Reaching agreement

In addition to the major linguistic components of language use, theories of language production must explain how utterances grow out of communicative intentions. In ordinary circumstances, utterances are rooted in meanings. The question addressed in this paper is whether the mechanisms of a core syntactic process, number agreement, depend in any important way on the conceptual underpinnings of number. We critically examine research that points to a role for number semantics in the agreement process, and consider alternative psycholinguistic accounts of agreement in the context of issues about how number meaning infiltrates or informs the structural components of language production.