• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.353-358
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• 2021

This study provides the syntactic analysis for the agreement attraction by proposing three types of syntactic subject-verb agreement. Because subject-verb number agreement codifies the link between a predicate and its subject, it must be the purely syntactic processes of the head-to-head agreement or the feature percolation, where relevant agreement features percolate upward or downward through the hierarchical syntactic structure. The agreement errors are not affected by linear proximity or minimal interference, but instead are affected by the hierarchical relationship between an agreement target and a local attractor. The data in this paper includes the complex noun phrases with a modifier PP or a relative clause CP. Here, the [+PL] feature is suggested to be a local attractor for subject-verb agreement errors as a strong feature. Therefore, speakers tend to erroneously produce plural agreement for a singular subject in a main clause due to a plural NP in a modifier PP or plural agreement for a singular subject in a relative clause due to plural main subject.