Agreeing adpositions in Avar and the directionality of valuation debate

Given the central spot afforded to unvalued features in current 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, 2001a, Carstens 2013, Preminger 2013), has to compete with downward valuation (Zeijlstra 2012), Hybrid Agree (Bjorkman & Zeijlstra 2018), bidirectional Agree (Baker 2008), amongst others.

The present paper discusses, using data from Avar, a crosslinguistically rare phenomenon of adposition agreement, whereby certain adverbs, postpositions and locative case forms 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 upward valuation is better equipped to account for the observed patterns than downward valuation, both on empirical and conceptual grounds.

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