A new approach to plurals-of-politeness and their number agreement

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.