Abstract
The paper examines the agreement behavior of coordinate phrases (&Ps) on the basis of Hungarian data. It examines subject-verb agreement in number (and, in the case of pronominal subjects, also in person), and object-verb agreement in definiteness. Its primary goal is to account for the different agreement behavior of IP-internal and left-peripheral &Ps. It argues that because & has no φ-features of its own, &P assumes the φ-features projected by its conjuncts in formal agreement relations, and the features of its discourse referent in semantically motivated relations such as binding. In Hungarian, IP-internal agreement relations are formal relations, in which &P participates with the φ-features of its conjuncts. A left-peripheral &P, on the other hand, can be associated with a resumptive pro sharing its semantic features, and can be represented in agreement relations by its pro associate.
An IP-internal &P elicits plural agreement on the verb if and only if either the specifier or the complement of &, or both, project a [plural] feature to &P. Since—as argued by Farkas and de Swart (2010) on the basis of Hungarian facts—only plural noun phrases have a number feature, the possibility of a number feature conflict does not arise. When the conjuncts project contradictory person features or definiteness features to &P, the feature conflict must be eliminated for agreement to be possible. An option is the left dislocation of &P, and agreement with the resumptive pro associated with it. In the case of conjoined objects with conflicting definiteness features, Hungarian speakers prefer closest conjunct agreement, which is presumably licensed at the syntax-phonology interface.
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Notes
The explanations proposed belong to the following major types.
A family of explanations, e.g., Munn (1993, 1999), inspired by McCloskey’s (1986) analysis of Irish, are based on the assumption that agreement can be realized in a specifier-head configuration and in a government configuration. The pattern in (1a) represents the former case, and (1b) represents the latter. The full coordinate phrase is claimed to be transparent to government. Its ungoverned status is supported by independent evidence: in Irish, only the first conjunct is assigned nominative case; the second conjunct bears default accusative. Doron (2000, 2005) formulated this theory in Minimalist terms, replacing the notion of government with “closest c-command”.
In Johannessen’s (1996) theory, the head of a coordinate phrase (CoP) also projects the features of its specifier, in addition to its own features—hence in languages with a leftmost specifier, CoP shares the features of its first conjunct, whereas in languages with a rightmost specifier, it shares the features of its last conjunct. Plural agreement in the case of conjoined singulars is semantic agreement.
Aoun et al.’s (1994, 1999) theory represents a completely different approach. They claim that coordinate singular subjects trigger singular agreement when the underlying structure consists of conjoined singular clauses to be subjected to Right Node Raising and Conjunction Reduction. Munn (1999) and Doron (2000, 2005) have argued against this theory by pointing out that—even if not in the dialects analyzed by Aoun et al.—coordinate subject noun phrases can also trigger singular agreement in the presence of expressions licensed only by a plural subject, e.g., together, each other, the same, different.
Citko (2004) claims that the possibility of singular and plural agreement with conjoined singular noun phrases derives from the following structural ambiguity:
Structure (ii), involving an empty plural pro head taking the &P as its complement, has been proposed independently by den Dikken (2001) for semantically plural, formally singular NPs triggering plural agreement. The bare &P with a singular DP in its specifier triggers singular agreement because the DP in Spec,&P is the closest goal for the T probe of the subsuming TP. In the case of structure (ii), the closest goal for T is the plural pro. Singular agreement is restricted to postverbal subjects because movement to Spec,TP is contingent on Agree. If T agrees with the DP in the specifier of a bare &P, the whole &P is not available for movement (and neither can its first conjunct move on its own).
According to Soltan (2007), a preverbal &P in Arabic is a topic base-generated in its surface position; what triggers plural agreement is a pro in Spec, v*P. Singular agreement arises because ConjPs may be introduced postcyclically in the thematic domain.
In sentences involving a particle verb, gapping always affects both the particle and the verb, although they do not form a syntactic constituent, e.g.:
This suggests that—as proposed by Hartmann (2000)—ellipsis takes place in PF, where the particle and the verb form one phonological word. For analyses of ellipsis in Hungarian, see Bánréti (1994), as well as Bartos (2000b, 2001), who treats ellipsis as the non-insertion of phonological material at the level of morphology.
This projection has also been labelled in Hungarian syntactic literature as TP, AspP, or PredP.
The assumption of topicalization across a filled Spec,IP may raise questions about how the Minimal Link Condition is satisfied. The possible solutions include analyzing topicalization as adjunction rather than substitution, as in Szendrői (2003).
For simplicity’s sake, I represent the V attracted by the focus in the Foc head. In fact, there is evidence that the preposed verb heads a functional projection different from FocP. As shown by Horvath (2005), the V-initial portion of the sentence can be coordinated and deleted, i.e., in frameworks assuming that coordination and ellipsis can only affect maximal projections, it acts as a maximal projection:
The plural suffix -i- appears in possessive constructions; it shows the plurality of the possessum.
Dutch is different though; bare-NP predicates in Dutch have been shown to remain uninflected for number (see de Swart et al. 2007).
The feature percolation assumed in &P is reminiscent of Lieber’s (1989) Back-up Percolation, allowing a feature specification to be percolated from the non-head if the head is not specified for that feature. In the case of conflicting features, this system would privilege the features of the complement over those of the specifier. It is not clear though if &P satisfies the condition of Back-up Percolation, requiring a proper path for percolation in which the syntactic category of the node from which the feature is percolated is nondistinct from that of the dominating node.
In a “liberal” minority dialect, the resumptive pronoun strategy is said to also be acceptable with the lexical associate left-adjacent to the projection of the possessed nominal; however, den Dikken’s examples do not make it clear whether the possessor occupies an A′-position inside the projection of the possessum or is external to it in such cases, as well.
Naturally, &Ps of the type my colleague and my best friend, referring to a single person, bind, and corefer with a singular pro—cf. Farkas and Zec (1995).
Corbett (2000: 202) claims with reference to Edith Moravcsik (p.c.) that conjoined singulars in topic position must be used with a singular verb if they are inanimate, e.g.:
cf.
The informants I consulted, including myself, disagree with the grammaticality judgment provided by Corbett/Moravcsik, but we concede that the singular verb sounds better than the plural one in (i). Plural agreement with topicalized inanimates is an unmarked option if it is obvious that the two inanimate referents are involved in the same event. E.g.:
In view of the grammaticality of (iii), the markedness of (i) must be of a pragmatic nature. Apparently, in a sentence involving conjoined inanimate subjects, the default reading is the non-collective, two-event reading, associated with two conjoined singular clauses, one of which is subjected to ellipsis. Subject noun phrase coordination and agreement with a plural resumptive pro is only assumed if the predicate requires a collective reading, as in (iii). Conjoined animate referents, capable of cooperating, can more easily be conceptualized as a group involved in a single event.
Occasionally, pronominal &Ps also occur in right dislocation, as in the following example of the Hungarian National Corpus:
Notice, though, that the sharing of the semantic features [+/-Speaker], [+/-Participant], and [Group/Atomic] does not necessarily mean referential identity; it can only mean the nondistinctness of referents. In (51c), Én és János and mi can be referentially identical; alternatively, mi can denote a group that includes me, John, and others; and it can also denote a group that only overlaps with the referent of én és János, including me and excluding John. This kind of vagueness is inherent in the binding of pronouns by pronouns; it is independent of whether or not the binder is a conjunct phrase. The referents of we and our need not be identical but merely nondistinct also in cases like We live in the second floor of our house.
A reviewer asks how the polite 2nd person pronoun is coordinated. In Hungarian, a non-peer, higher status addressee is referred to by the 3rd person pronouns ön or maga (whose plural forms are önök/maguk). These pronouns behave in coordinated constructions like any other 3rd person pronoun, except that they cannot be coordinated with a non-polite 2nd person pronoun—perhaps because there is no pronominal that could refer to a group involving both peer and non-peer addressees. Ti ‘you-PL’ has the feature [peer], whereas önök/maguk ‘you-PL’ has the feature [non-peer]. Mixed groups cannot be addressed simultaneously.
In South Slavic, a subject &P participates in both number and gender agreement, which complicates the resolution of feature conflicts. &P always counts as plural, therefore, Marušič et al. (2008) assume split number and gender agreement processes, Bošković (2009), however, aims at a uniform account. In Bošković’s theory of agreement with &P, the probe for agreement finds different valuators for number and gender (&P for number, and the first conjunct for gender). This situation results in ambiguous targeting for movement, which makes movement impossible; that is why first conjunct agreement is only attested in the case of unmoved postverbal subjects. In case an EPP feature requires the subject to move to preverbal position, a second probing operation has to be initiated within a larger search space, including the second conjunct. Now the gender feature of the first conjunct is deleted (provided it is uninterpretable—but valued—grammatical gender), and gender agreement targets the second conjunct. Since the second conjunct is immobile, the pied-piping valuator is unambiguously identified as &P. Conjuncts with natural gender (i.e., an interpretable gender feature) resist last conjunct agreement; they require default masculine agreement, which may be the manifestation of agreement with a covert pro.
Left dislocation constructions, with the resumptive pronoun left in situ, and contrastive left dislocation constructions, with the resumptive pronoun adjacent to the left-dislocated element, have been argued to have different derivations—cf. Cinque (1990) and Grohmann (2000); but the possibility of their involving different types of pronominals has not been raised.
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Acknowledgements
I owe thanks to Marcel den Dikken, Lanko Marusič, Henk van Riemsdijk, Balázs Surányi, and the reviewers of NLLT for their useful comments.
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É. Kiss, K. Patterns of agreement with coordinate noun phrases in Hungarian. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 30, 1027–1060 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-012-9178-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-012-9178-0