Rich Agreement in Basque: Evidence for Pre-verbal Structure Building

This chapter examines Basque, a head-final language with rich agreement, to investigate whether the parser uses agreement information in the auxiliaries to create syntactic predictions about upcoming sentence structure. The paper discusses how a combination of agreement and case marking information can act as a cue to predict the presence of an embedded clause. The study specifically investigates whether indirect cues provided by agreement mismatch between an auxiliary and an adjacent noun phrase are used in order to make inferences about upcoming structure and avoid garden-pathing. The role of agreement information in assisting pre-verbal structure building is examined and related to evidence from other head-final languages such as German and Japanese.