PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Language Processing
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/flang.2025.1662944
This article is part of the Research TopicBeyond Agreement: Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Syntactic Feature Manipulation in Real TimeView all articles
Agreement Features in the Nominal Domain as Classifiers: Theoretical and Experimental Perspectives
Provisionally accepted
- Universita degli Studi di Udine, Udine, Italy
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Number and gender features are often assumed to differ in agreement processing, yet psycholinguistic evidence does not consistently support this distinction. This paper examines optional agreement in complex NPs (e.g., Italian Un centinaio di senatori si è dimesso / si sono dimessi, “A hundred senators has/have resigned”), where verbs may agree with either the singular head noun or the plural embedded noun. We argue that number and gender operate similarly as feature bundles, functioning like nominal classifiers. Crosslinguistic data show that optional agreement arises from nominal class valuation rather than from inherent gender/number differences. Psycholinguistic experiments further reveal that speakers’ choices reflect structural prominence and processing ease, rather than morphological categorical distinctions. Our analysis unifies gender and number within a classifier-based framework, challenging traditional divisions and offering a streamlined account of agreement variability.
Keywords: optional agreement, Classifiers, Nominal phrase, complex NPs, gender feature, number feature, feature bundles
Received: 09 Jul 2025; Accepted: 11 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lorusso. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Paolo Lorusso, Universita degli Studi di Udine, Udine, Italy
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