Dear All I am a research scholar, working on Agreement and Coordination in Hindi. I have looked at some interesting agreement patterns and I am trying to impement them using LKB. I am struggling to get the facts implemented and going through a difficult stage in my research. I look forward to your expertise in the field and would be really grateful if you provide some support and directions. I understand that my mail would require some of your precious time however, I will be really indebted to you if you could help me as you all are experts in the field and I'm sure your guidance will get me through my work. First, I would like to summarise the coordination facts in Hindi below : Hindi Coordinate noun phrases differ in their agreement strategies between the predicate and its argument depending on the nature of the conjunct head noun i.e. animate/inanimate With regard to agreement between a predicate and coordinate noun phrase, although Hindi exhibits the widely attested “resolution agreement strategy”, it also uses a less familiar “Closest Conjunct Agreement (CCA)”. There are basically three different agreement patterns listed below: When two animate nouns are conjoined, the verb takes the masculine default form is any one of the conjuncts is masculine When two animate nouns are conjoined, the verb take the feminine plural form is both the conjuncts are feminine. When two nonanimate nouns are combined, the verb agrees with the rightmost conjunct in both its number and gender features. Also, agreement between a pronominal adjective and a Coordinate noun phrase is always CCA for both number and gender. Next, I propose the following analyses HPSG based analyses (to be implemented in LKB) ANALYSIS I This analysis is a modification of the one proposed in Villavicencio, Aline, Louisa Sadler, and Doug Arnold. 2005. An HPSG Account of Closest Conjunct Agreement in NP Coordination in Portuguese. In Stefan M¨uller (ed.), Proceedings of the HPSG05 Conference,Stanford, CA. CSLI Publications: <a href="http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publications">http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publications</a>. This analysis involves the introduction of new features LAGR and RAGR which contain agreement information about the left and right conjunct. So, all lexical nouns, adjectives and determiners have the feature LAGR and RAGR in addition to CONCORD. Also, in a non coordinate structure LAGR, RAGR and CONCORD will have the same value. The values of LAGR and RAGR will travel up to the mother i.e. coordinate NP, and the CONCORD will be structure shared with RAGR in case of CCA and it gets a default masc pl in case of resolved agreement. Also, when both LAGR and RAGR are fempl (feminine plural) at noun level, the NP has a CONCORD fempl. I propose to implement the same with following steps: Steps: 1. First, we propose to introduce two subtypes of nominal-coordinate-phrase (which is itself a subtype of coordinate phrase): one for animate coordinate phrases i.e. animate-n-coord-ph and one for nonanimate coordinate phrases i.e. nonanimate-n-coord-ph . As resolved gender agreement is seen only in the case of animate coordinate phrases, we introduce two subtypes of animate-n-coord-ph i.e. animate-n-coord-ph-m for phrases that resolve to masculine and animate-n-coord-ph-f that resolve to feminine. The above subtypes will satisfy the constraint that a coordinate structure is feminine if all the conjuncts are feminine and it is masculine, if a single conjunct is masculine. 2. Then, we introduce the features LAGR and RAGR, which store agreement information about the leftmost and rightmost conjuncts. LAGR contains information about the leftmost conjunct and RAGR contains information about the rightmost conjunct. The feature CONCORD is used to contain resolved agreement information. So, any lexical noun, adjective or determiner will have these head features and their values will be passed up. We will mention both NUM and GEND values for LAGR, RAGR and CONCORD as the rules need to look into the actual values 3. We will have to constrain NUM value of the CONCORD to be plural for animate-n-coord-ph 4. We need to constrain the rules in such a manner, that if any of the conjuncts has GEND masculine, the CONCORD| GENDER for the coordinate phrase is masculine and if both the conjuncts are GEND fem, the CONCORD value for Coordinate phrase is CONCORD|GEND feminine. 5. For animate nouns, we will have to define both NUM and GEND values for LAGR, RAGR and CONCORD. Then a rule needs to be written will require the CONCORD|NUM and CONCORD| GEND for the coordinate phrase to be the same as (shared with) RAGR| NUM and RAGR| GEND. 6. For agreement between adjectives and nouns, I suppose CONCORD|NUM and CONCORD| GEND will be shared with the values of RAGR. ANALYSIS II This analysis is focused more on implementing using the LKB system The Steps to be followed are: I will create a new HEAD feature FORM with its values as animate and inanimate. This feature will be defined for nouns. I want to rewrite the NP coordination rules in the following manner RULE 1 NP coordination rule for inanimate nouns It basically states that the AGR (Agreement) value of the coordinate NP is token identical with that of the right conjunct NP [ AGR #agr1 ] ------à N [AGR # agr1 ] and N [ AGR agr2] (Coordinate np) (Left conjunct) (Right conjunct) The feature AGR gives the NUM(BER) and GEN(DER) information. The constraint states that when two (inanimate nouns) are combined; the AGR value of the NP comes from the right conjunct. RULE 2: NP coordination rule for animate nouns -1 It basically states that if either of the conjuncts is GENDER masculine, the coordinate NP gets the AGR [masc plural]. NP [ AGR [ NUM pl N [AGR[ GEND masc] ] & N[AGR agr] GEND masc] ] à OR NP [ AGR [ NUM pl N [AGR[ agr] ] & N[AGR[GEND masc] GEND masc] ] à So, if either of the conjuncts is masculine, the NP is by default masculine plural. NUM can be left unspecified for the conjunct nouns. RULE 3: NP coordination rule for animate nouns -2 It basically states that if both the conjuncts are GENDER feminine, the coordinate NP gets the AGR [feminine plural]. NP [ AGR [ NUM pl N [AGR[GEND fem] ] & N[AGR[GEND fem ] GEND fem] ] à Also, the rules will have to be constrained so that they combine only nouns with the following features : SYNSEM. LOCAL. CAT. HEAD [ FORM animate] Or SYNSEM. LOCAL. CAT. HEAD [ FORM inanimate] So far we have not looked at a combination of animate and inanimate nouns. My Questions: 1) In order to implement the first analysis I would have to define LAGR, RAGR and CONCORD as subtypes of INDEX, or then specify NUM and GEND features on all of them. Later changes need to be made to the rules. I’m afraid this would lead to redundancy and also, does the customization page (the system) allow us to create subtypes of INDEX. 2) The second analysis requires constraining the rules as stated. When writing phrasal rules, can we write values instead of just sharing of the values because our data needs the rules to look into the NUM and GEND value and not just structure sharing. How do I constrain animacy/nonanimacy in the NP coordination rule? Please share your knowlege and expertise in the field and suggest me with some directions and/or solutions to the above problems. Your help is greatly appreciated Thank you in advance Awaiting your response Regards Nidhi