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Polite plurals and predicate agreement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Bernard Comrie
Bernard Comrie*
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge, England
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Abstract

Different kinds of predicate—nominal, adjectival, verbal etc.—may behave differently under predicate agreement when there is a difference between underlying and superficial subject. Data from a number of languages (Slavic, Romance, Modern Greek) concerning predicate agreement with the polite plural (semantically singular, but plural in surface structure) suggest that more verb-like predicates tend to agree with features of the surface subject, while more noun-like predicates tend to agree with the underlying subject. The pattern that emerges across languages is of a continuum from VERB to NOUN, with individual languages having different specific categories along this continuum. Other possible solutions, more traditional within transformational theory, are examined—the view that adjectives are verbs; feature analysis of major categories; rule-ordering—but these prove unable to characterize adequately the kind of data under discussion.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 1975, pp. 406 - 418
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 by Linguistic Society of America

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