The dynamics of agreement and conjunction

Partial agreement between verbs and conjoined noun phrases in languages like Swahili is only possible if the conjoined noun phrase (NP) follows the verb, that is, it is directly related to word order. This paper presents an analysis of partial agreement within Dynamic Syntax, a formal model of interpretation which models syntax as the building of semantic tree representations, driven by words in the order in which they appear in the utterance. The analysis presented makes the relation between partial agreement and word order explicit in that it shows that a preceding conjoined NP has already been assigned a plural value when the agreeing verb is parsed. In contrast, when the verb is parsed first, both the first conjunct and the fully developed conjunction can fulfil the requirement imposed by the verb.