Refine
Year of publication
- 2018 (3) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (3)
Language
- English (3)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (3)
Keywords
- Kopulasatz (3)
- Icelandic (2)
- Satzakzent (2)
- Syntaktische Analyse (2)
- agreement (2)
- copula (2)
- plurale tantum (2)
- specificational clause (2)
- Färöisch (1)
- Isländisch (1)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (3)
Publisher
In this paper we discuss a type of copular clause – specificational copular clauses – in which subject properties may be split between two nominative noun phrases. In particular, while the first noun phrase occupies the canonical preverbal subject position, in some languages the finite verb can agree with the postverbal nominative. Such agreement might be expected, on some theoretical assumptions, to show person restrictions. We discuss this phenomenon in two SVO Germanic languages – Icelandic and Faroese – and present new data from Faroese showing that the person effect here follows from the existence of distinct probes for Number and Person agreement.
In a number of languages, agreement in specificational copular sentences can or must be with the second of the two nominals, even when it is the first that occupies the canonical subject position. Béjar & Kahnemuyipour (2017) show that Persian and Eastern Armenian are two such languages. They then argue that ‘NP2 agreement’ occurs because the nominal in subject position (NP1) is not accessible to an external probe. It follows that actual agreement with NP1 should never be possible: the alternative to NP2 agreement should be ‘default’ agreement. We show that this prediction is false. In addition to showing that English has NP1, not default, agreement, we present new data from Icelandic, a language with rich agreement morphology, including cases that involve ‘plurale tantum’ nominals as NP1. These allow us to control for any confound from the fact that typically in a specificational sentence with two nominals differing in number, it is NP2 that is plural. We show that even in this case, the alternative to agreement with NP2 is agreement with NP1, not a default. Hence, we conclude that whatever the correct analysis of specificational sentences turns out to be, it must not predict obligatory failure of NP1 agreement.