Expressing Number Agreement for Pre- and Postverbal Subjects in Lebanese Arabic Heidi Lorimor & Elabbas Benmamoun University of Mary Washington and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [email protected]

• 8 Lebanese participants (over 4 sessions) viewed pairs of pictured objects and named them as conjunctions within declarative or interrogative sentences. The sentences were elicited by asking participants to name the objects and ask/tell us what color they were to provide in declaratives (e.g., “The king and queen were red”) or interrogatives (“Were the king and queen red?”).

Previous work on Single Conjunct Agreement (SCA) has debated how agreement with a single conjunct can arise. A variety of answers have been proposed, including clausal agreement with gapping [1], late-adjunction of the second conjunct [7], an asymmetrical ConjP structure, with the number being determined by the first conjunct [3], [5], or that the agreement target looks inside the ConjP and agrees with the closest conjunct [6], [8], [2]. We evaluated these theories of SCA in Lebanese Arabic using conjoined noun-phrase subjects.

300 ms

Word Order

• Statement Task: “Name the objects and tell us what color they were” • Question Task: “Name the objects and ask us what color they were”

Participant sees:

Animacy

• Is Single Conjunct Agreement semantic or syntactic in nature? • What role does linear word order play in the computation of agreement? • How does conceptual number (as influenced by animacy) affect agreement patterns?

100 ms

• 4 types of conjoined noun phrases 8 Mass snow and lightning 20 Count tree and whistle 20 Animal bee and ant 8 Human cook and maid

!

500 ms

Participant says:

CONCLUSIONS mass snow and lightning

count tree and whistle

animal bee and ant

DECLARATIVES

human cook and maid

• Closest noun plural • Animal and Count nouns (12 of each) Singular-Singular tree and whistle Singular-Plural tree and whistles Plural-Singular trees and whistle

Proportion Singular Agreement by Sentence Type and Noun Number

Proportion Singular Verb Agreement for Singular-Singular Conjunctions by Sentence Type and Noun Type

Distribution of Gender Agreement on Verbs by Gender of Subject Nouns for Singular-Singular Postverbal Subjects

Proportion Singular agreement

0.8 0.7

0.64

0.67

0.64

Fem. Sg

Masc. Sg

Fem-Fem

129

9

Fem-Masc

79

15

Masc-Fem

4

94

Masc-Masc

3

117

0.63

0.6 0.5 V Statements

0.4

V Questions

0.3 0.2 0.1 0

0

Mass

0.03

Count

0

Animal

Noun Type

0

Human

kanu elmasTara wel musmar 7umer? were the.ruler and.the nail red “Were the ruler and the nail red?”

plural-singular turkeys and rooster

RESULTS

These results provide compelling evidence that all conjoined NPs in Lebanese Arabic are plural, that singular agreement arises because of SCA and targetsource word order, and that Spec-head agreement is stronger than agreement under government alone.

INTERROGATIVES

elmasTara wel musmar kanu 7umer. the.ruler and.the nail were red “The ruler and the nail were red.”

Noun Number

0.7 Proportion Singular agreement

• Conjoined noun phrases that elicit SCA are plural • Word order plays a role in computing agreement • More singular verbs produced in interrogatives (64%) than declaratives (1%) • Singular verbs due to SCA and default agreement, and agreement is not always with the closest noun • Sentence-final adjectives are consistently plural (2% singulars for declaratives and interrogatives) • No effect of noun type (all Fs < 1) • Compatible with Spec-head “verification” of agreement, as stronger than agreement under government alone [4]

[1] Aoun, J., Benmamoun, E., & Sportiche, D. 1994. Agreement and conjunction in some varieties of Arabic. Linguistic Inquiry, 25, 195-220. [2] Badecker, W. 2007. A feature principle for partial agreement. Lingua, 117, 1541-1565. [3] Citko, B. 2005. Agreement asymmetries in coordinate structures, Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: the Ottawa Meeting. Ottawa: Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications. [4] Franck, J., Lassi, G., Frauenfelder, U., & Rizzi, L. 2006. Agreement and movement: A syntactic analysis of attraction. Cognition, 101, 173-216. [5] Johannessen, J.B. 1996. Partial agreement and coordination. Linguistic Inquiry, 27, 661-676. [6] Munn, A. 1999. First conjunct agreement: Against a clausal analysis, Linguistic Inquiry, 30, 643-668. [7] Soltan, U. 2006. Standard Arabic subject-verb agreement asymmetry revisited in an agree-based minimal syntax. In C. Boecks (ed.) Agreement Systems (pp. 239-265). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [8] van Koppen, M. 2006. One probe, multiple goals: The case of first conjunct agreement. In M. van Koppen, P. Hendriks, F. Landsbergen, M. Poss, & J. van der Wal (eds.) Leiden papers in linguistics 3.2 (pp. 25-52).

2000 ms

Factors

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

REFERENCES

PROCEDURE

VERB ELICITATION TASK

INTRODUCTION

0.65

0.6 0.5

SP Statement

0.4

SS Statement SS Question

PS Question

0.3 0.2 0.1

0.1 0

0.005

0.015

0

Verbs

0.02 0.002 0.02

Adjectives Noun Type