On the agreement between predicative complements and their target

Abstract

Predicative complements canonically show number and/or gender agreement with their target. The most detailed proposal on how to model it in HPSG is provided in Kathol (1999). This proposal, though, chiefly deals with the predicative adjectives of the Romance languages, and turns out to be inappropriate for dealing with predicate nominals. There is an obvious way to repair it, but it cannot be fitted in the canonical HPSG treatment of clauses with a predicative complement. It can be fitted, though, in a treatment of such clauses that was proposed in Van Eynde (2009). Adopting that treatment, the agreement is modeled in terms of a constraint on the lexemes which select a predicative complement.