Who am I to (dis)agree? Interpretation sensitive agreement: Experimental evidence from French relatives

Abstract

Agreement morphology is often assumed to realize φ-features unin- terpreted at LF. We provide experimental evidence from French relative clauses showing that agreement can in fact have an interpretative effect, adding to the range of ‘semantic agreement’ effects (e.g. Charnavel & Sportiche 2025). The choice of variable person agreement turns out to be sensitive to the placement of focus. We provide an analysis that relies on the interaction between focus, binding and the distribution of focus-sensitive operators.