One or More Labels on the Bottles? Notional Concord in Dutch and French

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Abstract
Three experiments, the first two in Dutch and the other in French, in which subject-verb agreement errors were induced, are reported. We investigated the effects of the number of tokens in the conceptual representation of the to-be-uttered subject noun phrase (i.e. distributivity). Previous studies have failed to show an effect of this variable in English (Bock & Miller, 1991; Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Garrett, in press). However, Vigliocco, Butterworth and Semenza (1995) and Vigliocco et al. (in press) did find an effect of distributivity in Italian and Spanish. In an attempt to account for this difference across languages, three structural differences between English and Spanish/Italian have been considered: (1) richness of verbal morphology; (2) possibility of post-verbal subjects; (3) possibility of null subjects. In the present study, we tested French and Dutch, which share some but not all of these properties with Italian and Spanish. In both languages, a distributivity effect was obtained, a result which strongly supports an account in which neither null subjects nor post-verbal subjects are the main determinants, across languages, of their different sensitivities to conceptual factors.

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