Number as Person

Many European languages have two second person pronouns, one for informal and one for formal address, such as French tu and vous, respectively.1 Such pronouns pose an interesting problem for number agreement. A second person formal subject pronoun triggers plural agreement on the finite verb regardless of whether the referent is one addressee or multiple addressees. Number agreement on non-finite elements, meanwhile, corresponds to semantic number, i.e. cardinality.2 Thus when used with singular reference, such pronouns trigger mixed agreement. Examples from French and Bulgarian are given in (1) and (2).3