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Hybrid agreement with English quantifier partitives

Paper · 2023 · Troy Messick

Summary

Messick examines a known asymmetry in agreement. Some nominals carry one feature value in their morphology and a different one in their meaning. When two agreeing elements are present, three of the four possible combinations of morphological and semantic values are acceptable, and one mismatch is consistently ruled out. This "3/4 pattern" has been reported for lexical hybrid nouns. The paper shows that it also occurs with English quantified NPs (quantifier partitives), in both verb agreement and pronoun/anaphor binding. Following Danon (2013), the author treats QNPs as belonging to the same natural class as hybrid nouns.

The paper is theoretical syntax and uses grammaticality judgments. It revises two common generative assumptions:

  • Bound pronouns and anaphors agree late, after the structure reaches the interfaces, while adjectival concord and T agree as soon as they are merged.
  • A new Constraint on Agreement with Semantic Features (CASF) says that once a probe has used semantic features, every later probe must also use semantic features.

The analysis covers both the new data and the earlier cases. It suggests that hybridness can come from syntactic structure rather than only from individual words, and it proposes CASF as a possible universal.

Key points

  • The paper reports three new 3/4 agreement patterns involving English QNPs. They concern verb agreement together with bound pronouns and anaphors.
  • It reviews earlier 3/4 cases:
    • Russian vrač 'doctor', gender (Pesetsky 2013)
    • Lebanese Arabic numerals above ten, number (Ouwayda 2014)
    • Hebrew be'alim 'owners/husbands' (Landau 2016b)
    • British English committee nouns with reflexives (Smith 2015; 2021)
    • Icelandic imposters such as undirritaðir 'the undersigned' (Wood & Sigurdsson 2014)
  • The timing proposal is that T and adjectival concord agree when merged, whereas pronoun and anaphor agreement happens post-syntactically.
  • Under CASF, morphological features become unavailable once semantic features have been targeted. For example, The government have offered itself is ruled out.
  • The author links CASF to monotonicity accounts of other universals (Graf 2019; 2020), such as the ban on improper movement and the absence of ABA patterns.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A nominal can carry two separate feature bundles, one grammatical and one notional, and different agreeing words may read either one; this is more accurate than assigning a single number or gender to a noun.
  • I2. The CASF one-way rule says that once the semantic value has been used, later agreement cannot return to the morphological value, which yields a cheap, ordered consistency filter.
  • I3. Different kinds of agreement targets agree at different stages: local concord happens at once, and pronominal agreement is settled later at an interface.
  • I4. Hybridness can be a property of the construction a noun appears in, not just a lexical idiosyncrasy.
  • I5. Each 3/4 paradigm contains exactly one starred combination, which works as a built-in minimal-pair negative control.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Store both a grammatical and a semantic number for entities like "the government" or quantified partitives, so that state and holding counts use the notional value while agreement checks use either.
  • I2 (frames): Coreference can use it to rank or reject antecedent links, e.g. allow plural "themselves" after singular "has" but flag a singular reflexive after plural "have" with the same committee-type antecedent.
  • I3 (tree): Check only verb and adjective agreement in the parser or tree validator, and defer pronoun feature matching to the coreference and world layer, so that legitimate mismatches are not marked as parse errors.
  • I4 (tokens): Do not rely only on a lexicon list of hybrid nouns; tag dual features when a quantifier-partitive construction is detected, so that agreement morphology is not mislabelled as an error.
  • I5 (learn): Build evaluation sets of four-way paradigms in which the forbidden mismatch must be rejected, to test whether parsers and readers have learned the asymmetry rather than mere tolerance of mismatches.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Rutgers, The State University of New JerseyNew Brunswick · United States40 works · 12,486 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 930 worksNeuroscience · 186 worksCognitive Neuroscience · 185 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 worksMorphology · 420 works

Cite

Cite as Troy Messick. 2023. Hybrid agreement with English quantifier partitives. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.10273

@article{messick2023hybrid,
  title = {{Hybrid agreement with English quantifier partitives}},
  author = {Troy Messick},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.10273},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.10273}
}

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