Some cases of disagreement in English: When the generative grammar meets the generative lexicon

Abstract

Inspired by Kim (2003, to appear), this paper explores a way to deal with some English cases of “disagreement” involving group-denoting nouns, agreement attraction, measure nouns, and predicate transfer, where “normal” agreement doesn`t seem to obtain between the determiners and nouns or between the subjects and verbs. We suggest that such cases are described in principled ways when the generative grammar theory interfaces with a generative lexicon theory. We take Copestake`s (1995) operator group-to-plural to combine with a group- denoting DP syntactically and provide [+Pl(ural)] for the DP. Then, we propose plural-to-unit, an operator that takes a plural measure DP, packages its denotation into a unit semantically, and provides [-Pl(ural)] for the DP. We show that this way of interfacing the syntax and lexicon theories describes disagreement cases with a greater descriptive adequacy generally maintaining the thesis of autonomy of syntax.