From non-canonical to canonical agreement

In this paper, I discuss some constructions in which, for various reasons, agreement does not involve all available features of the controller, targets some normally non-agreeing items, or is triggered by types of word that are normally not controllers. All issues reviewed highlight the impossibility of coming up with clear-cut boundaries between categories: rather, fuzzy boundaries are the leitmotif that connects various types of non-canonical agreement. Fuzzy boundaries are shown to exist among word classes (nouns that are treated as adjectives and adjectives that syntactically and semantically partly behave as nouns), as well as between morphological processes (derivation serving syntax), thus suggesting that fuzziness is a trademark of linguistic phenomena. Issues discussed in this paper include agreement between head nouns and appositions, and the possible transcategorization of nouns that become adjectives starting from specific collocations (section 3); special characteristics of possessive adjectives in some Indo-European languages (section 4), and case agreement in possessive constructions between head nouns and nominal modifiers (section 5). In section 2 I outline Corbett’s (2004) canonical approach to typology, especially regarding agreement. Section 6 contains the conclusion.