Abstract
In this paper we bring together the results of our research into agreement in copular clauses in four different Germanic languages—Dutch, German, Faroese, and Icelandic—in order to provide an overview of the results. These cases present a particularly interesting window into how verbal agreement operates, since there are two potential controllers of agreement, which may disagree in person and/or number (The source of the rumor BE the neighbors/you-sg/you-pl). We will show that there is variation at all levels in which nominal controls agreement: cross-linguistic, inter-speaker within a single language, and intra-speaker. We argue that our data support the following claims: (1) “Downward” agreement for person, as well as number, with a nominal that is not in the canonical subject position is possible and in some cases preferred; (2) The agreement patterns observed in Icelandic and Faroese support the hypothesis that in these languages there are distinct Number and Person heads; (3) “Downward” agreement from a high position in the left-periphery is a grammatically distinct phenomenon from agreement when the verb remains in a lower position in the clause; (4) In some languages and some configurations, speakers show a significant degree of indeterminacy in their judgments and production, suggesting that speakers use more than one grammar. We relate our findings to current discussions in the generative literature on subject agreement and in particular differences between number and person agreement, and possible connections to restrictions on object clitics; we also discuss questions that remain open, and invite new, cross-disciplinary research.
Highlights
In this paper we bring together results from a series of experiments that we have conducted investigating agreement in a particular type of clause, across four Germanic languages: Dutch, German, Faroese, and Icelandic
Summarizing our findings and relating them to other works on agreement patterns in specificational copular clauses, we found that these patterns are due to general properties of the agreement system of each language and properties of SCCs
(ii) We have argued that the crucial source of variation in the Germanic languages arises from the SCCs being inversion structures, which creates a configuration in which the initially lower DP1 can become accessible to a higher agreement probe, because it moves above DP2 to become the highest DP below a yet higher probe or probes, see (64) above
Summary
In this paper we bring together results from a series of experiments that we have conducted investigating agreement in a particular type of clause, across four Germanic languages: Dutch, German, Faroese, and Icelandic. While the details of the goals and results of the individual experiments are available in a number of different papers, our aim here is to summarize the results, show the emerging overall picture and relate our findings to current issues discussed in the syntax of copular clauses and agreement.
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