Persian exhibits subject-verb number agreement but agreement is optional if the subject of the sentence is an inanimate plural noun. The goal of this dissertation was to examine the effect of grammatical and conceptual factors on the production of optional number agreement in Persian.;Some additional features of Persian make it an especially interesting language to study agreement phenomena in. First, while most work on agreement has dealt with ungrammatical sentences, Persian allows the grammatical use of either number matched or mismatched verbs for inanimate plural noun subjects. Second, SOV word order of its sentences creates the opportunity to test the attraction effect of an intermediary object. Third, Persian has two bound plural morphemes, /-ha/ and /-an/, suitable to test the effect of morphology. Finally, using the compound verbs in Persian provides this opportunity to restrict the participants to complete the preambles with the desired verb (verbal constituent), keeping the effect of verb type constant.;A judgment task tested the participants' acceptance of sentences in Experiment 1 with matched and mismatched verbs and their interpretation of the thematic role of the subject nouns. The results showed a greater tendency to accept mismatched verbs in sentences with "patient" and "patient-like" subjects. Experiment 2 tested the effect of verb type and verb tense. The results were consistent with Experiment 1; participants produced more mismatched verbs with "patient" and "patient-like" subjects. Experiment 3 tested the effect of unity vs. individuality conceptualization of subject noun. The result showed more mismatched verbs produced with subjects conceptualized as a unit rather than as individuals. Experiment 4 tested the effect of concreteness of subject noun and the result showed more mismatched verbs produced with abstract nouns rather than concrete nouns. Finally, Experiment 5 showed the attraction effect of intermediary object nouns. The results showed an effect of number and morphology features of object nouns in SOV sentences.;The results of all the experiments show the effect of conceptual information in the subject-verb agreement. These results demonstrate the importance of non-syntactic factors in subject-verb number agreement in Persian.
展开▼
