Abstract for J. Kathryn Bock's talk

Producing Number Agreement
J. Kathryn Bock (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
February 7, 2008 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, The CUNY Graduate Center

Systematic variations in number agreement point to basic psycholinguistic mechanisms of agreement implementation. Three of the mechanisms implicate notional valuation, lexical specification, and transmission of agreement features. Verbs and pronouns are differently sensitive to notional number variations in agreement controllers but equally and surprisingly insensitive to notional variations in spurious controllers. Theories of agreement differ in their accounts for these patterns and more generally, for how agreement features are represented and transmitted during sentence formulation. The aim is to illuminate how agreement works to build a bridge from number meaning to number morphology.