MEANING, SOUND AND SYNTAX IN ENGLISH NUMBER AGREEMENT

Number is one of a small set of basic conceptual categories with relatively clear grammatical reflections and requirements. It must be called upon during fluent language production to create agreement between subjects and verbs, and the questions addressed in this paper concern how that is done. The number information that is used may be notional (whether the referent of the subject noun phrase is single or multiple), or lexical (whether the subcategorised number of the head of the subject noun phrase is singular or plural), or even morphophonological (whether the head of the subject noun phrase has the phonological features associated with plural inflections). Different views about language processes make contrasting predictions about the likelihood of contributions from each of these sources during normal speaking. In a series of experiments employing an agreement-error elicitation task, we examined the effects of variations in notional, lexical and morphophonological features on the implementation of agreement. The results suggest that verb agreement is dominated by lexical number.