Obviation in Subjunctive Clauses and AGR: Evidence from Russian

Subjunctive clauses of many Romance and Slavic languages show subject obviation phenomena; that is, the requirement that a pronominal subject of a subjunctive clause be disjoint in reference from the matrix subject. Most of the previous explanations of the phenomenon stipulated that the anaphoric nature of subjunctive Tense leads to an extension of the binding domain of the subject pronoun to include the matrix clause, thus leading to the pronoun being locally bound in violation of Principle B. Using evidence from Russian, we show that the domain extension approaches cannot be correct. We argue for an analysis in which the subjunctive Complementizer is an operator which moves at LF to bind the events of the matrix and the subjunctive clauses. The resulting configuration creates a violation of Principle B with respect to the subjunctive AgrS which is coindexed with the subjunctive subject. Our approach can explain all of the known facts and makes strong cross-linguistic predictionsthat we show to be correct.