Gender mismatches in Spanish and French N1/A de N2 affective constructions

Index agreement vs. morphosyntactic concord

Abstract

I examine Spanish and French agreement in sentences with "affective" N/A de N constructions, in terms of an agreement theory growing out of Pollard and Sag (1994, §2) and Kathol (1999), with a distinction between two kinds of agreement relations: index agreement and morphosyntactic concord. The application of this theory to hybrid nouns (Wechsler and Zlati´c, 2000) extends straightforwardly to affective constructions. Furthermore, Kathol's characterization of the difference between hybrid nouns in Spanish and French, which I pair with an interpretation in terms of the default unification mechanism of Lascarides and Copestake (1999), turns out to make correct predictions about subtle differences in predicate agreement with affective constructions in the two languages.