Complementizer Agreement and the Licensing of DPs: An Account in Terms of Referential Anchoring

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the phenomenon of complementizer agreement in West Germanic and the distribution of DPs in German can be given a common explanation in terms of an approach in which context values are not freely assigned via an interpretive function operation, as is assumed in standard accounts of formal semantics, but rather, they become accessible in a specific functional head in the C-domain.

Keywords

• complementizer agreement
• clitic movement
• scrambling
• weak and strong definite determiners
• anchoring to the discourse
• context values