The effective use of preverbal linguistic cues to make successful clause-final verbal prediction as well as robust prediction maintenance has been argued to be a cross-linguistic generalization for SOV languages such as German and Japanese. In this paper, we show that native speakers of Hindi (an SOV language) falter in maintaining clause-final verbal predictions in the presence of a center-embedded relative clause with a non-canonical word order. The fallibility of the parser is illustrated by the formation of a grammatically illicit locally coherent parse as well as by poor comprehension accuracy. Our investigations suggest that while plausibility is essential, presence of overt agreement features might not be necessary for forming a locally coherent parse in Hindi. The work highlights how top-down processing and bottom-up information interact during sentence comprehension in SOV languages – comprehension suffers with increased complexity of the preverbal linguistic environment.
In this paper, we present an analysis of Copular Agreement in Hindi-Urdu. We examine assumed identity copula structures (e.g., For today, I am him.), where we show that the broad characterization of the Hindi-Urdu agreement generalization – ‘agree with the highest unmarked DP’ – is insufficient: a structurally lower unmarked nominal has a demonstrable impact on the availability of agreement with a higher unmarked nominal. This interference arises as a function of the person specifications of the various unmarked nominals in the structure. Previous approaches account for such effects either in terms of the licensing needs of the nominals involved in identity copulas (Coon et al. 2017; Keine et al. 2019), or in terms of the properties of the person agreement probe (Coon & Keine 2020). We argue that in order to account for the interference effects observed in Hindi-Urdu, a combination of both perspectives is required. Given the impact of realization on the grammaticality of identity copula sentences – verbal morphology in certain tenses and the presence/absence of copulas modulate grammaticality – a feature gluttony analysis (Coon & Keine 2020) is required. Under this approach, for certain combinations of person features, the finite agreement probe is in an agreement relationship with both the nominals in the structure. Ungrammaticality arises when there is no morphological exponent that can realize the features associated with those two agreement relationships. Further, we establish that both the DPs in identity copula structures are licensed by finite T, and thus an analysis entirely without a licensing component is untenable. We also show that the issue of licensing in copular constructions (and elsewhere) in Hindi-Urdu can be handled through the adoption of a Kalin (2018) style analysis.
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