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Share Paper 3820

A Novel Account of Mixed Concord: The View from Punjabi Honorifics
Gurmeet Kaur and Yash Sinha
182-191 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

Mixed concord is the phenomenon where different modifiers in a single DP express concord for different values of the same feature. Existing accounts (e.g., Norris 2014, Pesetsky 2014, Landau 2016) generally agree that mixed concord configurations result from the partitioning of the nominal domain into two agreement zones via a functional head (say F) that introduces a feature value distinct from the head noun's. Modifiers that merge below F show concord with the head noun while those above F show concord with F. This paper examines mixed concord with Punjabi honorific nouns which obtains only with feminine but not masculine honorifics. While existing accounts can explain mixed concord with feminine honorifics, they are unable to explain the gender asymmetry. We provide a complete account of mixed concord in Punjabi, which employs insights from the analysis of gender asymmetry. In specific, we propose that a probe involved in concord can vary with respect to its search domain (i.e., how far in the DP the probe can search), modeled in terms of Interaction and Satisfaction conditions (Deal 2015, 2022). This yields gender asymmetry. Mixed concord arises when the nominal structure hosts two probes, each with its independent search domain, which allows mismatching valuation of features on each probe. Post-syntactic Feature Copying (in the sense of Norris 2012) ensures that modifiers reflect the feature values of the closest probe, resulting in mixed concord.

Published in

Proceedings of the 42nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Shweta Akolkar, Amber Galvano, Akil Ismael, Kang Franco Liu, and Line Mikkelsen
Table of contents
Printed edition: $475.00