The linguistics and psycholinguistics of agreement: A tutorial overview

Agreement lies at the heart of sentence structure in that it usually codifies the formal link between the subject and the predicate. In a way, although not strictly necessary, agreement tends to be what signals that a clause has been created. However, linguists and psycholinguists disagree as to whether this core process is essentially a semantic or a syntactic phenomenon, and there is evidence that suggests that it may be both things at the same time. Berg (1998) suggests that in morphologically impoverished languages like English, low frequency of agreement operations makes for a weak morphosyntactic component that is unable to keep semantic interference at bay, at least in production (where meaning comes first). In his completion study, he manages to show that the strong morphosyntactic defences of German do seem to encapsulate number agreement from non-formal forces. In this paper, I examine the psycholinguistic literature on the processing of agreement in English and Spanish in search of fine-grained evidence for encapsulation in all the relevant domains (NP, clausal, supra-clausal). The different grounding of the features of gender and number is also analysed and evidence for their differentiality in the first cycles of processing is ruled out. In general, Bergʹs hypothesis is confirmed by existing processing measures (Spanish patterns like German due to its rich morphology), but the fine picture of agreement operations in English and Spanish is also sensitive to the different domains tested and to whether production or comprehension is taken into account. Finally, it is argued that gender classes and the agreement systems based on them constitute a major generative device when constructing the clause. This is because gender is less semantically grounded than number and therefore easier to recruit for phrasal packaging, as this merely requires the co-variance of form.