Conflict Resolution in Hindi Agreement

This is a handout prepared for a talk titled, "Conflict Resolution in Hindi

Agreement" that I presented in a conference in 1993. It ought to have been

developed as an article, but for some reason, I have not done that yet. I still

hope to do so some time.

The central claim of the talk was that the facts of Subject-Verb Agreement in

Hindi require non-monotonic logic (also called defeasible logic) to resolve the

conflict between constraints that result in logical contradictions in situations

where the subject is of the form ‘X or Y’ (e.g. raam yaa siita ‘Rama or Sita’) as

distinct from ‘X and Y’ (e.g., raam aur sita ‘Ram and Sita’). Even though one

of the conjuncts is singular masculine (raam) and the other is singular

feminine (siita), the subject is treated as plural neuter for the purposes of

agreement. For disjunction, the matter is somewhat complicated, as it calls for

three distinct constraints, based on PROXIMITY, NUMBER, and GENDER. This

results in logically contradictory predictions resolved by the application of non-

monotonic reasoning in which strength is specified as a number ranging from

zero to one, resulting in ganging-up effects in some instances, and dead-lock

effects in the others. (See our abstract for the 2003 Stanford Colloquium, “The

Logical Structure of OT Constraints,” at

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