Abstract:Past Participle Agreement (PPA) in the Romance Perfect has been widely studied since G&B (Kayne 1989; Belletti 2011 ao), but it has also received renewed attention in recent Minimalism-couched literature (D’Alessandro & Roberts 2010; Kobayashi 2022 ao). However, the vast diachronic and synchronic micro-variation found in Romance PPA patterns still poses many open challenges for a unified analysis of the phenomenon.

For instance, a Minimalist account should be able to deal with the following issues, both cross- and intra-linguistically: free optionality (e.g., with some clitic objects in French and Catalan); interpretive effects (e.g., specificity in French or topicality in Majorcan Catalan); interaction with lexical aspect (e.g. telicity in Salentino); interaction with argument structure (e.g. different patterns in passives vs unaccusatives, as in Spanish and some Sicilian and Calabrese varieties).

An orthogonal problem in accounting for this puzzle concerns the locality of PPA, and of Agree in general: the intuition formalized with different tools in G&B and Minimalism seems to be that PPA is triggered by movement of the Goal (respectively to some Agr projection in a Spec-Head configuration with the v Probe, or to the same “Phase-domain” as the v Probe). However, two well-known issues arise: 1) The Goal cannot move “too far”, otherwise PPA is typically blocked; 2) Some apparent cases of in-situ, “long-distance” PPA are nevertheless well attested.

This talk aims at providing a provisional micro-parametric hierarchy of PPA across Romance, from the least to the most restrictive conditions on its realization.

The core theoretical assumption is the distinction between Agree in narrow syntax and agreement as its overt realization in morpho-phonology (see Arregi & Nevins 2011; Bhatt & Walkow 2013 ao).

Building on this premise, I follow D’Alessandro & Roberts (2010), in assuming that agreement is overtly realized only when Probe and Goal are both Spelled-Out together, in line with the Phase Impenetrability Condition.

However, I address several (apparent) counterexamples by considering factors to which PPA seems to be sensitive: 1) Intermediate movement of the Goal; 2) Low verbal projections encoding Telicity/Resultativity (Salvà 2017); 3) Discourse features encoded in the syntax (Miyagawa 2010); 3) Aspect as a “phase-boundary” (Fenger 2020); 4) Marked Phi-features values.

These factors are integrated into a parametric hierarchy, which essentially reveals a diachronic tendency of Romance PPA systems towards increasingly restrictive patterns and a more transparent mapping between syntax and morpho-phonology.

Selected References:

Arregi, K., & A. Nevins. 2012. Morphotactics: Basque auxiliaries and the  structure of spellout. Dordrecht: Springer // D’Alessandro, R. 2020. “Agreement across the board: Topic agreement in Ripano”. In K. Hartmann, J. Mursell, & P. Smith (eds.), Agree to Agree: Agreement in the Minimalist Programme, 235-270. Berlin: Language Science Press. // D’Alessandro, R., & I. Roberts. 2010. “Past participle agreement in Abruzzese: split auxiliary selection and the null-subject parameter”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28, 41-72. // De Cia, S. 2022. “Topicality and object–past participle agreement in Friulian”. In A. Nevins, A. Peti-Stantic, M. de Vos, & J. Willer-Gold (eds.), Angles of Object Agreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. // Fenger, P. 2020. Words within Words: The Internal Syntax of Verbs. PhD dissertation, University of Connecticut Kobayashi, A. 2022. “Past participle agreement in French and Italian: A two-Agree analysis”. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7(1), 1-41.

Syntax Interface Lecture EXTRA 19 November 2025   We’d like to inform you that the next Syntax Interface Lecture EXTRA will take place on Wednesday, 19th November, from 16:00 until 17:00, both on site (Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, room 1.06) and in our Syntax Interface Lectures team on MS Teams.   We will host a talk by Emanuela Pinna (Pompeu Fabra University) with the title ‘Past Participle Agreement in Romance: Between Syntax and Morpho-Phonology’.   If you are already a member of our team on MS Teams and/or are affiliated with UU, please use the following link to join the talk itself.   If you experience any trouble with the link above and/or you are NOT affiliated with UU, please email us so that we can add you to the team.   *** We kindly ask you to request to join the Syntax Interface Lectures team by 15:30 on the day of the talk***, as we have experienced some accessibility issues in the past and want everyone to be able to enjoy the talk in its entirety.