Accusative case, subject agreement: the Latin American Spanish existential construction with habe

SAAB, ANDRÉS

Maceió, Brasil

Workshop; V ENCONTRO NACIONAL SOBRE LÌNGUA FALADA E ESCRITA/ II WORKSHOP ROMANIA NOVA; 2006

Universidade Federal de Alagoas

In this paper, we propose that agreement and case must be independent phenomena, against Chomsky (2001) and related works. The proposal is justified by a specific empirical domain: the Spanish existential constructions with haber. In particular, we focus on those cases, observed in some dialects of Latin American Spanish, in which the nominal argument agrees with the verb (e.g., hubieron muchos invitados ‘there were many guests’) even when it receives accusative case (e.g., los hubieron Lit: “CL.AC.PL. have.3PL”). These data present a challenge for the unitary theory of case and agreement (UT), in which the operation Agree is constrained by the Activation Condition (AC), an operation requiring that Probe and Goal remain active for Agree to apply. Rodríguez-Mondoñedo (2005) proposes that UT can be solved if: (a) the DP agrees with a v in the feature of number, which is interpretable on DP, and uninterpretable on v, and (b) T agrees in number with v, not with the accusative DP.