form and function

[Michael Barlow]

Dick Hudson states:

> >He sees a formal rule linking those forms, but others don't.
> ## But since the formal rule is on the table (labelled "Rule A") it's now
> over to you to show how you can describe the covariance of noun and
> modifying adjective without using formal categories such as Noun, Adjective
> and Modifying.  It would also be good to see reasons why this gives a
> better analysis than Rule A.
>

I am not against the use of formal categories of Noun and Adjective. I need
them too.

Rule A works well in those cases where (i) the source of agreement, the noun,
is both present and is fully specified for agreement features and where (ii)
the agreement features of the adjective don't differ in their value from the
features of the noun. Looking at more data, however, leads to the discovery of
examples in which the source is either absent or exhibits fewer "features"
than occur on the agreement target, a situation, which I noted in my more
formalist days (1988), could be handled better by a unification account than
by feature copying or coindexing. More interesting are those cases in which
there is a feature mismatch (such as those noted by, for example, Edith
Moravcsik many years ago; by Grev Corbett in various publications; and, for
French, by Blinkenberg 1950).

Dick Hudson would agree that formal features such as FEM or PLUR have
interpretations or meanings and, in fact, are often polysemous such that
within a particular language PLUR may indicate, for instance, something like
"multiple entities" or "a single entity politely referred to". A FEM feature
might indicate "grammatical gender" or "natural gender". These relations
between forms and meanings are conventional; they are a part of a language and
are to some extent separate from information about actual referents. For Dick
(and many others) these interpretations have nothing to do with agreement.

If we consider the agreement features of an adjective, we can ask whether the
agreement relation associated with those features (i) is morphosyntactic and
depends on the features of the noun sources; or (ii) is based on a
"consistency" of interpretations of agreement features, or (iii) depends on
the properties of the referent associated with the noun.

My Rule B is based on a consistency relation between interpretations of
nominal/agreement morphology and relates to the identification and tracking of
discourse referents. I believe that this non-syntactic account is a "better
analysis" because it covers a wider range of data and because it can be shown
that what at the morphosyntactic level are unmotivated feature mismatches
typically turn out to "make sense" at the level of interpretation.  A mismatch
in formal features is nearly always associated with "extra" information about
the associated discourse referent. (I am far from home and don't have any
examples at hand.)  Also, when an agreement morpheme shows up in a discourse
fragment with no accompanying noun, and hence nothing to be modified by, then
somehow the agreement morpheme is still always there; it is not omitted.

I don't want to state Rule B here---I usually rely on diagrams---but
conceptually it is quite straightforward and involves (i) a listing of the
conventional relations between agreement/nominal morphemes and their
interpretations and (ii) a description of what counts as a coherent chain of
discourse referents, which is essentially that the associated interpretations
be consistent. (My Rule B can be found in a recent "agreement" issue of Folia
Linguistica XXXIII/2 guest-edited by Grev Corbett, which I am happy to send to
Dick and anyone else interested.)

I guess that the differences between our accounts of agreement come down to
the range of data to be considered as "ageement" and the level of commitment
or priority given to a morphosyntactic account, which in turn is associated
with differing degrees of tolerance of multi-domain accounts along the lines
of the discussion of reflexives in John Moore's recent posting.

Michael