Auxiliary selection is Agree

In this paper, I address the problem of auxiliary selection in Southern Italo-Romance and in Standard Italian. In the former, the perfect auxiliary depends on the person feature of the subject, in the latter on the argument structure. I propose that auxiliary selection is the result of person Agree in both systems. Cross-linguistic variation is due to a single syntactic parameter (the ordering of the features on Perf) and to different inventories of vocabulary entries. The apparently very different systems of person-driven and argument-structure-based auxiliary selection are not as different as they seem. Not only is auxiliary selection in Italian Agree for the person feature, but also many alleged person-driven varieties (mixed systems) are indeed argument-structure-based systems. The focus of this contribution is mainly on Italo-Romance, in particular on person-driven systems and on so-called mixed systems.