Verb agreement in definiteness

[Frans Plank]

>Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 10:47:21 -0500
>From: ph1u at andrew.cmu.edu
>To: Frans Plank <Frans.Plank at uni-konstanz.de>
>cc: ph1u at andrew.cmu.edu
>Subject: Verb agreement in definiteness
>X-Authenticated: ph1u by cyrus.andrew.cmu.edu
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>
>Frans,
>When I attempt to send a posting to LINGTYP, it comes back telling me I'm
>not authorized to do so! Could I ask you to forward this to LINGTYP?
>Thanks, and best wishes,
>Paul
>----------------------------
>Dear LINGTYPers,
>
>The discussion of definiteness agreement has presupposed a purely
>morphological situation in which verbs show morphological agreement with
>definite NPs. There has been little recognition of the problematical
>nature of the term "definite", and the discussion seems to assume that a
>translation with the English definite article "the" exhausts the
>possibilities. In fact we need to consider discourse anaphoricity, and
>general (pragmatic?) constraints on verbs and objects. Regarding the latter,
>"even" English shows contrasts like
>
>They drank 0/some/the beer
>They drank up the beer/they drank the beer up
>*They drank up beer/*they drank beer up
>
>I'm not suggesting these are examples of definiteness agreement, of
>course, but just that we may need to look a little beyond simple
>morphology and that there may be a discourse dimension to all this. Sandy
>Thompson and I discussed some of these issues in our 1980 paper on
>Transitivity (Language 1980).
>Cheers,
>Paul Hopper
>