Interpretable everywhere: Hybrid agreement in Brazilian Portuguese
Giuseppe Varaschin, Antonio Machicao y Priemer
May 2025 

The goal of this paper is to account for the variable agreement properties of the 1.PL pronoun "a gente" in Brazilian Portuguese. We argue that previous approaches make wrong predictions about how different types of agreement with "a gente" work in different environments (Costa and Pereira 2013; Taylor 2009, i.a.). As an alternative, we argue for a dual-feature approach that incorporates the distinction between ϕ-features that are semantically interpretable (INDEX features) and those that determine phonological exponents (CONCORD features) (Smith 2021; Wechsler and Zlatic 2003). We propose that "a gente" has 1.PL value for the former and a 3.SG value for the latter and that both types of features can be targeted in non-anaphoric agreement (e.g. subject–verb agreement). The distinct usage preferences for different types of features in different environments follows from register considerations: structures where "a gente" is associated with overt 1.PL exponents convey opposing social meanings. In order to capture this effect, we formulate a theory of social meaning composition based on formal models of honorification and conventional implicatures (McCready 2019; Potts 2007; Varaschin, Machicao y Priemer, and Lu 2025).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/009007 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	under review
keywords:	agreement, concord-index distinction, pronouns, variation, ϕ-features, register, social meaning, conventional implicatures, semantics, morphology, syntax
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