The Attractions of Agreement: Why Person Is Different

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Marcel den Dikken¹ 

[1] Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences;Department of English Linguistics, Eötvös Loránd University

关键词: agreement;    person;    number;    agreement attraction;    long-distance agreement;    relativization;    specificational copular sentences;    concord;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00978

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

This paper establishes the generalization that whenever agreement with the finite verb is controlled by a constituent that is not in a Spec–Head relation with the inflectional head of the clause, this agreement cannot affect person . A syntactic representation for person inside the noun phrase and on the clausal spine is proposed which, in conjunction with the workings of agreement and concord, accommodates this empirical generalization and derives Baker’s Structural Condition on Person Agreement. The proposal also provides an explanation for the φ-feature agreement facts of specificational copular sentences. The paper places its findings on person vs. number agreement in the context of recent psycho- and neuro-linguistic investigation of number/person dissociation.

【 授权许可】

CC BY