Influences on agreement in German hybrid nouns: Distance and syntactic domain

Hybrid nouns are nouns like German Madchen ‘girl’, which refers to a female person but is specified for neuter gender instead of feminine gender. Such nouns can occur with either syntactic or semantic agreement. In the case of 'Madchen' , syntactic agreement means that the noun triggers neuter gender on a co-referring pronoun (corresponding to the grammatical gender), semantic agreement means feminine (as the natural gender). Two acceptability studies and a production experiment were performed to investigate which factors influence the agreement pattern, focusing on the linear distance between noun and pronoun and the effect of the syntactic domain, i.e. if the pronoun is in a clause subordinated to that of the antecedent or in a new main clause. The results show an effect of linear distance but no effect of syntactic domain.