What is it about?
Consider a Latin expression such as “terra incognita” – unknown land. Both linguists and lay people often think that the word “incognita” is feminine BECAUSE it agrees in gender with another word – “terra”. But what about an expression such as “e pluribus unum” – one out of many? Why is “unum” a neuter form? Does it agree with anything? Furthermore, what controls the first person singular agreement in the verbs of “veni, vidi, vici” – I came, I saw, I conquered? This paper attempts a novel and general look at agreement phenomena.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Agreement phenomena are abundant in human language. Instances such as “e pluribus unum” and “veni, vidi, vici” are at least as frequent as the instances such as “terra incognita”. The common view of agreement is thus distorted. Linguistic theory needs to come up with a reasonable, systematic and empirically grounded treatment of agreement.
Perspectives
It is proposed in this paper that agreement in person, gender, and number is controlled by cognitive structure. Apparent agreement between linguistic forms is mostly a parallel, symmetrical relationship. Forms agree with one another because each of them agrees with the cognitive controller. Further studies of agreement should embrace such perspectives as diachronic development, role of normativity in linguistic structure, and behavioral and neural correlates of agreement processing.
Andrej A. Kibrik
Institute of Linguistics RAS
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Rethinking agreement: Cognition-to-form mapping, Cognitive Linguistics, February 2019, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/cog-2017-0035.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
