Home > Events > LangSci Lunch Talk: Zoe Schlueter (LING)
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LangSci Lunch Talk: Zoe Schlueter (LING)

Time: 
Thursday, September 17, 2015 - 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM
Location: 
St. Mary's Multipurpose Room (STM 0105)

Food and ideas bring people together.  Our weekly lunch talk series provides students and faculty with the opportunity to present their in-progress work to a supportive, interdisciplinary audience.

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Agreement attraction with conjoined singular DPs

Conjoined singular determiner phrases like ‘the cabinet and the dresser’ do not contain any overt plural morphology, although the entire conjoined phrase is notionally plural. It has been argued that the plural agreement we see with these conjuncts is the result of notional agreement, in which notional number trumps grammatical number (Brehm & Bock, 2013). In the current study, we use agreement attraction to investigate the morphosyntactic representation of number on conjoined singular DPs and the time course with which notional number is integrated in the process of computing this abstract number feature. I will present results from a self-paced reading study that shows that conjoined singular DPs cause agreement attraction in comprehension, much like lexically plural attractors. Since agreement attraction in comprehension is thought to be driven by morphosyntactic interference in cue-based memory retrieval (Wagers, Lau & Phillips, 2009; Tanner, Nicol & Brehm, 2014), this suggests that comprehenders rapidly compute the morphosyntactic number feature of the entire conjoined phrase and encode it as plural in memory.