Resolving polite conflicts in predicate agreement

Abstract

When an agreement controller contains conflicting semantic and formal features, the predicates that agree with it can differ with respect to the type of features they reflect. With the second person pronoun used for politely addressing a single referent, finite verbs always agree in (formal) plural number, while participles in some languages may or must agree in (natural) singular number and gender. Building on the claims from the previous literature that the honorific pronoun formally encodes both the grammatical features (plural number and person) and the natural gender and singular number, the analysis proposed in this paper derives the variation in predicate agreement by combining the formal tools of feature geometries, separate probing and variation in the ordering of Agree operations. The main claim advanced by the paper is that predicates differ with respect to the φ-features they probe for, and the order in which this probing applies.