Concord and agreement in the Romance nominal expression
Concord and agreement in the Romance nominal expression

Summary/Abstract: Why are Nominal Expressions (NEs) and clauses so similar and yet so different? Can we derive all the differences between these two syntactic objects from a unique formal feature of either and the similarities from general requirements on syntactic structure? This paper reduces the similarities between NEs and clauses to three recursive relations triggering “Merge”: selection, modification, and projection. The differences are reduced to the propositional vs. referential properties of the these syntactic objects. The truth value resulting from the propositional nature of clauses is the intersection of Person, Time and Polarity, while nominal reference is uniquely related to Person (which includes Number). Intersection occurs with the person feature of a possessor when present.

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