Formalizing two types of mixed A/Ā movement

Many scholars have argued that some instances of Ā movement include an interaction with some A feature, e.g., D (Aldridge 2004, 2008; Bossi and Diercks 2019; Coon, Baier, and Levin 2021; Branan and Erlewine 2024) or ϕ (van Urk 2015, Colley and Privoznov 2020). However, the interaction between the A and Ā features is not the same in every case. Assuming that Ā movement is predicated on an Agree relationship, I analyze two types of mixed A/Ā Agreement. In the first type, one probe searches for the A and Ā features conjunctively, such that both features must be found together. With novel fieldwork data, I illustrate that this pattern is found in Ndengeleko (Bantu). The conjunctive pattern is challenging to capture from a standard, two-probe perspective on mixed positions (following Chomsky 2001). Building on work on probes’ satisfaction conditions (Deal 2015, 2021), I show that the Ndengeleko pattern is best captured by a probe with a conjunctive satisfaction condition. In the second type of A/Ā movement, one syntactic head happens to host two probes (one A and one Ā). This pattern is found in Kipsigis (Bossi and Diercks 2019). The notion of conjunctive satisfaction allows us to capture agreement patterns that target two features, which extends beyond mixed A/Ā agreement. What emerges is a typology of mixed Agree operations in which features can be sought conjunctively, disjunctively, or independently. The empirical landscape places both conjunctive and disjunctive satisfaction as central to the Agree operation.