Subject agreement in Kalmyk: Implications for nominative case assignment

This paper investigates the nature of nominative case assignment and its relationship to agreement and finiteness in Kalmyk Oirat (or Kalmyk), a variety of the Oirat language (Mongolic) spoken in the Republic of Kalmykia, Russia and in diasporic communities in the US and Europe. Subject agreement in Kalmyk exhibits a puzzling relationship with nominative case assignment: while φ-agreement can only be with nominative subjects, we also find nominative subjects in environments where φ-agreement is not possible. This challenges theories of case assignment which take nominative case and subject agreement to always go together as the result of a single Agree operation (Chomsky 2000, 2001). I propose that this set of facts can be accounted for under a view where nominative case assignment does not depend on Agree with finite T0, and φ-agreement is the result of an Agree operation that is sensitive to the nominal’s case value (Bobalijk 2008; Preminger 2014).