A typological perspective on nominal concord

Abstract

This paper reports some of the results of the largest typological study of nominal concord to date. The sample contains 174 languages from 105 distinct families. Concord is found in 59.2% of languages in the sample. I demonstrate a number of tendencies among languages with concord: (i) number concord is the most common type, (ii) gender concord is common among languages with gender, (iii) case concord is relatively rare and almost never occurs alone, and (iv) it is more common to have concord on both adjectives and demonstratives than on just one or the other.