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 languageand its different dialects, especially in English -- this book fills some of these gaps and lays down the foundations forfurther 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.Itwill be of interest to all syntacticians and to researchers in Afroasiatic languages.Table of Content1. 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.Review Quote"This book is an important 'must read' contribution both to contemporary syntactic theory and to the description and analysis of understudied Berber dialects. It illuminates fundamental aspects of syntactic theory and Minimalist method analyzing phenomena of enduring interest, including (Anti-) Agreement, Cliticization and Negative Concord while insightfully revealing their possible unification and deduction as facilitated by adopting and further clarifying certain central formal aspects of current Minimalist analysis."Biographical NoteHamid Ouali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA.This book presents a study of various important aspects of Tamazight Berber syntax within the generative tradition.Formerly Continuum Studies in Theoretical Linguistics; for titles published before September 2012 click here. Bloomsbury Studies in Theoretical Linguistics publishes work at the forefront of present-day developments in the field. The series is open to studies from all branches of theoretical linguistics and to the full range of theoretical frameworks. Titles in the series present original research that makes a new and significant contribution and are aimed primarily at scholars in the field, but are clear and accessible, making them useful also to students, to new researchers and to scholars in related disciplines.Is a strong contribution to the current theoretical discussion of the treatment of Agreement in MinimalismComprehensively covers agreement phenomena in Tamazight BerberIs a comprehensive presentation of the notion of 'Agreement' within generative grammar