Conjoined Noun Phrases Research Articles

Comparing the roles of referents and event structures in parsing preferences

Recent work has shown that potentially reciprocal verbs are interpreted reciprocally when their subjects are complex reference objects (plural referents that incorporate multiple referents), but transitively when their subjects are undifferentiated plural sets. Four self-paced reading experiments investigated why this is the case. The experiments contrasted the hypothesis that the parser's behaviour is driven by the complexity or specificity of potential event structures with the hypothesis that what matters is simply the availability of multiple referents. First we replicated Patson & Ferreira's Experiment 1 with self-paced reading, and then in three studies we manipulated the conjuncts within a conjoined noun phrase (NP) subject (e.g. the men and the women vs. the man and the women) in order to vary event structures. The results indicated that potentially reciprocal verbs were interpreted as reciprocal with any conjoined subject, regardless of what type of NPs comprised it. This suggests that the parser is sensitive specifically to the presence of referents, not to the relative complexity or specificity of the event structure that could be built based on those referents. These findings are consistent with Patson and Ferreira's hypothesis that available referents matter because they immediately saturate the thematic roles of reciprocal verbs.

Interpreting Conjoined noun Phrases and Conjoined Clauses: Collective versus Distributive Preferences

Two experiments are reported that show that introducing event participants in a conjoined noun phrase (NP) favours a single event (collective) interpretation, while introducing them in separate clauses favours a separate events (distributive) interpretation. In Experiment 1, acceptability judgements were speeded when the bias of a predicate toward separate events versus a single event matched the presumed bias of how the subjects' referents were introduced (as conjoined noun phrases or in conjoined clauses). In Experiment 2, reading of a phrase containing an anaphor following conjoined noun phrases was facilitated when the anaphor was they, relative to when it was neither/each of them; the opposite pattern was found when the anaphor followed conjoined clauses. We argue that comprehension was facilitated when the form of an anaphor was appropriate for how its antecedents were introduced. These results address the very general problem of how we individuate entities and events when presented with a complex situation and show that different linguistic forms can guide how we construe a situation. The results also indicate that there is no general penalty for introducing the entities or events separately-in distinct clauses as "split" antecedents.

Shared information structure: Evidence from cross-linguistic priming

This study asked whether bilinguals construct a language-independent level of information structure for the sentences that they produce. It reports an experiment in which a Polish–English bilingual and a confederate of the experimenter took turns to describe pictures to each other and to find those pictures in an array. The confederate produced a Polish active, passive, or conjoined noun phrase, or an active sentence with object–verb–subject order (OVS sentence). The participant responded in English, and tended to produce a passive sentence more often after a passive or an OVS sentence than after a conjoined noun phrase or active sentence. Passives and OVS sentences are syntactically unrelated but share information structure, in that both assign emphasis to the patient. We therefore argued that bilinguals construct a language-independent level of information structure during speech.

A typology of split conjunction

In this paper, I study instances of noun phrase conjunction where the conjoined noun phrase is subject and the referents of the conjuncts are human, of the type ‘John and Mary are having lunch’. More specifically, I study different, possible splits that occur in such structures, which involve the disruption of the phrasal continuity of the conjuncts, resulting in structures roughly equivalent to ‘they are having lunch with Mary’ and ‘John are having lunch with Mary’. I claim that such splits are allowed by the inherent asymmetries of conjunctional structures, and I see them as functionally motivated by a play of prominence of the conjuncts involved. In the paper, I advance a typology of such splits in three subtypes: (i) splits by elision, where the conjuncts form a constituent but their phrasal contiguity is disrupted because the more salient conjunct is elided due to its topicality; (ii) splits by extraction, where the salient conjunct is given even more prominence by being extracted to a topical position thus breaking the continuity of the conjuncts; and (iii) splits by integration, where the role of the less salient conjunct is upgraded by means of dual or plural agreement on the verb. The constructions equally involve standard coordinative structures of the type ‘Mary and I’ as well as other non-coordinative types such as inclusory conjunction among others.

Conceptual plural information is used to guide early parsing decisions: Evidence from garden-path sentences with reciprocal verbs

In three eyetracking studies, we investigated the role of conceptual plurality in initial parsing decisions in temporarily ambiguous sentences with reciprocal verbs (e.g., While the lovers kissed the baby played alone). We varied the subject of the first clause using three types of plural noun phrases: conjoined noun phrases ( the bride and the groom), plural definite descriptions ( the lovers), and numerically quantified noun phrases ( the two lovers). We found no evidence for garden-path effects when the subject was conjoined [Ferreira, F., & McClure, K. K. (1997). Parsing of garden-path sentences with reciprocal verbs. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12, 273–306], but traditional garden-path effects were found with the other plural noun phrases. In addition, we tested plural anaphors that had a plural antecedent present in the discourse. We found that when the antecedent was conjoined, garden-path effects were absent compared to cases in which the antecedent was a plural definite description. Our results indicate that the parser is sensitive to the conceptual representation of a plural constituent. In particular, it appears that a Complex Reference Object [Moxey, L. M., Sanford, A. J., Sturt, P., & Morrow, L. I. (2004). Constrains on the formation of plural reference objects: The influence of role, conjunction, and type of description. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 346–364] automatically activates a reciprocal reading of a reciprocal verb.

On the give and take between event apprehension and utterance formulation

Two experiments are reported which examine how manipulations of visual attention affect speakers’ linguistic choices regarding word order, verb use and syntactic structure when describing simple pictured scenes. Experiment 1 presented participants with scenes designed to elicit the use of a perspective predicate ( The man chases the dog/The dog flees from the man) or a conjoined noun phrase sentential Subject ( A cat and a dog/A dog and a cat). Gaze was directed to a particular scene character by way of an attention-capture manipulation. Attention capture increased the likelihood that this character would be the sentential Subject and altered the choice of perspective verb or word order within conjoined NP Subjects accordingly. These effects occurred even though participants reported being unaware that their visual attention had been manipulated. Experiment 2 extended these results to word order choice within Active versus Passive structures ( The girl is kicking the boy/ The boy is being kicked by the girl) and symmetrical predicates ( The girl is meeting the boy/The boy is meeting the girl). Experiment 2 also found that early endogenous shifts in attention influence word order choices. These findings indicate a reliable relationship between initial looking patterns and speaking patterns, reflecting considerable parallelism between the on-line apprehension of events and the on-line construction of descriptive utterances.

Semantic relatedness effects in conjoined noun phrase production: implications for the role of short-term memory

Speech error data and empirical studies suggest that the scope of planning is larger for semantic than for phonological form representations in speech production. Previous results have demonstrated that some patients show dissociable impairments in the retention of semantic and phonological codes. The effect of these STM deficits on speech production was investigated using a phrase production paradigm that manipulated the semantic relatedness of the words in the phrase. Subjects produced a conjoined noun phrase to describe two pictures (e.g., "ball and hat") or produced the same phrases in response to pairs of written words. For the picture naming condition, control subjects showed an interference effect for semantically related pictures relative to unrelated pictures. This interference effect was greatly exaggerated for two patients with semantic short-term memory deficits but not for a patient with a phonological STM deficit. For the written words, control subjects showed a small facilitatory effect for the onset of phrases containing semantically related words. One of the patients with a semantic STM deficit who was tested on picture naming was also tested on these materials and showed a small facilitatory effect within the range of controls. The findings support the contention that speech planning is carried out at a phrasal level at the lexical-semantic level and that the capacities that support semantic retention in list recall support speech production planning.

The dynamics of agreement and conjunction

Partial agreement between verbs and conjoined noun phrases in languages like Swahili is only possible if the conjoined noun phrase (NP) follows the verb, that is, it is directly related to word order. This paper presents an analysis of partial agreement within Dynamic Syntax, a formal model of interpretation which models syntax as the building of semantic tree representations, driven by words in the order in which they appear in the utterance. The analysis presented makes the relation between partial agreement and word order explicit in that it shows that a preceding conjoined NP has already been assigned a plural value when the agreeing verb is parsed. In contrast, when the verb is parsed first, both the first conjunct and the fully developed conjunction can fulfil the requirement imposed by the verb.

Can You Be Gay and Lesbian in Australian English?

The use of the expression gay and lesbian in a corpus of televised spoken Australian English is examined. It is shown that speakers treat this as a lexicalized expression, rather than a productively created conjunct of gay and lesbian . The meaning of the whole expression is not predictable from the meaning of the parts, in that gay and lesbian is used to refer to a broader set of people than the sets covered by the terms gay and lesbian individually. Gay and lesbian is also used in reference to a single non-specific individual, where a disjunct phrase with or would normally be appropriate. Additional support for the lexicalized status of this expression comes from the occasional use of gay and lesbians, with a single marker of plurality on what appears to be a conjoined noun phrase.

Disambiguation Preferences in Noun Phrase Conjunction Do Not Mirror Corpus Frequency

The results of two self-paced reading studies of a syntactic ambiguity involving conjoined noun phrases to three potential noun phrase sites were compared to the corpus frequencies of the resolutions of the same ambiguity. The reading times for the attachment to the first noun phrase were faster than for the attachment to the second noun phrase, but, to the extent that any differences were observed in the corpus frequencies, attachments to the second noun phrase were more frequent. We therefore argue that the sentence comprehension mechanism is not using corpus frequencies in arriving at its preference in this ambiguity, and hence the decision principles of sentence comprehension and sentence production must be partially distinct. It is proposed that there is a factor operative in sentence comprehension that is not operative in sentence production, and this factor favors attachment to the first noun phrase.

Plural Pronouns and the Representation of Their Antecedents

Three experiments were carried out to investigate what kind of representation is accessed during the search for the antecedent of a plural pronoun. In the first two experiments, subjects read texts that contained two participants of different gender introduced by their proper names and, after finishing the texts, either a plural or a singular pronoun was presented. The subjects' task was to produce aloud a plausible continuation of the texts. The time between the presentation of the pronoun and the onset of the subjects' utterances was recorded. In the first experiment, the two participants were placed in the same or in different scenarios. In the second experiment, the two participants were presented in a conjoined noun phrase (John and Mary) or as subjects of different sentences (John... and Mary...). In the third experiment, the stimuli from Experiment 2 were used in a probe recognition task. The results showed that antecedents for pronouns are found by consulting a discourse model of the text, and that antecedents in the same scenario are likely to be represented as two different tokens linked by a plural address.

Binding conditions in Young Children's Grammar: Interpretation of Pronouns Inside Conjoined NPs

Some researchers attempt to explain children's prolonged delay in showing knowledge of Binding Condition B (Chien and Wexler (1990)) as an indication that Binding Condition B is relevant only to binding relations that involve pronouns interpreted as bound variables. This study extends the study of children' s knowledge of Condition B to a construction containing pronouns embedded in conjoined noun phrases (NPs). Pronouns bound by a quantifier were included in the study. The results were surprising. A group of children accepted bound variable pronouns in violation of Condition B when the pronoun was embedded in a conjoined NP. The results support the argument of Reinhart and Reuland (1993) that anaphoric relations are constrained by more than one module of grammar.

Gender agreement in Chicewa

Gender in Chichewa is described as a complete system. First the basic data on gender agreement are presented and it is shown how the available agreement markers correlate with the noun genders (and how the system has changed in the recent past). There follows a discussion of interesting phenomena which do not fit easily into the main gender system. Next structures involving conjoined noun phrases headed by nouns from various genders are analysed in detail. The rules required to account for the Chichewa system prove particularly complex; rules proposed for other Bantu languages do not cover all the Chichewa facts. The data are important for comparative work within Bantu and for typological claims which go beyond. O.

Antonym adjective contexts and the facilitation of noun-pair learning in children

Second and sixth graders were asked to learn noun pairs linked by various types of verbal connectives: verbs, unmarked and marked comparative adjectives, polar antonym adjective pairs, and conjunctions. Results indicated that all contexts produced better learning than conjunctions, that comparative adjective effects were comparable to verb effects, and that both of these sentence contexts were superior to the polar-pair condition which consisted of conjoined noun phrases. Also, in all conditions, first- and final-position nouns were found to prompt equivalent recall. Results provide compelling evidence for the operation of adjective structures as mnemonic organizers in younger as well as older children, and they challenge imagistic accounts of the verb facilitation effect.