ABSTRACT
Verb agreement with a nominative element is severely constrained in Icelandic when a Quirky subject is present: only partial (number, not person) agreement obtains. Here I propose an account of this restriction by taking it to be an instance of Bonet’s (1994) Person-Case-Constraint, which blocks ‘object’ person agreement when agreement with a dative element takes place. For the Person-Case-Constraint account to hold, it is necessary to claim that agreement obtains with Quirky subjects, although it fails to show up morphologically on the verb for non-syntactic reasons. It is also crucial to assume that case and agreement can be licensed ‘at a distance’ (i.e., without movement), subject to minimality effects.
