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It's different with you: Contrastive perspectives on address research
Edited by Nicole Baumgarten and Roel Vismans
[Topics in Address Research 5] 2023
► pp. 373–396

Chapter 15
Hybrid agreement in polite address

A contrastive approach to Romance languages

| Freie Universität Berlin

This chapter examines ‘hybrid agreement’ in polite address in the Romance languages. This term usually describes a two-way agreement pattern and presents a major challenge to syntactic theories due to the apparent formal mismatches that occur, for example, in French Vous êtes loyal ‘You are loyal’, where the polite address pronoun vous and the predicate êtes are both plural, while the predicative adjective loyal is singular. Similarly, Modern Italian shows a gender conflict between the female politeness pronoun lei and the predicative adjective when the addressee is male, e.g., Lei è generoso ‘You are generous’. While Pollard and Sag (1994) and Wechsler (2011) assume double feature sets for solving mismatches of this sort, I propose an analysis including single feature sets and a syntactic politeness feature in the classical version of Lexical-Functional Grammar. Synchronic as well as diachronic evidence is supplied from a contrastive perspective on French, Italian, Peninsular Spanish, and Chilean Spanish.

Keywords: hybrid agreement, address pronouns, politeness, syntax, copula sentences, Lexical-Functional Grammar, French, Italian, Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1French
    • 3.2Italian
    • 3.3Spanish
  • 4.Summary
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tar.5.15gag
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