Syntactic Agreement Research Articles

Syntactic Variations in Referential Metonymy

AbstractThis paper explores the syntactic variations of concord in sentences involving referential metonymy in English. Apart from the standard type in which syntactic agreement is shown between the metonymic NP and the verbs or pronouns that follow, this article also discusses and summarizes other types where there are various degrees of disagreement. Moreover, this paper formalizes the principles of Ruiz de Mendoza and Díez (2004) by introducing the metonymic function, and proposes simplification of these principles based on the notion of metonymy as a contingency. Finally, this paper discusses other possible factors – both contextual and non‐contextual – that may lead to these syntactic variations.

Subject–verb agreement: Three experiments on Catalan

This study delves into the syntactic parsing abilities of children and infants exposed to Catalan as their first language. Focusing first on ages 3 to 6, we conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks. In experiment 1, 3 to 4-year-old children failed in identifying singular third-person subjects within null-subject sentences, although they performed above chance in all other scenarios, including plural third-person subjects and sentences with overt full DP subjects. This is reminiscent of the results of Pérez-Leroux for Spanish. In experiment 2, with the same design but involving numeral distractors, children’s performance was above chance level across all conditions from age 3 to 4. Then, in experiment 3, we moved to a younger age range with the help of eye-tracking techniques. The findings revealed that infants at 22 months had the ability to parse subject–verb agreement in sentences with third-person null subjects, and at 19 months there was evidence of parsing for third-person plural null subjects. These findings are inconsistent with the perception of children grappling with syntactic agreement computation. We argue that instances of underperformance in subject–verb agreement parsing identified in the literature often stem from task-related and pragmatic issues rather than core syntactic delay. If so, the putative asymmetry between early production of verbal inflection and late comprehension disappears; rather, the results suggest early establishment of matching operations and mastery of language-specific agreement properties before production starts.

The Syntactic Agreement of Verbs with Enumerated Controller Subjects in Najdi Arabic: An HPSG Approach

The Syntactic Agreement of Verbs with Enumerated Controller Subjects in Najdi Arabic: An HPSG Approach

Typological passport of Basque as a minority language

The aim of the research is to make an inventory of the most salient typological traits of Basque as one of the extant minority languages, whose origin and typological status have been debated ever since the 16th century. Despite the well-meaning attempts to compile a unified standard of Basque, the majority of its speakers communicate using one of its numerous dialects. Apart from that, most of the contemporary coursebooks of Basque convey contradictory messages about its main grammatical features. This lack of uniformity acts as an impediment on the way to learning Basque or forming a well-defined concept of its typology. To enhance and spread knowledge about Basque typology, the present research adopts the methodology of contrastive-typological studies, namely, the method of typological passport developed by Professor V.D. Arakin. The empirical data for the research were drawn from the courseand textbooks recommended by The Royal Academy of the Basque Language. Research results revealed a number of universal typological traits shared by Basque with well-studied languages of the world, such as the presence of articles, cases, assimilation, post-modifying adjectives, etc. However, from the perspective of contrastive typology, it is the unique typological features that are most typologically and conceptually salient, such as voiced and devoiced aspiration, variations in the pronunciation of diaphonic sounds, non-systematic (non-pleonastic) marking of number, conceptual salience of specific numerals (2, 4, and 11), neutral and emphatic world-building patterns as well the absence of some models altogether (blending, shortening, back-formation). Research results show that the typological passport of Basque can be defined as an agglutinative language with suffixes, syntactic agreement and fusions at morphemic junctures. One of the avenues for further research is a multifactorial analysis with a view to obtaining statistical data about typologically significant categories of Basque.

The Agreement Hierarchy and (generalized) semantic agreement

Agreement systems often allow alternatives: This family has/have lost everything. Therefore typology requires a means for generalizing over them. Instances like PLURAL live are frequently termed ‘semantic agreement’ (vs. ‘syntactic agreement’ for SINGULAR lives), but this notion has proved difficult. The challenge is to encompass the full typological range of alternative agreements. These include the core instances: (i) hybrid nouns like family; and (ii) constructional mismatches, such as conjoined nominal phrases, but also less obvious phenomena: (iii) split hybrids where neither alternative is straightforwardly semantic, both appear related to form, and (iv) examples like Scandinavian ‘pancake sentences’, which stretch semantic agreement towards pragmatics. These different types are comparable in that (i) the alternatives are realized by the normal agreement forms; and (ii) they are subject to the Agreement Hierarchy. Hence they demand a common treatment. To achieve this, I first unpack the Agreement Hierarchy constraint into the agreement target positions and the directionality implied by ‘semantic agreement’. I show how the latter arises from mismatches between the agreement information available from different sources. In the core instances, the information from one source is, typically, more evidently semantic than the other. But in other instances, this is less clear. I argue that it is more parsimonious to treat these less obvious phenomena as falling under the constraint of the Agreement Hierarchy, and as being part of the pattern of a Hierarchy of Agreement Sources, which gives different degrees of ‘generalized semantic agreement’. This reworking offers a more robust underpinning to the Agreement Hierarchy, and fits into a current trend in typology. A typology that works is no longer sufficient: we examine and justify the defining criteria, and relate them to the underlying attributes of the domain.

Выбор значения категории одушевлённости для сочетания «юридическое лицо» в деловом медиадискурсе

The purpose of the research is to determine the relationship between the meaning of the animacy category of the collocation «юридическое лицо» (“juridical person”) and the types of actual knowledge in business media discourse. Scientific novelty of the work lies in studying the relationship between the meaning of animacy as a grammatical category manifested in inflection and syntactic agreement and cognitive categories, namely, types of knowledge that are actualised in a particular context. The meaning of the animacy category is independently determined by the speaker for the non-prototypical cases of a native speaker’s idea of animate or inanimate objects and, therefore, does not always rely on obvious criteria. The relationship between the meaning of animacy chosen by the speaker in the usage and code knowledge or specific knowledge is considered. At the same time, code knowledge is understood as the knowledge about the meaning of a word, specific knowledge is understood as the knowledge about the truth of a certain proposition and the rules for filling in its terms. As a result, the relationship between the meaning of the animacy category of the collocation «юридическое лицо» and the types of knowledge has been determined: inanimacy indicators are found in the contexts that realise code knowledge, animacy indicators are peculiar to the cases of specific knowledge actualisation. Cases of variation have also been noted.

Eyetracking evidence for heritage speakers' access to abstract syntactic agreement features in real-time processing.

This paper presents the results of an eyetracking study that uses the Visual World Paradigm to determine whether heritage speakers of Polish can use grammatical gender cues to facilitate lexical retrieval of the subsequent noun during real time processing. Previous work has investigated this question for heritage speakers of Spanish with gender cues located on definite articles, which are highly frequent in Spanish; the results are therefore consistent both with a grammatical account, wherein heritage speakers access abstract syntactic gender features during processing, and a probabilistic account, wherein facilitation is due to transition probabilities between frequently co-occurring elements. In Polish, gender cues appear on adjectives, which are optional and infrequent. Results of the present study show that heritage speakers of Polish can use gender on inflected adjectives to fixate on the target noun faster in trials where that gender cue uniquely identifies the target noun. This finding supports a grammatical rather than probabilistic account of the facilitative use of grammatical gender in this population: heritage speakers are able to access abstract syntactic information in real time to aid word recognition in a target-like manner.

Understanding same subject-verb agreement differently: ERP evidence for flexibility in processing representations involved in French subject-verb agreement

In an ever-changing environment such as a situation with a variety of linguistic information, individuals have to adapt by selecting the most relevant and appropriate information. In event-related potential studies that manipulated the syntactic agreement between a subject and a verb, it was shown that morphosyntactic features (e.g., number or person feature) are used to compute syntactic dependencies. Furthermore, statistical language information seemed to play a role in the production of subject-verb agreement. We thus investigated flexibility in the processing of morphosyntactic features and co-occurrence frequency between a subject and its verbal inflection. Pronoun primes and verbal targets were presented auditorily and the flexibility of the representations in French subject-verb agreement was studied by manipulating the task to be performed on the target. In Experiment 1, the task was a lexical decision task to induce the use of co-occurrence frequency between a subject and its verbal inflection; in Experiment 2, the task was a grammatical categorization task to amplify the use of morphosyntactic features. Results showed that statistical information affected the processing of the verb earlier than the use of morphosyntactic features, whose violation produced the classic biphasic reaction with negativity followed by positivity. Our findings suggest that there is flexibility in the use of both statistical and abstract morphosyntactic feature representations, although the flexibility of the use of features depends more on task strategies.

Gender and Noun Class Markers in Kubeo (Tukanoan)

Abstract This paper analyzes Kubeo’s system of nominal classification from a synchronic, diachronic and typological perspective. It is argued that Kubeo has two distinct but integrated systems, labeled as “gender” and “noun class markers” (CMs). Gender contrasts animacy and number for all nouns and sex-based gender only for animate nouns. CMs mostly code for physical properties. Both systems are productively used in several morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse functions, such as noun derivation, syntactic agreement, individuation, reference identification and management. The paper focusses on highlighting formal and functional asymmetries between the systems, especially in situations where gender and noun class overlap and compete. It is shown that despite a great deal of functional equivalence, Kubeo’s “gender” is more similar to typologically defined gender systems than the language’s class marker system, while the latter, by contrast, is more similar to specific types of noun class and classifier systems found in Amazonia and elsewhere.

Morphosyntactic Features Versus Morphophonological Features in L2 Gender Acquisition: A Cross-Language Perspective

This paper aims to demonstrate the reliability of morphosyntactic versus morphophonological features in the acquisition of L2 gender of inanimate nouns across languages. Based on Anna Kibort study “Towards a typology of grammatical features”(2010), the current research proposes that the presence of a gendered determiner is more reliable than gendered noun-final morphemes in the process of adjective agreement within the Determiner Phrase (DP) across two gender transparency system languages. To test this hypothesis, the current research compares English second-language (L2) learners of Hebrew and Spanish. Both languages have a binary gender system for nouns; however, Hebrew lacks a determiner with gender value, but provides a plural ending morpheme that encodes both number and gender. In contrast, Spanish has a gendered article that facilitates gender acquisition, but lacks a plural ending morpheme that indicates gender. Thirty-two L1 English–L2 Spanish learners and thirty-two L1 English–L2 Hebrew learners with different proficiency levels completed an adjective-agreement forced-choice task and an adjective-agreement elicited-production task—in their respective target languages. The tasks contained Spanish opaque plural nouns and Hebrew plural transparent nouns, highlighting the role of the determiner in Spanish and the role of transparency plural-ending morphemes in Hebrew. The results revealed that Spanish L2 learners performed better on the tasks than L2 Hebrew learners, offering evidence for the relevance of syntactic agreement knowledge over phonological cues in gender acquisition.

A typology of northwestern Bantu gender systems

AbstractNorthwestern Bantu is the most linguistically diverse area of the Bantu-speaking world. Several unusual grammatical gender systems are reported for this area, but there has been a lack of comprehensive comparative studies. This article is a typological investigation of northwestern Bantu gender systems based on a sample of 179 languages. We study the distribution of various patterns of animacy-based agreement in the languages of the sample and in relationship with the Agreement Hierarchy. We find that animacy-based agreement is widespread in northwestern Bantu. If restricted to animate nouns, it tends to coexist in stable variation with syntactic agreement. When generalized to both animate and inanimate nouns, animacy-based agreement appears to contribute to the erosion of gender marking. In line with the prediction of the Agreement Hierarchy, we find that animacy-based agreement is prevalent with verbs and pronouns. Within the noun phrase, it spreads in ways that are suggestive of a hierarchy of syntactic integration between nouns and adnominal modifiers, which had gone unnoticed in the existing literature. These results have important implications for current models of Bantu gender systems and shed new light on animacy effects in the diachrony of gender more generally.

Default is different: relations and representations in agreement processing

ABSTRACT Theories of agreement processing typically focus on the mechanisms by which comprehenders relate the morphological features of the agreement-controlling NP and those of the verb. However, agreement is fundamentally a syntactic relation. In this paper, I examine the processing of default agreement with clausal subjects (“[cp That the doctors studied hard] was reassuring”) vs. the processing of agreement with near-synonymous NPs (“[np The fact that the doctors studied hard] was reassuring”). In the NP subject case, there is a syntactic agreement dependency between the head noun fact and the verb was but not in the the CP case. I show that the agreement processing profile for CP subjects differs from those of NP subjects. This suggests that agreement configurations with similar morphology and semantics may be processed using different strategies when embedded in different syntactic structures.

Generalizing the Presuppositional Approach to the Binding Conditions

AbstractAlmost all current approaches to the binding theory (the conditions that regulate covaluation between NPs within a sentence) have accepted the view that the binding theory should regulate only syntactic binding and not coreference. In this article, I argue that this is incorrect and that we need a binding theory that regulates both binding and coreference, as the classical binding theory had it. I also show some problems with the idea that the binding conditions somehow involve or should reduce to syntactic movement or syntactic agreement (Agree), as many recent works argue. I suggest instead that we should pursue a presuppositional approach to the binding conditions, as has been proposed for Binding Condition A. I spell out such an analysis and illustrate some benefits of pursuing it.

Object-Attribute Approach for Semantic Analysis of Natural Language

he article describes the methodology of semantic analysis of natural language (NL) and semantic search in it, which includes: the general stages of analysis of NL, the format of the semantic network for presenting the meaning of the text, words polysemy analysis, semantic and syntactic agreement of words, etc. The method is based on the object-attribute principle of organization of calculations and data structures, belonging to the dataflow class.

Mechanisms for handling nested dependencies in neural-network language models and humans

Recursive processing in sentence comprehension is considered a hallmark of human linguistic abilities. However, its underlying neural mechanisms remain largely unknown. We studied whether a modern artificial neural network trained with “deep learning” methods mimics a central aspect of human sentence processing, namely the storing of grammatical number and gender information in working memory and its use in long-distance agreement (e.g., capturing the correct number agreement between subject and verb when they are separated by other phrases). Although the network, a recurrent architecture with Long Short-Term Memory units, was solely trained to predict the next word in a large corpus, analysis showed the emergence of a very sparse set of specialized units that successfully handled local and long-distance syntactic agreement for grammatical number. However, the simulations also showed that this mechanism does not support full recursion and fails with some long-range embedded dependencies. We tested the model's predictions in a behavioral experiment where humans detected violations in number agreement in sentences with systematic variations in the singular/plural status of multiple nouns, with or without embedding. Human and model error patterns were remarkably similar, showing that the model echoes various effects observed in human data. However, a key difference was that, with embedded long-range dependencies, humans remained above chance level, while the model's systematic errors brought it below chance. Overall, our study shows that exploring the ways in which modern artificial neural networks process sentences leads to precise and testable hypotheses about human linguistic performance.

Syntactic Gender Agreement Processing on Direct-Object Clitics by Spanish-Speaking Children with Developmental Language Disorder: Evidence from ERP.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have a psycholinguistic profile evincing multiple syntactic processing impairments. Spanish-speaking children with DLD struggle with gender agreement on clitics; however, the existing evidence comes from offline, elicitation tasks. In the current study, we sought to determine whether converging evidence of this deficit can be found. In particular, we use the real-time processing technique of event-related brain potentials (ERP) with direct-object clitic pronouns in Spanish-speaking children with DLD. Our participants include 15 six-year-old Mexican Spanish-speaking children with DLD and 19 typically developing, age-matched (TD) children. Auditory sentences that matched or did not match the gender features of antecedents represented in pictures were employed as stimuli in a visual–auditory gender agreement task. Gender-agreement violations were associated with an enhanced anterior negativity between 250 and 500 ms post-target onset in the TD children group. In contrast, children with DLD showed no such effect. This absence of the left anterior negativity (LAN) effect suggests weaker lexical representation of morphosyntactic gender features and/or non-adult-like morphosyntactic gender feature checking for the DLD children. We discuss the relevance of these findings for theoretical accounts of DLD. Our findings may contribute to a better understanding of syntactic agreement processing and language disorders.

The Influence of Verbal Semantics on Agreement Patterns in Arabic: the Role of Agenthood

Abstract The present paper, based on a complete analysis of the Quranic text, investigates the influence of verbal semantics on agreement choices in Quranic Arabic. Building on the principle according to which, when a language shifts from a prevalently formal agreement system to a partially semantic one, conditions gain more importance (Fleischer, Rieken, Widmer 2015: 21), it focuses on the role of agenthood (or agency) in triggering syntactic agreement. The analysis of the data reveals that the occurrence of an action verb and of an agent subject favors syntactic agreement in the feminine plural, although not systematically. Passive verbs, copulas and state verbs, in which the subject is either a patient or an experiencer, on the other hand, strongly favor semantic agreement in the feminine singular. From this perspective, moreover, Quranic Arabic seems to represent a more innovative stage of the language when compared to pre-Islamic poetry, described in D’Anna (forth.).

Negative Concord in Modern Standard Arabic

This study examines negative concord (NC) constructions in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The study shows that MSA is a strict NC language with n-words that must co-occur with a negative expression yielding only one logical negation to the semantics in spite of the fact that they can contribute negation on their own in fragment answers. I argue that an analysis of NC in MSA as syntactic agreement whereby n-words are assumed be non-negative indefinites with a formal negative feature that needs to be checked and deleted against semantic negation can better capture the distribution of n-words in the language than other approaches that take n-words to be either negative polarity items (NPIs) or negative quantifiers.

Evidence against preserved syntactic comprehension in healthy aging.

We investigated age-related differences in syntactic comprehension in young and older adults. Most previous research found no evidence of age-related decline in syntactic processing. We investigated elementary syntactic comprehension of minimal sentences (e.g., I cook), minimizing the influence of working memory. We also investigated the contribution of semantic processing by comparing sentences containing real verbs (e.g., I cook) versus pseudoverbs (e.g., I spuff). We measured the speed and accuracy of detecting syntactic agreement errors (e.g., I cooks, I spuffs). We found that older adults were slower and less accurate than younger adults in detecting syntactic agreement errors for both real and pseudoverb sentences, suggesting there is age-related decline in syntactic comprehension. The age-related decline in accuracy was smaller for the pseudoverb sentences, and the decline in speed was larger for the pseudoverb sentences, compared to real verb sentences. We suggest that syntactic comprehension decline is stronger in the absence of semantic information, which causes older adults to produce slower responses to make more accurate decisions. In line with these findings, performance for older adults was positively related to a measure of processing speed capacity. Taken together, we found evidence that elementary syntactic processing abilities decline in healthy aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

An empirical study of honorific mismatches in Korean

While numerous studies have approached honorification mainly focusing on how honorific forms and features agree with each other in syntactic derivation, the present study focuses on mismatches between a referent and the verb that the referent depends on with respect to honorification. If Korean honorification is a syntactic phenomenon, the mismatches in honorification must be fully accounted for as syntactic agreement cannot be disobeyed in principle. However, either theoretical or empirical inquiry into the mismatches in honorification has not received due attention. Systematic theoretical research on the issue is scant and the empirical endeavors are even rarer. Therefore, the full range of acceptability variance for different honorific expressions remains unknown, which hinders a livelier discussion about honorification. In this context, the present work employs two widely supported methods of linguistic research, viz. acceptability judgment testing and corpus exploration, in order to account for cases of the honorific mismatches. First, the cross-validation reveals that there is no a posteriori evidence for believing that Korean honorification undergoes a syntactic agreement. The experimental results indicate that Korean native speakers largely allow the mismatches involving a referent in an honorific form and a verb in a non-honorific form. Furthermore, they reveal that this type of mismatch forms occurs almost twice as frequently as the forms in perfect agreement in the corpus. These results demonstrate that the syntactic agreement-based approach conflicts with the native speakers' acceptability judgments and the language usage in daily speech. Second, the present study empirically corroborates the evidence that Korean honorification is semantically/pragmatically controlled. On the one hand, it is borne out that the mismatches involving a referent in a non-honorific form and a verb in an honorific form are mostly disallowed. These mismatches are instances of semantic restriction (i.e., anomalies); the head lexically imposes a blocking constraint on its dependent (not vice versa) with respect to the meaning and marking of honorifications. On the other hand, the empirical findings support the validity of the pragmatic conception that speakers manipulate the attitudes toward a given discourse situation and thereby choose the most appropriate honorific form out of the different forms with different degrees of deference. Since the most salient entity to the speaker in discourse (mentally as well as physically) is the hearer, the hearer (if honorable) tends to receive the strongest deference in honorific expressions; it turns out that if the verb is honorifically marked almost two-thirds of the associated referents refer to the honorable hearer. In addition, the mismatches with a referent in a non-honorific form and a verb in an honorific form can appear when the speaker needs to modulate their attitude of deference to an extreme degree or the honorific feature of the referent is semantically underspecified.