Agreement Features

Gender, person and number are uncontroversial instances of agreement features.

They are called ‘agreement features’ in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (Pollard and Sag, 1994) and Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) (Bres-nan, 1982, 2001; Kaplan and Bres(Bres-nan, 1982) and ‘ϕ^{-features’28} in Chomskyan Generative Grammar (Government and Binding Theory, Principle and Parameter Theory, Minimalism).

Person Agreement

Agreement in person is common with verbs and other predicates. Bybee (1985) found person agreement in more than the half of the languages of her sample (56%, N=50). Siewierska (2004) found an even higher rate of 77%.

(31) a. I am a linguist.

b. You are a linguist.

c. She is a linguist.

Contrary to its frequency in verb agreement, person seems to be excluded from NP-internal agreement (Lehmann, 1982, 1988; Plank, 1994).²⁹ Lehmann (1988) argues that this discrepancy follows naturally under the assumption that person agreement serves to keep track of referents in the discourse—NP-internally this is superfluous since controller and target are constituents of the same NP and hence have a common referent. This line of argumentation is supported by diachronic facts. NP-internal agreement markers evolve from weakly deictic demonstrative pronouns whereas predicate agreement evolves from personal and thus clearly

28The term ‘ϕ-features’ is first introduced in Chomsky, 1981.

29Nikolaeva (2005) presents counterexamples from Nenet, an Uralic language.

deictic pronouns. Given that demonstrative pronouns do not show person differ-ences, the absence of person agreement within NPs follows naturally (cf. Givón, 1976).

For a detailed discussion of person agreement involving a huge variety of lan-guages see Siewierska (2004).

Gender Agreement

Many languages show gender agreement between an anaphor and its antecedent, for English see the example below.

(32) a. The boy ... he/*she ... . b. The boy lost his/*her way.

c. The boy watched himself/*herself in the mirror.

But, as indicated earlier, pronoun agreement in cases like (32) might well result from the fact that pronoun and antecedent share the referent. So-called ‘hybrid nouns’ are an interesting case in this regard. Hybrid nouns exhibit a mismatch between grammatical and notional gender. An example is the German noun Mäd-chen ‘girl’ which is grammatically neuter but refers to a female referent. Hybrid nouns entail an inconsistent although not arbitrary agreement pattern since they allow for both grammatical and notional concord, but not for all agreement targets alike. In accordance with the agreement hierarchy (Corbett, 1979), attributive tar-gets are strongly tied to grammatical agreement whereas pronouns are most likely to show notional concord (cf. Batliner, 1984; Corbett, 1991, 2006). For illustration consider the little discourses in (33).

(33) a. Ich

‘I admire this girl. Her kicks are precise.’

b. Ich

‘I admire this girl for her precise kicks.’

While the choice of a determiner in (33) is restricted to the grammatical gender of Mädchen (‘girl’), i.e. to neuter gender, the possessive pronoun shows some flexibility. Across sentences, notional concord seems to be preferred (the neuter pronoun would sound odd although not completely wrong); grammatical agree-ment is strongly preferred within the same clause. Nevertheless, even within a single clause an inconsistent agreement pattern can occur as in the Spanish exam-ple below.

(34) Su

‘His surpreme majesty is happy.’

(Kathol, 1999)

The possessive pronoun and the predicative adjective in (34) both show mascu-line agreement, i.e. notional concord given that the king of Spain is male. The attributive adjective, however, shows grammatical agreement with the feminine noun majestad.

In addition to the mixed agreement patterns with hybrid nouns, the examples above show that gender agreement also occurs in noun phrases, with determiners and adjective agreeing with the head noun of a noun phrase. Examples from German and Russian are given below.

(35) die

While in Russian and German, gender contrasts are neutralized in the plural they are preserved in other languages, e.g., Spanish as illustrated below.

(37) a. la

Predicates like verbs and predicative adjectives are also sensitive to gender agree-ment; an example was already given in (27) above. But verb agreement in gender is rare in comparison to agreement in number or person. Only 16% of the lan-guages in Bybee’s (1985) sample showed gender agreement on the verb. For a typological overview of gender agreement see Corbett (1991).

Number Agreement

Number agreement is common, it occurs both NP-internally and with predicates and pronouns. Bybee (1985) found number agreement on the verb in 54% of the languages in her sample.

(38) a. This book is quite interesting. It documents several cases in which . . . b. These books are quite interesting. They document several cases in

which . . .

Just like gender agreement, number agreement is occasionally inconsistent, e.g., with collective nouns. Agreement targets in the context of a singular collective noun oscillate between singular agreement and plural agreement. Put differently, the agreement target’s number specification seems to be determined by either the grammatical number of the corresponding noun or by its notional number. Again the degree of flexibility correlates with the position of a given target on the agree-ment hierarchy (Corbett, 1979). NP-internal modifiers are restricted to singular agreement, predicates are most likely to show singular agreement whereas pro-nouns are most likely to show plural agreement. This tendency holds both within languages and across languages.

(39) a. this/*these committee

b. the committee has/have decided that it/they . . .

English speakers agree on the choice of a singular determiner in examples like (39a) but they disagree on the choice of the verb and the pronoun in (39b). In contrast to the determiner which must be singular, both a singular verb and a plu-ral verb are possible. The preferences for singular or pluplu-ral vary considerably—

across English varieties (e.g., Bauer, 2002; Biber et al., 1999; Quirk et al., 1985), across text types, between written and spoken language (Fries, 1981; Levin, 2001), across individual collective nouns (cf. Corbett, 2006 summarizing data from De-praetere, 2003; Hundt, 1998; Levin, 2001; see also Biber et al., 1999; Hundt, 2006; Siemund, 1995), and also across agreement targets (e.g., verbs versus pro-nouns). Differences between American English and British English have long been acknowledged and became a textbook wisdom. The strong claim, how-ever, that American speakers have a general preference for singular verbs while British speakers strongly prefer plural verbs (e.g., Algeo, 1988) does not with-stand an empirical validation.³⁰ Corpus data show a general singular bias for all English varieties, though most pronounced in American English and less strong in British English (cf. Levin, 2001; for experimental data on American English versus British English see Bock et al., 2006). Other varieties take an intermedi-ate position; Philippine English, Australian English and New Zealand English are more like American English while Hong Kong English and Singaporean English are more like British English (Hundt, 1998, 2006; Levin, 2001; Wong, 2009).

The variation across the agreement targets is in accordance with the Animacy Hierarchy—pronouns are more likely to show notional concord than verbs. There seems to be a general preference for plural in spoken language (apparently even more pronounced in American English than in British English) while written data

30Though prescriptive pressure works exactly in this direction as evidenced in official docu-ments (Fries, 1981) and styleguides such as the Associated Press Stylebook and the BBC News Styleguide (for a comparison see Bock et al., 2006).

again show some abeyance (Levin, 2001). An interesting though seldom case is what (Johansson, 1979) calls ‘discord’—instances of a mixed pattern within a single sentence, e.g., The committee has decided to confine their attention (for corpus evidence see, Hundt, 2006; Levin, 2001; Wong, 2009). Discord usually involves a singular verb and a plural pronoun though the reversed constellation has been attested as well. Example (40a) is typical for discord whereas example (40b) is exceptional.

(40) a. When the company is ready to send the application form, then they’ll send it. (taken from Wong, 2009: 62)

b. I mean who are your target audience so to speak and uhm what kind of return do you expect of it? (taken from Hundt, 2006: 219)

German shares the flexibility of pronoun agreement with collective nouns but ad-heres to grammatical agreement with modifiers and predicates. Moreover, no-tional concord of pronouns is excluded within a clause.

(41) a. Das/*Die

‘The orchestra discusses its program.’

c. Das

‘The orchestra discusses whether it/they . . . .’

It is usually assumed that in cases where the grammar offers optionality with re-gard to singular or plural agreement the actual choice is affected by the way the speaker conceptualizes the referent(s) of a given collective noun. The speaker’s conceptualization in turn is affected by the type of event or state she or he aims to describe and hence by the choice of the predicate. When choosing singular agree-ment, the speaker focuses on the collective as a unit, when choosing the plural form, the speaker makes a statement about the individual members of the collec-tive. Or put the other way round, when talking about a collective as a unit, speak-ers tend to produce a singular verb/pronoun and when talking about the individual entities which form this unit, speakers tend to produce a plural verb/pronoun.

Evidence for such a tendency comes from a language production experiment by Humphreys and Bock (2005). Speakers produced more plural verbs after a sub-ject NP like the gang on the motorcycles which is most likely to be interpreted distributively—distributing the members of the gang to the motorcycles in a one-to-one-relation—than after subject NPs like the gang near the motorcycles. For

comparable findings in Dutch see Joosten et al. (2007) who show that differences in conceptualization do not only occur ad-hoc but found their way into the lexi-con.³¹ Nouns like club contrast with nouns like audience. While the former can be old while its members are young indicating a holistic conception of the club abstracting away from its members, the an old audience means that the members of that audience are old. Nouns like family take some intermediate position. An old family states that the family as a unit can look back on a long history while a big family refers to the number of its current members. Accordingly, Joosten et al.

(2007) identify three types of collective nouns: nouns that generally trigger a col-lective level interpretation and subsequently singular agreement (on pronouns),³² nouns that generally trigger member level interpretations and entail mainly plural agreement, and nouns that readily license both interpretations and show both sin-gular and plural agreement to more or less the same degree. Note that under this perspective singular agreement might well be an instance of notional concord.

The same variability between singular and plural agreement depending on the conceptualization of the referent can also be found with nouns that are not genuine collective but can be re-interpreted in this way.

(42) a. The defence have to be in a line.

b. England play Wales on Saturday.

c. Cambridge are favorite for this year’s race.

Measure phrases show a similar behavior (examples are taken from Morgan, 1972).

Again agreement is influenced by the conceptualization of the corresponding en-tity.

(43) a. Forty acres is/*are a lot to plow.

b. Forty acres *is/are ready for John to plow.

In addition to collective nouns and alike, numerals can occur with singular verbs as well as with plural verbs. The similarity, however, is only superficial. With nu-merals, the crucial distinction is not collective versus distributive but noun versus adjective. Adjective only apparently control agreement, e.g., when used ellipti-cally as in (44a) or deictiellipti-cally as in (44b). The noun referring to the cardinal number or used as a kind of label to identify objects or persons (e.g., players of team) requires singular agreement in correspondence with its grammatical num-ber. For illustration see (44c) and (44d).

31For lexical differences among collective nouns in English see Corbett (2006) based on data from Depraetere (2003), Hundt (1998) and Levin (2001).

32Verbs almost consistently show singular agreement across all three noun classes. Insofar Dutch behaves like German.

(44) a. During the first hour we counted only forty-two cranes. But in the next hour two-hundred and forty-one were flying above our heads.

b. Those two are coming with me.

c. Two is an even number.

d. Two is off-side.

Case Agreement

NP-internally, determiners and modifiers often have to share the head noun’s case as illustrated by the German example below.

(45) Peter

‘Peter knows the new client’

Therefore, case is often included in the list of common agreement features. Yet, (45) is an instance of co-variation—it results from the fact that the noun as well as the determiner and the adjective are governed by the same element, namely the ac-cusative assigning verb. We have to distinguish cases of seeming case agreement as in (45) from cases like (46).

(46) a. Er

‘He sang like a young god.’

b. Die

‘The fans adored him like a god.’

In (46), the pronoun gets its case from the verb whereas the noun phrase preceded by wie receives case via agreement. Despite this distinction of case agreement in the narrow sense and case agreement resulting from government, it is noteworthy that case and agreement are obviously related. Syntactic theory in the Chom-skyan tradition captured this intuition by treating case assignment and agreement checking uniformly. A first step in this direction was undertaken by assuming that verb agreement and nominative Case are checked by the same head (Chomsky, 1981). More recently, the association of case and agreement was strengthened by claiming that both are calculated by the same operation Agree (Chomsky, 2000, 2001).

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