Noun Phrase Agreement and Coordination
This AHRC
funded project ran from 1/3/04 to 31/3/06 (Project
MRG-AN10939/APN17606), and involved two sites:
Mary
Dalrymple and Irina Nikolaeva
based in the
Centre for
Linguistics and Philology, University
of Oxford, (and
here is
the project description for the site) and
Louisa
Sadler and Ryo
Otoguro based in the
Department of Linguistics, University of Essex. Previously
Aline
Villavicencio worked on the project at Essex. She is now a
lecturer at the
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Ryo
Otoguro is now a lecturer at Fukui Prefectural University, Japan.
Objectives
Many current treatments of agreement assume that a noun
phrase like "John" or "the book" has a single set of agreement (person, number,
gender) features, referenced by determiners, adjectives, nouns, and other
agreeing elements. Our project focuses on cases involving coordination, such as
"John and I" or "this man and woman", which show that this simple assumption is
untenable: different agreement processes can refer to different agreement
features in the noun phrase, or to the features of a single conjunct. These
complex phrases provide a window into general processes of agreement.
Part of the work of this project has involved a relatively large scale
data search concerning agreement patterns within Portuguese NPs. See
here to view the data collected on these agreement patterns.
Links
These are links for some useful lists, resources and tools that are relevant
for this project:
