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In:The Ziggurat of Grammar: In honor of Ur Shlonsky
Edited by Lena Baunaz, Giuliano Bocci and Andrew Nevins
[Language Faculty and Beyond 20] 2025
► pp. 34–55

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Chapter 3
Conjunction agreement as semantic agreement

 | UNIGE
 | UCLA
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 13 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.20.03cha
Abstract
We discuss number, and to a lesser extent person, feature value cooccurrence restrictions between a head (Tense here) and a conjoined DP subject. We conclude that these restrictions instantiate semantic agreement, which arises in cases in which the feature values on T do not match the feature values of this DP. In the case of conjunction, this is because, we conclude, a conjunction of DPs lacks such features as there are no syntactic feature resolution rules. Instead, semantic agreement on T is ad sensum, meaning based, and can trigger presuppositions on the subject’s denotation. We also discuss cumulative agreement cases, concluding it is not semantic, at least not in the same sense.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.British collective nouns
  • 3.Conjunction and agreement
    • 3.1Some basic observations
    • 3.2Constituent sharing?
  • 4.Semantic agreement with conjunctions
    • 4.1Conjunction agreement: Only semantic
    • 4.2How it applies
    • 4.3Independent evidence
    • 4.4Deriving the properties of semantic agreement
    • 4.5Conjunction agreement and reconstruction
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (41)
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