form and function

[Dick Hudson]

Dear Michael (Barlow) and Funknet,
Thanks for the two messages about agreement, reacting to my use of
adjective-noun agreement as an example of a purely formal relationship. I
think you may well be right, and agreement isn't anything like as good an
example as I thought it was.

>There may be relations which, for all intents and purposes, may count as
>purely formal. Here I am simply taking issue with Dicks's assumption (and the
>assumption of many people) that agreement is clearly formal in the sense
>that agreement can best be described by saying that form of the agreement
>target depends on the morphosyntactic form of the agreement source. If you
>want to account for a range of agreement phenomena in a language (even
>English), then such an approach breaks down.
## Yes, I certainly agree that in some cases it's clearly driven by
meaning, so we have to decide for each case how best to treat it. As a
matter of fact I've recently written a paper on English Subject-Verb
Agreement in which I've argued against the traditional agreement story in
terms of morphosyntactic features of person and number (English Lang and
Linguistics 3, 1999, 173-207).

>
>If agreement morphemes exert themselves in Quirk-style examples such as "that
>two weeks", "England collapse" "rain and mist is expected", "two is too many"
>"the french fries at table 10 is" etc., then are we assume that something
>completely different is occurring in the above examples compared to in "those
>two weeks" "England collapses" etc.
## Yes, precisely. These examples are strong evidence against a purely
formal account.


Richard (= Dick) Hudson

Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London,
Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT.
+44(0)171 419 3152; fax +44(0)171 383 4108;
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm