syncretism w/o paradigms

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi Jonathan,

>Is there any reason to think that impoverishment (or one's favourite
>corresponding device) necessarily applies before agreement (or even
>that it can)?

Oh good, I thought this would get a rise out of you!  In the original
Halle & Marantz story, Agr is inserted post-syntactically.  If so,
Impoverishment *could* occur before agreement (in the sense of
detailed feature-copying, not in the sense of abstract syntactic
agreement).  If Impoverishment *must* occur before feature-copying
(or *must* affect copied features as well as the originals), then the
theory is stronger -- more potential evidence for Impoverishment.  I
don't know if there's evidence against the stronger theory.  Do you?

Cheers,
Martha
--
mcginnis at ucalgary.ca