Universal Concord as Syntactic Agreement

This paper argues that universal concord is attested in Cantonese and offers a syntactic agreement account. The Cantonese verbal suffix -can is shown to be a concord element that requires the presence of a universal quantifier but it lacks inherent quantificational force. Drawing crucial evidence from minimality and locality, I propose that -can carries an uninterpretable universal feature that agrees with a genuine universal quantifier. Consequently, the empirical landscape of concord is extended to universal quantifiers. Moreover, this study also offers additional support for a syntactic approach to concord by exploring minimality effects, which have not received enough attention in the studies on concord.