The Grammars of Conjunction Agreement in Slovenian

Abstract

In this paper we report on the results of five experiments documenting the existence of three distinct grammars of conjunct agreement in Slovenian, found both within and across individuals: agreement with the highest conjunct, agreement with the closest conjunct, or agreement with the Boolean Phrase itself. We show that this variation is constrained and that some of these mechanisms can be blocked and/or forced depending on the properties of the conjuncts. Finally, we offer the suggestion that the presence of intraindividual variation arises because of ambiguous properties of the primary linguistic data.We thank the three anonymous Syntax reviewers and the following colleagues for comments, discussion, and help:

Agreement and the structure of relative clauses

“…Accounts in which agreement takes place in two stages, one of which is in narrow syntax (Agree/Link) and the other at PF (Agree/Copy), such as Arregi and Nevins (2013), and most other multi-component views of agreement (a.o. Guasti & Rizzi 2002;van Koppen 2005;Franck et al 2006;Marušič et al 2007;Benmamoun et al 2009;Franck 2011;Bhat & Walkow 2013;Polinsky 2014) are still compatible with our data.…”

Licensing and Differential Object Marking: The View from Neo‐Aramaic

“…There are various proposals about how agreement and case morphology interface with the syntax. It could be that case and agreement are calculated in the narrow syntax as two sides of one coin (Chomsky ) or as independent processes (Preminger , ), or that case and agreement are both calculated in the postsyntax (Marantz , Bobaljik , among others), or perhaps different components of case and agreement are calculated in different domains (Bhatt & Walkow , Marušič, Nevins & Badecker ). The data discussed here do not adjudicate among these proposals, apart from supporting a view of the grammar where there is still abstract nominal licensing in the syntax (whether one equates licensing with “abstract Case” or not).…”

Closest conjunct agreement in replacives: Experimental evidence from Estonian

“…Interestingly, an overall CCA bias was seen in all disjunction conditions with the exception of VS disjunction with a 1st person CC (M=3.54, SE=3.50), repeated in (6). A look at byparticipant responses for this subset of the data reveals great variability, much like reported by Marušič et al (2015) for Slovenian, rather than consistent center-of-scale responses -32.5% of participants never provided a CCA response (i.e. >0) while 25% of participants only provided CCA responses in this condition.…”