An Integrated Morphosemantics of Agreement

语法一致（比如“She sings”和“I sing”中的主谓一致）是自然语言中最普遍但也最令人困惑的方面之一。从逻辑的角度来看，这种一致性似乎是多余的，然而大多数已知的语言都有某种形式的一致性，其中许多比英语或其他印欧语言要复杂得多。形态学（研究形式）和语义学（研究意义）的最新进展揭示了这一现象的各个方面，尽管这两个领域的工作在很大程度上是独立的，而且每个领域的结果在某些情况下似乎是相互冲突的。这个项目是康涅狄格大学和德国柏林普通语言学中心（ZAS）的研究团队合作完成的，汇集了两个学科领域的研究人员，旨在解决这些明显的冲突，并朝着一个连贯的理论取得进展。一个具体目标是通过创建跨语言数据库，将这两个学科前沿问题的覆盖范围扩大到各种较少研究的语言。

Grammatical agreement (such as the subject-verb agreement in 'She sings' versus 'I sing') is one of the most pervasive yet puzzling aspects of natural language. From a logical perspective, such agreement appears to be redundant, and yet most known languages have some form of agreement, many far more complex than what is found in English or other Indo-European languages. Recent advances in Morphology (the study of form) and Semantics (the study of meaning) have shed light on aspects of the phenomenon, though work in the two areas has been largely independent and the results from each area appear in some instances to stand in conflict. This project, in a collaboration between research teams at the University of Connecticut and the Center for General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, Germany, brings together researchers from both discipline areas, with the aim of resolving these apparent conflicts and making progress towards a coherent theory. One specific aim is to extend the coverage of issues at the frontier of the two disciplines to a variety of lesser-studied languages through the creation of a cross-linguistic database.