Agreement variation in copular sentences

What is it about?

We argue that the type of abstract structure proposed for the subject of "specificiational" copular sentences (My favourite performance was/were the dancers) in the papers by Béjar and Kahnemuyipour does not give the right predictions for the variation in agreement observed. We maintain instead that the syntactic positions of the noun phrases in the course of the derivation has to play a part.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

There has been a lot of interest recently in the morphosyntax of agreement in different languages. We think that there is much to be learned from the variation in agreement in copular sentences where there are two noun phrases differing in person and/or number, either of which the copular verb could potentially agree with. We are contributing to this discussion by providing carefully controlled quantitative data from production and judgment tasks in four different Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Faroese, Icelandic).