Unexpected agreement in Spanish revisited

Abstract

Verbal agreement in Spanish is materialized as the rightmost morpheme on a verb. When enclitics attach, the expected order is: verbal base + AGR(eement) + CL(itic): 'hága-n'AGR-'lo'CL ‘Do it!’. Nevertheless, in non-standard Spanish, verbal agreement can appear at the right of the clitic, giving rise to what has been named unexpected agreement: 'haga-n'AGR-'lo'CL-'n'AGR or 'haga-lo'CL-'n'AGR ‘Do it!’. This squib discusses different data related to unexpected agreement in order to provide some generalizations which previous approaches to this topic fail to address. So as to revisit the operations involved in this broad phenomenon, it is pivotal to make a distinction between unexpected exponents and unexpected locus.

Keywords

• agreement
• non-standard Spanish
• plurality
• clitics
• movement
• merge