A new approach to plurals-of-politeness and their number agreement
Name
11049_2025_Article_9680.pdf
Size
1.47 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
9d8f47885f99a2f7cfaa1e855830f75f
Author(s)
Kaur, Gurmeet
Sinha, Yash
Date Issued
August 25, 2025
Journal
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Citation
Kaur, G., Sinha, Y. A new approach to plurals-of-politeness and their number agreement. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 43, 2935–2967 (2025).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Plural DPs, which indicate politeness or honorification towards a singular referent, have received significant attention in the literature. Unlike regular plurals that always trigger plural agreement, these DPs, which we call plurals-of-politeness/PoPs, can trigger singular agreement on some probes in some languages. Moreover, the distribution of singular agreement is subject to certain constraints. Expanding the class of PoPs to include not only pronominals but also nominals, which are crosslinguistically rarer and have received relatively less attention, this paper offers a new analysis of agreement with PoPs. We propose a structure of PoPs, in which the pl feature in a PoP is embedded further inside the DP than the pl feature in a regular plural. The core idea is that a probe that can access the pl feature in a regular plural can sometimes fail to do so in a PoP, resulting in singular agreement. This analysis can derive all the constraints on singular agreement with PoPs, which existing accounts of agreement with PoPs are unable to do. Additionally, by examining nominal and pronominal PoPs together, we provide the first unified account of DP-internal and external agreement with PoPs.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-025-09680-6
