Dual preservation in Slovenian: The verb supports the noun in semi-spontaneous production

We investigated the use of dual morphology on nouns in six Slovenian dialects
which either completely or only partially preserved dual marking on the verb in
a language-production experiment using a picture description task with a pre-set
vocabulary. We compared our results against the typology of Slovenian dialects
with respect to preserving the dual feature, as presented in Jakop (2008), and based
on data from the Slovenian Linguistic Atlas (collected 1946–1999). We found that
the use of the targeted dual of a noun in Slovenian dialects is influenced by the
dual of a verb via agreement. More specifically, the higher rate of preserved verb
dual forms are associated with higher use of the dual and lower use of the plural in
the subject – but not in the object. Greater use of the dual in the subject does
not affect greater use of the dual in the object – although the nominative and
accusative forms are identical in the masculine. These findings, for the first time,
experimentally confirmed the previously suspected (Tesnière 1925) supporting role
of verb agreement on preservation of the dual in Slovenian.