Syntactic and Semantic Agreement in British English

Patrick Sturt
University of Edinburgh

Agreement has been described as “the systematic covariance between a semantic or formal property of one element and a formal property of another” (Steele, 1978). This means that we can use agreement to understand how syntactic and semantic information are represented, and how they interact during language processing. In British English, semantic number agreement can arise when a morphologically singular collective noun like “committee” forms a dependency with a morphologically plural agreement target, because of the semantic property that a single committee may be composed of multiple members (e.g. “The committee were mentioned in the report”; “The committee awarded themselves a payrise”). These examples are judged as grammatical despite the mismatch between semantic and morpho-syntactic information.

In this talk, I will describe experiments that examine this phenomenon using eye-tracking and acceptability judgements. These techniques can be used to show patterns of temporary processing difficulty and gradient judgements that help to illuminate how agreement processes access syntactic and semantic/discourse information over the course of a sentence. The talk will end with speculations about how the results might be reconciled with existing linguistic and psycholinguistic theories.