Case and agreement patterns in Northern Russian participial constructions in -n-/-t

Cross-dialectal variation in Northern Russian is dealt with in this article from the point of view of the realisation participial perfect construction, w.r.t. the case of the Internal Argument of the verb, its (non)agreement in gender and number with the participle and the further agreement patterns that obtain when an auxiliary intervenes. In the paper it is claimed that the cross-dialectal variation arises as a combination of specific properties of morphological elements, the participle inflectional head -n- and the agreement inflections -a and -o. It is argued that, contrary to the mainstream view, these agreement inflections concur to satisfy the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) requirement of Chomsky 1995 and therefore the notion of “quirky” or “oblique” subject, often deployed to account for NR constructions, is unnecessary.