Cousins do not always agree: unagreement in Spanish and Italian
[eng] This thesis examines a Spanish agreement pattern in which the plural person subject and its counterpart plural verb do not match in person, as in "Los lingüistas [3PL] leemos [1PL] mucho" (We linguists read a lot.). This structure, known as “Unagreement”, occurs in a variety...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2025 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:dnet:ubarcelona__::fa89754b6caa980f020920b3ade61320 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2445/229336 https://hdl.handle.net/10803/697413 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Sintaxi Castellà (Llengua) Electroencefalografia Syntax Spanish language Electroencephalography |
| Sumario: | [eng] This thesis examines a Spanish agreement pattern in which the plural person subject and its counterpart plural verb do not match in person, as in "Los lingüistas [3PL] leemos [1PL] mucho" (We linguists read a lot.). This structure, known as “Unagreement”, occurs in a variety of languages of different families; as for Romance languages, it is observed in Spanish, Galician or Catalan but not in others, like Italian, Portuguese, or Romanian. Various accounts have been considered to explain Unagreement. Some authors state that it is an irregular or exceptional case of subject-verb agreement (Hurtado, 1985; Richards, 2005; Villa-García, 2010 et al.); others state that it is due to the particular structure of its Determiner Phrase (Bosque and Moreno, 1984; Olarrea, 1994; Höhn 2016; et al.). In our study we explore an alternative explanation, the hypothesis proposed by Ordoñez and Treviño (1999) and Ordoñez (1997, 2000), which suggests that Unagreement is a piece of evidence in favor of the Subject Agreement Clitic Hypothesis (SACH), which assumes that in Spanish subject-verb agreement is a pronominal clitic. To test this hypothesis, this dissertation presents two types of experimental data on Spanish Unagreement across two experiments: first, Experiment 1 collects behavioral data from grammaticality judgment of 60 sentences presented in three conditions: Standard Agreement, Agreement Clash and Unagreement (20 sentences of each type). This data were gathered through an online survey. The 5-point Likert-scale survey administered to 154 neurotypical adult Italian speakers and 114 Spanish speakers. Second, Experiment 2 collects electrophysiological data from the event-related potentials (ERPs) of 120 sentences (the same 3 conditions as in the survey, this time with 40 sentences for each condition) involving 19 Spanish-speaking neurotypical adults (female=16, mean age =21.4). This ERPs experiment collects a) grammaticality-judgment data, b) reaction time data for the judgments and c) event-related potentials data. Experiment 1 data shows that Spanish-speakers perceive Unagreement sentences as acceptable as Standard Agreement sentences; while they judge Agreement Clash as highly unacceptable; furthermore, reaction time data for these judgments show that Unagreement and Standard Agreement are not significantly different from one another in Spanish. Italian-speakers on the other hand, judge both Agreement Clash and Unagreement as significantly less acceptable than Standard Agreement sentences. Experiment 2 data suggests that Unagreement sentences in Spanish are processed first as syntactically ill-formed, and then, at around 250 or 300 ms, there is a change. Although initially the brain's response to Unagreement sentences closely resembles the response to Agreement Clash sentences, after 300ms of the presentation of the verb it differs significantly from it and more closely resembles the brain's response to sentences that are typical of Standard Agreement. |
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