The Anaphor Agreement Effect (AAE) is a crosslinguistically robust empirical observation underpinning a wide range of theories of anaphoric binding (Kratzer 2009; Rooryck & Vanden Wyngaerd 2011). Stated informally, it refers to the inability of reflexive pronouns to trigger φ-agreement on the verb; several more formal definitions are provided in (1) below.

A major application of the AAE has been to support those theories of anaphoric relations (e.g. Heinat 2006; Rooryck & Vanden Wyngaerd 2011) which seek to derive the referential dependence of reflexive pronouns by postulating an inherent deficiency in φ-features that is eliminated in the course of the derivation via an application of the generalised agreement operation, Agree (Chomsky 2000). On this view, Agree is also the mechanism used to derive the AAE itself (cf. Murugesan 2019).

This paper focuses on cases of legitimate covarying φ-agreement between verbs and reflexives in the Northeast Caucasian language Avar such as (2) below.1

I first show that the AAE does not arise in either finite or non-finite clauses in Avar (Section 2). I argue that, even though Avar is a genuine counterexample to the AAE, it does not warrant dismissing the AAE as a crosslinguistic principle, and the right account of the AAE should explain both the AAE and its exceptions in a systematic way. In Sections 3 and 4, I compare the predictions of the Agree-based account of Murugesan (2019) with those of Preminger (2019), a novel analysis of the AAE deriving the defectiveness of agreement from the anaphors’ φ-features being encapsulated in additional layers of syntactic structure. I conclude that while the encapsulation view accommodates the Avar facts effortlessly, the φ-deficiency view based on Agree fails to do so.

For a language to qualify as a true exception to the AAE, three things are required.

In the remainder of this section I show that all three conditions hold for Avar but first I present three arguments showing that the locus of both agreement and case in Avar is v.

Avar (Northeast Caucasian, ca. 700 000 speakers) is a morphologically ergative language where verbal agreement uniformly tracks the unmarked (absolutive) case; no other cases are able to control verbal agreement. In intransitive clauses such as (3a), the subject murad ‘Murad’ is unmarked for case and controls agreement. In transitive and ditransitive clauses, it is invariably the direct object, unmarked for case, which controls agreement, as illustrated in (3b).

There is no person agreement in Avar, and verbal agreement is restricted to noun class and number, with four noun classes being identified: masculine (realised as w), feminine (realised as j), neuter (realised as b) and plural (realised as r). In the ditransitive sentence in (3b) above, only one noun phrase, the neuter ruq’ ‘house’ in the absolutive case, can control agreement on the verb, which appears as the neuter agreement prefix b; neither the masculine w nor the feminine j is acceptable.

The case-marking and agreement patterns illustrated above generalise to all clause types in Avar: irrespective of finiteness, S- and O-arguments always appear in the absolutive case and control agreement, whereas the A-argument is marked with ergative (or dative/locative in the case of transitive experiencer verbs) and never controls agreement. I first illustrate the identity of these patterns in transitive clauses:

In all three clause types in (4), the agreeing transitive verb cm–ič- ‘sell’ carries the plural agreement prefix r– coreferencing the noun class of the absolutive object mašinal ‘cars.ABS’, and the external argument uniformly carries ergative marking. In intransitive clauses, illustrated in (5), the case and agreement pattern is equally uniform.2

The identity of patterns of case assignment and agreement across all clause types in Avar provides an argument for dissociating the unmarked (absolutive) case from T and, therefore, against viewing it as nominative. In particular, if T were the source of the unmarked case, that unmarked case would be predicted not to survive in the absence of T (as is indeed attested in a number of ergative-absolutive languages, cf. Legate 2008, and the overwhelming majority of nominative-accusative languages). As we have just seen, however, this prediction is incorrect for Avar, whose absolutive case persists on S- and O-arguments in the absence of tense marking, suggesting that case assignment and agreement obtain lower in the structure.3

The second argument for v being the locus of agreement and case in all Avar clauses is to be found in the interaction of finiteness with negation. As Rudnev (2015) demonstrates, infinitival clauses in Avar are incompatible with clausal negation—a traditional diagnostic of T-less restructuring complements (Wurmbrand 2001).

Clausal negation in Avar is realised as a suffix on the tensed verb: in (6a), the suffix -ro attaches to the present-tense form ričula ‘sell.PRS’ familiar from (4a) above. Attempting to directly negate a low nominalisation, as in (6b), or an infinitive, as in (6c), results in unacceptability.

Given that these nominalisations, which are too ‘low’ to be able to host negation, still display φ-agreement with the absolutive argument, it follows that φ-agreement in Avar must obtain low. Given the presence of an external argument in Avar infinitival clauses and low nominalisations, signalling the presence of v, I contend that v is the locus of φ-agreement in Avar as has also been proposed for several related languages (see Gagliardi et al. 2014 for Lak and Tsez, and Polinsky 2016; Polinsky, Radkevich & Chumakina 2017 for Archi). Low nominalisations will then be vP-nominalisations formed, on this view, by the nominalising functional head n taking the vP as a complement, as sketched in (7).

That vP is the locus of φ-agreement and case assignment in Avar can also be seen based on the behaviour of complex predicates. For reasons of space, I only discuss two patterns, but the generalisation regarding case assignment and agreement having applied before a complex predicate has finished forming holds across the board.

The first process is reduplication: verbal roots may be reduplicated to yield compound verbs with meanings similar to the ones obtained by adding particles to verbs in Germanic (cf. break with break up) or prefixes in Slavic. Only bare roots can be reduplicated, no inflectional or derivational morphology being allowed, with the exception of agreement marking, which is both allowed and required, as illustrated below.

Sentence (8a) contains an intransitive verb, cm–ił’- ‘divide’, which agrees with its only absolutive argument, ič’go ‘nine’. Example (8b) involves the same verbal root, which is reduplicated. The two sentences differ event-structurally in that reduplication evokes a resultative/telic component.

What is notable about (8b) is that the agreement marker must be present before root reduplication can apply, and the bare root carrying an agreement marker does not correspond to any inflected form, verbal or otherwise, as it cannot be used on its own. Nothing, not even the thematic vowel, can be added to the root before reduplication, as witnessed by the unavailability of *b–ił’-i-b–ił’-ana, which illustrates a failed attempt at reduplicating a bigger constituent (i.e. a nominalisation).

The pre-reduplication agreement pattern follows straightforwardly from a decompositional approach to complex predicates along the lines of Ramchand (2008), whereby event participants are introduced in specifiers of dedicated v-heads as holders of states into which the event under construction decomposes, as sketched in (9).

The party in (9) is the holder of the result state of being split up simultaneously with being the undergoer of the event leading up to the result state. The two argument positions are related by movement, and the lexical root is inserted at both v-heads. I conclude from this that, since agreement must be resolved prior to reduplication, and reduplication creates a complex vP, it is necessary that agreement also apply at vP.4

The other argument-structure operation of relevance is causativisation: under causativisation in Avar, the external argument of a causativised vP (i.e. the causee) is marked with locative case, the causer is marked with ergative case, whereas the internal argument remains absolutive. Both the lexical verb and the causative marker agree with the absolutive argument, as below:

Causative forms such as ričizaruna in (10) consist of the infinitive of the causativised verb (ričiz- in (10) above) and the causativising morpheme (diachronically, a truncated form of do), which contains an agreement marker in addition to the lexical verb’s own agreement marker. The infinitival form ričiz-, in turn, contains the low nominalisation riči. These containment patterns in Avar are robust and uncontroversial. Given the consensus view of complex predicate formation occurring at the level of event and argument structure traditionally corresponding to vP, and, consequently, of the complement of the causative head being either equal to or smaller than vP (Li 1990; Alsina 1992; Kratzer 1996; Folli & Harley 2007; Pylkkänen 2008; Ramchand 2008; Svenonius 2008; Horvath & Siloni 2011; Ramchand & Svenonius 2014; Guasti 2017; Ramchand 2018), it follows that both infinitival and nominalised clauses are either equal to or smaller than vP. They can thus be represented as the following simplified hierarchy of functional projections, where both v_caus and v_lex carry unvalued φ-features:

With a basic understanding of Avar agreement and case assignment in non-reflexive clauses in hand, we are ready to see that Avar obeys the three requirements formulated at the beginning of this section and is a genuine exception to the AAE. I return to causativisation and its interaction with reflexivisation in §2.3.5

As stated in the introduction, Agree-based approaches to anaphora in general and the AAE in particular postulate an inherent featural deficiency for referentially dependent expressions: either a φ-deficiency in the case of anaphors (Heinat 2006; Rooryck & Vanden Wyngaerd 2011), or a referential deficiency encoded in terms of a dedicated referential feature (Hicks 2009; Sundaresan 2016). What matters is that anaphors acquire their φ-feature specifications from their binders.6

To keep the discussion concrete, I begin this section by considering a recent Agree-based account of the AAE due to Murugesan (2019) since it formulates an especially clear set of predictions concerning the structural conditions for the AAE to arise. I show that the Avar data introduced in the preceding section falsify Murugesan’s (2019) prediction. In §3.2, I demonstrate that attempts to salvage the analysis as formulated in §3.1 by appealing to differences in the timing of syntactic operations result in a contradiction. In doing so, I rely on Preminger’s (2019) discussion of the deficiencies of timing-based approaches to the AAE.

Preminger (2019) provides a novel analysis of the AAE designed to account for the existence of both the AAE-obeisant languages and the offenders. The gist of the proposal is that anaphors are structurally complex expressions carrying their own sets of φ-features that are then encapsulated—and, consequently, hidden from the φ-probe—due to extra layers of structure (26a). Preminger’s (2019) proposal is buttressed by a typological study of syncretism and containment patterns inside anaphoric expressions (Middleton 2018).9

Preminger confesses that, since his account of the AAE is universal, it predicts identical cross-linguistic behaviour of anaphors with respect to triggering the AAE, which makes it vulnerable in light of potential exceptions to the AAE. Rather than dismiss the AAE as effectively coïncidental, Preminger takes the universalist stance and proposes instead that the opacity brought about by encapsulation need not be absolute. In particular, citing the crosslinguistic distribution of preposition stranding, he argues that a domain’s opacity for syntactic operations in one language does not entail the opacity of comparable domains in other languages. This is essentially his account of the exceptions to the AAE: they arise when the anaphors’ internal complexity extends the domain containing the φ-features (PhiP) thus keeping them accessible for probing (26b).

Even though Avar is a genuine exception to the AAE, as argued in §2, I contend that it is nevertheless compatible with the encapsulation view: ži‹w›go, by virtue of being an anaphor, is the source of the valued φ-features on v. However, for Preminger’s (2019) theory to be a plausible account of the Avar facts under discussion, the premises upon which it itself rests should be shown to hold in that language as well. The key question here is whether the anaphor possesses the kind of internal complexity that Preminger’s (2019) account demands.

As a first approximation, and setting aside the issues of non-complementary distribution of the various types of anaphoric expression in Avar (though see Testelets & Toldova 1998; Rudnev 2017 for an overview and discussion), the internal composition of Avar anaphors, diaphors, exophors and pronouns are broadly in line with Middleton ‘s (2018) approach.10

According to Middleton (2018), anaphors and pronouns across languages display systematic containment relations, either overt or covert, represented in (27). Pronouns, which occupy low positions inside the pronominal expression, are contained inside anaphors and are intrinsically specified with φ-features. Applying this system to the Avar pronominal forms yields (28), where both the pronoun and exophor are realised as pro, the diaphor/long-distance reflexive is lexicalised as žiw, whereas the anaphor ži‹w›go consists of žiw and the emphatic particle -go cliticising to it.11

That Avar reflexives indeed possess the structural layers depicted above (rather than lacking them altogether) is evidenced by the morphological makeup of first- and second-person reflexives in the language. The absolutive first-person singular reflexive pronoun dungo from Table 2 on p. 9, for instance, would have the structure in (29), with the pronoun, the exophor and the diaphor being syncretic.

Preminger (2019) tentatively mentions two ways of making the interior of AnaphP inaccessible for φ-probing from a higher functional head: either Anaph demarcates a locality domain or it carries a set of valued φ-features of its own. Consequently, there are two potential ways for a language to become an exception to the AAE, viz. by violating either of the two requirements. If -go is the exponent of the Anaph head in Avar, then it is instructive to look at some of its other uses: as Forker (2015) shows, -go is an intensifying enclitic capable of attaching to nominals and non-nominals alike. It is not inherently nominal and therefore unlikely to be specified with valued φ-features. This raises the question whether Anaph in Avar is simply transparent for syntactic operations and what the evidence in favour of such a view could be.

Rudnev (2015) mentions in passing that certain nominals in Avar do not delineate a separate locality domain for φ-agreement, as evidenced by the optional availability of long-distance agreement into nominalised clauses. An illustration is given in (30) below.

If the matrix verb bixana/jixana ‘saw’ in (30) agrees with its nominalised absolutive complement clause (bracketed in the example above), it surfaces with the neuter agreement prefix b; it can, however, also agree with an absolutive argument of the nominalised embedded clause, and surface with a feminine agreement prefix. It is therefore not inconceivable that reflexives, which are also nominal, could be transparent for agreement. Given the current lack of understanding of the fine structure of the Avar noun phrase, however, this is a matter for future research and definitely beyond the scope of the present squib.

In summary, then, we have seen preliminary evidence of both parts of Preminger’s (2019) proposal—structural complexity of reflexives and non-opacity of certain nominals for agreement—holding of Avar. The full agreement patterns between the Avar reflexive ži‹w›go and the v probe are thus compatible with Preminger’s (2019) encapsulation view, and do not threaten the validity of the AAE as a crosslinguistic generalisation.

In this paper, I have adduced novel data from the Northeast Caucasian language Avar showing them to be a real counterexample to the Anaphor Agreement Effect as formulated by Rizzi (1990), and subsequently reformulated by, amongst others, Woolford (1999); Sundaresan (2016): Avar reflexive pronouns are bona fide anaphors that can nevertheless appear in agreeing positions and trigger non-trivial, φ-covarying agreement in finite and non-finite clauses alike.

I have also demonstrated the non-viability of timing-based analyses of the AAE by pointing out the lack of a principled mechanism underlying the AAE and its violations as well as by elaborating on a false prediction such an account would inevitably make.

Finally, I have argued that the encapsulation analysis put forth by Preminger (2019) does not suffer from the deficiencies identified for the timing-based approach and accounts for the AAE and its exceptions in a systematic way.