Subject to change: Agreement and Case

In contemporary colloquial Hebrew, unaccusative verbs may fail to exhibit ϕ-agreement with their subject when the latter appears postverbally, but not when it appears preverbally. To resolve disagreements regarding the role that intervention may play in licensing this lack of agreement, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments, whose design and results we report. The findings indicate that intervention is not the factor licensing lack of agreement, contra Preminger’s (2009, 2014) claim, which means the phenomenon does not corroborate his approach to grammaticality. Further, we provide evidence that this lack of ϕ-agreement with a postverbal internal subject results from the reanalysis of the subject as caseless. This is liable to occur in languages that do not morphologically mark nominative. Hebrew existential and possessive constructions had undergone a parallel process in the beginning of the past century.