1887
Volume 36, Issue 1
  • ISSN 0929-7332
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9919

Abstract

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’s 2008 SCOPA, by variants of the Person Licensing Condition of Béjar & Rezac 2003, or by multiple agreement see Schütze 2003Ackema & Neeleman 2018). 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 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.

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2019-11-05
2025-02-19
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): copular constructions; Dutch; person agreement; syntax
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