'Agreement' is the grammatical phenomenon in which the form of one item, such as the noun 'horses', forces a second item in the sentence, such as the verb 'gallop', to appear in a particular form, i.e. 'gallop' must agree with 'horses' in number. Even though agreement phenomena are some of the most familiar and well-studied aspects of grammar, there are certain basic questions that have rarely been asked, let alone answered. This book develops a theory of the agreement processes found in language, and considers why verbs agree with subjects in person, adjectives agree in number and gender but not person, and nouns do not agree at all. Explaining these differences leads to a theory that can be applied to all parts of speech and to all languages.
For decades, generative linguistics has said little about the differences between verbs, nouns, and adjectives. This book seeks to fill this theoretical gap by presenting simple and substantive syntactic definitions of these three lexical categories. Mark C. Baker claims that the various superficial differences found in particular languages have a single underlying source which can be used to give better characterizations of these 'parts of speech'. These definitions are supported by data from languages from every continent, including English, Italian, Japanese, Edo, Mohawk, Chichewa, Quechua, Choctaw, Nahuatl, Mapuche, and several Austronesian and Australian languages. Baker argues for a formal, syntax-oriented, and universal approach to the parts of speech, as opposed to the functionalist, semantic, and relativist approaches that have dominated the few previous works on this subject. This book will be welcomed by researchers and students of linguistics and by related cognitive scientists of language.
NOUN INCORPORATION (NI) in Mapudungun is different from NI in better-studied languages like
Mohawk in three ways: the incorporated noun is invisible to verbal agreement, incorporation into
unaccusative verbs is impossible unless a possessor is stranded, and possessors are the only
modifiers that can be stranded. These differences can be explained by saying that the trace of NI
retains its person, number, and gender features in Mohawk but not in Mapudungun. Those aspects
of grammar that do not involve these features treat NI in the two languages the same; thus, NI
has the same gross distribution and anaphoric possibilities in both languages. We extend these
results to Nahuatl, Chukchee, Ainu, Southern Tiwa, Mayali, and Wichita, showing that our theory
accounts for MithunÕs (1984) distinction between Type III and Type IV noun incorporation in a
general way.
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