Closest conjunct agreement with attributive adjectives

Contrary to most French grammars claiming that French only allows masculine agreement when mixed-gender nouns are conjoined, we show that closest conjunct agreement (CCA) does exist in contemporary French, as in other Romance languages, and is the preferred strategy for prenominal adjectives. Using data from a large corpus (FrWac) and an acceptability rating experiment, we show that (feminine) CCA is well accepted in contemporary French, and should be distinguished from attraction errors, despite the norm prescribing masculine agreement. We also show the role of the adjective position, i.e. prenominal or post-nominal, and humanness. CCA is the preferred strategy for prenominal adjectives, and non-human nouns favour CCA for post-nominal adjectives. Assuming a hierarchical structure for coordination, the closest noun is the highest in A-N order, whereas it is the lowest in N-A order. Thus CCA in prenominal position may be favoured by a shorter structural distance. One can also see CCA with a prenominal adjective as ‘early’ agreement. Regarding humanness, grammatical gender is interpreted as social gender with human nouns, and a masculine plural can refer to a mixed group. This ‘gender neutral’ plural may favour masculine agreement for human nouns, or the prescriptive norm is more influential for human nouns.

Gender agreement with exclusive disjunction in Slovenian

This paper addresses two issues: 1. Empirically, we report novel experimental data on agreement with exclusively disjoined subjects in Slovenian; 2. Theoretically, we look into the nature of attested agreement strategies with coordinated NPs. In particular, we investigate how these strategies behave under coordinators with different semantics, i.e. exclusive disjunction and conjunction. Based on the elicitation results, we argue that closest conjunct agreement, resolved agreement, and highest conjunct agreement are all present under exclusive disjunction to different extents, which suggests a uniform set of agreement strategies under disjunction and conjunction despite the semantic difference. Further, we argue against the presence of default agreement under both disjunction and conjunction in Slovenian, and argue for a particular set of gender resolution rules.

Closest conjunct agreement in replacives: Experimental evidence from Estonian

The phenomenon of closest conjunct agreement (CCA) has been documented cross-linguistically in conjunctions (“X and Y”) and disjunctions (“(either) X or Y”), and agreement patterns with feature-mismatching coordination have been shown to be variable, both across constructions and speakers. The present work addresses agreement patterns with replacives subjects (“not X but Y”) in Estonian, where subjects can occur pre- or postverbally. Replacives differ from other forms of coordination by having a single asserted subject. A series of two speeded acceptability experiments with postverbal subject replacives, and a relative naturalness rating experiment comparing replacives to disjunctions showed that both CCA and a bias towards agreeing with the asserted subject (ASA) play a role in determiningverbal agreement with replacive subjects. Additionally, there is evidence for less featurally marked 3rd person verb forms being preferred, particularly when there are conflicting pressures on agreement from CCA and ASA, and for person mismatches being fully repaired by morphological syncretism.

Word order and closest-conjunct agreement in the Greek Septuagint: On the position of a biblical translation in the diachrony of a syntactic correlation

Clauses can show closest-conjunct agreement, where the verb agrees only with one conjunct of a conjoined subject, and not with the full conjoined subject. The aim of this study is to examine the properties of word order and closest-conjunct agreement in the Greek Septuagint to distinguish which of them are due to the native syntax of Koiné Greek, possibly influenced by contact with Hebrew, and which of them are the result of a biblical translation effect. Both VSO and closest-conjunct agreement in the case of postverbal subjects have been considered characteristics of Biblical Hebrew. VSO becomes a neutral word order for Koiné Greek, and Koiné Greek exhibits examples of closest-conjunct agreement as well. The present study shows that VSO is the neutral word order for various types of texts of Koiné Greek (biblical and non-biblical, translations and non-translations) and that closest-conjunct agreement is also present with similar characteristics in pre-Koiné Greek. All relevant characteristics reflect a type of a syntactic change in Greek related to the properties of the T domain, and evidenced not only in translations or Biblical Greek. However, the frequencies of word orders are indeed affected by the source language, and indirect translation effects are evident in the Greek Septuagint.

A concordância com adjetivos pós-nominais em expressões nominais coordenadas com apenas um determinante

This paper provides a corpus-based study of agreement with post-nominal adjectives in coordinate nominal expressions with only one determiner in European Portuguese (EP). It aims to provide clues to understand the patterns of agreement that contradict the predictions of our previous studies in which we made a distinction between two constructions corresponding to the same categorial linear outputs: (a) those associated with the reference of only one entity and (b) those in which nouns are used to refer distinct entities. Since it was suggested by those previous studies the existence of parallel patterns of agreement between Spanish and EP in these types of constructions, we aim to provide a preliminary comparative study that allow us to explore this possibility, namely in what concerns the closest conjunct agreement in both gender and number (considering the different behaviors of the values of these features). Finally, we aim to evaluate the adequacy of some proposals presented for Spanish to explain the EP data, contributing to the description of these structures and presenting some clues for further investigation.

Closest Conjunct Agreement

Closest conjunct agreement is of great theoretical interest in terms of what it reveals about the structure of coordination; the locality of agreement relations; and the interaction between syntax, semantics, and morphology in the expression of agreement. We highlight recent approaches to the phenomenon, including typologically diverse case studies and experimentally elicited results, and point out crystallized generalizations as well as directions for future research, including the absence of last conjunct agreement, the absence of closest conjunct case, differences between conjunction and disjunction, and the role of linear adjacency in morphological realization.

A compositional approach to conjunct agreement in Turkish

This article presents novel empirical evidence on verbal agreement patterns observed in conjunction phrases (CPs) in Turkish. To account for the discrepancies observed in native speaker preferences in agreement paradigms in CPs, two experimental tasks were carried out: namely an acceptability judgment task and a forced choice task. Based on the results, it is proposed that there is compositional conjunct agreement in Turkish that takes place in two stages. The agreement relationship is first established between the Agreement head and the coordinated phrase in the syntax. Then, the PF spells out the features of either the coordinated phrase, or the features of the linearly closest conjunct inside the coordinated phrase. I argue that Full Agreement (FA) results from the Spec-head agreement with the CP, whereby the features of both conjuncts are resolved and inherited to the CP (Johannessen 1996). In Closest Conjunct Agreement (CCA), on the other hand, the agreeing head has asymmetric access to one of the prominent conjuncts or its features (Bošković 2009; Johannessen 1998; Munn 1993, 1999; Benmamoun 1992). Thus, in CCA in Turkish, the agreement is with the linearly closest conjunct and the features of that conjunct appear on the verb.