The emergence of attraction errors during sentence comprehension

The United States is, not are.
The Civil War was fought over
a verb.
— Carl Sandburg — 2
Theoretical Background
The Sandburg quote above illustrates that agreement can contribute to meaning in
an essential way. 1 Though this dissertation deals with rather innocent and simple
instances of agreement, this chapter provides the broader linguistic background
including the role of semantic aspects. Section 2.1 starts with some basic assumptions
regarding grammatical number. The remaining three sections deal with
agreement. Section 2.2 approaches the topic from a more general perspective, trying
to define the notion of agreement and distinguishing it from other doubling
and concord phenomena. Furthermore, the section introduces the basic terminology
of agreement controllers, agreement targets and agreement features. For each
of these categories, a few examples will be given, indicating the huge variety of
agreement patterns across languages. The technical implementation of agreement
within syntactic theory is the topic of section 2.3. Finally, section 2.4 summarizes
the main points and adds the psycholinguistic perspective including a brief outline
of the upcoming experiments.
1 The quote exists in various versions. The one given above is taken from Depraetere (2003)
who refers to Walker-Read (1974).
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