Featural Excess and Exponence

Another major theme in my research is the question of how natural language grammars handle featural excess created by syntactic operations, and what we can learn from such configurations about the principles of Vocabulary Insertion and about the architecture of the grammar. For example, are the features that the exponent is not specified for deleted once it matches with the syntactic head, or can they be shipped off to some other head that could expone them? Does featural excess ever create problems for the Spell-Out? Can it lead to ungrammaticality, and could that ungrammaticality be saved by syncretism? To answer these questions, I have been investigating complex agreement in South Caucasian languages and, more recently, agreement and Person Case Constraint effects in Alabama and case-matching effects in long-distance wh-movement in Georgian.