Missing inflectional features and missing exponents in DP-internal agreement asymmetries

This paper focuses on different types of agreement asymmetries within the DP in which postnominal modifiers exhibit full agreement while in prenominal modifiers agreement can fail in different ways. The main lines of the optimality-theoretic proposal in Bonet, Lloret & Mascaró (2015) are followed, but it is shown, through a comparison of two Northern Italian varieties, that their constraint set cannot account for varieties of Friulian, where the plural exponent fails to surface in plural contexts. It is argued that one of their constraints must be split into two separate ones, a strictly phonological constraint, Max(segment), on the one hand, and, on the other, a constraint on exponence, Max-M[F], proposed by Wolf (2008).