Agreement with disjoined subjects in German

Abstract

This paper presents results from an empirical study on number and person agreement with disjoined subjects in Standard German. We show that disjunctive agreement resolves to plural if one or both of the disjuncts are plural. The main empirical finding of the paper is that if both disjuncts are singular, verbal agreement is either singular or plural, irrespective of the relative order of subject and verb. We account for this observation in an Optimality Theoretic approach by assuming that the verb has to agree with each disjunct as well as with the disjunction itself, which bears a special kind of plural feature. The number feature of the verb has to match the number feature of both the disjunction and the disjuncts. This can lead to potential conflicts which as we show is the source of agreement optionality in case of singular disjunctions. Further, we discuss the effects of mismatching person in disjunctions, the effects of syncretic verb forms, as well as word order effects. Importantly, we observe that closest conjunct agreement is not consistently available in German. Finally, we present a brief excursus to agreement with disjoined subjects in other languages and discuss how data from Somali, Slovenian, and Hebrew fit into our analysis.