Default is different: relations and representations in agreement processing

Abstract

ABSTRACT Theories of agreement processing typically focus on the mechanisms by which comprehenders relate the morphological features of the agreement-controlling NP and those of the verb. However, agreement is fundamentally a syntactic relation. In this paper, I examine the processing of default agreement with clausal subjects (“[cp That the doctors studied hard] was reassuring”) vs. the processing of agreement with near-synonymous NPs (“[np The fact that the doctors studied hard] was reassuring”). In the NP subject case, there is a syntactic agreement dependency between the head noun fact and the verb was but not in the the CP case. I show that the agreement processing profile for CP subjects differs from those of NP subjects. This suggests that agreement configurations with similar morphology and semantics may be processed using different strategies when embedded in different syntactic structures.