Dead and dying duals meet the Agreement Hierarchy

Upper Sorbian clarifies the nature of ‘semantic agreement’

Dados Bibliográficos

ID21820002
AutoresGreville G Corbett (0000-0002-2667-9870, University of Surrey), Leńka Scholze (0000-0002-1272-8002, Sorbian Institute)
Ano2026
Volume79
Fascículo2
Páginas191-207
Data de publicação2026-07-24
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoLanguage Typology and Universals (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1867-8319 • E-ISSN: 2196-7148
EditoraWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/stuf-2026-3002
OpenAlexW7167666524
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas25

The dual in Colloquial Upper Sorbian is in severe decline. It is now largely limited to use with dwaj/dwě ‘two’ and wóbej/wóboj ‘both’. Dual agreement is being replaced by plural agreement, with dual agreement now restricted mainly to attributive position. We document this interesting situation from a range of sources, and give native speaker judgements on the alternative agreements. It has been claimed that the development is in accord with the Agreement Hierarchy, and indeed the monotonic pattern of agreement alternatives fits the constraint of the Hierarchy. However, it is not self-evident which value of the number feature (dual or plural) should count as semantic agreement. Recent work on the Agreement Hierarchy shows that, rather than looking at feature values (the symptoms), we need to appeal to the competing sources of agreement. To do this, a Hierarchy of Agreement Sources has been proposed, orthogonal to the Agreement Hierarchy, and this specifies which agreement alternative will count as showing generalized semantic agreement. We demonstrate that the data from Colloquial Upper Sorbian can be analysed in this way, thus adducing novel data to support our much more general typological claim

Agreement · Attributive · Contradiction · Hierarchy · Plural · Sentence · Categorization, perception, and language · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation