Agreement With Conjoined NPs Reflects Language Experience

Abstract

An important question within psycholinguistic research is whether grammatical features, such as number values on nouns, are probabilistic or discrete. Similarly, researchers have debated whether grammatical specifications are only set for individual lexical items, or whether certain types of noun phrases (NPs) also obtain number valuations at the phrasal level. Through a corpus analysis and an oral production task, we show that conjoined NPs can take both singular and plural verb agreement and that notional number (i.e., the numerosity of the referent of the subject noun phrase) plays an important role in agreement with conjoined NPs. In two written production tasks, we show that participants who are exposed to plural (versus singular or unmarked) agreement with conjoined NPs in a biasing story are more likely to produce plural agreement with conjoined NPs on a subsequent production task. This suggests that, in addition to their sensitivity to notional information, conjoined NPs have probabilistic grammatical specifications that reflect their distributional properties in language. These results provide important evidence that grammatical number reflects language experience, and that this language experience impacts agreement at the phrasal level, and not just the lexical level.

Processing agreement in Hindi: When agreement feeds attraction

“…While the form-to-form priming hypothesis can explain a subset of our present results, there remain some open issues. For example, Haskell et al (2010) found that mere exposure to a plural verb form was not enough to prime subsequent uses of a plural verb; there needed to be sufficient constructional similarity for these effects to occur (see also Lorimor et al, 2018). It is not clear whether the embedded environments we tested count as sufficiently similar in the relevant sense across all our experiments, but we cannot rule this possibility out.…”

“…Based on this guiding principle, at the end of the sentence the relative clause verb would be the most recent source of overt featural information and it could impact the continuation chosen in this task. It is also possible that the relative clause verb creates agreement attraction in Hindi through formto-form priming, where the expression of verbal agreement features on the intervening auxiliary primes the selection of a verb with those same features subsequently, similar to effects observed in Haskell et al (2010) and Lorimor et al (2018). So, if the RC verb was plural (e.g.…”

“…It is not clear whether the embedded environments we tested count as sufficiently similar in the relevant sense across all our experiments, but we cannot rule this possibility out. However, it is difficult to directly compare our effects to these earlier reports due to differences in the task: Lorimor et al (2018) and Haskell et al (2010) used written fragment completion tasks, whereas we used Staub (2009)'s RSVP and two-alternative forced-choice continuation task. Because of these differences, we cannot rule out the possibility that our choice of task may have contributed to this effect.…”

Correlative Coordination and Variable Subject–Verb Agreement in German

“…Agreement with coordinated subjects is influenced by several syntactic and semantic factors (e.g., Corbett 2006) as well as by usage frequency (Goschler 2014;Lorimor et al 2018). The present study focused on two of these factors, examining how the semantic type of conjunction and a conjunct's linear proximity to the verb affect German speakers' number agreement preferences with correlatively conjoined subjects.…”

“…An alternative analysis to (2) has been proposed by Schwarz (1999) according to which correlative coordination involves an elliptical construction derived from the conjunction of two separate clauses, as indicated in (3). Other approaches to number agreement with coordinated subjects include the proposal that the conjoined noun phrase's number specification interacts with semantic information (such as the subject phrase's notional plurality) to favour either singular or plural agreement (Lorimor et al 2018). A comprehensive review of theoretical approaches to agreement with coordinated subjects is beyond our study's scope, but it is conceivable that alternative syntactic or semantic representations of correlative coordination are available to speakers of German in principle.…”