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Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2019
Edited by Janine Berns and Elena Tribushinina
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 36] 2019
► pp. 130–146

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Part II: Selected papers presented at the Dutch Annual Linguistics Day of 2019

Restrictions on “Low” person agreement in Dutch specificational copular constructions

 | IDS Mannheim
 | University of Edinburgh
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 5 November 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00028.har
Abstract
Agreement between the verb and its arguments as a predominant phenomenon in language has received major attention in the theoretical literature. One specific aspect under discussion concerns differences between number and person agreement, with the latter being the more restricted one (restricted by Baker, Mark C. 2008. The syntax of agreement and concord. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar SCOPA, by variants of the Person Licensing Condition of Béjar, Susana & Milan Rezac. 2003. “Person licensing and the derivation of PCC Effects.” Romance Linguistics: Theory and acquisition ed. by A. T. Perez-Leroux and Y. Roberge, 49–62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, or by multiple agreement see Schütze, Carson. 2003. “Syncretism and double agreement with Icelandic nominative objects.” Grammar in Focus: Festschrift for Christer Platzack ed. by L.-O. Delsing, C. Falk, G. Josefsson and H. Á. Sigurðsson, 295–303. Lund: Department of Scandinavian Languages, Lund University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Ackema, Peter & Ad Neeleman. 2018. Features of person. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). In this paper we address the restrictions on person agreement with a nominative noun phrase in a low position by investigating a relatively little-discussed configuration, namely specificational copular constructions in Dutch such as dat de inspiratie voor deze roman niet jij %bent/??is. We provide data from both a production and a rating study comparing 3/2 person agreement and show that what initially looks like a “person effect” in Dutch turns out to be a pronoun effect.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: “Low” person agreement and specificational copular clauses
  • 2.Production study
    • 2.1Method and participants
    • 2.2Conditions and materials
    • 2.3Results and statistical analysis
    • 2.4Summary
  • 3.Rating study
    • 3.1Method and participants
    • 3.2Conditions and materials
    • 3.3Results and statistical analysis
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (42)
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Jurczyk, Rafał
2024. Post-verbal agreement and obligatory presence of particle to in Polish dual copula clauses. Linguistics Beyond and Within (LingBaW) 10 ► pp. 65 ff. DOI logo
van Alem, Astrid & Sjef Barbiers
2021. Poor weakhet‘it’ and agreement patterns in pronominal clefts. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 53:2 ► pp. 221 ff. DOI logo
Hartmann, Jutta M. & Caroline Heycock
2020. (Morpho)syntactic Variation in Agreement: Specificational Copular Clauses Across Germanic. Frontiers in Psychology 10 DOI logo
Hartmann, Jutta M. & Caroline Heycock
2023. Person effects in agreement with Icelandic low nominatives: An experimental investigation. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 41:3 ► pp. 1029 ff. DOI logo

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