Technical Correspondence: Subject-Verb Agreement In Respective Coordinations And Context-Freeness

Langendoen (1977) advanced an argument against English being a context-free language involving cross-serial subject-verb agreement in respectively constructions such as (1). (1) The man and the women dances and sing, respectively. As noted by Pullum and Gazdar (1982), however, and acknowledged subsequently by Langendoen (personal communication), such examples are unacceptable, and the argument collapses on empirical grounds. However, at least some speakers reject examples like (2) as well. (2) The man and the women dance and sing, respectively. This fact leads directly to a demonstration that there is, after all, a cross-serial dependency involving the grammatical number of subject NPs and verbs in respectively constructions. However, it is not clear at present how representative such speakers are, and so instead of making claims about English in general, we will confine them to just those varieties of the language that stigma-tize examples like (2), which will be denoted as English1, leaving to one side any varieties of which this may not be true (English2). I In English1, a verb that formally distinguishes singular from plural, i.e., a non-auxiliary present tense verb, cannot occur in a respectively construction if the corresponding subject NP is singular. This cannot be accounted for merely by barring marked singular verbs from occurring in coordinate predicates of respectively constructions. Such a move would correctly exclude examples like (1), but it would allow sentences like (2), with plural verbs corresponding to singular subjects. Nor is it possible to simply bar singular subjects from occurring in respectively constructions, since they are perfectly possible provided the corresponding verb is either a past tense, as in (3a), or an auxiliary, as in (3b). (3) a.The man and the women danced and sing, respectively. b.The women and the man sing and can dance, respectively. This means that a singular subject can only co-occur with a past tense or an auxiliary verb, whereas a plural subject can take a non-auxiliary present tense verb as well. The difference in the co-occurrence possibilities of singular as opposed to plural subject NPs amounts to a peculiar kind of number agreement. 2 This fact leads quite directly to a demonstration that English 1 is not context free. 3 Consider the regular set (4). (4) {the man x and the women danced y and sing respectively [ x e {the man, the women}+; y E {danced, sing} + } This is the set of all strings 4 (only …