When agreement is for number and gender but not person

In many languages, adjectives agree with a noun phrase in number and gender, but not in person. In others, ditransitive verbs can agree with their theme argument in number and gender, but not in person (the Person Case Constraint). However, a unified account of these two similar patterns has rarely...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNatural language and linguistic theory Vol. 29; no. 4; pp. 875 - 915
Main Author Baker, Mark C.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer 01.11.2011
Springer Netherlands
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Accusative case
Adjectives
Agreement
Gender
Grammatical agreement
Grammatical clauses
Grammatical constructions
Grammatical gender
Grammatical number
Inflection (Morphology)
Language
Linguistic agreement
Linguistic Theories
Linguistics
Morphology
Natural language
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Noun phrases
Number
Person
Phi features
Philosophy of Language
Pronouns
Scopa
Social Sciences
Syntactic structures
Syntactics
Syntax
Theme
Topic and comment
Verbs
Indiana
United States > US
Agreement
Phi-features
Person case constraint
Number
Adjectives
Person
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Summary:In many languages, adjectives agree with a noun phrase in number and gender, but not in person. In others, ditransitive verbs can agree with their theme argument in number and gender, but not in person (the Person Case Constraint). However, a unified account of these two similar patterns has rarely been attempted. In this article, I review how a single syntactic principle from Baker (2008)—the Structural Condition on Person Agreement (SCOPA)—can explain both phenomena, in contrast to other existing proposals. I then go on to show how the SCOPA also accounts for five other environments in which verbs agree in number and gender (if relevant) but not in person. Special attention is given to two entirely new cases: subject raising constructions in Sakha and agreement with direct objects in Ostyak. Along the way, I also discuss the consequences of partial agreement for case assignment, using this to explain why non-SCOPA-compliant configurations sometimes result in legitimate partial agreement with a first or second person pronoun, and sometimes result in a structure being ineffable.
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ISSN:0167-806X
1573-0859
DOI:10.1007/s11049-011-9147-z