Variation in comitative constructions. Adpositions triggering agreement (inter alia)

MARÍA MARE

Cambridge

Workshop; Morphosyntactic variation in adpositions; 2017

It is well known that comitative items may affect argument selection and agreement operations. For that reason, the status of comitative constructions has long been discussed in the bibliography, the following being the main proposals: (a) the comitative item is a preposition (Ionin & Matushansky 2002); (b) it is the head of a boolean phrase (Lakoff & Peters? 1969 seminal work, Kayne 1994); (c) it is a D head inside a complex DP (Feldman 2002); and (d) it is the head of an Applicative Phrase (Dourado 2002). The relationship between comitative constructions and coordination concerning plurality has been observed by many authors, and has given rise to Stassen?s (2000) typological approach. This author argues that languages are characterized by the strategy that is used to codify the participation of two individuals in an event (AND- languages and WITH-languages). Notwithstanding, as Stassen himself observes, several languages have a special strategy for cases in which one or both of the participants are represented by a pronoun. In this presentation, I focus on comitative constructions that trigger morphosyntactic effects concerning plurality, with special attention in the linguistic variation involved in this phenomenon.