Danon, Gabi. 2014. Syntactic (dis)agreement is not semantic agreement. In Anna Bondaruk, Gréte Dalmi & Alexander Grosu (eds.), Advances in the Syntax of DP’s: Structure, agreement, and case (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today), vol. 217, 95–116. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Abstract

This chapter looks at two cases where subject agreement in Hebrew does not follow the morphosyntactic (phi) features of the subject: singular agreement with plural subjects, and plural agreement with singular group-denoting subjects. The paper argues that there are important differences between these two cases; in particular, it is argued that the former is not agreement but lack of agreement, whereas the latter involves (syntactic) agreement. Lack of agreement is tied to constraints on thematic role assignment. Neither case poses a real problem to current syntactic models of agreement.

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