Agreement, Shells, and Focus
- Resource Type
- research-article
- Authors
- Simpson, Andrew; Wu, Zoe
- Source
- Language, 2002 Jun 01. 78(2), 287-313.
- Subject
- Verbs
Morphemes
Linguistic agreement
Pronouns
Relative clauses
Syntax
Linguistics
Syntactics
Definiteness
Linguistic complements
- Language
- English
- ISSN
- 00978507
15350665
This article reconsiders the development and licensing of agreement as a syntactic projection and argues for a productive developmental relation between agreement and the category of focus. The authors suggest that focus projections are initially selected by a variety of functional heads with real semantic content. Over time however such selected focus frequently decays into a simple concord shell, and when this occurs, the lower half of the shell becomes a simple agreement projection parasitically licensed by the higher functional head, which does have a genuine semantic value.