An HPSG account of closest conjunct agreement in NP coordination in Portuguese

Abstract

This paper discusses the NP-internal agreement strategies observed in an empirical (corpus based) study of Portuguese, and proposes an analysis which is formalized in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The empirical study suggests that what were previously thought to be rare or non-existent strategies occur with surprising frequency. Capturing these strategies poses problems for many standard approaches to agreement. The formalization shows how they can be captured with a relatively conservative extension of the existing HPSG theory of agreement.