Abstract

Some Ibero-Romance dialects show neuter agreement with uncountable nouns. According to data recently compiled in dialect corpora, mass neuter agreement varies according to word classes, being most frequent in pronouns and moderate in adjectives. Pronouns, both overt and null, regularly give rise to mass neuter agreement. Both the syntactic position of the predicate (attributive or predicative) and the predicate type (individual-level [IL] or stage-level [SL] predicate) play a role in triggering mass neuter agreement. Mass neuter agreement is strongly associated with SL predicates, and it proposed that it’s an extension of the so-called Romance neuter, or agreement with nonlexical antecedents, for it implies the syntactical cancellation of gender and number. The origins of neuter morphology should be thus found in the demonstrative neuter pronouns, from which it gradually extends in steps regulated by the syntactic distance between mass antecedents and the agreeing predicates.

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