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

Abstract

The paper investigates whether agreement attraction is modulated by distributional properties determining subject-likelihood. 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 conducted three speeded forced-choice sentence continuation tasks on Romanian native speakers: Experiment1: N+Article head, bare noun (non-subject-like) intervenor, Experiment 2: N+Article head, N+Article+Adjective (subject-like) intervenor, Experiment 3: N+Article+Adjective head, N+Article+Adj (subject-like) intervenor. Subject-like intervenors cause significantly more attraction than bare nouns, which lead to almost no errors. The results are consistent with cue-based retrieval, where the verb is more likely to activate a DP than a bare noun. We argue that a theory of cues should include [+DP] as an essential retrieval cue, gating access to other cues.