ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Language Processing
This article is part of the Research TopicBeyond Agreement: Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Syntactic Feature Manipulation in Real TimeView all 6 articles
On Semantic Agreement
Provisionally accepted
Isabelle Charnavel1*
Dominique Sportiche2*- 1Université de Genève, Genève, Switzerland
- 2UCLA, Los Angeles, United States
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We discuss semantic agreement, cases in which agreement between a head and a DP seems to drive, or be driven by, interpretive properties of this DP rather than its syntactic properties. This discussion centers mostly on the case of subject/verb number and person agreement (but its conclusions would extend to other cases of agreement between a head and a DP). In such a configuration, semantic agreement occurs in cases in which the feature values on T do not seem to match the feature values of its DP subject. More specifically, we conclude that features on agreeing heads (probes in the Agree sense of Chomsky, 2000) can and sometimes must be semantically interpretable. In such cases, the values of the features on T can target the denotational properties of its DP subject, instead of its ϕ-feature (values): they can or must trigger a presupposition about this DP subject's denotation.
Keywords: agreement, Collective nouns, conjunction, Partitives, Presupposition
Received: 08 May 2025; Accepted: 08 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Charnavel and Sportiche. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Isabelle Charnavel
Dominique Sportiche
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