Highest Argument Agreement (HAA)

The goal of this project is to provide an in-depth study of constructions across languages in which verbs sometimes agree with their subject and sometimes agree with a non-subject argument or sometimes agree in syntactic features and sometimes in semantic features. The linguistic literature includes well-known cases of languages in which the subject is merely the default trigger of verb agreement and nominal expressions other than the subject can function as agreement triggers under certain circumstances. Perhaps the first such case documented in the literature and the best-known is the phenomenon of agreement in Icelandic in constructions with quirky case subjects. But other constructions have been described in which non-subject agreement is found, in languages that have subject agreement as a general rule.

Existing theories and theoretical frameworks are designed to account for subject-verb agreement (or for object agreement in those languages with object agreement) in terms of syntactic features, but lack the necessary flexibility to allow the same verb morphology to select the subject as the agreement trigger in some cases and a non-subject in other cases and to sometimes be sensitive to syntactic information and sometimes to semantic information. The present project explores and tests an approach using Optimality Theory in which different rankings of constraints yield the different attested languages. We propose that subject agreement is part of a more general phenomenon of Highest Argument Agreement (HAA): the verb agrees with the highest argument, but the prominence of an argument can be computed taking into account different factors or scales, so that, depending on which factor or scale is stronger, the subject may be defined as the highest argument relevant for agreement or a non-subject may be.

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Contact

Prof. Dr. Eugenio M. Vigo

Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge

Roc Boronat building (Poblenou campus)
Roc Boronat, 138
08018 Barcelona

[email protected]

Principal Investigator

Prof. Dr. Alex Alsina

Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge

Roc Boronat building (Poblenou campus)
Roc Boronat, 138
08018 Barcelona

[email protected]

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