Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

In this talk I will present data from a collaboration with Jutta Hartmann (Stuttgart) in which we investigate how agreement is resolved in copular clauses where there are potentially two DPs that could control it. In particular the case that shows the most variation is that of “specificational” copular clauses like “My greatest fear is/are marauding zombies.”  I will present data from two SOV Germanic languages (Dutch and German) and two SVO (Faroese and Icelandic) that give some idea of the inter- and intra-language variation. I’ll argue that some cases where there is mismatch in person, as well as / instead of number, constitute a further exception to Baker’s SCOPA generalization about the locality of person agreement. Finally, I will outline an analysis and discuss the extent to which the data allow us to discriminate between different types of approach, including possible variants of the analysis presented in Bejar & Kahnemuyipour 2014.