On Agreement with Numeral Phrase Subjects Including ≥5 in Old and Middle Polish

Abstract

The paper addresses the topic of sentential agreement with numeral subjects such as pięć kobiet/pięciu chłopców ‘five women/five boys’ in Polish, and argues on the basis of historical data that the issues presented by such subjects shed light on the nature of syntactic agreement, in particular its connection to the nominative case. Numeral expressions with ≥5 have been argued in the literature to be intrinsically accusative and therefore their triggering default (3rd person singular neuter) agreement as subjects has been ascribed to their non–nominative status. While this hypothesis is viable for the Polish of the 17th century onwards, it is not applicable to the earlier 15th and 16th century stages. Based on historical evidence, where syntactic agreement with the numeral nouns is conspicuous by its absence and instead we find default agreement coexisting with semantic agreement (synesis), it will be argued that during that period the numeral nouns in direct case contexts were caseless due to the inaccessibility of their formal features to outside probing and that this constitutes the sole reason for the missing syntactic agreement with such subjects.