This book investigates the historical paths leading from pronouns to markers of verbal agreement and proposes a unified formal account of this grammaticalization process. In opposition to beliefs widely held in the literature, it is argued that new agreement formatives can be coined in a multitude of syntactic environments. Still, the individual paths toward agreement are shown to exhibit a set of underlying similarities which are attributed to universal principles that govern the reanalysis of pronominal clitics as exponents of verbal agreement across languages. It is claimed that syntactic principles impose only a set of necessary conditions on the reanalysis in question, while its ultimate trigger is morphological in nature. More specifically, it is argued that the acquisition of inflectional morphology is governed by blocking effects which operate during language acquisition and promote the grammaticalization of new markers if this change serves to replace 'worn-out', underspecified forms with new, more specified candidates.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements ix–x Notes for the reader and list of abbreviations xi Introduction 1–21 Theoretical preliminaries 23–53 The structural design of agreement 55–128 The transition from pronoun to inflectional marker 129–155 The reanalysis of C-oriented clitics 157–228 Morphological blocking and the rise of agreement 229–297 Concluding summary 299–304 References 305–324 Index 325–335

"This is the first empirically detailed, theoretically informed study of the historical development of agreement marking in the context of a generative approach to syntactic change. As such it represents a major contribution to the field, and deserves a very wide readership." Ian Roberts, University of Cambridge