Morphology and Agreement

Agreement is the systematic covariance of one element's form with properties of another, and it is asymmetric: the controller determines the target. Gender, number and person are the indisputable agreement features because their values originate on the controller, gender inherent to the noun, person to the pronoun, and number relating primarily to the noun; case covaries within the noun phrase too, but is imposed on noun and modifier alike by a governor outside it, and definiteness is imposed on the phrase as a whole, so neither is agreement. The exponents of agreement are affixes before, after and inside the stem, and a target may carry several for one controller; the features constrain one another, Russian distinguishing gender only in the singular in conformity with Greenberg's universal, and their joint expression may be fusional and syncretic, at its most spectacular in polarity, where the Somali article of one gender in one number is that of the other gender in the other number. The target then shapes agreement twice over. The forms available depend on its word class and even its lexical class, Upper Sorbian finite verbs and participles agreeing in different features and Latin adjective classes distinguishing three genders, two or none; and the form selected may depend on another target or on syncretism, conjoined Chichewa plurals taking the target form they share rather than the resolved one. The chapter's examples are the rows of Data/Examples/Corbett1998.json.

Implementation notes

• The asymmetry criterion is read off where a covarying feature's value originates, the chapter's classification of the five dimensions carried as data; what a Russian target is inflected for is derived from its forms in the fragment, and what it agrees in is the inflected dimensions whose origin is the controller.
• Polarity is the substrate's Morphology.Polar, which the Somali fragment proves of its article (Table 9.1); the verbal prefix is shown not to be polar, the plural prefix coinciding with the masculine singular's instead.
• Number-conditioned gender distinctions are the substrate's convergent maps between the target genders of two numbers; Chichewa's coordination rules are the substrate's ordered resolution rules over fragment nouns, one per target form before the semantic rule.
• The agreement slots of a target, their controllers and their bound of four are described in the rows and not modelled.
• The syncretism claims are stated over the languages' own gender carriers, not over the cell-to-exponent tables of Syntax/Agreement/Paradigm.lean, whose gender cells take the Universal Dependencies tags.

TODO

• Nichols's hierarchy of the three features by their propensity to be marked only by agreement, the default-or-ungrammaticality outcomes of missing morphology, and the dependence of one target's form on another in Tigre, in Somali focus constructions and in German noun phrases are prose only.
• The Chichewa nouns carry no number, so the restriction of the shared-form rule to plural conjuncts, and the triggering of gender resolution by number resolution, are not stated.

References

• Corbett 1998, Morphology and Agreement
• Corbett 1998, Morphology and Agreement
• Corbett 1998, Morphology and Agreement
• Corbett 1998, Morphology and Agreement