Abstract

This paper argues for a post-syntactic analysis of complementizer agreement in Germanic. It is shown that the realization of inflectional features in the C-domain is subject to a set of restrictions that exhibit a decidedly phonological character including adjacency effects, sensitivity to sluicing and deletion of the finite verb in comparatives. This is taken to indicate that complementizer agreement is established by post-syntactic operations. Moreover, the fact that C may not carry inflection if the finite verb has been deleted suggests that complementizer agreement does not involve a dependency between C and the subject, but rather between C and the finite verb. Based on these observations, it is argued that inflectional features present in the Cdomain are added post-syntactically via the insertion of an agreement morpheme which adjoins to C at the level of Morphological Structure. The observed restrictions on complementizer agreement are then analyzed in terms of constraints on this insertion procedure.