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Abstract
We assessed whether and under what conditions noncanonical agreement patterns occur in Russian, with the goal of understanding the factors involved in normal agreement. Russian is a morphosyntactically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, gender, and case. If consistent, overt specification of number and gender agreement features supports agreement processes in language production, agreement should be less vulnerable to number and gender attraction than in languages with sparse agreement morphology. A related question was the degree to which notional number influences agreement patterns in morphologically rich languages. We varied the grammatical and notional number properties of sentence subjects and examined the effects on the predicate in sentence completion tasks using native Russian speakers. Noncanonical agreement occurred, but at rates lower than those observed in English and other languages without rich number morphology. Noncanonically plural predicates occurred more often after notionally plural subjects, suggesting notional number agreement, but the incidence was also lower than in languages with sparser agreement morphology. Gender attraction was almost nonexistent. The results suggest that morphology arbitrates grammatical agreement processes and reduces the impact of variations in notional number.
Acknowledgements
The work was supported in part by research and training grants from the National Science Foundation (BNS 90-09611, SBR 94-11627, SBR 98-73450) and the National Institutes of Health (R01 HD21011, R01-MH66089, T32-MH18990). We thank Elizabeth Octigan and Matthew Rambert for their help with the experiment, Erica Middleton for comments on the manuscript, Donna Puccini at the Bernard Horwich Jewish Community Center in Chicago and Deborah Hermelyn at the Shalom Welcome Center in Skokie, IL for their cooperation and assistance in recruiting Russian speakers, and especially the Russian speakers themselves for generously and graciously offering their time.