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Furthest conjunct agreement in Jordanian Arabic

Evidence for multiple (non)simultaneous Agree

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Abstract

Agreement with coordination has been a topic of much discussion in the syntactic literature for decades. This is due to its significance in deepening our understanding of key issues, such as the way primitive syntactic operations such as Merge and Agree operate and interact with hierarchical/linear distance, the location of agreement in the grammar, and whether or not narrow syntax, just like the PF, has access to linear order when valuing agreement. This paper empirically and theoretically contributes to the growing body of literature on the topic by investigating agreement with preverbal and sandwiched coordinate phrases in Jordanian Arabic. A special focus will be directed to furthest conjunct agreement, agreement with the first conjunct in preverbal position, since it challenges the mainstream generalization that conjunct agreement occurs with the closest conjunct. The paper reports on a series of four large-scale experiments on Jordanian Arabic and shows that agreement in these domains comes in various forms. Building on Citko (2018), I propose an analysis of the facts that overcomes the problems faced by previous work and that provides support to a new perspective on the computation of agreement, by distinguishing multiple simultaneous Agree that gives rise to resolved agreement from multiple nonsimultaneous Agree, where agreement may be distributed between narrow syntax and the PF.

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Notes

  1. See also among others Aoun et al. (1999), Dalrymple and Kaplan (2000), Soltan (2006), Corbett (2006), van Koppen (2007), Demonte and Pérez-Jiménez (2012), É. Kiss (2012), Larson (2013), Al Khalaf (2015), Palmović and Willer-Gold (2016), Arsenijević et al. (2019), and Mitić and Arsenijević (2019).

  2. The following abbreviations will be used in the paper: 1 = first person, 2 = second person, 3 = third person, acc = accusative, aux = auxiliary, cond = conditional, du = dual, f = feminine, fut = future, gen = genitive, ipfv = imperfective, m = masculine, neg = negation, nom = nominative, pass = passive, pl = plural, refl = reflexive, sg = singular, vir = virile.

  3. Zhang (2007, 2010) argues that there are two possible structures of comitatives. The first one is like the one shown in (8a), whereas the second has the comitative phrase as a VP adjunct. I will not discuss examples of the latter type although in many of the comitative constructions to be discussed in the paper, the comitative PP may receive a VP-adjunct parse.

  4. Much literature has shown that DPs/NPs are more permissive of extraction than previously thought. See for instance Chaves (2012). Thus, extraction out of a comitative does not necessarily incur an island violation. I here refer to comitatives in which the comitative PP forms a constituent with the core nominal.

  5. But note that in a comitative construction, the comitative nominal itself can be a coordinate phrase (1a). The same applies to the core nominal (1b). This is different from iteration.

    1. (i)
      figure o

    Moreover, as noted by an anonymous reviewer, the comitative nominal may itself act as a core nominal to another comitative nominal, as in John with Jane with her children came to the party. This is also different from iteration. The effect of adding a third nominal in a comitative is a stacking/embedding effect not an iteration effect. In particular, changing the order of nominals in such cases would often result in a drastic change in meaning (coffee with [cookies with cream] ≠ cookies with [coffee with cream]), but not in coordination (Ali and Omar and Hussein = Omar and Hussein and Ali). In other words, further embedding of a comitative PP does not change the fact that the biggest comitative contains only two nominals: the core nominal and the comitative nominal.

  6. One might wonder why I did not test the agreement of the element preceding the coordinate phrase and the one following it independently. I chose not to do so because it is not my intention to see if there is an interaction between the agreement forms of these elements because this will take us too far afield from the purpose of the study, which is agreement in preverbal position, specifically HCA. Thus, to control for any possible interaction that might affect the acceptability of agreement, I decided to test the effect of each sandwiching possibility individually, though testing the effect of the interaction would be an interesting issue to investigate.

  7. Transforming the results was also necessary because most speakers did not use a normal scale. I tried fitting a Cumulative Link Model (Christensen 2015) and Cumulative Link Mixed Model (Christensen 2019), using Ordinal package (Christensen 2018)—which are used for Likert data specifically. However, the assumptions of those models were not met because of the violation of normality of the scale. I thus decided to transform the data and use a generalized linear model using mlogit package, which can be used for such cases, following the recommendations of Field et al. (2012).

  8. I assume that sandwiched coordinate phrases occupy spec-TP and a verbal element occupies C. Assuming that subjects start in spec-vP, the coordinate phrase should move to spec-TP before it can agree with the element in C. See Sect. 5.

  9. Note that the analysis also accommodates the agreement pattern of the RAOnly group, the group that only allowed RA in preverbal position. It seems that for this group T always enters in a simultaneous Agree operation, which results in RA in narrow syntax.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Julie Anne Legate and Professor Hedde Zeijlstra for their insightful suggestions. I also thank three anonymous NLLT reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. I am indebted to all the students at the University of Jordan who volunteered to participate in the surveys. Special thanks go to the students of Special Topic in Linguistics course, which I taught in the spring semester of the academic year 2019/2020. I dedicate this paper to my husband, Akram Al-Shadaydeh, and to my children: Ibaa, Rawaa, Elan, Hawraa, and Saleh. I also thank my relatives: Karima Al-Shadaydeh, Naimah Al-Shadaydeh, Safaa Al-Manaseer, Ruba Al-Araydah, Ahmad Mousa Al-Manaseer, Hassan Al-Shadaydeh, Hussein Al-Shadaydeh, and Yasser Al-Shadaydeh for their emotional and financial support.

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    Eman Al Khalaf

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Test items of Experiment 1

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Appendix 2: Test items of Experiment 2

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Appendix 3: Test items of Experiment 3

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Appendix 4: Test items of Experiment 4

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Al Khalaf, E. Furthest conjunct agreement in Jordanian Arabic. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 40, 345–391 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-021-09515-0

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