Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

The presentation will discuss some cases of sylleptic agreement or agreement ad sensum: these are cases in which agreement of T with a DP seems to drive, or be driven by, interpretive properties of this DP rather than its syntactic properties. 

(1) l'équipe des escrimeurs a gagné /ont gagné leur match

Such patterns are robustly documented and in fact explicitly discussed (often with a normative angle) in French, and are present in English and elsewhere. Plural - sylleptic - agreement here occurs in a case in which the features values on T do not *seem* to match the feature values of its DP subject. Basic properties of such agreement will be presented for French and English. The discussion will center mostly on cases of subject/verb number and person agreement (but its conclusions would extend to other cases of number and person agreement between a head and a DP).

Can such agreement patterns can be captured by standard syntactic analyses of agreement? 

A negative answer will be motivated (on a number of counts), leading to the conclusion that person and number features on T, unsurprisingly from the view of the interpretive import of such features on pronouns, carry a presupposition constraining the denotation of the DP T agrees with. I will also argue that this result is in fact expected if some stipulations regarding the properties of such features on T (and more generally on probes) are given up.

The work presented builds on and is in part joint work with Isabelle Charnavel, and in other parts joint with Isabelle Charnavel and Tom Meadows.