Hristov, Bozhil: A staggering four doctoral dissertations: the AANN construction revisited
This paper examines the construction exemplified in the title, consisting of the singular determiner a followed by an adjective, a numeral and a plural noun (abbreviated as AANN). Building on LFG work by Dalrymple and King (2019), I capture the syntactic structure and functional properties of this construction by assuming a standard NP analysis at c-structure, coupled with concord and index agreement within the NP at f-structure. I propose that the numeral, which acts as a modifier, agrees with the plural concord of the head noun, while the determiner proper (the article) is exceptionally allowed to agree with the N’ string staggering four doctoral dissertations in terms of index (singular when a single-unit reading is available). Thus, without altering the formal apparatus of LFG, this proposal has the advantage of explaining a number of previously unexplained contrasts and of being able to cover a wide range of related constructions, including quantified NPs of the ANN type without an adjective (another four dissertations), or quantified NPs with fluctuation in determiner and verb agreement (that/those four years in the US was/were…), where the numeral again agrees with the head noun in morphological concord, while the determiner’s number, like that of the verb, can reflect the singular or plural semantic interpretation of the numeral + noun unit, captured in LFG and HPSG via the semantics-sensitive index feature. Similar contrasts apply to collective nouns like family or to pseudo-partitives (a group of students was/were…), with variable verb agreement due to the subject’s fluctuating index (depending on how the subject is viewed semantically). All of this lends further support to the plausibility of the current proposal and its wider applicability in the grammar.
December 22, 2022 |