The emergence of internal agreement systems

Grammatical agreement means that two linguistic units share certain syntactic or semantic features such as gender, number or person. Agreement has a variety of grammatical functions. One of them, called internal agreement, is to signal which words are grouped together as part of the same phrase. This chapter explores how a population might self-organize such an agreement system. We argue that this happens when speakers attempt to reduce processing effort and avoid ambiguities.

Published online: 23 February 2012
https://doi.org/10.1075/ais.3.12beu