Agreement and movement: A syntactic analysis of attraction

Abstract

This paper links experimental psycholinguistics and theoretical syntax in the study of subject-verb agreement. Three experiments of elicited spoken production making use of specific characteristics of Italian and French are presented. They manipulate and examine its impact on the occurrence of 'attraction' errors (i.e. incorrect agreement with a word that is not the subject of the sentence). Experiment 1 (in Italian) shows that subject modifiers do not trigger attraction errors in free inverted VS (Verb Subject) structures, although attraction was found in VS interrogatives in English (Vigliocco, G., & Nicol, J. (1998). Separating hierarchical relations and word order in language production. Is proximity concord syntactic or linear? Cognition, 13-29) In Experiment 2 (in French), we report stronger attraction with preverbal clitic object pronouns than with subject modifiers. Experiment 3 (in French) shows that displaced direct objects in the cleft construction trigger attraction effects, in spite of the fact that the object does not intervene between the subject and the verb in the surface word order (OSV). Moreover, attraction is stronger in structures with subject-verb inversion (...). These observations are shown to be naturally interpretable through the tools of formal syntax, as elaborated within the Principles and Parameters/Minimalist tradition. Three important constructs are discussed: (1) the hierarchical representation of the sentence during syntactic construction, and the role of intermediate positions by which words transit when they move; (2) the role of specific hierarchical (c-command) but also linear (precedence) relations; and (3) complexity in agreement is presented which relates empirical evidence to these theoretical constructs. q

Agreement and the structure of relative clauses

“…Accounts in which agreement takes place in two stages, one of which is in narrow syntax (Agree/Link) and the other at PF (Agree/Copy), such as Arregi and Nevins (2013), and most other multi-component views of agreement (a.o. Guasti & Rizzi 2002;van Koppen 2005;Franck et al 2006;Marušič et al 2007;Benmamoun et al 2009;Franck 2011;Bhat & Walkow 2013;Polinsky 2014) are still compatible with our data.…”

Object interference in subject–verb agreement: The role of intermediate traces of movement

“…This research builds upon and extends our previous work on interference effects in the production of subjectverb agreement (Franck, Lassi, Frauenfelder, & Rizzi, 2006). As in this study, the general approach adopted here combines the empirical tools of experimental psycholinguistics and the theoretical constructs of formal syntax.…”

“…Furthermore, experimental psycholinguistics goes beyond off-line observations (such as grammaticality judgments and cross-linguistic comparisons) and thus provides novel types of evidence potentially having a bearing on the construction of formal syntactic models. Our past research has already shown the relevance, in the interpretation of interference data, of critical theoretical constructs such as intervention, the distinction between c-command and precedence, and the distinction between AGREE and Spec-Head checking (Franck et al, 2006). In this paper, a new series of experiments is reported which further explores object interference, teasing apart the role of movement, argumenthood and participle agreement in the occurrence of errors.…”

Defining an “ideal” heritage speaker: Theoretical and methodological challenges Reply to peer commentaries

“…This is especially true when the agreement controller and its target are in a specifier-head relationship, since this is considered the strongest context for agreement to surface (Franck et al 2006). If our conclusion is correct, agreement is a promising area from which to probe (no pun intended) interface phenomenon in heritage grammars.…”