Making Syntax of Sense: Number Agreement

things (substances, events, abstractions); Corbett (2000, chap. 3) reviewed the relevant evidence regarding linguistic number. Because less imageable referents have less discernible internal boundaries, they may tend to be construed as units even when they are potentially ambiguous in notional number (Eberhard, 1999). Ambiguities in notional number result from conflicts in valuation that can come about when a change in perspective changes the number inferred (Humphreys & Bock, in press). A related source of notional variability is likely to be found in the conceptual operations that integrate over the notional numbers of complex referents (Jackendoff, 1991; Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004). We hypothesize that the features involved in number construal, the products of construal, and the construal processes themselves do not differ with respect to verb and pronoun number or, more accurately, with respect to the controllers of verb and pronoun number. A unitary notion should have the same representation regardless of whether it is the source of verb number, pronoun number, or both. So, the notional number of a referent should be the same regardless of whether the referent is expressed as a subject noun phrase that controls verb number, as a bound pronoun with a coreferential same-clause antecedent, or as a free (unbound) pronoun. This commits us to a single notional value, or to the same notional number ambiguities, behind different manifestations of verb and pronoun number.