Syntactic and semantic mismatches in English number agreement

In English, it is possible for a morphologically singular collective noun like government to control both (syntactic) agreement and plural (semantic) in the same sentence (e.g. The government has praised themselves). It been claimed that sentences with opposite pattern of agreeing elements are ungrammatical *The have itself), there corresponding asymmetry corpus frequencies these two configurations. Across acceptability judgement experiments, we show contrast affected by relative order elements, degraded case where first element shows second agreement, configuration. This found when verb precedes reflexive, reflexive verb. Overall, results suggest initial formation semantic dependency between an target controller makes subsequent morpho-syntactic less accessible. We argue any theoretical account would require important role incremental processing.