Closest conjunct agreement in head final languages

Asymmetries in Conjunct Agreement

Hindi-Urdu displays an asymmetry with respect to the availability of Closest Conjunct Agreement. It is available only to objects and not to subjects. Agreement with subjects is always agreement with the full conjunct. We argue that this asymmetry in Conjunct Agreement is related to another asymmetry between subject and object agreement in Indo-Aryan languages: object agreement never involves pe...

An HPSG Account of Closest Conjunct Agreement in NP Coordination in Portuguese

This paper discusses the NP-internal agreement strategies observed in an empirical (corpus based) study of Portuguese, and proposes an analysis which is formalized in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The empirical study suggests that what were previously thought to be rare or non-existent strategies occur with surprising frequency. Capturing these strategies poses p...

Coordination in Portuguese An HPSG Account of Closest Conjunct Agreement in NP

This paper discusses the NP-internal agreement strategies observed in an empirical (corpus based) study of Portuguese, and proposes an analysis which is formalized in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The empirical study suggests that what were previously thought to be rare or non-existent strategies occur with surprising frequency. Capturing these strategies poses p...

Final Complementizers in Hybrid Languages

On Parameters of Agreement in Austronesian Languages

In general, a functional head can search upward or downward through the syntactic tree in order to find a DP/NP that it can agree with (I claim, see Baker In press: ch. 2, 3 for much discussion). The DAP says that this freedom is restricted in some languages, such that functional heads only search upward. Most Niger-Congo (NC) languages have the positive setting of the DAP, whereas most Indo-Eu...