Ling E: Agreement and Concord (advanced)

This class explores agreement and concord. A well-known example of agreement occurs between the subject and verb of a sentence: e.g., I read vs. The student reads. In concord, modifiers share features such as case, gender, or number with the head noun. Since both agreement and concord appear to involve the sharing of features between elements, many have attempted to formulate a unified analysis of the two phenomena. Other theories take the opposite tack, arguing that agreement and concord are better analyzed as distinct phenomena. Looking at data from a variety of languages, this class will evaluate the pros and cons of both types of approach.