Agreement Inside and Outside the Noun Phrase

Determiner-noun agreement in English and many other languages appears to be straightforwardly describable; singular determiners go with singular nouns, and plural determiners go with plural nouns. The situation is more complicated with coordinate nouns, however, since unexpected agreement patterns often result. Our theory makes the correct predictions for English and other languages by combining two crucial insights: the dual nature of agreement features inside the noun phrase (Kathol 1999; Sadler 1999, 2002; Wechsler and Zlatic, 2000) and the distinction between distributive and nondistributive features in coordination (Dalrymple and Kaplan 2002).

Not submitted; contact authors for original LFG02 slides or current manuscript.