Morphosemantic Mismatches, Structural Economy, and Licensing

Agreement and concord involve mismatches between the position where a syntactic or semantic contribution is made and where it is expressed morphologically. Such mismatches are often taken to involve either movement or the spreading and realization of features. I examine a number of superficially different instances of this kind of mismatch that seem to resist an account based on realization and movement alone. I argue that the patterns involved should receive a unified account in terms of licensors, elements subject to a condition of structural economy that associate indirectly with semantically contentful heads through features that those heads spread and that require a c-commanding licensor.