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Re: Number/Specificality/Archetypes in Language

From:John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Date:Thursday, September 23, 2004, 16:36
Thomas R. Wier scripsit:

> He did indeed. Which just goes to show that number agreement in > English cannot be purely determined based on either semantics or > morphology, since more recent American English has changed in this > respect.
I don't think this counts as evidence: the behavior of proper names is always going to be lexically idiosyncratic, because some features are sealed off whereas others bubble up. In the early days of the Union, "the united states" was clearly not a name but a mere phrase, more often applied to the united Netherlands than to us. Later it became a name and got singular agreement; though legal documents can still speak of "the United States or any of them", it feels profoundly weird to me, much more so than ordinary archaism.
> It's possible that all lexical items may simply lexically > specify what "number" they are, and failure to agree is simply a > feature-clash, i.e., there is no trigger or controller of agreement.
That strikes me as wildly unlikely, unless you want to say that the head of "dogs" is "-s". To my mind, claiming that American (at least) English doesn't have syntactic agreement in number is like claiming that it has grammatical gender on the grounds that ships, bells, countries (sometimes), and a few other inanimates are called "she". -- Henry S. Thompson said, / "Syntactic, structural, John Cowan Value constraints we / Express on the fly." jcowan@reutershealth.com Simon St. Laurent: "Your / Incomprehensible http://www.reutershealth.com Abracadabralike / schemas must die!" http://www.ccil.org/~cowan