Subset controllers in agreement relations

Ackema, Peter; Neeleman, Ad

doi:10.1007/s11525-013-9218-4

Cited by 31 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Sentences like (11) have been recently analysed cross-linguistically by Ackema and Neeleman (2013), Costa and Pereira (2013), Choi (2013) or Höhn (2016). These analyses conclude that unagreement is mainly attested in pro drop languages.…”

Section: Theoretical Foundationsmentioning

confidence: 98%

When agreement is for covert but not for overt: the case of ustedes plus second person plural inflections in peninsular Spanish

Bermejo

2016

isogloss

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The Spanish spoken in western Andalusia is characterised by having a single second person plural pronoun (ustedes) (unlike the standard variety which possesses two) and by inducing two agreements (second person and third person). In this article, I propose an analysis of unagreement configurations that follows the big DP hypothesis of Uriagereka (1995) for clitic doubling constructions. That is, I argue that the overt subject is base generated in the complement of a big DP whose specifier is a silent pronoun (a pro). The overt subject moves to a topic position and the silent pro stays in the subject position. Agreement mismatches arise from the fact that both DPs can trigger agreement. Furthermore, I propose that the different patterns in agreement found with ustedes arise from the diachronic cycle through which overt subjects are first topics. I state that in the process of reanalysis of topics as subjects, there is an intermediate phase in which a big DP emerges. This DP structure contains two different pronouns (one overt and one covert) that can establish different agreement relations. Finally, when the topic is completely reinterpreted as the subject, its agreement spreads throughout syntax, making agreement mismatches disappear.

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Section: Theoretical Foundationsmentioning

confidence: 98%

When agreement is for covert but not for overt: the case of ustedes plus second person plural inflections in peninsular Spanish

Bermejo

2016

isogloss

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“…Several theoretical analyses have been put forward to account for mixed agreement patterns (e.g. Sauerland 2004;Steriopolo & Wiltschko 2010;Ackema & Neeleman 2013), but the one we focus on here is Matushansky's (2013). Studying mixed agreement in Russian, Matushansky (2013) proposes that agreement markers on verbs with non-inherent feature specifications can be endowed with semantic features as a last-resort strategy.…”

Section: Feature Mismatchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body-anchored verbs and argument omission in two sign languages

Oomen

Kimmelman

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Using quantitative methods, we analyze naturalistic corpus data in two sign languages, German Sign Language and Russian Sign Language, to study subject-omission patterns. We find that, in both languages, the interpretation of null subjects depends on the type of the verb. With verbs signed on the signer's body (body-anchored verbs), null subjects are interpreted only as first person. With verbs signed in neutral space in front of the signer (neutral verbs), this restriction does not apply. We argue that this is an effect of iconicity: for body-anchored verbs, the signer's body is a part of the iconic representation of the verbal event, and by default the body is interpreted as referring to the signer, that is, as first person. We develop a formal analysis using a mechanism of mixed agreement, taking inspiration from Matushansky's (2013) account of mixed gender agreement in Russian. Specifically, we argue that body-anchored verbs bear an inherent feature that gives a first-person interpretation to null subjects. When a body-anchored verb is combined with an overt third-person subject, a feature mismatch occurs which is resolved in favor of the third person. Neutral verbs do not come with inherent feature-value specifications, thus allowing all person interpretations. We also explain how our analysis predicts the interpretation of null subjects in the context of role shift. With our account, we demonstrate that iconicity plays an active role in the grammar of sign languages, and we pin down the locus of the iconicity effect. While no iconic or modality-specific syntactic mechanisms are needed to account for the data, iconicity is argued to determine feature specification on a subset of sign language verbs.

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“…One possible candidate for the co-occurrence of the two are nouns that trigger the so-called unagreement patterns (cf. Mancini et al 2011;Ackema & Neeleman 2013;Höhn 2016). Some languages such as Spanish allow for 1 st or 2 nd person agreement with regular nouns, as in (34a) and (34b), respectively.…”

Section: Generalizing and Extending The Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some languages such as Spanish allow for 1 st or 2 nd person agreement with regular nouns, as in (34a) and (34b), respectively. 34Spanish (Ackema & Neeleman 2013) a. ¡Qué desgraciad-as somos las mujer-es!…”

Section: Generalizing and Extending The Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resolving polite conflicts in predicate agreement

Puškar-Gallien

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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When an agreement controller contains conflicting semantic and formal features, the predicates that agree with it can differ with respect to the type of features they reflect. With the second person pronoun used for politely addressing a single referent, finite verbs always agree in (formal) plural number, while participles in some languages may or must agree in (natural) singular number and gender. Building on the claims from the previous literature that the honorific pronoun formally encodes both the grammatical features (plural number and person) and the natural gender and singular number, the analysis proposed in this paper derives the variation in predicate agreement by combining the formal tools of feature geometries, separate probing and variation in the ordering of Agree operations. The main claim advanced by the paper is that predicates differ with respect to the φ-features they probe for, and the order in which this probing applies.

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Subset controllers in agreement relations

Cited by 31 publications

References 33 publications

When agreement is for covert but not for overt: the case of ustedes plus second person plural inflections in peninsular Spanish

When agreement is for covert but not for overt: the case of ustedes plus second person plural inflections in peninsular Spanish

Body-anchored verbs and argument omission in two sign languages

Resolving polite conflicts in predicate agreement

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