I argue that certain binding facts from Serbo-Croatian (SC), previously analyzed as Condition B violations by Despić (2011, 2013), are best captured in terms of specific discourse constraints on coreferential pronouns and that such cases have no bearing on the categorial status of the nominal domain in SC. I show that the availability of clitic and non-clitic pronouns that are coreferential with a possessor antecedent crucially depends on whether the antecedent is a discourse topic or new information focus, which will lead me to conclude that such cases are not Condition B violations. I also observe that pronouns in English are subject to identical conditions and conclude that English also has clitic and non-clitic pronouns.
In some previous experimental work on agreement strategies in South Slavic languages, it was demonstrated that the closest conjunct agreement (CCA) is the only available strategy for agreement with conjoined noun phrases in postverbal contexts. However, the examples that are claimed to be a result of CCA could potentially be analyzed as a clausal ellipsis (CE). e CE analysis was argued for by Aoun, Benmamoun and Sportiche (1994). In their approach based on examples from three dialects of Arabic, the postverbal linear agreement was claimed to be a result of CE, not of CCA. us, they predicted the semantic independence of two coordinated events. However, this claim is di cult to defend if a speci c type of predicates is taken into account -the so-called collective predicates.erefore, we designed a sentence-picture matching experiment with collective verbs and postverbal subjects with speakers of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) to test whether the postverbal linear agreement was a result of phrasal coordination or CE. e study managed to show that CCA is not a result of CE, but a distinct agreement strategy.
In this paper, we demonstrate that Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS), like Slovenian, has three distinct strategies of subject-predicate agreement when the subject consists of conjoined noun phrases: 1. agreement with the maximal projection – a Boolean Phrase (&P), 2. agreement with the conjunct which is closest to the participle, and 3. agreement with the conjunct which is hierarchically the highest. In order to test the initial hypothesis that there are three agreement strategies, we conducted a controlled experimental study of the morphosyntax of agreement between conjoined subjects and participles in BCS, which consisted of an oral production experiment and a written production experiment. These experiments revealed a high presence of default agreement and closest conjunct agreement in the language. 50% of preverbal conjoined phrases elicited the default masculine agreement and 95% of postverbal conjoined noun phrases elicited the closest conjunct agreement. However, the bulk of the analysis focused on the possibility of treating the highest conjunct agreement (HCA) as a legitimate agreement strategy. 7% of all of the agreement forms in the subject preverbal (SV) examples demonstrated HCA. These figures increased to 13% if individual conditions were considered. Last conjunct agreement (LCA) for subject postverbal (VS) examples, on the other hand, was only present in 1% of the examples. For this reason, we classified them as performance errors and refuted LCA as an agreement strategy. These results are contrary to Bošković’s findings (2009), in which he does not acknowledge HCA as a legitimate strategy, however, our results do confirm the findings of Marušič et al. (2015).
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