Distributed agreement with conjoined subjects and objects in Zulu: Evidence from elicited production

A great deal of work over the last two decades has explored strategies of agreement with coordinate structures whose DP-conjuncts have different φ -feature specifications. However, most of these studies have focused on agreement with conjoined subjects. We investigated verbal agreement with conjoined DPs in the Bantu language Zulu, in which object-DPs optionally agree with the verb; this allowed us to compare agreement with conjoined subjects and conjoined objects. Zulu also has a number of interesting properties that constrain the space of possible models of conjunct agreement, including the fact that all agreeing DPs have moved out of their base position. In a four-part experimental syntax study conducted with a large base of speakers, we demonstrate that Zulu patterns with languages such as Slovenian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, in which preverbal agreement allows a greater range of options than postverbal agreement. We show that our results provide evidence in favor of the Distributed Agreement model proposed in earlier work on conjunct agreement, which allows for agreement to be partially established based on the linear relation between the agreement controller and the target at PF.