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The Two Faces of Agreement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Alex Alsina  and
Boban Arsenijević
Alex Alsina*
Affiliation:
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Boban Arsenijević*
Affiliation:
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
*
Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 08018 Barcelona, Catalonia [alex.alsina@upf.edu]
[[b.arsenijevic@gmail.com]
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Abstract

The goal of this discussion note is to argue that the complex facts of hybrid agreement in Serbo-Croatian can and should be accounted for by assuming that only two sets of features are relevant to agreement: a syntactic set and a semantic set. This is in opposition to existing proposals that claim that two distinct sets of syntactic features are required in addition to the set of semantic features in order to account for those agreement facts (Wechsler & Zlatić 2000, 2003). The proposal defended here with two sets of agreement features is shown to be superior to the alternative with three feature sets because it not only is simpler and accounts for the facts just as well, but it also does not make some incorrect predictions that the alternative makes when crucial facts are considered.

Keywords

agreementhybrid agreementconcordsemantic agreementSerbo-Croatian

Information

Type
Discussion Notes
Information
Language , Volume 88 , Issue 2 , June 2012 , pp. 369 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Linguistic Society of America

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