LINGUIST List 2.121

Sunday, 7 Apr 1991

Misc: LINGUIST's Move; Verb Agreement

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Directory

1. The Moderators of LINGUIST, LINGUIST is Moving
2. Steve Harlow, Subject-verb agreement in Arabic
3. "Hi, 'lo", Re: Verb Agreement
4. Guido Vanden Wyngaerd, Re: Agreement

LINGUIST will soon be moving from its present site to a new one in
the USA. We hope that this can be accomplished with a minimum of
disruption and inconvenience to subscribers, but there may be minor
delays in postings and acknowledgements of mail. For most of you, 
the only evidence of the move will be the new address from which 
LINGUIST will be originating.

This move is necessitated by a number of different factors. First,
LINGUIST has grown to such a degree that the software we are running 
is now having considerable difficulty generating mailings in a reasonable
amount of time. In order to obviate this problem, we are having to
make our postings somewhat longer than we would like. Second, we are 
running LINGUIST on a Unix machine, with collating software which is
much inferior to that which can be provided on other platforms. This
makes editing LINGUIST much more of a chore than it should be, and 
generates on occasion unfortunate errors in postings. Third,
LINGUIST will acquire in this way both an Internet and a Bitnet address, 
which may facilitate communicating with some of you. 

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, the moderator 
who supervises the list at its site, Anthony Aristar, is moving from 
Australia to the US, and the list will have to move with him.

At the time of the move, all subscribers will be sent complete information
on LINGUIST's new addresses, and on how to interact with our new listserv.

We would like to acknowledge, shortly before we make this move, the
considerable debt LINGUIST owes to the Department of Anthropology at
the University of Western Australia. It was their support, both 
administrative and financial, which enabled Anthony Aristar to
found the list in the first place, and we owe them a great deal
for this generosity. 

Alison Henry doesn't need to go as far afield as Arabic to find examples of
the kind she mentions. Her description is a pretty good account of what
happens in Celtic languages. Broadly speaking, pronominal subjects in VSO
clauses trigger person and number agreement on the verb. Non-pronominals do
not. Preverbal subjects (of both sorts) fail to trigger agreement. You also
get absence of agreement when the (post-verbal) subject is a WH-trace
(although you get it back again in Welsh if the clause has a negative
complementiser).

There is a description of the phenomenon for Welsh in a paper by me in Frank
Heny's 'Binding and Filtering' and for Irish in a paper in NLLT 1 by
McCloskey and Hale. Borsley and Stephens discuss Breton in a paper in NLLT 7.
There is an incorporation analysis of Welsh pronominal agreement by Rouveret
in Syntax and Semantics Vol 23. Pronominally triggered agreement in Welsh was
also (part of) the topic of Rouveret's paper at the GLOW meeting last week in
Leiden.

Steve Harlow

With regard to whether my observation on verb agreement has been published, I
*think* I mentioned it (in a different context) in my 1971 MIT dissertation,
"The acquisition of verb-particle and dative constructions," toward the end; I
first observed the phenomenon listening to Haj Ross, and have mentioned it in
print somewhere, so that's my best guess.
Susan Fischer

For Ralph Thiede ("disagreement query"):
You will want to look at R. Kayne (1989) "Notes on English Agreement",
ms. CUNY. Kayne also discusses a paper by J Kimball and J. Aissen (1971)
"I Think, You Think, He Think," LI 2, 242-246, which might be of interest
to you.
-Guido Vanden Wyngaerd

[End Linguist List, Vol. 2, No. 121]