On agreement variation in Russian

The paper deals with intricate instances of predicate agreement in Russian whereby the features of the agreement target are not expressed in the agreement controller. The proposed analysis is couched in the Distributed Morphology framework. I argue that in Syntax, the controller is specified for the whole set of formal features, and the Agree-Copy operation copies it from the controller to the target. After that, Impoverishment operations occur at both nodes independently of each other. As a result, a subtype of variable agreement, namely, “semantic” agreement based on the referent’s features that are not expressed in the nominal expression denoting it, receives a principled explanation and can be subsumed under canonical agreement. Under this approach, another type of complicated agreement where variation occurs — predicate agreement in relative clauses modifying pronominal heads — does not require recourse to a non-canonical controller, either. Variation is modeled by changing the timing of the Agree-Copy operation with respect to the impoverishment of the relative pronoun. The DM-based approach opens up new perspectives in the study of variable agreement, which can result not only from syntactic homonymy or competing strategies for establishing an agreement relation, but also from the variable order of postsyntactic operations which creates varying featural characteristics of the agreement target.