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Agreement, Shells, and Focus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Andrew Simpson  and
Zoe Wu
Andrew Simpson*
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Southern California
Zoe Wu*
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Southern California
*
Simpson, SOAS, University of London, Russell Sq, London WCIH 0XG, England [as4@soas.ac.uk]
Wu, Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, THH226A Los Angeles, CA 90089-0357 [xiuzhiwu@usc.edu]
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Extract

This article reconsiders the development and licensing of agreement as a syntactic projection and argues for a productive developmental relation between agreement and the category of focus. The authors suggest that focus projections are initially selected by a variety of functional heads with real semantic content. Over time however such selected focus frequently decays into a simple concord shell, and when this occurs, the lower half of the shell becomes a simple agreement projection parasitically licensed by the higher functional head, which does have a genuine semantic value.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 78 , Issue 2 , June 2002 , pp. 287 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America

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