Multiple Antecedent Agreement: A comparative study of Greek and Latin
Cynthia A. Johnson
The Ohio State University
A study of multiple antecedent agreement, where more than one controls agreement on a
single or multiple targets, can provide insight into both historical and typological issues of
agreement in Indo-European. In contrast with single antecedent contexts, where the target
typically assumes the same features as the controller, multiple antecedent contexts produce an
agreement mismatch: the target’s features do not match those of at least one of the controllers.
Latin and Ancient Greek employ the same strategies in multiple antecedent contexts:
Resolution and Partial Agreement (cf. Corbett 1991, 2006; Wechsler & Zlatić 2003). Resolution
(1) is agreement with the collective noun phrase: the features of the conjoined controllers are
“computed” to produce plural number and a resolved gender. Partial Agreement (2) occurs when
the target assumes the features of only one of the antecedents; in most cases, the closest
antecedent provides the features (“nearest antecedent agreement”).
(1)
Resolution
i.
formosi
sunt verris
et scrofa
handsome.M.PL. are boar.M.SG. and sow.F.SG.
‘The boar and the sow are handsome.’ (Varro, RR II.4.4)
ii.
εἶδε
saw
πατέρα
τε καὶ µητέρα
καὶ ἀδελφοὺς
καὶ τὴν
father.M.SG. both and mother.F.SG. and brothers.M.PL. and the
εαυτοῦ
γυναῖκα αἰχµαλώτους
γεγενηµένους
own
wife.F.SG. captive.M.PL. made.M.PL.
‘He saw both his father and mother, his brothers, and his own wife had been made
captives’
(2)
Partial Agreement
i.
filia
atque unus
e
filiis captus est
daughter.F.SG. and one.M.SG. from sons was-captured.M.SG
‘the daughter and one of the sons were captured.’ (Caesar, BG 1.26)
ii.
πολλῶν δὲ λόγων
καὶ θορύβου
γιγνοµέ νου
much
and discussion.M.PL. and confusion.M.SG. arising.M.SG.
‘There arising much discussion and confusion’
Corbett (1991, 2006) explains the distribution of the two strategies by analyzing
Resolution as semantic agreement and Partial Agreement as syntactic agreement, which are
constrained by the Agreement Hierarchy (Corbett 1979) and the Predicate Hierarchy (Comrie
1975). Two corpus studies of Latin and Ancient Greek indicate that the patterns of the
hierarchies are observed.
In order to accurately describe the reality behind these typological generalizations, I
suggest a performance-based analysis that emphasizes the similarities between strategies like
Partial Agreement and attraction errors observed in psycholinguistic settings. Both nearest
antecedent agreement and attraction errors are affected by manipulating syntactic and semantic
features of the agreement participants (e.g. Bock & Miller 1991, Vigliocco & Franck 1999),
indicating a similar cognitive difficulty posed by both of these structures. When a speaker
encounters an infrequent and cognitively difficult construction, he/she can choose to avoid the
problem altogether through Partial Agreement, one type of Hock’s (2007) Avoidance strategies.
Under this analysis, it would not be impossible for Resolution and Partial Agreement to arise as
agreement strategies independently in Latin and Ancient Greek. The same strategies are found in
Sanskrit (Hock 2007), but also in non-Indo-European languages, e.g. Swahili (Corbett 1991), so
these strategies cannot be meaningfully projected back to the proto-language.
However, Ancient Greek provides an additional agreement issue that interacts with
multiple antecedent agreement: neuter plural subjects regularly agree with singular verbs. Within
multiple antecedent agreement, the resolved target of inanimate antecedents is a neuter plural
form, which raises the question of how the Resolution strategy will be affected: will Partial
Agreement be the preferred strategy for these contexts (as Resolution here involves an increase
in cognitive difficulty)? When Resolution does occur, will a verb target vs. an adjectival target
show different agreement features? The answers to these questions provide insight into how
agreement rules interact and whether a more complex set of agreement constraints can affect the
distribution of strategies (especially in comparison to a language that does not have an additional
constraint, i.e. Latin). Importantly, this neuter plural agreement rule is found also in Vedic
Sanskrit, Avestan, and Hittite, suggesting that it can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European. The
application and behavior of this rule in Ancient Greek can therefore give us a basis for
reconstructing agreement patterns in this context in the proto-language.
References
Bock, Kathryn, and Carol A. Miller. 1991. Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology 23:45-93.
Comrie, Bernard. 1975. Polite plurals and predicate agreement. Language 51(2):406–18.
Corbett, Greville. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
---. 1979. The agreement hierarchy. Journal of Linguistics 15(2):203-224.
---. 1991. Gender. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hock, Hans Henrich. 2007. Early Germanic agreement with mixed-gender antecedents with
focus on the history of German. Paper presented at the UCLA Indo-European
Conference, 2-3 November 2007.
Viggliocco, Gabriella, and Julie Franck. 1999. When sex and syntax go hand in hand: gender
agreement in language production. Journal of Memory and Language 40:455-78.
Wechsler, Stephen, and Larisa Zlatić. 2003. The Many Faces of Agreement. Stanford: CSLI
Publications.