The Anaphor Agreement Effect is not about featural deficiency: Evidence from Avar

Abstract

This paper discusses two analyses of the Anaphor Agreement Effect (AAE, Rizzi 1990) in the light of novel data from Avar. By demonstrating that Avar anaphors trigger full, non-trivial agreement on the φ-probe, I argue that the Avar data instantiate a genuine exception to the AAE. I then compare two competing analyses of binding and the AAE: an account whereby anaphoric dependencies arise via the syntactic operation Agree (Murugesan 2019), and a theory deriving the inability of the anaphors’ φ-features to trigger full agreement from the presence of additional structural layers inside the anaphors that render the features inaccessible (Preminger 2019). I claim that the absence of the AAE in Avar is in line with the encapsulation analysis whereas the Agree-based analysis is unsuccessful.