Again on participial constructions in Northern Russian varieties: patterns of agreement with the auxiliary

The so called ‘possessive perfect’ participial construction of North Russian (NR) varieties, since Timberlake's (1976) seminal work, has attracted the attention of researchers in view of the fine-grained cross-dialectal variation it displays. Indeed, its base schema (adessive/ablative PP + past passive participle + AUX +NP/DP) gives rise to different configurations of: a) (non-)agreement between the NP/DP and the participle; b) case on the noun (nominative or accusative); c) (non-)agreement between the AUX and the NP/DP and/or between the participle and the AUX. Building on the literature both from the typological-functional tradition (Heine \& Kuteva 2004, Danylenko 2005, Seržant 2012) and from the generative field (Lavine 1999, 2000, Tsedryk 2006, Jung 2008, 2011; Romanova 2015), this paper extends the analysis of NR possessive perfects, as to agreement with the AUX, proposed in previous work (Civardi 2013; 2016). The fact that, in addition to the case and participle agreement configurations, also some patterns of agreement with AUX are not attested, is in fact correctly predicted by a theory whereby the neuter inflection -o is conceived as an ‘expletive clitic’ that acts as placeholder for one of the verb’s argumental roles, which in their turn can be manipulated by the -n/-t participial inflection . Furthermore, as in previous work, an analogy is made with null subjects in Romance varieties and their variation patterns: thus, the obligatory agreement between the participle and the auxiliary (regardless of the ±AGR feature with the DP), or between the auxiliary and the DP (regardless of ±AGR with the participle) is seen as driven by the requirement that referential properties be compatible, so as to allow the formation of chain relations. Such a requirement bans possible configurations of non-agreement between all the components, which are in fact not attested in the varieties under investigation.