German guitars, Lithuanian violins and Norwegian pancakes: metonymy meets the Agreement Hierarchy

Abstract

Two-way agreement alternatives are familiar ( this family has/have travelled all night ), but larger systems (with multiple agreement alternatives) are rare and remain poorly understood. Focusing on German, Norwegian and Lithuanian, we see how metonyms and their interactions induce agreement alternatives. We focus on two types: instrument-for-player metonymy and entity-for-eventuality metonymy. In Norwegian, nouns like bratsj ‘viola’ can take pronouns based on the player’s gender. And Norwegian ‘pancake sentences’, where subjects like pannekaker ‘pancakes’ take neuter singular agreement, illustrate entity-for-eventuality metonymy. These patterns are then analyzed using the Agreement Hierarchy (to capture differences between targets) and the Hierarchy of Agreement Sources (to rank possible agreements according to their degree of generalized semantic agreement). Lithuanian data confirm our findings, revealing similar agreement patterns in a different morphosyntactic environment. The distribution of these metonymy-induced patterns can be integrated into the typology of agreement alternatives, and without additional machinery. Our analysis also yields testable predictions for further investigation.