Structural ambiguity and optionality of agreement patterns in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian conjunct agreement

Abstract

The paper deals with conjunct agreement and addresses the question whether the choice of agreement patterns with conjoined subjects is determined by the underlying syntactic structure. We focus on so-called bare conjunction with a shared adnominal item (modifier or determiner) which agrees only with the first conjunct, in particular on the split interpretation of this construction. Since this type of conjunction allows the adnominal item only to agree with the first conjunct, even though it structurally dominates the entire conjunction, we hypothesize that it also yields first conjunct agreement on the verb. We report and discuss the results of a production experiment that tests this hypothesis and confirms its predictions.

Keywords

• conjunct agreement
• bare nominal conjunction
• structural ambiguity
• production experiment
• Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian