Agreement puzzles in Germanic possessives
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | One of the more robust generalisations in morphological theory concerns the absence of ABA-patterns, that is, paradigms where, given a structured sequence of forms, the first and third members exhibit morphological identity, to the exclusion of the middle form (cf. Bobaljik 2012, Bobaljik & Sauerland 2018). Observed across domains such as case, degree and person morphology, the lack of ABA has been taken to reflect underlying structural containment and locality conditions on spell-out (e.g., Caha 2009, Bobaljik 2012, Moskal 2018, Smith et al. 2018, Zompi 2019, Sudo & Nevins 2022). Nevertheless, apparent exceptions have been attested in the same environments: so-called pseudo-ABA patterns, whereby the morphology on the surface mimics an ABA configuration, but the underlying structure continues to respect standard syntactic and morphological constraints (cf. Middleton 2021, Blix 2021, Davis 2021, Kasenov 2023). This paper examines pseudo-ABA patterns exhibited by the gender agreement markings of Germanic possessive pronouns in relation to regular patterns, drawing on data found in both standard and non-standard varieties. We argue that these patterns are indeed neither accidental irregularities nor true ABAs, but rather predicted and systematically derivable possibilities within the Nanosyntactic model of lexicalisation (cf. Caha et al. 2025, Starke 2009). The analysis which we propose aims to capture the attested variation while maintaining the structural conditions that rule out true ABAs. We thus wish to contribute to ongoing debates on morphological spell-out and the comparative morphosyntax of Germanic languages. |
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