Agreement, Pronominal Clitics and Negation in Tamazight Berber A Unified Analysis

This book presents a study of various important aspects of Tamazight Berber syntax within the generative tradition. Work on Berber linguistics from a generative perspective remains in many ways uncharted territory. There has been hardly any published research on this language and its different dialects, especially in English -- this book fills some of these gaps and lays down the foundations for further research. Ouali looks at three seemingly disparate ranges of syntactic phenomena, namely Subject-verb agreement, Clitic-doubling and Negative Concord. These phenomena have received different analytical treatments, but Ouali proposes that they are all forms of agreement derived under the same Chomskian 'Agree' mechanism. The book addresses a fundamental question in the ongoing debate in recent Minimalism with regard to how subject-verb agreement is obtained and proposes a new analysis of the so-called Anti-Agreement Effect. It will be of interest to all syntacticians and to researchers in Afroasiatic languages.

Hamid Ouali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA.

1. Introduction \ 2. Background on the Berber language \ 3. Agreement: from GB to Minimalism \ 4. Tamazight verb morphology and clause structure \ 5. Subject verb agreement and agreement suppression effects \ 6. Object pronominal clitics \ 7. Clitic doubling \ 8. Negative concord \ 9. Agreement suppression effects and unification via agree \ Conclusion \ Bibliography \ Index