Single Conjunct Agreement and the Formal Treatment of Coordination in LFG

In cases of single conjunct agreement (SCA), the features of one conjunct within a coordinate structure control syntactic agreement between the coordinate NP and agreement targets external to that NP. This requires agreement processes to see inside the f-structure representation of the coordinate structure. Despite its intuitive simplicity, it has turned out to be surprisingly difficult to develop an approach to SCA within the framework, and existing approaches to SCA suffer from a range of technical inelegancies and/or empirical difficulties. We propose a novel approach to SCA which challenges the use of unordered sets for the representation of coordination at f-structure. Instead we propose a slightly more structured representation, which we call local f-structure sequences, for the representation of coordinate structures. Furthermore, we add more fine-grained subdistinctions to the standard LFG classification of features into distributive and non-distributive ones. This distinction controls the interpretation of feature path expressions as they interact with sets (of conjuncts) in f-structure, and the refined feature classification makes it possible to deal with SCA while keeping a simple, non-disjunctive formulation of the agreement constraints on the targets (such as verbs, which may combine with coordinate or simple NPs).