Long Distance Agreement in Hindi-Urdu

This paper provides a new analysis of the phenomenon of Long Distance Agreement in Hindi-Urdu and argues for a dissociation between case and agreement. Long Distance Agreement involves a verb agreeing with a constituent inside the verb's clausal complement. Long Distance Agreement and Object Agreement in Hindi-Urdu are shown to involve the same structural configurations. They both involve a head (T-0) agreeing with an argument whose case-features T-0 does not value. In particular, it is argued the operation Agree of Chomsky (1998, 1999, 2001) needs to be reformulated to be able to handle the facts of Hindi-Urdu Long Distance Agreement. The analysis is largely motivated on the basis of evidence from Hindi-Urdu but is shown to extend to the Long Distance Agreement facts of Tsez (Polinsky and Potsdam 2001) and Kashmiri (Subbarao and Munshi 2000).