Abstract
This study investigates “alternative agreement” in Danish, where predicative adjectives sometimes agree with the object of a preposition (P-Obj) rather than the subject. Unlike English “mismatch agreement” Danish alternative agreement occurs without linear intervention between the competing elements. Three experiments examine this phenomenon: two sentence-completion tasks (with fronted vs. in-situ P-Obj) and an acceptability judgment task. Results show that alternative agreement occurs significantly more frequently with singular P-Obj than plural P-Obj, and more frequently with fronted P-Obj than in-situ P-Obj. Standard agreement is consistently rated more acceptable than alternative agreement, though fronting increases the acceptability of alternative agreement. We argue that Danish alternative agreement results from two independent factors: (1) the phonological tendency to drop inflectional endings (apocope), affecting singular and plural P-Obj differently, and (2) the cognitive preference to interpret sentence—initial nominal elements as subjects, creating processing bias favoring agreement with fronted P-Obj. Rather than reflecting a new agreement system or language change, Danish alternative agreement appears to be a systematic performance error.
Introduction
We present the results from three studies on mismatch agreement in Danish not previously published internationally in English (, ; ). In the Danish literature, mismatch agreement is referred to as “alternative agreement” (). Danish verbal morphology is very weak, and because verbs only inflect for tense, the verb does not agree with the subject in person or number, which makes it impossible to make a direct comparison with mismatch agreement studies on, for example, English. However, in Danish, a predicative adjective agrees with the subject in number, when in the singular, and in gender (c = common gender, n = neuter):
(1) a. Katt-en / den er vild-Ø / *vild-t / *vild-e.
Cat-the / it is wild-c.sing/*wild-n.sing/*wild-plur
“The cat / it is wild.”
b. Dyr-et / det er *vild-Ø / vild-t / *vild-e.
Animal-the / it is*wild-c.sing/ wild-n.sing/*wild-plur
“The animal is wild.”
(2) a. Katt-e-ne / de er *vild-Ø / *vild-t / vild-e.
Cat-plur-the / they are*wild-c.sing/*wild-n.sing/ wild-plur
“The cats / they are wild.”
b. Dyr-e-ne / de er *vild-Ø / *vild-t / vild-e.
Animal-plur-the / they are*wild-c.sing/*wild-n.sing/ wild-plur
“The animals / they are wild.”
Interestingly, in informal variants of spoken and (unedited) written Danish, sometimes a predicative adjective appears to agree with the nominal complement of the preposition selected by the adjective (henceforth, the prepositional object, P-Obj) and not with the subject, even when the P-Obj is overtly accusative (i.e., a pronoun), as shown in the following examples from the web:
(3) Patrich og Simon er jeg vild-e med, dem har vi også snakket om, …
Patrick and Simon am I wild-plurwith, them have we also talked about
“Patric and Simon, I am crazy about. We've also talked about them.” [baby.dk/debat]
(4) Tusinde tak for alle jeres skønne hilsner på min fødselsdag,
Thousands thanks for all your lovely greetings on my birthday,
dem er jeg virkelig glad-e for.
them am I really happy-plurfor
“A thousand thanks for all your lovely greetings on my birthday. They really made me happy.” [Instagram]
(5) Jeg undskylder for meget tørre neglebånd –
I really apologize for my dry cuticles
jeg har ikke været god-e ved dem det sidste stykke tid;
I have not been good-plurwith them the last piece time
“I apologize for my dry cuticles. I haven't been good to them lately.” [appeal4.dk/blogs]
(6) De er SÅ søde, uanset om det er hund, kat eller hest!
They are so sweet, regardless if it is dog, cat or horse!
Jeg er trygg-e ved dem
I am comfortable-plurwith them
“They're SO sweet, no matter if it's a dog, a cat, or a horse! I'm comfortable with them.” [hestegalleri.dk/forum]
A striking fact about Danish alternative agreement is that the “competing” element does not “intervene.” A number of studies have shown that when a nominal element intervenes between the head noun in the subject and the verb in English or French, it may lead to subject–verb agreement errors, so-called mismatch agreement, if the two (or more) nouns differ in grammatical number (; ; ; ). For example, in (7), based on , the task is to complete the sentence by inserting a verb inflected for number (and tense):
(7) The key to the cabinets ___ missing. (Answer: is / are)
Central to this phenomenon is that the “distractor” [cabinets in (7)] intervenes linearly between the target noun (key) and the verb, leading to competition between the distractor and the target (this “intervention” is strictly linear, not hierarchical). In experiments, this “competition” elicits mismatch agreement in approximately 20% of cases. Note that the distractor is part of the subject noun phrase (NP), and because English has subject–verb agreement, the verb should agree with the head noun. Mismatch agreement is considered a performance error, and although random errors do occur, mismatch agreement, like many other types of performance errors, is not necessarily random but systematic (). It should be noted that, on one hand, not every agreement mismatch is agreement attraction (e.g., Keung and Staub, 2018), and, on the other hand, agreement attraction was perceived as a colloquial (dialectal) variation before it was thoroughly tested () and can arise without linear intervention (; ; ; ; ; among others).
Unlike the English type, as shown in (7), in Danish alternative agreement, the two competing elements are distinct constituents, a subject and a P-Obj, and the subject is always closer to the predicative adjective than its competitor, the P-Obj. When the P-Obj is in situ, as in (8) [and (3) and (4)], the subject immediately precedes the adjective, and both precede the P-Obj. When the P-Obj is fronted, as in (9) [and (5) and (6)], the subject still immediately precedes the adjective. The competing P-Obj never intervenes, and hence, Danish alternative agreement does not appear to be an intervention effect. In analogy with English mismatch agreement, we would thus expect only standard agreement (except for random mistakes).
(8) a. Jeg er vild-e med dem. (P-Obj in situ)
I am crazy-plurwith them
”I am crazy about them”
b. Vi er vild-Ø med den.
We are crazy-plurwith it
“I am crazy about them”
(9) a. Dem er jeg vild-e dem. (P-Obj fronted)
Them am I crazy-plurwith
“Those (ones), I am crazy about”
b. Den er vi vild-Ø med.
It are we crazy-plurwith
“That (one), I am crazy about”
Another striking fact about the Danish examples is that alternative agreement targets an element (P-Obj) inside a preposition phrase. outlines several cross-linguistic criteria for syntactic agreement. Based on these criteria, an argument inside a prepositional phrase should not be able to control agreement because such arguments are assigned case by a preposition. The preposition is necessary because adjectives are not able to assign case on their own (, p. 73). As a result, we would not expect the adjective to agree with P-Obj. However, this kind of agreement does occur in actual language use in Danish, as illustrated earlier in (3)–(6). Moreover, constructions in which the predicative adjective agrees with neither the subject nor the P-Obj are exceedingly rare (; see also ).
The basic question, then, is what controls this alternative agreement. One option is that it has to do with apocope and the alleged tendency to “swallow” or drop the endings in Danish (; ; , see also ). Dropping the plural -e leads to alternative agreement in examples such as (8b) and (9b). However, apocope primarily affects non-syllabic (weak) endings (such as neuter -t). Plural -e tends to be syllabic (heavy) and, hence, should be more resilient to erosion. Indeed, the -e ending is sometimes added, as in (3)–(6).
A second option is that the grammar as such is undergoing a change, possibly away from subject agreement and toward topic agreement: When a (non-subject) topic is fronted, it triggers alternative agreement, but alternative agreement may also be triggered when the topic is in situ (One obvious problem here is that this is circular: alternative agreement would signal topicality, and topicality triggers alternative agreement).
Finally, alternative agreement may in fact not be “alternative” but rather the result of a performance error, occasionally triggered by a number of independent factors under the right circumstances. We shall argue that the latter option is most likely the case.
A corpus study by investigated clear cases of agreement (i.e., where the P-Obj has a different number than the subject) and found that the average occurrence rate of alternative agreement was 2.4% for singular P-Obj and 5.5% for plural P-Obj. Although uninflected adjectival forms are generally far more frequent, the data showed that in alternative agreement, the inflected form of the predicative adjective appeared more often. This suggests that frequency alone cannot account for the occurrence of this phenomenon. In a reading time experiment, they found that sentences lacking agreement altogether, as in (10d), were read more slowly than sentences in which the predicative adjective agreed with the P-Obj, as in (10c). Perhaps most strikingly, there was no significant difference in reading times between alternative agreement, (10c), and standard subject agreement, (10b). The following examples are from (, p. 223):
(10) a. Full agreement:
Den bog var hun helt vild med for et år siden
That book was she completely crazy-singabout for a year ago
“She was completely crazy about that book a year ago”
b. Subject agreement:
De bøger var hun helt vild med for et år siden
Those books was she completely crazy-singabout for a year ago
“She was completely crazy about those books a year ago”
c. Agreement with P-Obj:
De bøger var hun helt vilde med for et år siden
Those books was she completely crazy-plurabout for a year ago
“She was completely crazy about those books a year ago”
d. No agreement:
Den bog var hun helt vilde med for et år siden
That book was she completely crazy-plurabout for a year ago
“She was completely crazy about that book a year ago”
Based on the findings discussed above, we predicted that plural P-Obj would trigger alternative agreement more readily than singular P-Obj. Plural NPs have been found to be “strong attractors” and elicit more errors than singular NPs (; ). Plural NPs are more marked than singular ones: children acquire plural forms later; people make more spontaneous errors with plural elements; plural nouns are often remembered as singular but not vice versa; working memory limitations affect plural elements more severely; and plural is more marked both semantically (meaning “more than one”) and morphologically (requiring inflectional endings; , p. 394–397). even suggested that alternative agreement only occurs with plural P-Obj, and found more cases of alternative agreement with plural than singular P-Obj in their corpus study.
We did two sentence-completion studies, one with fronting and one without fronting (, ), and an acceptability study to investigate the relationship between production and acceptability (). In the following, we bring these studies together in a synthesis, subjecting the data to a new analysis and, consequently, a new interpretation.
Sentence completion
Materials and methods
The studies involved a sentence-completion task using Google Forms. Participants were presented with sentences such as (11) and (12), where the expected predicative adjective is provided in the short preceding sentence. Participants were instructed to fill in the blanks by reusing the predicative adjective in the preceding sentence [e.g. a form of vild as in (11) and (12)]. The items in the two studies were almost identical, except for fronting and in the fronting condition, the sentences began with “And these here, … / And this here,…” as shown in (11) and (12):
(11) Jeg er helt vild med kager. Og dem her, dem er jeg specielt _____ med.
I am totally crazy about cakes. And these here, those am I particularly _____ about.
(12) Vi er helt vild-e med kager, især den her. Vi er specielt _____ med den her.
We are totally crazy-plur about cakes. We are particularly _____ about this here.
Note that the context shows standard agreement, biasing against alternative agreement, and crucially, that the grammatical number of the P-Obj and the grammatical number of the subject were always different, which ensured competition between the two.
The stimulus consisted of 28 target sentences (14 different predicative adjectives), presented in random order, half of which had a plural P-Obj and a singular subject, while the other half had a singular P-Obj and a plural subject. The stimulus set also included 42 fillers. The sentences were distributed across two lists such that each participant only saw one version of each sentence, that is, with either a plural P-Obj (and singular subject) or a singular P-Obj (and plural subject). The predicative adjectives involved were:
(13) enig (agreeing), glad (happy), god (good), ligeglad (indifferent), stolt (proud), sur (angry), tilfreds (satisfied), træt (tired), tryg (comfortable), vild (crazy), sikker (sure), ked (sad), and flov (embarrassed).
In the first study, involving 100 participants (82 females, 16 males; age 21–75 years, mean 35.6), all the sentences had a fronted P-Obj, as in (11). In the second study, involving 74 participants (54 females, 20 males; age 24–75 years, mean 45.2), all the sentences had a P-Obj in situ, as in (12).
Results
The results were analyzed in R (v.4.1.2; ) and plotted using the tidyverse package (). We used mixed effects models with logistic regression (glmer), using the lme4 package (), one model for each study. The models had alternative agreement as outcome and number (P-Obj = singular vs. P-Obj = plural), frequency of the predicative adjective (log10 transformed), and trial as predictors; random intercepts for participant and item (sentence); and random slopes for number by participant and by sentence. Both models converged with warnings.
The results are shown in Table 1 and Figure 1. In both studies, the effect of number was highly significant (p ≤ 0.001); the effect of log10 frequency of the predicative adjective was also significant (p ≤ 0.05): the more common the adjective, the more alternative agreement. Language change typically starts in infrequent forms; according to , p. 141), “words that are used more often—lexical items which have a high token frequency—are more resistant to regularization over time.” So, we would expect a significant, negative frequency effect if alternative agreement were indeed a change in the language system.
Table 1
| 1. P-OBJ IN SITU | Estimate | SE | z | p |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| (Intercept) | −9.366 | 1.822 | −5.141 | 0.000*** |
| Number (P-Obj = sg) | 2.560 | 0.767 | 3.336 | 0.001*** |
| Frequency (log10) | 1.414 | 0.592 | 2.388 | 0.017* |
| Trial | −0.016 | 0.026 | −0.601 | 0.548 |
| 2. P-OBJ FRONTED | Estimate | SE | z | p |
| (Intercept) | −5.752 | 1.156 | −4.975 | 0.000*** |
| Number (P-Obj = sg) | 3.517 | 0.688 | 5.114 | 0.000*** |
| Frequency (log10) | 0.764 | 0.389 | 1.963 | 0.050* |
| Trial | −0.001 | 0.019 | −0.051 | 0.960 |
The results of the mixed-effects logistic regression models of alternative agreement as a function of number (sg = singular), lexical frequency, and trial.
***p < 0.001.
*p < 0.05.
Figure 1
There was no significant effect of trial.
To see if the two models were different, we applied a standard linear model (lm) with alternative agreement as outcome and the interaction between position [in situ (Study 1) vs. fronted (Study 2)] and number as predictor. There were no random factors as neither participants nor items were the same in the two studies. The result showed that the interaction was significant (p < 0.001).
Acceptability study
What people say or write (the types of constructions people use) is not necessarily the same as what they find acceptable (). Neither study nor the two studies analyzed earlier tell us whether Danish speakers find alternative agreement acceptable. However, given that standard agreement is elicited more frequently than alternative agreement, we hypothesized that standard agreement would also be more acceptable. Furthermore, we hypothesized that fronting would also increase acceptability of alternative agreement, as fronting increased elicitation of alternative agreement.
Materials and methods
We constructed an acceptability test on Google Forms using a set of stimulus sentences modeled on actual examples with context found on Google, as in (3)–(6). We used 12 different predicative adjectives, the same as in (13), except that we used vred på (angry with) instead of sikker/sikre på (sure about), ked(e) af (sad about), flove (over). Each sentence was preceded by a short context, and each adjective occurred with and without fronting, with and without alternative agreement and with a singular P-Obj (and plural subject) and with a plural P-Obj (and singular subject). This resulted in 96 target sentences, as in (14)–(15) (plus 17 fillers, not discussed here, consisting of 14 sentences with similar structures but with a different adjectival agreement paradigm, -t vs. de, and 14 unrelated sentences where half had a tense omission error). The stimuli were distributed across 8 lists, with 12 targets and 13 fillers (Latin square), presented in random order. Participants were instructed to evaluate each sentence on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = completely unacceptable, 7 = completely acceptable), and to use their own intuition rather than what they thought might be “correct” or “standard.”
(14) Disse tasker er fundet i en genbrugsbutik i Berlin.
These bags are found in a second-hand-shop in Berlin.
a. Jeg er vild-Ø/e med dem, (P-Obj = plur, in situ)
I am wild with them,
b. Dem er jeg vild-Ø/e med, (P-Obj = plur, fronted)
Them am I wild with,
fordi der er så mange farver, og pailletterne er for skønne.
because there are so many colors, and sequins-the are too beautiful.
“These bags were found in a thrift shop in Berlin. I love them because there are so many colors and the sequins are so pretty.”
(15) Denne taske er fundet i en genbrugsbutik i Berlin.
This bag is found in a second-hand-shop in Berlin.
a. Vi er vild-Ø/e med den, (P-Obj = sing, in situ)
We are wild with it,
b. Den er jeg vild-Ø/e med, (P-Obj = sing, fronted)
It are we wild with,
fordi der er så mange farver, og pailletterne er for skønne.
because there are so many colors, and sequins-the are too beautiful.
“This bag was found in a thrift shop in Berlin. I love it because there are so many colors and the sequins are so pretty.”
The study involved 197 participants (196 female, 1 male; age 18–72, mean = 32).1 We used a cumulative link mixed-effects model (clmm) with the ordinal package for R (). The model had acceptability as outcome variable and the three-way interaction between agreement, fronting, and number as predictor and random intercepts for participants and items, and random slopes by participant for the three-way interaction. The results are shown in Table 2, and the interaction between agreement and fronting is illustrated in Figure 2A. Figure 2B shows the distribution of acceptability ratings by agreement. The distribution for alternative agreement in situ is skewed to the left; the one for fronted is more or less flat.
Table 2
| Effect | Estimate | SE | z | p |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agreement (standard) | 3.359 | 0.359 | 9.357 | 0.000*** |
| Fronting | 0.779 | 0.313 | 2.490 | 0.013* |
| Number (P-Obj = sg) | −0.102 | 0.317 | −0.324 | 0.746 |
| Agreement × fronting | −0.915 | 0.453 | −2.019 | 0.044* |
| Agreement × number | 0.095 | 0.458 | 0.208 | 0.835 |
| Fronting × number | 0.259 | 0.441 | 0.587 | 0.557 |
| Agreement × fronting * number | −0.891 | 0.635 | −1.403 | 0.161 |
The results of the cumulative mixed-effects model of acceptability as a function of agreement, fronting, and number.
The first three lines show the main effects of Agreement, Fronting and Number, respectively.
***p < 0.001.
*p < 0.05.
Figure 2
Discussion
In , it is hypothesized that adjectives in alternative agreement constructions might agree with a pragmatic element (topic) rather than the syntactic subject. Typological data from , p. 319ff) supports this, showing that “trigger-happy” agreement (where multiple grammatical elements can control agreement) depends on an NP's “topicworthiness”—how likely it functions as a topic—which relates to NP definiteness and pragmatic prominence or “salience” (, p. 329). The following hierarchy shows decreasing topicworthiness:
(16) (I love) it > this book > the book > a book
Because fronted elements tend to serve as topics or focus elements with discourse prominence, it could be argued that alternative agreement would be easier to elicit in sentences with fronting, which is also the pattern that we attested in the first study. However, the pattern in Figure 1 can be explained with reference to two independently motivated factors that do not require the stipulation of a new kind of agreement system, namely, apocope (sometimes dropping the -e ending, resulting in bare forms) and the preference for having the subject first (sometimes leading to a misparse and reanalysis), as we discuss next.
Some instances of apparent alternative agreement may be due to the phonological loss of inflectional endings on adjectives in Danish, such as apocope (see the Introduction). When the P-Obj is singular (and the subject is plural), dropping the -e increases the amount of alternative agreement (because -Ø is singular agreement); conversely, when the P-Obj is plural (and the subject is singular), the tendency to drop the -e only enforces the standard subject agreement (i.e., the bare form). This explains why both lines in Figure 1 have an upward slope, with more cases of elicited alternative agreement with a singular P-Obj.
The second factor is related to the fact that the subject appears in the sentence-initial position more frequently than any other syntactic function in Danish: Subject–verb–object order occurs almost 10 times as frequently as object–verb–subject order (), and overall, the subject is the initial constituent approximately 70% of the time (; see also ; ). The fact that Danish is overwhelmingly a subject-initial language may lead us to interpret the first nominal constituent as the subject. When processing a sentence in which the syntactic role of the first NP is ambiguous, it is initially interpreted as the subject (; ). Therefore, in constructions where P-Obj is fronted, the sentence may be reanalyzed upon encountering the actual subject right after the finite verb. However, this initial misinterpretation is likely not fully discarded (; ), which could bias processing in favor of agreement with the predicative adjective. Furthermore, in Danish, where the subject normally has nominative case, sometimes the subject may be accusative instead of nominative, at least in colloquial speech and informal writing, for example, coordinate subjects and post-modified pronominal subjects (; ). This means that even in cases in which P-Obj is morphologically marked as accusative, it could still initially be analyzed as a subject; compare our stimulus sentences in examples (14b). In (15b), the singular P-Obj den “it” is ambiguous due to syncretism between nominative and accusative, hence, easily compatible with being the subject. In short, there is more alternative agreement with a fronted P-Obj than with an in-situ P-Obj simply because the first NP tends to be the subject, and because Danish has subject–predicate agreement. This asymmetry is significantly affected by number, because apocope increases alternative agreement when the fronted P-Obj is singular but decreases it when the P-Obj is plural.
Standard agreement is significantly more acceptable than alternative agreement (significant main effect of agreement, see Table 2), but alternative agreement is significantly more acceptable if the P-Obj is fronted than if it is in situ, as shown in Figure 2A; compare the significant agreement × fronting interaction effect in Table 2. There was, however, no effect of number. As shown in Figure 2B, the distribution of acceptability ratings for alternative agreement in situ is skewed to the left, suggesting that it is generally considered unacceptable. The distribution when the P-Obj is fronted (blue line) is more or less flat, suggesting that across participants, the overall acceptability was less clear. This indeterminacy, following ideas by , might be taken as an indication of a “grammatical lacuna,” a gap in the grammar where a clear rule is not specified. However, we argue that our results can be explained by the independently motivated factors mentioned above: apocope and misparsing with fronting. This seems more parsimonious than suggesting specific rules for each of the individual levels of the interaction between fronting and agreement and then suggesting that the one for alternative agreement with a fronted P-Obj (the blue line in Figure 2B) is unspecified. The flat distribution is also compatible with our explanation.
One might speculate that alternative agreement is due to phonetic factors, because the two forms might be close to identical in pronunciation. However, vild and vilde, for example, are in fact phonetically distinct: Vild has “stød” (it basically ends with a glottal stop), whereas the final schwa in vilde is assimilated with the preceding vowel or sonorant without syllable loss (; ; ). suggest that alternative agreement may have started as spontaneous phonetic assimilation which, over time, has been integrated into the language system. However, because alternative agreement does not occur without a competing complement nominal, (1)–(2), and is not found with attributive adjectives, this indicates that phonetic factors alone cannot explain the phenomenon.
Agreement with predicative adjectives occurs across Romance and Scandinavian languages, regardless of inflectional richness (). In generative grammar, agreement is viewed as the matching of grammatical person, number, and gender features (Kayne, 1989). In standard subject–adjective agreement, the subject originates inside the adjective phrase as part of its argument structure, which allows for local feature agreement. By analogy with Kayne's (1989) analysis of participle agreement in French, one might hypothesize that a fronted P-Obj agrees with the predicative adjective through movement. However, Danish alternative agreement is difficult to explain on syntactic grounds alone because (a) it occurs regardless of whether the P-Obj remains in situ or is fronted, (b) in the absence of an intervener, and (c) it takes place in a preposition phrase, which, according to , should not be possible.
Conclusion
As the discussion shows, accounting for Danish alternative agreement on predicative adjectives using a single explanatory model is difficult. It seems more plausible that a conspiracy of different factors explains the phenomenon. In our elicitation experiment, the result resembled a 50/50 distribution between standard agreement and alternative agreement when the fronted P-Obj was singular. This remarkable pattern can be attributed to two well-known factors that we know play a role independently of the grammatical phenomenon under scrutiny here—namely, on one hand, the tendency to drop inflectional endings in Danish, and on the other hand, a preference for interpreting the first nominal element as the subject. When these two factors are eliminated, alternative agreement is virtually non-existent; that is, when P-Obj is in situ and hence, the initial NP is the subject. When P-Obj was plural and the subject singular, the inflected form of the predicative adjective (alternative agreement by adding -e) was used in only 1% of the cases. As “alternative agreement” is not actually an alternative to standard agreement, perhaps “atypical agreement” would be a more appropriate label.
Although we cannot rule out that the phenomenon might reflect a new kind of agreement system interfering with standard subject agreement or that we are witnessing the emergence of a language change, we likewise have no data to support that. Conversely, performance errors are usually not entirely random but often systematic. Moreover, the phenomenon of alternative agreement is in fact systematic and productive, and for the very same reasons, it appears to be more or less acceptable among Danish speakers.
Statements
Data availability statement
The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.
Author contributions
KC: Project administration, Data curation, Methodology, Visualization, Validation, Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Formal analysis, Investigation, Software. AN: Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Formal analysis, Investigation, Validation, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Conceptualization.
Funding
The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research and/or publication of this article. Anne Mette Nyvad was funded by a grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark (grant ID: DFF-9062-00047B).
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Generative AI statement
The author(s) declare that Gen AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. Gen AI was used to shorten the paper and to draft the abstract.
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Footnotes
1.^There is a massive gender bias, but we do not have any reason to expect any difference in their acceptability ratings one way or the other. The participants were recruited on Instagram in a knitting forum. We have no reasons to assume that people who knit use more or less alternative agreement either.
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Summary
Keywords
fronting, apocope, performance error, acceptabilitity, grammaticality
Citation
Christensen KR and Nyvad AM (2025) Alternative agreement in Danish—mismatch without intervention. Front. Lang. Sci. 4:1632675. doi: 10.3389/flang.2025.1632675
Received
21 May 2025
Accepted
09 September 2025
Published
13 October 2025
Volume
4 - 2025
Edited by
Arthur Stepanov, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia
Reviewed by
Björn Lundquist, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway
Maayan Keshev, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Updates
Copyright
© 2025 Christensen and Nyvad.
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*Correspondence: Ken Ramshøj Christensen krc@cc.au.dk
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