The Syntax-Semantics reading group and MULL-lab will be meeting on Wednesday, November 1st at 4pm in Rm. 117 of the McGill Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join in person.
This week, George will be presenting a talk entitled: ‘Closest Conjunct Agreement in the DP’.
Closest Conjunct Agreement (CCA) refers to the phenomenon whereby a verb agrees with linearly closest/adjacent of two (or more) coordinated subject DP/NPs. The commonly adopted asymmetrical/hierarchical model of coordination is argued to neatly account for post-verbal CCA under the assumption that the first (leftmost) conjunct is structurally higher than following conjuncts, and is therefore the first DP that the Probe encounters during its downward search for phi-valuation. CCA is also observed in the nominal domain (i.e. DP-internally) in a large number of European languages, in which a determiner and/or adjective agrees in gender with the closest noun. The few existing papers on DP-internal CCA more or less directly apply the Probe/Goal analysis of CCA in the clausal domain to determiner/adjectival agreement. However, in recent years, some have hypothesized that DP-internal agreement involves an entirely different mechanism than that which facilitates subject-predicate agreement, called Concord. These authors propose that Concord is based on domination, rather than c-command. If this is true, then DP-internal CCA requires a new theory. In this presentation, I propose a new approach to DP-internal CCA – namely, Closest Conjunct Concord.
Please register in advance HERE to receive the Zoom link. You can also share this link with others who may want to join.