Where plural refusesto agree: feature unification end morphological economy

Author: Ortman Albert  

Publisher: Akademiai Kiado

ISSN: 1216-8076

Source: Acta Linguistica Hungarica, Vol.47, Iss.1-4, 2000-09, pp. : 249-288

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Abstract

The paper oÿers an account of languages such as Hungarian which do notallow for number concord, that is, for several noun-phrase internal realisations of plural. It is looked at the combinations of noun and adjective, numeral and noun, and subject and verb. I firstshow that an underspecification analysis fails to capture the data. I argue that nevertheless, the lack of number agreement in this language type is only apparent and that it is still possible to stick to the concept of feature unification for these constructions. The solution I propose is coached in the framework of Optimality Theory and crucially relies on an economy constraint which I call pepl and which outranks two other constraints: map, which requires a correspondence of semantic aggregate individuation and the morphological feature [ + pl]; and realise, which requires that affix material that into the morphosyntactic context should be realised. A consequence of the analysis is that non-default mapping of aggregate semantics to the morphosyntactic specification [ + pl] is a typological option in order to respect formal agreement. The variation between “Type Hungarian” languages and “Type English” languages (i.e., languages that exhibit plural concord) is thus accounted for in terms of a diÿerent ranking of the constraints that require morphological economy (pepl) and explicitness (map, realise), respectively.