Where plural refuses to agree: feature unification and morphological economy

Abstract

The paper offers an account of languages such as Hungarian which donot allow for number concord, that is, for several noun-phrase internal realisationsof plural. It is looked at the combinations of noun and adjective, numeraland noun, and subject and verb. I first show that an underspecification analysisfails to capture the data. I argue that nevertheless, the lack of number agreementin this language type is only apparent and that it is still possible to stickto the concept of feature unification for these constructions. The solutionI propose is coached in the framework of Optimality Theory and crucially relieson an economy constraint which I call PEPL and which outranks two other constraints:MAP, which requires a correspondence of semantic aggregate individuation andthe morphological feature [+pl]; and REALISE (μ), which requires that affixmaterial that fits into the morphosyntactic context should be realised. Aconsequence of the analysis is that non-default mapping of aggregate semanticsto the morphosyntactic specification [+pl] is a typological option in orderto respect formal agreement. The variation between “Type Hungarian”languages and “Type English” languages (i.e., languages that exhibitplural concord) is thus accounted for in terms of a different ranking of theconstraints that require morphological economy (PEPL) and explicitness (MAP,REALISE (μ), respectively.