Agreement with quantified nominals: implications for feature theory
Danon, Gabi. 2011. Agreement with quantified nominals: implications for feature theory. In Olivier Bonami & Patricia Cabredo Hofherr (eds.), Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 8: Proceedings of CSSP 2009, 75–95.
Abstract⌗
In Modern Hebrew, as in many other languages, subjects that are quantified noun phrases (QNPs) may trigger more than one agreement pattern on the verb/predicate: agreement with the morphological features of the noun, or with those of the quantifier. This alternation seems to pose a problem to most theories of agreement, which predict only one agreement pattern – with the head of the QNP. This paper argues that this agreement alternation can be accounted for by adopting the distinction between two clusters of features, INDEX and CONCORD, as in Pollard & Sag (1994) and Wechsler & Zlatic (2000, 2003). It is argued that this kind of analysis can best be implemented within the Minimalist framework if the framework allows for a certain amount of complexity in its feature system, where feature values are not restricted to simple atomic symbols.