Summary
There exist two major proposals concerning the feasibility of a universal semantically based definition of grammatical agreement (GA), and the issue of a universal semantically based solution to the domain problem of GA, viz. Keenan’s functional (dependency) principle and its elaborations, and the’coreference/anaphoric’ approach, first presented in Lapointe (1980). Both proposals have been put forward as absolute universal principles governing GA. This paper pursues several issues related to empirical testability of both approaches and shows, on the basis of Indo-European and Non-Indo-European evidence, that there exist significant counterexamples to both principles, which invalidate them as absolute universals and seriously undermine the corresponding universal definitions of GA.
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin · Heidelberg
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Schmidt, P. (1996). Semantically Based Universal Definitions of Grammatical Agreement and Agreement Domain Universals: A Critical Evaluation. In: Gaul, W., Pfeifer, D. (eds) From Data to Knowledge. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79999-0_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79999-0_37
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