Agreement with complex disjunction Syntactic and semantic strategies with singular disjuncts in child and adult Romanian
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This study investigates subject-verb agreement with singular disjuncts coordinated by the complex disjunction sau…sau (‘either…or’) in Romanian, focusing on both monolingual 5-year-old children and adults. While prior research has documented variability in agreement with the simple disjunction sau (‘or’), it remains unclear whether similar patterns extend to sau…sau, typically linked to an exclusive interpretation. To explore the relationship between agreement and interpretation, we conducted two forced-choice tasks: a sentence selection task and a picture selection task. In sentence selection, many adults showed context sensitivity, adjusting agreement morphology based on the number of referents; others applied consistent singular or plural agreement. Children mostly selected agreement patterns matching the number of disjuncts verified by the visual context. This suggests that agreement with complex disjunction is initially context-driven in childhood and remains partly so in adulthood. In the picture selection task, adults showed a strong preference for one-disjunct interpretations, whereas children displayed more variability, consistent with an inclusive interpretation. However, adult comprehension aligns more strongly with exclusivity. Overall, our results indicate that speakers differ in how they connect syntactic agreement to interpretation, and that, while for many, complex disjunctions involve exclusivity, for some, complex disjunctions may be ambiguous between inclusive and exclusive readings.
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(c) Adina Camelia Bleotu, Gabriela Bîlbîie , 2025
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