On the Person-Number Distinction: Evidence from the Processing of Subject-Verb Agreement in Italian
SIMONA MANCINI
The syntactic phenomenon of agreement is one of the most debated topic in both Theoretical Linguistics and
Psycholinguistics. Recent psycholinguistic studies (De Vincenzi & Di Domenico, 1999; De Vincenzi, 1999; Barber &
Carreiras, 2005; Nevins et al., 2007) have focused their attention on the relationship between the nature of agreement features such as Person, Number and Gender, and sentence comprehension. The goal of these studies is twofold: to investigate at what stage of parsing the processor makes use of the information provided by agreement features, and to ascertain whether these features are accessed separately or as a bundle, as assumed in standard minimalist work
(Chomsky, 1995, 2000, 2001).
Contrary to a view of Person and Number as a set of agreement features hosted under the Agr or T head
(Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001), it has been proposed, within a cartographic conception of clausal structure, that AgrP can be decomposed into separate projections each hosting a different feature (Shlonsky, 1989; Linn & Rosen, 2003), or into separate probes, each probing a different feature (Sigurdsson, 2004; Sigurdsson & Holmberg, 2006). Grammar can then access phi-features separately, and person and number (as well as gender) marking would result from distinct checking operations. Moreover, such operations may be qualitatively different in that the number feature on the verb may be seen as a mere copy of the number specification on the noun (as in Chomky’s system), while the licensing of the person feature may require a more complex anchoring to discourse-participant features, arguably expressed in the complementizer system (Bianchi, 2006, Sigurdsson, 2004).
In light of this, I try to give a fine-grained representation of subject-verb agreement and to account for psycholinguistic data indicating that the parser accesses and uses the morpho-syntactic information carried by Person,
Number and Gender at different levels of sentence processing. In particular, here I focus my attention on Person and
Number and on the role that they play in guiding the parser toward the interpretation of a sentence.
I report some findings from a self-paced reading study on the parsing of subject-verb agreement in Italian. These results show that in the processing of subject-verb agreement, Person violations endanger sentence comprehension more seriously than Number ones. I interpret these effects as evidence for a stronger processing relevance of Person over
Number and for a structural distinction between these two features. Person may not belong to a collection of features under a syncretic head Agr or T (Chomsky, 1995, 2000, 2001), it may instead be an autonomous head structurally distinct from Number (Shlonsky, 1989; Sigurdsson, 2004, Sigurdsson & Holmberg, 2006) and the parser may be sensitive to the qualitative difference between these two kinds of feature licensing. A follow-up behavioral study, still based on the self-paced reading task but with different stimuli, is currently being run, in parallel with an ERP experiment. Moreover, I intend to deepen the formal analysis of the distinct properties of person and number feature licensing in the broader theoretical context of morpho-syntactic feature licensing within minimalist and cartographic studies.
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