English Agreement Revisited: A Constraint-Based Approach without Syncretism

Abstract

Although agreement has been treated as a rudimentary phenomenon in English syntax, this paper raises questions on the traditional conventions. Following the HPSG tradition, this paper suggests that subject-verb agreement involves referential indices whereas the determiner-noun concord involves a morpho-syntactic number feature. However, in this paper, the feature is treated as a medium between morphological signal and semantic interpretation. In addition, it shows evidence that words without overt morphological indication are exempt from the agreement requirement pace the tradition, syncretism. The theoretical basis for the analysis is HPSG-based constructional grammar, and it is shown that its feature structure regime well embraces the suggestion in this paper.