Hybrid agreement as a conflict resolution strategy

Situations in which conflicting constraints clash can potentially provide
linguists with insights into the architecture of grammar. This paper deals
with such a case. When predicative modifiers of morphologically rich languages head relative clauses, they are involved in two, sometimes conflicting,
agreement relationships. Different languages adopt different strategies in order to resolve situations of conflicting constraints. This paper focuses on
Standard Arabic and the hybrid agreement strategy which it employs. It argues that the HPSG theory of agreement, which distinguishes between morphosyntactic and semantic agreement, constitutes an appropriate framework
for accounting for the phenomenon. In addition, it shows that contrary to
claims made by Doron and Reintges (2005), a non-derivational framework
such as HPSG is adequate for accounting for this non-trivial agreement pattern. Moreover, with a constructional approach, whereby constraints can
target syntactic structures above the lexical level, better empirical coverage
is achieved.