THE RESOLUTION OF NUMBER CONFLICTS IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN AGREEMENT PATTERNS

This paper examines the strategies native speakers of American English and German employ in resolving number conflicts in subject-verb agree ment. These conflicts are created by the competition of syntactic and semantic principles. Significant differences are found between the two groups of subjects. The English speakers tend to follow the semantic principle in certain lexical items and in ''N(sg) of NP(pl)'' construc tions but the syntactic principle in sentences with subject complement s, in clefts, and, to a lesser extent, in pseudoclefts. The German spe akers do almost exactly the reverse. These inconsistencies notwithstan ding, semantic arguments are claimed to prevail in English and syntact ic arguments in German agreement decisions. The cross-linguistic diffe rences may be put down to the fact that the morphology and the word-or dering component are impoverished in English but not in German. This w eakens the syntactic force in the former though not in the latter lang uage. The semanticity of English and the syntacticity of German appear to extend beyond the realm of agreement. Evidence from other areas pr ovides preliminary support for the hypothesis that the semantic slant is a more general characteristic of English and the syntactic slant a more general characteristic of German.