation) ensues. The main conclusion is that it is very unlikely that Celtic languages have a verb movement operation involving an agreement projection. They are better analyzed as having a verb movement operation that projects tense features. The result is that the nature of verb movement in Germanic and Celtic is basically the same. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Partial agreement between verbs and conjoined noun phrases in languages like Swahili is only possible if the conjoined noun phrase (NP) follows the verb, that is, it is directly related to word order. This paper presents an analysis of partial agreement within Dynamic Syntax, a formal model of interpretation which models syntax as the building of semantic tree representations, driven by words in the order in which they appear in the utterance. The analysis presented makes the relation between partial agreement and word order explicit in that it shows that a preceding conjoined NP has already been assigned a plural value when the agreeing verb is parsed. In contrast, when the verb is parsed first, both the first conjunct and the fully developed conjunction can fulfil the requirement imposed by the verb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]