Agreement and attraction in Russian

Abstract

We assessed whether and under what conditions noncanonical agreement patterns occur in Russian, with the goal of understanding the factors involved in normal agreement. Russian is a morphosyntactically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, gender, and case. If consistent, overt specification of number and gender agreement features supports agreement processes in language production, agreement should be less vulnerable to number and gender attraction than in languages with sparse agreement morphology. A related question was the degree to which notional number influences agreement patterns in morphologically rich languages. We varied the grammatical and notional number properties of sentence subjects and examined the effects on the predicate in sentence completion tasks using native Russian speakers. Noncanonical agreement occurred, but at rates lower than those observed in English and other languages without rich number morphology. Noncanonically plural predicates occurred more often after notionally plural subjects, suggesting notional number agreement, but the incidence was also lower than in languages with sparser agreement morphology. Gender attraction was almost nonexistent. The results suggest that morphology arbitrates grammatical agreement processes and reduces the impact of variations in notional number.

Symmetric and asymmetric patterns of attraction errors in producing subject–predicate agreement in Hebrew: An issue of morphological structure

“…The relative contribution of each of these components to the computation of subjectÁpredicate agreement may vary, depending on the type of agreement (such as number or gender) and the morphological structure of the language. For example, notional factors do not contribute to grammatical agreement for gender in the case of inanimates (in computational terms they may exhibit a missing value), but they may be a fundamental component in governing number agreement via the marking process (Lorimor et al, 2008). On the lexical level, however, number features often have no independent grammatical specification, with the number characteristics inherited from the notional level translated directly into an inflectional structure on the morphological level.…”

The impact of notional number and grammatical gender on number agreement with conjoined noun phrases

“…For instance, in Serbian, the feminine genitive plural is homophonous with the nominative singular ending; Mirković and MacDonald (2013) found that with quantifier expressions, the presence of a genitive plural noun that was homophonous with a nominative singular form was associated with increased rates of singular verb agreement (see also Hartsuiker et al, 2003, for similar effects of case marking in German and Badecker & Kuminiak, 2007, for examples with gender attraction in Slovak). An analysis of Russian also showed an increase in number agreement attraction with non-subject plural nouns that were homophonous with nominative plural forms (Lorimor, Bock, Zalkind, Sheyman, & Beard, 2008).…”

“…the preparation and cooking) when both of the conjoined nouns were singular. Given that Dutch and German are more morphologically complex than English, we might expect lower rates of singular agreement in Dutch and German than in English (cf., Foote & Bock, 2012;Lorimor et al, 2008), but even a reduced notional effect may provide enough variability to investigate the role of gender morphophonology in number agreement.…”

The differential representation of number and gender in Spanish

“…), testing whether there is an asymmetry between di erent values of features in triggering agreement errors. In particular, previous studies looked at errors involving number (Bock and Miller, 1991;Bock and Eberhard, 1993;Vigliocco et al, 1996;Bock et al, 2012;Alcocer and Phillips, 2009;Vigliocco et al, 1995;Hartsuiker et al, 2003;Bock et al, 2001;Vigliocco and Nicol, 1998), gender (Vigliocco and Franck, 1999), or both gender and number (Antón-Méndez, 1999;Antón-Méndez et al, 2002;Lorimor et al, 2008). We can build on this substantial body of work and put the phenomenon of attraction to use in exploring the di erence between bundling and split approaches.…”