On Romance Past Participle Agreement and Its Challenges

Abstract

Past participle agreement in Western Romance displays cross-linguistic differences that have not yet been adequately explained in the linguistic literature of the past 30+ years, especially the oft-cited difference between Italian and French: Italian direct object wh-phrases (wh-DOs) do not trigger PPA, while French ones do. In this thesis, I explore the facts and generalizations in the PPA data more deeply, providing an exploratory yet thorough investigation of the areas in which PPA occurs as well as an investigation of the properties of the direct object clitics (DO-clitics) and partitive clitics which trigger PPA in these Romance languages. In doing so, I evaluate some of the options that may eventually lead to a satisfactory explanation of cross-linguistic PPA patterns.