Romanian (subject-like) DPs attract more than bare nouns: Evidence from speeded continuations

This paper investigates whether agreement attraction is modulated by distributional properties determining subject-likelihood by examining the degree to which bare nouns and full determiner phrases (DPs) cause agreement attraction effects in Romanian. Romanian represents an ideal testing ground for this, given two distributional constraints making bare nouns less subject-like: Locative Determiner Omission, preventing locative prepositions from taking nouns with definite articles (unless modified by adjectives), and the Naked Noun Constraint, disallowing bare nouns as preverbal subjects. We predicted that bare nouns should be less likely to trigger agreement attraction than overt DPs. We conducted four speeded forced-choice sentence continua-tion tasks on Romanian native speakers to test this prediction. We observe that overt DPs cause significantly more attraction than bare nouns. We suggest that the results are consistent with a cue-based retrieval mecha-nism for forming agreement dependencies, where cues that determine subjecthood are used to reactivate elements in working memory upon processing a verb. These cues can be language specific, and in Romanian, this means that agreement attraction is sensitive to the morphophonological overtness of the determiner.

Automated summary

This paper investigates the impact of distributional properties on agreement attraction in Romanian, specifically examining the effects of bare nouns and full determiner phrases. The results show that overt determiner phrases cause significantly more attraction than bare nouns, suggesting the presence of a cue-based retrieval mechanism for forming agreement dependencies. These findings highlight the sensitivity of agreement attraction to morphophonological cues in Romanian.