Morphosyntactic production of Coordination Agreement in South Slavic: A Comparative Study

Autor: Willer-Gold, Jana, Arsenijević, Boban, Batinić, Mia, Čordalija, Nermina, Kresić, Marijana, Leko, Nedžad, Marušič, Lanko, Miličev, Tanja, Miličević, Nataša, Mitić, Ivana, Nevins, Andrew, Peti-Stantić, Anita, Stanković, Branimir, Šuligoj, Tina, Tušek, Jelena
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2015
Předmět:
Popis: We conducted a comparison of preverbal and postverbal subjectverb agreement in an elicited production study carried out with 60 speakers of different language varieties in South Slavic, spanning Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Slovenian at six local universities. These languages have three genders, and we measured the response type and total reaction time for production for the nine possible combinations of two plural noun phrases. Elicited production experiments for the preverbal and postverbal versions were conducted separately, with 54 items and 54 fillers. A sample target item involved a model sentence, immediately followed by a replacement phrase, and participants had to produce the entire sentence that resulted from combining the new replacement subject noun phrase (a coordination, such as the books and the magazines), with the remaining predicate, making morphosyntactic adjustments where necessary (e.g. in agreement). Our analysis of the gender agreement reveals that preverbal versus postverbal positioning make a large difference in the availability with the linearly furthest conjunct: while highest agreement is possible preverbally (e.g. the FN and NF columns), lowest-conjunct agreement is essentially unattested postverbally. In terms of reaction times, we find longest latencies for the conditions where speakers have the most grammatical options to choose among, suggesting that all three strategies are in principle available, although constrained by syntactic (hierarchical) and morphological factors (default masculine and relative markedness). The consequences of these results will be discussed with respect to three recent theoretical models of closest-conjunct agreement in South Slavic (Boskovic 2009, Puskar & Murphy 2014, Marusic, Nevins & Badecker 2015).
Databáze: OpenAIRE