Universal 576: semantic agreement for personal pronouns ⇒ semantic agreement for relative pronouns ⇒ ⇒ semantic agreement for predicates ⇒ semantic agreement for attributes

Original: The Agreement Hierarchy
If agreement features are optionally referential-semantic or syntactic, the likelihood of semantic agreement increases monotonically as one moves down the following hierarchy of targets:
Attributive > Predicate > Relative pronoun > Personal pronoun
Standardized: IF personal pronouns can have semantic rather than syntactic agreement in gender or number with a particular noun, THEN relative pronouns, predicative, and attributive constituents can also have semantic agreement with that noun.
IF relative pronouns can have semantic agreement in gender or number with a particular noun, THEN predicative, and attributive constituents can also have semantic agreement with that noun.
IF predicative constituents can have semantic agreement in gender or number with a particular noun, THEN attributive constituents can also have semantic agreement with that noun.
Keywords: agreement, gender, number, attributive, predicate, relative pronoun, personal pronoun
Domain: inflection, syntax, semantics
Type: implicational hierarchy
Status: achronic
Quality: absolute
Basis: languages in Corbett 1979, Corbett 1988, Corbett 1991: more than 200 from all over the place; claim originally motivated by Slavonic
Source: Corbett 1979, Corbett 1983, Corbett 1988, Corbett 1991: Ch. 8

Counterexamples: Hungarian (Ugric, Uralic) possibly violates this hierarchy, if appositives count as attributes. In Hungarian, appositives (nouns and adjectives) show semantic agreement, whereas predicates do not (Moravcsik 1997).

FP