Minimal Interference from Possessor Phrases in the Production of Subject-Verb Agreement

Abstract

We explore the language production process by eliciting subject-verb agreement errors. Participants were asked to create complete sentences from sentence beginnings such as The elf's/elves' house with the tiny window/windows and The statue in the elf's/elves' gardens. These are subject noun phrases containing a head noun and controller of agreement (statue) and two nonheads, a “local noun” (window(s)/garden(s)), and a possessor noun (elf's/elves'). Past research has shown that a plural nonhead noun (an “attractor”) within a subject noun phrase triggers the production of verb agreement errors, and further, that the nearer the attractor to the head noun, the greater the interference. This effect can be interpreted in terms of relative hierarchical distance from the head noun, or via a processing window account, which claims that during production, there is a window in which the head and modifying material may be co-active, and an attractor must be active at the same time as the head to give rise to errors. Using possessors attached at different heights within the same window, we are able to empirically distinguish these accounts. Possessors also allow us to explore two additional issues. First, case marking of local nouns has been shown to reduce agreement errors in languages with “rich” inflectional systems, and we explore whether English speakers attend to case. Secondly, formal syntactic analyses differ regarding the structural position of the possessive marker, and we distinguish them empirically with the relative magnitude of errors produced by possessors and local nouns. Our results show that, across the board, plural possessors are significantly less disruptive to the agreement process than plural local nouns. Proximity to the head noun matters: a possessor directly modifying the head noun induce a significant number of errors, but a possessor within a modifying prepositional phrase did not, though the local noun did. These findings suggest that proximity to a head noun is independent of a “processing window” effect. They also support a noun phrase-internal, case-like analysis of the structural position of the possessive ending and show that even speakers of inflectionally impoverished languages like English are sensitive to morphophonological case-like marking.

Straight from the horse’s mouth

“…Whereas possessive case marking in languages like English and German precludes nouns from being grammatical subjects, Turkish requires genitive-marked subjects in non-finite embedded clauses. We hypothesized that if case information played a role in the selection of an appropriate controller for agreement, then attraction effects with possessors should occur in Turkish, in contrast with languages like English, where attraction from possessor modifiers has been reported to be non-existent or minimal (Nicol et al, 2016).…”

“…Both the attractor and subject head were third person nouns, always animate and human. The relationship between the possessor and the head noun was controlled for as it has been shown that it can influence the incidence of agreement errors (Nicol et al, 2016, Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004. All subject noun phrases encoded a semantic relationship between the possessor and the head noun that could be appropriately paraphrased in English by using the possessive marker 's or the preposition of.…”

“…Our interest in agreement attraction in Turkish as a target language was also motivated by the properties of its rich case system. Previous production studies have shown that grammatical case modulates attraction in languages with case systems of different complexity (Russian: Lorimor et al, 2008;Nicol & Wilson, 1999;Dutch: Hartsuiker, Antón-Méndez, & van Zee, 2001;Slovak: Badecker & Kuminiak, 2007;English: Nicol & Antón-Méndez, 2009;Nicol, Barss, & Barker, 2016). One robust finding is that in languages where subjects always bear nominative case, a morphological nonnominative marker on the attractor reduces attraction, as compared to configurations where the subject head and the attractor share the same case form.…”

Straight from the horse's mouth: agreement attraction effects with Turkish possessors

“…Previous production studies have shown that grammatical case modulates attraction in languages with case systems of different complexity (Russian: Lorimor et al, 2008;Nicol & Wilson, 1999;Dutch: Hartsuiker, Antón-Méndez, & van Zee, 2001;Slovak: Badecker & Kuminiak, 2007;English: Nicol & Antón-Méndez, 2009;Nicol, Barss, & Barker, 2016). One robust finding is that in languages where subjects always bear nominative case, a morphological nonnominative marker on the attractor reduces attraction, as compared to configurations where the subject head and the attractor share the same case form.…”

Agreement Attraction in Turkish: The Case of Genitive Attractors

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Speakers have been shown to find sentences with erroneous agreement acceptable under certain conditions. This so-called agreement attraction effect has also been found in genitive-possessive structures such as "the teacher's brother" in Turkish (Lago et al, 2019), which is in contrast to its absence in similar constructions in English (Nicol et al, 2016). It has been hypothesized that this discrepancy is a result of the association between genitive case marking and subjecthood in Turkish.We test an alternative explanation according to which Lago et al's findings are due to a potential confound in their experiment, as all subject head nouns were locally ambiguous between possessive and accusative case.

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