Agreement and pronouns: Implications for partial control

This chapter compares the workings of agreement mismatches involving the French pronoun on with those involving PRO in partial control (PC) environments in order to advance our understanding of the type of plurality that has been assumed to be associated with the latter. The theoretical framework used to effect this comparison is the two-step theory of Agree argued for by Arregi and Nevins (2012) and Smith (2017). The evidence uncovered suggests that whatever is assumed to induce the plurality of PC PRO (e.g. Landau’s (2016b) associative morpheme) leaves neither morphological nor semantic agreement footprints. We also show that, on the LF side, the type of plural set denoted by PC PRO appears to be immune to any sort of quantificational manipulation. We are thus left with an inference of plurality with no tangible grammatical correlates, which points in the direction of a process of pragmatic associative reference along the lines of Haug (2014).