The agreement hierarchy

Abstract

Consideration of the problem of alternative agreement forms (§ 1) leads us to postulate a hierarchy of agreement positions (§ 2) which allows us to make predictions as to the possibility and relative frequency of semantic as compared to syntactic agreement. The hierarchy is justified by data from a variety of languages which permit alternative agreements (§ 3). Confirming evidence comes from a study of the instances where agreement in case and person is required in different languages (§ 4). The status of the hierarchy and the type of prediction it makes are discussed. It is suggested that the hierarchy determines the main divisions of a measure called SYNTACTIC DISTANCE and that other factors (word order, distance between controller and agreeing element, depth of stacking) determine relative degrees of distance within these main divisions (§ 5). The basic claim of the paper is that as syntactic distance increases so does the likelihood of semantic agreement.