Whamit!

Speaker: Isa Kerem Bayirli (MIT)

Title: On the concord phenomenon

Time: Tuesday 10/20, 10-11am

Place: 32-D461

I will talk about the morphosyntactic features (gender, number and case) that enter into
concord in natural languages. I first attempt to establish the following generalization:

Concord Hierarchy

For some language L Let a₁…a_n be features (canonically) hosted by functional heads in the extended projection of the noun such that a_j+1 c-commands a_j, then

If a_j+1 enters into concord with the adjectives in L

then a_j enters into concord with the adjectives in L

This generalization is derived from an extension of the FA Rule (first version) developed in Pesetsky (2013). It turns out that, when combined with some, hopefully plausible, assumptions, this system makes two more predictions: concord-suspension complementarity and idiosyncratic gender generalization. I provide some data indicating that the observations are in line with these predictions.