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Call for Papers

Agreement as a grammatical phenomenon exhibits great variety in the extent of its application. It may surface on a number of different categories: verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals, determiners, and complementizers, and it does so differently across various languages. It is often considered a purely syntactic phenomenon (Chomsky 1999, Bošković 2009), as it is not obviously interpreted at Logical Form and in many respects works just like an automatic necessity. Yet it has been argued to take place even across the border of syntax -- postsyntactically (e.g. Bobaljik 2008, Ackema & Neeleman 2007, Marušič et al. 2015, Benmamoun et al. 2009), and have direct or indirect semantic (Dowty & Jacobson 1988, Mahajan 1992, Bobaljik 2008), morphophonological (Mirković et al. 2013) and discourse effects (É. Kiss 2012). 

Agreement is a popular topic in theoretical linguistics but it has been studied also well over the border of linguistic theory alone. The multiple steps theoretically argued to be involved in agreement are often validated in the production experiments of the widely investigated attraction error phenomena in English, Italian, French, Basque and in SLI (e.g. Bock & Miller 1991, Franck et al. 2006, 2011, Gillespie 2011, Santesteban 2013). Likewise, the agreement mismatch phenomena and the agreement relations targeting a subset of features in Spanish, Hindi,  and Italian (e.g. Nevins et al. 2007, Mancini et al. 2011, 2014, Quiñones et al. 2014) have prompted neurolinguistic investigations to detail the timing of multi-level feature integration processe (Molinaro et al. 2011, 2013), as well as a recent discovery of two routes underlying agreement processing in the brain (Caffarra et al. 2014). 

However, rich inter- and intra-speaker variation in agreement patterning still calls for a revision of the empirical base and methods of empirical access to the agreement phenomena (grammaticality judgments, elicited production, quantitative corpus investigations). One of the priorities of this conference is to bring about a discussion of the methodology in the research of agreement, both in theoretical linguistics and in psycho- and neuro-linguistics. We wish to cross the borders traditionally bounding research on agreement and bring together linguists conducting both theoretical investigations on agreement and related phenomena (e.g. concord, unagreement, feature checking, coordination, partial agreement, ellipsis, determiner/modifier agreement, multiple conjunct agreement, animacy, distributive/collective verbs) and those studying agreement experimentally (e.g. EEG, fMRI, eye-tracking).

Abstracts are invited for talks on topics on agreement in all areas of theoretical linguistics, comparative linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language acquisition, and clinical linguistics. All theoretical and experimental studies that have consequences for linguistic theory are welcome. We particularly encourage contributions on approaches to rich intra- and inter-speaker variation. Abstracts can be submitted for either an oral presentations or a poster presentation. Each talk selected for presentation will be allotted 20 minutes followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Submissions will be anonymously refereed.

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References

  • Ackema, P., and A. Neeleman. 2007. Beyond morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Benmamoun, E., Bhatia, A. and M. Polinsky. 2009. Closest conjunct agreement in head final languages. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 9, 67–88.
  • Bobaljik, J. D. 2008. Where’s phi? Agreement as a post-syntactic operation. Harbour, D., Adger, D. & S. Béjar (eds.). Phi-Theory: Phi features across interfaces and modules. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 295–328.
  • Bock, J. K., and Miller, C. A. 1991. Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology 23, 45–93.
  • Bošković, Ž. 2009. Unifying first and last conjunct agreement. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 27, 455–496. 
  • Caffarra, S., Janssen, N. and H A. Barber. 2014. Two sides of gender: ERP evidence for the presence of two routes during gender agreement processing. Neuropsychologia 63, 124-3.
  • Chomsky, N. 1999. Derivation by phase. MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics 18. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
  • Dowty, D. and P. Jacobson. 1988. Agreement as a Semantic Phenomenon. Proceedings of Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, Columbus: OSU Dept. of Linguistics. 
  • Franck, J., Lassi, G., Frauenfelder, U. H. and L. Rizzi. 2006. Agreement and movement: A syntactic analysis of attraction. Cognition 101, 173–216. 
  • Franck, Julie. 2011. Reaching agreement as a core syntactic process. Commentary on Bock & Middelton Reaching Agreement. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 29:  1071-1086. 
  • Gillespie, M. and N. J. Pearlmutte. 2011. Hierarchy and scope of planning in subject–verb agreement production. Cognition 118, 377–397.
  • Kiss, K. É. 2012. Patterns of agreement with coordinate noun phrases in Hungarian. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 30.4, 1027-1060. 
  • Mahajan, A. 1992. Clitic doubling, Object Agreement and Specificity. Proceeding of NELS 21.
  • Mancini, S., Molinaro, N., Rizzi, L., and Carreiras, M. 2011. When persons disagree: an ERP study of Unagreement in Spanish. Psychophysiology 48:10, 1361–1371.
  • Mancini, S., Postiglione, F., Laudanna, A. and L. Rizzi. 2014. On the person-number distinction: Subject-verb agreement processing in Italian. Lingua 146, 28-38. 
  • Marušič, F., Nevins, A. and B. Badecker. 2015. The grammars of conjunction agreement in Slovenian. Syntax 18.1:39–77. 
  • Molinaro, N., Vespignani, F., Zamparelli, R., and R. Job. 2011. Why brother and sister are not just siblings: Repair processes in agreement computation. Journal of Memory and Language 64, 211-232.
  • Molinaro, N., Barber, H.A., Pérez, A., Parkkonen, L., and M. Carreiras. 2013. Left fronto-temporal dynamics during agreement processing: Evidence for feature-specific computations. NeuroImage 78, 339-352.
  • Mirković, J. and M. C. MacDonald. 2013. When singular and plural are both grammatical: Semantic and morphophonological effects in agreement. Journal of Memory and Language 69, 277–298.
  • Nevins, A., Dillon, B., Malhotra, S. and C. Phillips. 2007. The role of feature-number and feature-type in processing Hindi verb agreement violations. Brain Research 1164, 81–94.
  • Quiñones, I., Molinaro, N., Mancini, N., Hernández-Cabrera, J.A., and Carreiras, M. 2014. Where agreement merges with disagreement: fMRI evidence of subject-verb integration. NeuroImage 88, 188–201.
  • Rothweiler, M., Solveig, C. and H., Clahsen. 2010. Subject–verb agreement in Specific Language Impairment: A study of monolingual and bilingual German-speaking children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15:01, 39-57.
  • Santesteban, M., Pickering, M.J. and H. P. Branigan. 2013. The effects of word order on subject–verb and object–verb agreement: Evidence from Basque. Journal of Memory and Language 68:2, 160–179.