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Agreement variation in European Portuguese dilaects: on syntactic conditions for the alternation 3SG/3PL

Publication . Cardoso, Adriana; Carrilho, Ernestina; Pereira, Sandra

In this paper we scrutinize a case of concord variation in European Portuguese (EP) concerning third singular vs. third plural verbal agreement in the co-presence of an overt plural argument, which in the standard variety agrees with the inflected verb. The paper is focused on the linguistic factors that correlate with singular concord in this context. Going beyond previous proposals that emphasize the correlation between agreement variation and particular morphological and phonological factors, it is shown that there exist syntactic conditions that favor the incidence of non-standard singulars in EP. The empirical basis for this investigation is CORDIAL-SIN, a dialect corpus of EP (600,000 words). The evidence from this corpus leads us to discuss and reconsider the role that different linguistic factors play in the manifestation of non-standard singulars. It is shown that this case of third singular agreement occurs in EP dialects in correlation with particular syntactic conditions, mainly in unaccusative-like configurations. Furthermore, it is suggested that this kind of agreement variation may be ultimately ascribed to lexical variation concerning the availability and feature specification of (null) expletives.

2011Journal article

Open access