Some attractions of verb agreement

In English, words like scissors are grammatically plural but conceptually s ingular, while words like suds are both grammatically and conceptually plur al. Words like army can be construed plurally, despite being grammatically singular. To explore whether and how congruence between grammatical and con ceptual number affected the production of subject-verb number agreement in English, we elicited sentence completions for complex subject noun phrases like The advertisement for the scissors. In these phrases, singular subject nouns were followed by distractor words whose grammatical and conceptual n umbers varied. The incidence of plural attraction (the use of plural verbs after plural distractors) increased only when distractors were grammaticall y plural, and revealed no influence from the distractors' number meanings. Companion experiments in Dutch offered converging support for this account and suggested that similar agreement processes operate in that language. Th e findings argue for a component of agreement that is sensitive primarily t o the grammatical reflections of number. Together with other results, the e vidence indicates that the implementation of agreement in languages like En glish and Dutch involves separable processes of number marking and number m orphing, in which number meaning plays different parts. (C) 2001 Acadernic Press.