Assuming that agreement processes are the expression of morphosyntactic relations inside a dedicated projection (an Agr phrase), we examine the feature geometry involved in the construction of subject verb agreement relation. A production experiment was carried out in Italian using the attraction paradigm to investigate the various properties of Subject-Verb agreement when different elements occur in an intervening position between the subject and the verb. Attraction is manifested in Italian, and this occurs more frequently with prepositional phrases as intervener than with object clitics. Furthermore, the agreement configuration in the clitic condition in our experiment had a more complex structure, evidenced by the presence of many errors with all plural forms. The agreement domain of the clitic is sensitive to the nature of the pronoun and this can be seen by comparing different Romance languages. Pronouns have different agreement relations at the marking stage according to whether they are weak pronouns or clitics. The results of the study point to a more finely-tuned model of agreement in which the processing of agreement relations is subject to cross-linguistic variation, given the different types of pronoun found in natural languages.
The syntactic domain of number agreement: Attraction effects and pronominal classes
DI DOMENICO, ALBERTO;DI MATTEO, ROSALIA
2011-01-01
Abstract
Assuming that agreement processes are the expression of morphosyntactic relations inside a dedicated projection (an Agr phrase), we examine the feature geometry involved in the construction of subject verb agreement relation. A production experiment was carried out in Italian using the attraction paradigm to investigate the various properties of Subject-Verb agreement when different elements occur in an intervening position between the subject and the verb. Attraction is manifested in Italian, and this occurs more frequently with prepositional phrases as intervener than with object clitics. Furthermore, the agreement configuration in the clitic condition in our experiment had a more complex structure, evidenced by the presence of many errors with all plural forms. The agreement domain of the clitic is sensitive to the nature of the pronoun and this can be seen by comparing different Romance languages. Pronouns have different agreement relations at the marking stage according to whether they are weak pronouns or clitics. The results of the study point to a more finely-tuned model of agreement in which the processing of agreement relations is subject to cross-linguistic variation, given the different types of pronoun found in natural languages.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
