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<Paper uid="P90-1025">
  <Title>THE LIMITS OF UNIFICATION</Title>
  <Section position="25" start_page="202" end_page="202" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
A-SG/D-PL ACC DAT
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> '! have seen the docent and helped the docents.' Example (44), which by the account presented here would involve the attempted neutralization of number, a semantically relevant feature, is ungrammatical, just as is predicted. However, (43), which also seems to involve the attempted neutralization of number, is unexpectedly grammatical. Zaenen and Karttunen also present an example from Finnish parallel to (43): (45) He luldvat hanen uusimman _ ja They read his newest and GEN-SG me hanen parhaat _ kirjansa.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> we his best book(s) NOM-PL GEN-SG/NOM-PL 'They read his newest book and we his best books.' Here again, number, a semantically relevant feature, appears to be neutralized. Although Zaenen and Karttunen's treaUnent of neutralization is different from that suggested here is several respects, they suggest a crucial difference between (43) and (45) on the one hand and (44) on the other that may carry over. In (44), the constitutent level at which neutralization is attempted is that of the phrase (N-P), whereas in (43) and (45) it is at the level of the pre-tenninal (N). Zaenen and Karttunen (1984, p. 317) suggest that the neutralization is possible at the one level but not the other because &amp;quot;reference is assigned to noun phrases, not to common nouns.&amp;quot; Or, in the terms we have been using here, number is semantically relevant for noun phrases, but not nouns. 12 Clearly, more research needs to be done to determine 12In our work on the BBN ACl~ system (Boisen 1989e, b), we have also found that features such as number, degree, and tense seem to have their semantic effect at the phrasal level, rather than that of if the proposed distinction is valid or not. Moreover, if it is valid, the theory of feature percolation needs to be modified to allow number to be neutralized at the level of N, but to produce ambiguity at the level of NP.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Finally, one issue that has not yet been mentioned is that of speaker preferences. While the discussion in Section 2 treated constructions involving the neutralized forms as perfectly grammatical, variation in speaker judgement has been reported. Thus, Zaenen and Karttunen (1984) comment that some Icelandic speakers reject (30b) as well as (30a). Pullum and Zwicky (1986) present similar sorts of judgements for other consU'uctions. Moreover, there axe also judgements in the opposite direction. For example, Modern Greek, unlike German, does not require that the relative pronoun in a free relative clause have a Case compatible with both its source and superficial positions; see, for example Mackridge (1985, pp. 259ff) for discussion. This means that the Modem Greek equivalents of (4b) and (5b) are grammatical. Nevertheless, some speakers 13, while ac= cepting such sentences as grammatical, report that sen= tences containing a free relative pronoun which neutralizes the abstract Case conflict are somewhat more acceptable. These facts set us a broader research goal: that of proposing a theory of agreement which does not produce simple binary grammaticality statements but one which is capable of estimating degrees of relative grammaticality. Since the necessity of such a finer-grained theory of grammaticality is becoming more and more obvious in computational linguistics as a whole, it is no surprise to find it appearing in the study of agreement, as well.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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