Marina Cerebrinsky
2025
Subject-Verb Agreement Alternations in Spanish Pseudopartitive Constructions: A Corpus Study
Marina Cerebrinsky
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (QUASY, SyntaxFest 2025)
Pseudopartitive constructions, following the format N1-of-N2 (such as a group of students), are known to feature alternations in their subject-verb agreement patterns, either with the N1 or the N2. Through a corpus analysis, this study investigates the possibility of a correlation between the choice of N1/N2 as an agreement trigger and the semantic type of the N1, as well as the animacy status of the N2. Although a positive correlation was found for N1 semantic type, no statistically significant results emerged for N2 animacy.