Agreement with coordinated subjects in Slavic languages has recently seen a rapid increase in theoretical and experimental approaches, contributing to a wider theoretical discussion on the locus of agreement in grammar (cf. Marušič et al. 2007, Bošković 2009, Marušič et al. 2015). In this paper, we revisit the theoretical predictions proposed for conjunction agreement in a group of South Slavic languages, with a special focus on gender agreement. The paper is based on two experiments involving speakers of Bosnian/ Croatian/ Serbian (B/C/S) and Slovenian (Slov). Experiment 1 is an elicited production experiment investigating preverbal conjunct agreement, while Experiment 2 investigates postverbal conjunct agreement. The data provide experimental evidence discriminating between syntax proper and distributed agreement models in terms of their ability to account for preverbal Highest-Conjunct agreement, and present the need for a distinction between Default agreement (which has a fixed number and gender, independent of the value of each conjunct) and Resolved agreement (which computes number and gender based on the values of each conjunct, and must resolve potential conflicts). Focusing on the variability in gender agreement ratio across nine combinations, the experimental results for B/C/S and Slov morphosyntax challenge the notion of Gender markedness generally posited for South Slavic languages.

A recurring hypothesis about the agreement phenomena generalized as closest‐conjunct agreement takes this pattern to result from reduced clausal conjunction, simply displaying the agreement of the verb with the nonconjoined subject of the clause whose content survives ellipsis (Aoun, Benmamoun & Sportiche 1994, 1999; see also Wilder 1997). Closest‐conjunct agreement is the dominant agreement pattern in the South Slavic languages Slovenian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. A natural question is whether closest‐conjunct agreement in these varieties may indeed be analyzed as entirely derived from conjunction reduction. In this article, we report on two experiments conducted to test this. The results reject the hypothesis as far as these languages are concerned, thereby upholding the relevance of models developed to account for closest‐conjunct agreement within theories of agreement.

Psycholinguistic databases containing ratings of concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, and subjective frequency are used in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies which require words as stimuli. Linguistic characteristics (e.g. word length, corpus frequency) are frequently coded, but word class is seldom systematically treated, although there are indications of its significance for imageability and concreteness. This paper presents the Croatian Psycholinguistic Database (CPD; available at: 10.17234/megahr.2019.hpb), containing 6000 Croatian nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, rated for concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, and subjective frequency. Moreover, we present computationally obtained extrapolations of concreteness and imageability to the remainder of the Croatian lexicon (available at: https://github.com/megahr/lexicon/blob/master/predictions/hr_c_i.predictions.txt). In the two studies presented here, we explore the significance of word class for concreteness and imageability in human and computationally obtained ratings. The observed correlations in the CPD indicate correspondences between psycholinguistic measures expected from the literature. Word classes exhibit differences in subjective frequency, age of acquisition, concreteness and imageability, with significant differences between nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. In the computational study which focused on concreteness and imageability, concreteness obtained higher correlations with human ratings than imageability, and the system underpredicted the concreteness of nouns, and overpredicted the concreteness of adjectives and adverbs. Overall, this suggests that word class contains schematic conceptual and distributional information. Schematic conceptual content seems to be more significant in human ratings of concreteness and less significant in computationally obtained ratings, where distributional information seems to play a more significant role. This suggests that word class differences should be theoretically explored.

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