Resolution agreement in German and Dutch: implications for person feature decomposition

Abstract DP-conjunctions with a mismatch in person features call for additional resolution rules to determine the values the agreement target has to copy. Across languages, resolution for person features typically follows a hierarchy of the form 1 $$\succ $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mo>≻</mml:mo> </mml:math> 2 $$\succ $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mo>≻</mml:mo> </mml:math> 3 —with some well-known exceptions, namely German and Dutch coordinations conjoining 2nd and 3rd person which allow for both agreement options. This paper takes a closer look at resolution agreement in German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic. The German(ic) anomaly provides evidence for the presence of an underlying binary feature system and the need for set union as a resolution mechanism. The pattern is derived within the framework of Distributed Morphology where vocabulary insertion happens late and is thereby sensitive to decomposed and unified feature sets. Crucial for the account is an independently motivated impoverishment rule that tracks the absence of 1st person inclusive exponents in Germanic.