Two ways to agree in D[N1&N2] constructions – Romance left-conjunct agreement and Germanic morphologically resolved agreement

What it is about

The paper compares determiner agreement in phrases such as "this philosopher and linguist", where a determiner takes a coordination of two nouns. Romance (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese) agrees with the left conjunct. Germanic (German, Dutch, English) shows "morphologically resolved" agreement: a mismatch in number is acceptable only if the determiner form is syncretic. English has no gender marking in the nominal phrase, so the pattern appears only with number, as in "the children and mother" (acceptable) against "this/these children and mother" (unacceptable). The author ties this to the joint and split readings of Heycock and Zamparelli: English-type languages allow split readings, and so allow number mismatches. The proposal is one parameter: Germanic Num° has both gender and number, Romance Num° lacks gender. The analysis uses multiple Agree, constrained by interface conditions. The evidence is corpus examples and native-speaker judgements; the article reports no large counts.

Ideas

• I1. Write the English rule as a table over determiners: forms that do not change with number (such as "the", "my", "your") are accepted with mixed-number conjuncts; "this" and "these" are not. Apply it to UD trees where a determiner heads a conj pair with different Number values.
• I2. Use the paper's minimal pairs (the sentence pairs with "the" and "this/these", in both noun orders) as a small seed set in en/seeds/. The rule must accept every pair marked grammatical and reject every starred one, and the same test with the determiner swapped is the negative control.
• I3. Do not use gender for English noun-phrase agreement at all: the paper's point is that English lacks gender there. Check that the rule reads only Number.
• I4. Measure the parser on determiner-headed noun coordinations in UD EWT: how often the conj attaches to the noun the determiner agrees with, and whether the errors cluster in mixed-number phrases.

For Mova

The relevant chapters are 12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals (determiner forms), 11-nouns.md (number) and 22-phrases.md (noun phrase coordination). The code is en/src/morph.rs for number, en/src/udreg.rs for the feature registry, and en/src/parse.rs for the coordination structure. The measures: the rule's accuracy on the seed pairs, run twice with identical output, and the parser's attachment score on determiner-headed coordinations. The paper's Romance and Germanic data beyond English are not Mova's data.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.6315

@article{lamoure2023two,
  title = {{Two ways to agree in D[N1\&N2] constructions – Romance left-conjunct agreement and Germanic morphologically resolved agreement}},
  author = {Lamoure, Nicolas Mathieu},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.6315},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.6315}
}

References

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