Agreeing adpositions in Avar and theories of Agree

Given the central spot afforded to unvalued features in current minimalist theorizing, the directionality of feature valuation is the subject of a lively debate in the syntactic literature. The traditional conception of upward valuation, whereby the unvalued probe inherits features from a valued goal in its c-command domain (Chomsky 2000, 2001, Carstens & Diercks 2013, Preminger 2013), has to compete with downward valuation (Zeijlstra 2012), Hybrid Agree (Bjorkman & Zeijlstra to appear), bidirectional Agree (Baker 2008), amongst others.

This talk discusses, using data from Avar, a crosslinguistically rare phenomenon of adposition agreement, whereby certain adverbs, postpositions and locative-marked noun phrases undergo agreement with an absolutive argument. I show that the agreement morphology on agreeing adpositions is a result of agreement rather than concord, and explore the consequences of adposition agreement in Avar for upward and downward valuation. I conclude that the traditional conception of upward valuation is both conceptually and empirically superior to its alternatives.