Overview of Theoretical Approaches

Theoretical approaches of agreement can be classified along two dimensions—as to whether thy treat agreement as a symmetrical or an asymmetrical relation and as to whether they conceive agreement as a morphological, syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic phenomenon. In particular, the answer to the last question depends on how one defines agreement and what instances are included. It is, for in-stance, uncontroversial that the feature match between a personal pronoun and its antecedent is mainly a matter of semantics, although the case of hybrid nouns indicates that morphosyntactic features also play a role.³⁶ Since the upcoming ex-periments investigate subject–verb agreement, I will concentrate on the treatment of subject–verb agreement and discuss other instances of agreement only briefly.

Some of the problems outlined above suggest that semantic properties of the subject NP referent are crucial for verb agreement. A radical semantic view is contended in Dowty and Jacobson (1988)³⁷ and Reid (1991). From a functional persepctive, Reid (1991) argues that both the verb’s and subject’s number specifi-cation are chosen independently from each other.

Although semantic accounts deal easily with the variability of agreement pat-terns with collective nouns and alike, a purely semantic account has difficulties to capture cases with no obvious semantic grounding, e.g., formal agreement with a gender hybrid noun like Mädchen ‘girl’.³⁸ Although the neuter noun Mädchen can be associated with a feminine pronoun as exemplified in (33) and (60) it has to be accompanied by a neuter determiner. Hence NP-internal agreement is restricted to morphosyntactic features.

‘The girl had forgotten her bag.’

Sentence (60) illustrates also another property of pronoun agreement. Although, the neuter noun Mädchen can be pronominalized with either a neuter pronoun

36Furthermore, the conditions on binding clearly show that pronouns are subject to syntactic restrictions.

37Recently, Dowty published a disclaimer on his website stating that he no longer holds the view that all agreement is semantic in nature. (see http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/ dowty/papers/agreement-note.html) (16.07.2009)

38Grammatical gender not based on natural gender poses a general problem as pointed out by Dowty and Jacobson (1988). Dowty and Jacobson propose a solution which transforms lexical properties to non-linguistic properties. More precisely, they suggest that the way an object is lexicalized is part of its properties; in their words: "one of the real-world properties of, say, chairs is that the English word conventionally used to denote this class of objects is chair, and that the French word is chaise" (Dowty and Jacobson:1988:98). In my view, the proposal lacks explanatory power—it transforms morphosyntactic properties into semantic properties for no other reason than to justify the claim that all agreement is semantic in nature.

or a feminine pronoun, the latter is strongly dispreferred within the same clause (Batliner, 1984). Reversely, the choice of the pronoun matching the natural gender is more likely the longer the distance between the antecedent and the pronoun. In any case, the choice has to be consistent across pronouns when more than one pronoun is used. This requirement is shown in (61). Pollard and Sag (1994) raise a similar argument with regard to reflexive pronouns as illustrated in (62).

(61) Das

‘The girl went back because she had forgotten her bag.’

(62) a. That dog is so ferocious. It even tried to bite itself/*himself.

b. That dog is so ferocious. He even tried to bite *itself/himself.

Based on the speaker’s conceptualization, dog can be pronominalized with either the neuter pronoun it or the masculine pronoun him. The reflexive pronoun can ac-cordingly be itself or himself. The choice must, however, be uniform for personal pronoun and reflexive pronoun. This uniformity is clearly syntactically motivated and thus evidence in favor of a morphosyntactic account of agreement.

Syntactic accounts can be classified as to whether they conceive the agreement relation as a symmetrical relation in which both the agreement controller and the agreement target contribute jointly to the result or as an asymmetrical relation in which the controller determines the feature specification of the target. Pollard and Sag (1994) suggest a slightly different division and distinguish ‘constraint-based’

versus ‘derivational’ approaches. The latter assume some sort of feature transfer from the controller to the target or a movement operation. Early transformational grammar, for instance, assumed feature copying (cf. Chomsky, 1965; Akmajian and Heny, 1975). Recent versions of the minimalist approach involve the opera-tion Agree which again involves an asymmetrical relaopera-tion, called probe-goal rela-tion Chomsky (2000, 2001). Though the term evokes the impression that ‘probe’

corresponds to the more traditional notion of controller while ‘goal’ corresponds to target, this equation is wrong. The agreement relation is thought to be medi-ated via a functional head, in case of subject–verb agreement via T (details are provided below). Agree neither involves movement (at least not necessarily) nor feature transfer in the common sense. Though, the evaluation process—unvalued features of the probe receive their values from the goal—can be considered a fea-ture transfer in the broader sense.

The basic intuition underlying the characterization of agreement as an asym-metric relation is that the feature specification of the controller is logically prior to that of the target. If a feature value is inherent, it is the controller’s feature value (e.g., a noun’s gender value). If a feature is interpretable then it is interpretable on the controller (e.g., the controller’s number specification). Note that it is not the case that all controller features are interpretable. Nor it is true that all con-troller feature values are inherent, in the sense that they are lexically specified.

The target, in contrast, has only uninterpretable agreement features.

Symmetric conceptions of agreement, on the other hand, assume that both the controller and target contribute each their own feature specification. The check-ing account of agreement (Chomsky, 1995) is an example: Both the verb and the subject come fully specified into the derivation. The match of these specifica-tions is later checked in a spec–head configuration mediated by a functional head, Agr_S in case of subject–verb agreement. Checking can also be conceived as an asymmetric relation since only the target’s features are subsequently all removed whereas the controller’s features survive as long as they are interpretable. Finally, the checking approach is clearly a derivational approach in the sense of Pollard and Sag (1994).

A really symmetric relation holds in unification based-grammars such as HPSG (Pollard and Sag, 1994) and LFG (Bresnan, 1982, 2001; Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982). Both the controller and the target contribute feature values while the com-bination of the two in order to build larger syntactic object is constrained by the requirement that the corresponding feature values have to match, hence the qual-ification ‘constrained-based’ in Pollard and Sag (1994). Unqual-ification fails when the two objects have incompatible feature specifications. Under this perspective it makes no sense to decide which of the two objects is responsible for the fail-ure, hence the qualification ‘symmetric.’ Noteworthy, HPSG does not have an ex-plicit agreement rule or mechanism. Instead agreement follows from more general principles like the subcategorization principle. Furthermore, so-called ‘anchoring conditions’ ensure that objects with conflicting index feature values³⁹ cannot be anchored to the same real-world object(for details see Kathol, 1999; Pollard and Sag, 1994; Wechsler and Zlati´c, 2003).

39A noun’s lexical entry comprises inter alia two sets of agreement features: concord features (number, gender, and case) which are part of the head features and index features (number, gender, and person) which are part of the semantic features. Usually but not necessarily the corresponding values are identical. The German hybrid noun Mädchen ‘girl’, for instance, has deviating values for the feature gender—the head feature has the value neuter while the index feature has the value feminine.