Common Contracts
1 similar Secondary Agreement contracts
Information structure and secondary agreementSecondary Agreement • August 25th, 2005
Conditions on verb agreement are often assumed to be definable in purely syntactic terms. In some languages, however, agreement depends on information structure role: the verb agrees with topical ar- guments, and not with nontopics. We will explore the interaction of discourse roles and agreement with nonsubjects in two languages, Northern Ostyak and Maithili, showing that the verb agrees with the secondary topic in both languages. We present a formal analysis of these patterns within the theory of Lexical Functional Grammar, which allows for a formal representation of discourse roles in information structure as well as grammatical functions.
