Project Details
Projekt
Anaphora vs. Agreement: investigating the Anaphor Agreement Effect
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2015 to 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 289743821
The Anaphor Agreement Effect (AAE henceforth) describes an observation, originally due to Rizzi (1990), that no language is attested where anaphors (i.e. expressions, such as *herself* our *ourselves* that must be bound by an antecedent in the sentence or clause they occur in) are capable of triggering regular person, number, and/or gender agreement on finite verbs. In simple terms, this means that an anaphor may never be the source of regular verbal agreement. For instance, in a language that exhibits object agreement, the verb in a sentence like *we like ourselves* could never receive a 1st person plural object agreement marker. It remains as yet unclear whether the AAE reflects a universal ban in natural language or rather simply a strong tendency among languages. Nor is it clear what the exact range of variation is in strategies for avoiding violations of the AAE. This a point with respect to which languages differ. For instance, in certain languages like Albanian, the agreement marker on the verb, when controlled by an anaphor, takes on a default form (3rd person singular instead of 1st person plural with a 1st person plural anaphor); in other languages like Inuit, the anaphor has to appear in a non-regular, agreement-blocking case, for instance a dative, when it appears in a position where it would have controlled agreement; and even other languages have special agreement markers that go with anaphors to prevent them from triggering regular agreement. This project, the first large-scale examination of the AAE, aims at resolving these unclarities, on the one hand by empirically investigating the universality of the AAE and the range of variation in strategies that languages exhibit to avoid violating it, and on the other hand by providing a theoretical explanation for the AAE and its cross-linguistic manifestations. Two PhD students to be supervised by the PIs, one located in Leipzig and one in Göttingen, will carry out in-depth typological studies on an array of languages to investigate the AAE in its full extent. This research will not only result in a more complete explanation of the AAE, but also yield a better understanding of the nature of anaphoric binding and verbal agreement in general. In particular, the long-standing question as to whether anaphoric binding reflects a type of morphosyntactic agreement (where the anaphors person, number and gender features must agree with that of its antecedent) can finally be addressed in this project by directly examining how that anaphoric binding and verbal agreement interact.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
