Apparent minimality violations solved by Nested Agree

Although minimality is a well-established locality condition on syntactic dependencies, apparent minimality violations are attested across different domains and languages. One such phenomenon is auxiliary selection in Standard Italian: the choice of the perfect auxiliary depends on the features of lower arguments rather than those of the higher subject. I argue that such effects can be explained by Nested Agree, a configuration that arises from the interaction of (i) ordered probes on the same head, and (ii) a principle that maximizes feature matching. Under this approach, an already established dependency between two heads must be exploited by all the features located on those heads, and prior operations restrict the search domain of later ones. Apparent minimality violations emerge when higher elements are excluded from the search space due to prior operations. I show that this is precisely the case in Italian auxiliary selection. In addition, I present supporting evidence for Nested Agree in other domains: case and agreement alignments in ditransitive clauses, dative intervention in Icelandic, subject agreement in VOS clauses in Spanish, person agreement in Lak, and multiple wh-fronting in Bulgarian. The paper thus provides evidence for feature ordering as a crucial factor in syntactic locality, showing how apparent minimality violations can emerge when probes are hierarchically ordered.