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In:Advances in the Syntax of DPs: Structure, agreement, and case
Edited by Anna Bondaruk, Gréte Dalmi and Alexander Grosu
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 217] 2014
► pp. 95–116

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Syntactic (dis)agreement is not semantic agreement

Published online: 14 October 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.217.04dan
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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