Hybrid Agreement as a Conflict Resolution Strategy

Abstract Situations in which conflicting constraints clash can potentially provide linguists with insights into the architecture of grammar.,This paper deals with such a case. When predicative modifiers of morphologically,rich lan- guages head relative clauses, they are involved in two, sometimes conflicting, agreement relationships. Different languages adopt different strategies in or- der to resolve situations of conflicting constraints. This paper focuses on Standard Arabic and the hybrid agreement strategy which it employs. It ar- gues that the HPSG theory of agreement, which distinguishes between mor- phosyntactic and semantic agreement, constitutes an appropriate framework for accounting for the phenomenon. In addition, it shows that contrary to claims made by Doron and Reintges (2005), a non-derivational framework such as HPSG is adequate for accounting for this non-trivial agreement pat- tern. Moreover, with a constructional approach, whereby constraints can target syntactic structures above the lexical level, better empirical coverage is achieved.