An HPSG Account of Closest Conjunct Agreement in NP Coordination in
Portuguese
Aline Villavicencio
Department of Language and Linguistics Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK
avill@essex.ac.uk
1 Introduction
This paper discusses agreement strategies inside
the Noun Phrase observed in an empirical study
of Portuguese. Agreement phenomena in general
have received considerable attention in recent years
from the HPSG community (Pollard and Sag, 1994;
Wechsler and Zlatić, 2003), among others. Pollard
and Sag (1994) propose what can be thought of as
a multilayered theory of agreement that allows dif-
ferent agreement relations to hold between different
objects simultaneously. This proposal, further de-
veloped by Wechsler and Zlatić (2003) is centred on
the notions of CONCORD and INDEX agreement at-
tributes. CONCORD, is closely related to the noun’s
inflected form and includes information about case,
number, and gender, which are relevant for agree-
ment between e.g. determiners and nouns. INDEX,
is related to semantic characteristics of the noun like
male or female, aggregate or non-aggregate and are
defined in features such as number, gender and per-
son, for agreement between e.g. subjects and verbs.
Languages vary as to which features are used for
which agreement processes. Using this framework it
is possible to account for many agreement phenom-
ena, as for example, hybrid nouns (Corbett, 1991),
which can be exemplified by titles like Majesty in
languages like Spanish and French, since they trig-
ger different agreements on different targets within
the same clause, as in sentence (1) in Spanish, where
the noun, which refers to a male referent, triggers
feminine agreement on the attributive adjective and
masculine in the predicative adjective. They can be
analysed in terms of a mismatch of INDEX and CON -
Louisa Sadler
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK
louisa@essex.ac.uk
CORD values by specifying that a title like Majestad
has a feminine CONCORD and a masculine INDEX
and assuming that in Spanish predicate adjectives
show INDEX agreement while NP-internal attribu-
tive adjective shows CONCORD agreement.
(1) Su Majestadi suprema esta contento. Éli ...
his majesty supreme.F is happy.M. He ...
’His supreme majesty is happy. He ...’
A somewhat similar situation can be found in
NP (and plural noun) coordination in Portuguese,
where a mixed gender coordinate structure can trig-
ger different agreement patterns in different targets
in the NP. For example, in (2), a masculine noun and
a feminine noun are coordinated, and they trigger
masculine agreement with the determiner and femi-
nine with the postnominal adjective. 1
(2) Esta canção anima os corações e
This song animate the.MPL heart.MPL and
mentes brasileiras.
mind.FPL Brazilian.FPL
‘This song animates Brazilian hearts and
minds.’
(3) Esta canção anima os corações e
This song animates the.MPL heart.MPL and
mentes brasileiros.
mind.FPL Brazilian.MPL
(4) Esta canção anima as/*os mentes
This song animate the.FPL/MPL mind.FPL
e corações *brasileiras/brasileiros.
and heart.MPL Brazilian.FPLMPL
1
In these examples the adjectives and the determiners scope
over the coordinate structure as a whole.
145
One problem with this kind of construction lies in
deciding which gender the coordinate structure as a
whole should have. If one decides for a given gender
for the coordination, e.g. masculine, this would cap-
ture the agreement with the determiner, but not with
the adjective (even though it would also account for
sentences like (3) where the adjective is resolved to
masculine). Therefore a second problem is how to
account for the agreement with the adjective in (2),
given that is has a strong correlation with the gender
of the closest noun, so that sentence (4) would be
ungrammatical.
These are examples of closest conjunct agree-
ment (CCA) in noun coordinations, where a mod-
ifier/specifier of a coordinate structure agrees with
only one conjunct: the one that is closest to it. Clos-
est conjunct agreement has been discussed by Cor-
bett (1991), Sadler (1999), Moosally (1999), Abeillé
(2004) and Yatabe (2004) inter alia, and it is a strat-
egy of partial agreement that can be found in many
languages such as Ndebele (Moosally, 1999) and
Welsh (Sadler, 1999). Moosally (1999) proposes
an HPSG formalisation for capturing partial agree-
ment in Ndebele, where agreement constraints are
defined in a multiple inheritance hierarchy, and the
CCA constraint is defined as:
2 3
CONT.INDEX.GENDER
6 7
: 1
6 7
6 » – 7
6 7
4
CONJ-DTRS : < ... INDEX.GENDER 1 >
5
:
capturing agreement with the last conjunct. Yatabe
(2004) formalises CCA as part of a unified treat-
ment which also deals with coordination of unlike
categories. However, in order to capture cases like
that in (2), it is essential to take into account infor-
mation about the conjuncts in both extremities. In
this paper we discuss a possible formalisation for
capturing agreement patterns found in NP coordi-
nations in Portuguese. The discussion is based on
an empirical study of different agreement strategies
and the requirements they pose for an HPSG treat-
ment. Portuguese presents an interesting case study,
since a number of different agreement strategies trig-
gered by a given source can be employed at the same
time, such as those in (2), where a coordination can
have closest conjunct agreement between the deter-
miner and the first coordinated noun and between
the last noun and the postnominal adjective. In or-
146
der to cover these cases, we propose an HPSG anal-
ysis that has access to the agreement features of the
first and last conjuncts. To present that we start with
a discussion of nominal agreement patterns found
in NP (and noun) coordinations in Portuguese, sec-
tion 2. We then look at an empirical study of closest
conjunct agreement, in section 3. Finally, the ac-
count proposed in HPSG that captures these cases is
presented, and the implications of adopting this ap-
proach are discussed.
2 Agreement in Portuguese
In Portuguese determiners and adjectives straight-
forwardly agree in gender and number with the noun
they scope over:
(5) a/*as parede colorida/*vermelhas
the.FS/the.FPL wall.FS coloured.FSG/red.FPL
the coloured/red wall
On the other hand coordinate structures present a
much wider range of agreement patterns, since co-
ordinated nouns often jointly control agreement on
determiners, adjectives and other dependents within
the NP. A crosslinguistically very common pattern
in a two gender system involves the syntactic princi-
ples of resolution summarized as:
(6) If all conjuncts are GEN = FEM, resolve to FEM
else, resolve to MASC
Although valid, this generalisation fails to address
cases of CCA. A more complete picture is given
by Moosally (1999), where agreement strategies in
coordinations in Ndebele are classified in 3 types,
which can also be applied to Portuguese. The first
one, Regular Agreement, is adopted when all the
coordinated NPs have the same gender, and speci-
fiers and modifiers of the coordinate structure fol-
low that gender (7). Resolution Agreement can be
adopted for a conjunction of mixed gender nouns,
whereby agreement is triggered by a specific feature
in one of the conjuncts. For Portuguese, if there is at
least one masculine noun in the coordinate structure,
it can trigger agreement with a postnominal adjec-
tive, regardless of the gender of the other conjuncts
(sentence 3). The third agreement strategy is that
of Closest Conjunct Agreement, when agreement
with dependents like determiners and adjectives is
triggered by the conjunct that is closest to each of
them (sentences 2 and 8).
(7) a parede e a janela
the.FS wall.FS and the.FS window.FS
coloridas/vermelhas/*vermelhos
coloured.FPL/red.FPL/red.MPL
the coloured/red wall and window
(8) ... que o professor possa recontextualizar
... that the teacher may recontextualise
o aprendizado e a experiência
the.MS learning.MS and the.FS experience.FS
vividas durante a sua formação ...
lived.FP during the his training ...
from www.seed.pr.gov.br/evento fust/
Sentence (8) in particular raises a number of in-
teresting issues because it is a clear case where num-
ber resolution is also involved: despite the fact that
the postnominal adjective scopes over the NP coor-
dination as a whole, the feminine gender on the ad-
jective indicates gender agreement with the closest
conjunct, while plurality on the adjective indicates a
resolved feature, since each NP is actually singular.
Determiners and adjectives differ as to which of
these strategies they employ for agreement with
NP/noun coordinations. Both determiners and
prenominal adjectives scoping over all coordinated
nouns, follow CCA, e.g. sentences (4) and (9), re-
spectively. For a postnominal adjective modifying
a coordination of mixed gender, agreement can ei-
ther follow a resolution strategy, with the adjective
in the masculine form (3) or it can agree with the
closest conjunct (2 and 8).
(9) ...as assustadoras colinas e
...theFPL frightening.FPL mounds.FPL and
morros de argila do Parque Nacional...
hills.MPL of clay of the National Park...
from www.nationalgeographic.pt/revista/0404/wallpaper.asp (c)
A complex picture emerges in which the three
sorts of agreement coexist in the NP, triggered by
different targets: determiners, prenominal adjectives
and postnominal adjectives. In many cases coordi-
nated nouns trigger agreement between the deter-
miner and the leftmost conjunct and the postnominal
adjective and the rightmost conjunct (2). This pic-
ture is confirmed in a corpus based investigation of
NP internal agreement patterns in Portuguese, dis-
cussed in the next section.
3 A Corpus Study
To estimate the approximate frequency with which
the agreement strategies are used in coordinate NPs
modified by postnominal adjectives, a corpus-based
investigation was performed. Of particular interest
are cases that combine agreement strategies (closest
conjunct agreement of gender, but semantic resolu-
tion of number).
In order to perform this analysis we searched the
Web (using Google) for occurrences of coordinated
NPs followed by plural adjectives. The searches
used the following pattern: “<ART> * e <ART> *
<ADJ>”, where ART refers to Portuguese (definite
and indefinite) articles, and ADJ to adjectives, which
were extracted from the 1,528,590 entry NILC Lex-
icon (http://www.nilc.icmc.usp.br/nilc/index.html).
As we want to test the correlation between the gen-
der of each of the NPs and the gender of the adjec-
tive, only adjectives that overtly reflect gender dis-
tinction were used (9,915 masculine and 9,811 fem-
inine adjectives). The results found are displayed in
tables 1 and 2, where Frequency indicates the num-
ber of pages returned by Google for the searches,
and NP1, NP2 and Adj refer to the gender of the
first conjunct, second conjunct, and adjective, re-
spectively. The number of the NP conjuncts is in-
dicated in each table, but the adjective is plural in
both cases.
Table 1: Frequency of Adjective modifying an NP
Conjunction - Conjunction of Plural NPs
Case Frequency NP1 NP2 Adjective
(a) 0 FEM MASC FEM
(b) 489 FEM MASC MASC
468 MASC FEM FEM
(d) 2317 MASC FEM MASC
These results give an indication of how
widespread the adoption of the closest con-
junct agreement strategy is, in cases (b) and (c).
Case (c), in particular, provides clear evidence for
CCA, where the adjective scopes over both nouns,
147

Table 2: Frequency of Adjective modifying an NP
Conjunction - Conjunction of Singular NPs
Case Frequency N1 N2 Adjective
(a) 0 FEM MASC FEM
(b) 137 FEM MASC MASC
(c) 90 MASC FEM FEM
(d) 1737 MASC FEM MASC
but agrees in gender with the closest. Simultaneous
CCA of gender and number resolution are shown
in table 2, case (c) . These constitute unambiguous
cases of number resolution, as both NPs are singular
and the adjective is plural (8). Such data provides
empirical evidence for the complex interrelation
of agreement strategies in NP coordinate struc-
tures that need to be accounted for in a theory of
agreement.
4 An HPSG Formalisation
To account for these cases we propose an analyses
that stores agreement information about the leftmost
and rightmost noun conjuncts, introducing two addi-
tional agreement attributes: LAGR, for the leftmost
conjunct, and RAGR for the rightmost conjunct.
For non-coordinated nouns LAGR, RAGR and
CONCORD share the same values.
2 3
6
6 VAL.SPR.HEAD.CONCORD
7
: 1 7
6 2 3 7
6 7
6 LAGR : 1 /p 2
6 7
6 7 7
6 7
HEAD : 6
6 RAGR : /p 2
6 6 7 7
6 7 7
6 7 7
CONCORD : /p 2
4 4 5 5
Determiners and prenominal adjectives agree
with nouns via LAGR, while postnominal adjectives
agree with nouns via RAGR, all having the same
value but via different attributes. For a coordi-
nate structure, the values of LAGR, RAGR and CON -
CORD may differ. As these reentrancies between
them are defined as persistent default specifications
(Lascarides and Copestake, 1999), noun coordinate
structures override these defaults and instead define
that LAGR values are reentrant with those of the left-
most conjunct and RAGR with those of the rightmost
conjunct.
We assume that the CONCORD of the coordinate
structure reflects the resolved gender for the whole
conjunct, adopting a resolution approach like that of
148
Wechsler and Zlatić (2003) or of Dalrymple and Ka-
plan (2000). Kaplan and Dalrymple, for example,
use marker sets to represent gender information and
this approach gives the desired result that, if there is
at least a masculine noun in the coordinate structure,
CONCORD . GENDER is masculine. As determiners
and prenominal adjectives in Portuguese agree with
the leftmost noun closest to them, the agreement
is by coindexation with LAGR. Postnominal adjec-
tives, on the other hand, agree with the rightmost
noun closest to them (via RAGR), or adopt a resolved
agreement (via CONCORD).
For sentences like (2 and 3), both LAGR and CON -
CORD are masculine and RAGR is feminine and the
correct agreement values are observed, since the ad-
jective can either agree with RAGR or CONCORD, but
it will correctly rule out sentence (4) as ungrammat-
ical. This formalisation can also capture a sentence
like (8), which has CCA for gender, but resolved
number agreement for the postnominal adjective.
The coordination of mixed gender singular nouns
sharing a determiner seems to be much more con-
strained. However, acceptable occurrences can be
found as the sentence below, from one of the clas-
sic exponents of Brazilian literature, O Guarani by
Machado de Assis, exemplifies, where the relevant
parts are in bold font:
D. Antônio tinha ajuntado fortuna durante os
primeiros anos de sua vida aventureira; e n ão só por
capricho de fidalguia, mas em atenç ão à sua famı́lia,
procurava dar a essa habitaç ão construı́da no meio
de um sertão, todo o luxo e comodidade possı́veis.
The principles that allow cases like this need to
be further investigated, and will not be addressed in
this paper.
5 Conclusions
In this paper we discussed agreement processes
found in NP/noun coordinations in Portuguese, fur-
ther investigated through an extensive empirical
study. Although we concentrated on gender and
number agreement between nouns and their depen-
dents in Portuguese, some similar strategies can also
be found in other languages like Spanish and Ara-
bic (Camacho, 2003), and this proposal could be
used as the basis for a cross-linguistic formalisa-
tion of these agreement processes. In order to cap-
 2 3
6 2 3 7
6
6
6 6 LAGR : 1 / 3 7
7
7
7
SYNSEM.CAT.HEAD RAGR : 2 / 3
6 6 7 7
6 : 6
6
7
7 7
6 7
CONCORD :
6 4 5 7
6 3 7
6 » – » – 7
6 7
4
CONJ-DTRS : < SYNSEM.CAT.HEAD.CONCORD : 1 ... SYNSEM.CAT.HEAD.CONCORD : 2 >
5

2 3
6 2 2 37
6 2 2 3 3 3 7
GENDER :
6 77
1
6 6
6 7 7 77
RAGR
6 6 6 6 6 7
6 6 : 4 7 7 77
NUMBER :
6 6 5 7 7 77
2
6 6 6
6 6 6 7 7 77
MOD SYNSEM.CAT.HEAD
6 6 6 7 77
6 6
6 : 6 : 6 2 37
7 7 77
6 7 7
GENDER :
6 6 77
3 77 7
6 6 6 77
SYNSEM.CAT.HEAD CONCORD
6 6 6 6 7
: 6 6 6 6
: 4 57 77
6 5 7 7
6
6
6
6
6
4 4
NUMBER : 4 5 77
77
77
6 6 77
6 6 2 3 77
6
GENDER :
6 7
1 ∨ 3
6 6 77
CONCORD
6 6 6 7 77
6 : 4 57
NUMBER :
4 5
2 ∨ 4
4 5

ture these cases, we proposed an HPSG formalisa-
tion that stores information about the leftmost and
the rightmost conjuncts, which, together with the
resolved CONCORD feature, control agreement be-
tween nouns, prenominal (determiners and adjec-
tives) and postnominal (adjectives) dependents. This
formalisation successfully captures the cases found
in the empirical study, and correctly rules out un-
grammatical combinations.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Noun Phrase
Agreement and Coordination AHRB Project MRG-
AN10939/APN17606.
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