Angles of Object Agreement

This volume draws on insights from a range of theoretical perspectives to explore objects, agreement, and their intersecting angles, based on novel data from multiple language families. The recent expansion of agreement theories has revealed new ways of integrating phenomena that affect objects and their relational and featural properties with conventional object markers, under a single ’agreement’ umbrella. The contributions to this book present the major advances in these new angles of research into object agreement, and highlight in particular the shared conditions on objects undergoing agreement that are attested in a large number of genetically unrelated languages and language modalities. Following a detailed introduction, the chapters are organized into four parts that explore respectively the mechanics of object agreement, constraints on symmetry, features of object agreement, and issues relating to the left periphery. The volume’s findings and the novel questions that they raise will be of interest to theoretical linguists, typologists, sign language researchers, and anyone working on the theoretical analysis of Amazonian, Bantu, Romance, Semitic, and Slavic languages.

Andrew Nevins, Professor of Language Sciences, University College London, Anita Peti-Stantic, Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Mark de Vos, Associate Professr in Linguistics, Rhodes University, Jana Willer-Gold, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Linguistics, University College London

Andrew Nevins is Professor of Language Sciences at University College London. He has conducted research on the contribution of minoritized languages to linguistic theory, with work ranging from Zazaki Kurdish to MaxakalÃ- Sign Language, across domains such as phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, and is involved with the training of new generations of researchers in methods of experimentally-based data collection. Within the domain of object agreement, he has worked on the person-case constraint, omnivorous number, and issues in exponence such as portmanteau and discontinuous expression of inflection.

Anita Peti-Stantić is Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. She is interested in the interface of syntax, semantics and information structure (primarily word order and clitic placement) but has also published on historical comparative sociolinguistics and language planning. Since 2017, she has been the PI of the Croatian Science Foundation project The Building Blocks of Croatian Mental Grammar: Constraints of Information Structure. Within the project, Peti-Stantić and her collaborators produced the Croatian Psycholinguistic Database available via the project website http: //megahr.ffzg.unizg.hr/.

Mark de Vos is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at Rhodes University South Africa and former chair of the Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies Society. He obtained his PhD from Leiden University in the Netherlands after completing his Masters at Universitetet i TromsÃ, in Norway. He has published and supervised research around topics on coordination, agreement and general syntax as well as exploring the quantitative psycholinguistics of early literacy in isiXhosa.

Jana Willer-Gold is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Linguistics at University College London. Her research explores the theoretical modelling of agreement informed by experimental methods with a focus on conjunct agreement, resolution, gender feature, attraction, attachment height in relative clauses, and with particular reference to South Slavic languages. She has been involved in the projects Coordinated Research in the Experimental Morphosyntax of South Slavic Languages (EMSS) and Agreement Mismatches in Experimental Syntax: from Slavic to Bantu (ESSB).