• Language and Information
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.55-68
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• 2003

Most of the previous approaches to English agreement phenomena have relied upon only one component of the grammar (e.g., either syntax, or semantics, or pragmatics). This paper argues that interrelationships among different grammatical components play crucial roles in such phenomenon too (cf. Kathol 1999 and Hudson 1999). The paper proposes that, contrary to traditional wisdom, English determiner-noun agreement is morpho-syntactic whereas subject-verb and pronoun-antecedent agreement are reflections of index agreement (cf. Pollard and Sag 1994). The present hybrid analysis of English agreement shows the importance of the interaction of different components of the grammar in accounting for English agreement phenomena. In particular, once we allow morphology to tightly interact with the system of syntax, semantics, or even pragmatics, we could provide a solution to some puzzling English agreement phenomena. This allows a more principled theory of English agreement.

• Language and Information
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.19-36
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• 2015

Honorific agreement is one of the main properties in languages like Korean, playing a pivotal role in appropriate communication. This makes the deep processing of honorific information crucial in various computational applications such as spoken language translation and generation. This paper shows that departing from previous literature, an adequate analysis of Korean honorification needs to involve a system that has access not only to morpho-syntax but to semantics and pragmatics as well. Along these lines, this paper offers a constraint-based HPSG analysis of Korean honorification in which the enriched lexical information tightly interacts with syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels for the proper honorific system.