Number agreement in copular constructions: A treebank-based investigation

•We model the agreement between subject, copular verb and predicate nominal.•We employ a new query tool to extract relevant data from a Dutch treebank.•We provide a corpus based typology of matches and mismatches in the data.•We develop a unified formal account of the agreement phenomenon.•For the formal account we employ Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar.

This paper has both a theoretical and a methodological objective. The theoretical one concerns the modeling of number agreement in copular constructions. For that purpose it adopts the distinction, familiar from Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, between morpho-syntactic agreement (also known as concord) and index agreement. The methodological objective concerns the demonstration of how treebanks can be exploited in order to guide the formulation of relevant generalizations. For that purpose we crucially rely on tools and resources that have recently been developed in the framework of the Dutch-Flemish stevin program (2004–2011) and the European clarin infrastructure.