Icelandic agreement talk at WCCFL 38
I gave a syntax talk at WCCFL 38, at UBC in Vancouver, titled Accounting for variation in number agreement in Icelandic DAT-NOM constructions.
Basically, when they’re using certain specific verbs that don’t agree with their subjects, some Icelandic speakers let the verb agree with the object, and others don’t, and this seems to depend a little bit on word order. My proposal is an attempt to provide a concrete mechanism to explain these differences. The proposal uses the feature gluttony mechanism of Coon and Keine 2020 (an agreement mechanism wherein \(\varphi\)-probes can enter into agree relationships with multiple goals) to derive reported interspeaker variation in number agreement.
Update: proceedings paper here.