Agreement, Coordination and Portuguese NPs

Relatively little attention has been paid in the theoretical linguistic literature to single conjunct agreement patterns, and the focus of most existing work has been on cases of single conjuncts controlling predicate-argument agreement (typically, subject-verb agreement) (McCloskey 1986, Moosally 1998, Sadler 1999, Munn 1999). The focus of this presentation is the existence of single conjunct concord within NPs in Portuguese. The existence of such agreement patterns alongside (regular) syntactic resolution is accorded brief mention in (some) descriptive grammars of Portuguese, but appears not to have been much investigated to date. On the basis of a relatively large corpus study using the CETEMPublico and NILC corpora (available from http://www.linguateca.pt/), and supplementary google searches, we present the complex picture of agreement patterns, within and beyond NPs, which emerges from a detailed look at corpus data.

The data shows that both leftmost and rightmost single conjunct agreement occur relatively frequently within NPs. We consider the implications of the Portuguese data for an analysis in LFG. Reference to the agreement features of both initial and final conjuncts can be simply achieved at f-structure by positing LAGR and RAGR agreement features in the f-structure of the coordinate structure, alongside the resolved features (Sadler 2003). However the patterns of target-controller associations are strongly suggestive of additional linear order constraints on choice of controller.

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