An Integrated Morphosemantics of Agreement

语法一致性（如“She sings”与“I sing”中的主谓一致性）是自然语言中最普遍但令人困惑的方面之一。从逻辑的角度来看，这种一致似乎是多余的，但大多数已知的语言都有某种形式的一致，许多比英语或其他印欧语言复杂得多。最近在形态学（形式的研究）和语义学（意义的研究）方面的进展已经阐明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，并且每个领域的结果在某些情况下似乎是相互冲突的。该项目是康涅狄格大学和德国柏林普通语言学中心（ZAS）的研究团队合作开展的，汇集了来自两个学科领域的研究人员，旨在解决这些明显的冲突，并朝着连贯的理论取得进展。一个具体目标是通过建立一个跨语言数据库，将这两个学科前沿问题的覆盖范围扩大到研究较少的各种语言。

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.