Number mismatches in coordination: an LFG analysis

Abstract

In some languages, including Russian and Italian, it is possible for a plural noun to be modified by two or more coordinated singular adjectives. At the same time, it is possible for a singular noun to be modified by two or more coordinated singular adjectives, but for the reference of the noun phrase to be plural, rather than singular. We provide a formal analysis of these problematic agreement phenomena, making use of the distinction between INDEX and CONCORD agreement features, and the distinction between distributive and non-distributive features. We propose that the distributivity or non-distributivity of a feature may vary not only between different languages, but even on a construction-by-construction basis within a language. Specifically, CONCORD is a non-distributive feature in certain constructions in languages like Russian and Italian.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.