Agreement hierarchy in Russian coordinated noun phrases: corpus and experimental study

According to the standard model of agreement, the target copies syntactic features of the controller, namely gender, person, or number. But in the situation when the features of the controller cannot be calculated definitely, semantic agreement becomes allowable. Typologically, the possibility of syntactic strategy increases in attributive position while predicate agreement is more likely to allow semantic strategy. The agreement hierarchy proposed by G. Corbett ranges the agreement positions.
The paper deals with the attributive and the predicate agreement in Russian noun phrases with coordinated modifiers. Split interpretation of this construction enables variability of number of the head noun. The data from NRC shows that only plural predicate agreement is possible for the noun phrases with coordinated adjectives. It corresponds to the semantic strategy for singular nouns and the syntactic strategy for plural nouns. A self-paced acceptability experiment was conducted to examine the strategies of attributive agreement of the premodifier referring to the whole noun phrase. The results demonstrate that the plural noun allows both plural and singular premodifier. This generalization coincides with agreement hierarchy. Since the syntactic strategy is possible for predicate agreement, it should also be acceptable in attributive position. Only singular premodifier turns out to be acceptable with the singular noun, which corresponds to the syntactic strategy. This fact is also explained by agreement hierarchy. The possibility of semantic predicate agreement does not imply the possibility of semantic attributive agreement since the syntactic strategy is typologically more probable in the attributive position. Thus, the data on agreement of noun phrases with coordinated modifiers confirms typological expectations regarding the choice of the agreement strategy in cases with ambiguous calculation of controller features.