We are glad to announce that yesterday October 3rd our colleague and member of the HAA project, Prof. Eugenio M. Vigo, defended his PhD thesis at the UPF. The thesis is titled "Copular inversion and non-subject agreement" and has been supervised by Prof. Dr. Alex Alsina. The committee was formed by Prof. Dr. Joan Maling (Brandeis University), Prof. Dr. Jaume Mateu (Autonomous University of Barcelona), and Prof. Dr. Josep Quer (Pompeu Fabra University).

The main claim by Prof. Vigo is that copular inversion in Catalan and other Romance languages is just an instance of non-subject agreement, contrary to previous claims that have attempted to explain this phenomenon as a case of covert subject agreement. Therefore, in sentences like El sopar d'avui són/*és verdures a la planxa 'Tonight's dinner is grilled vegetables' (where plural agreement with the postverbal DP is mandatory; singular agreement with the preverbal DP is barred), the copula is actually agreeing with the postverbal DP. In order to integrate this cases with the regular subject-verb agreement cases, Prof. Vigo proposes that verbs in copular inversion languages agree with the most marked cosubject in the sentence, a cosubject being any grammatical function that is coreferential with the subject or the subject itself. This explains why transitive and intransitive sentences always show subject-verb agreement; in such cases the subject is the only cosubject available.

Prof. Vigo also tries to extend his findings to explain why many languages lack copular inversion (e.g. English), by means of an OT-based version of LFG. He also explores possible ways to relate copular inversion to other non-subject agreement phenomena such as those found in Icelandic "quirky case" constructions, Dargwa person-based agreement, and others.

We wish our colleague the best of lucks as a postdoctoral researcher and remain thankful of his participation in our HAA project.

(The slides of his presentation and the full-text of his PhD thesis will soon be available.)