Syntactic Agreement Research Articles

States of indecision in the brain: ERP reflections of syntactic agreement violations versus visual degradation

According to the monitoring theory of language perception, language errors can create strong conflicts between expected and observed representations. When a strong conflict is present this functions as a bottom-up signal to bias attention towards the unexpected representation for reprocessing to check for possible processing errors. This monitoring process, encompassing both the conflict and reprocessing, is thought to be reflected in the late positivity or P600 effect. The present ERP study compared sentences with syntactic agreement violations to sentences containing visually degraded words. The latter could also signal that control adjustments are needed, because of a lack of bottom-up information. The results showed that both agreement violations and degraded words elicited long-lasting positivities—though with different onsets and some distributional differences. It is proposed that the general process underlying these positivities is similar. Both language errors and degraded words signal the need for adjustments in control to reprocess the input—either to check for errors, or to identify the word. However, depending on the type and complexity of the information that interrupts comprehension, the positivities vary in onset and/or scalp distribution. An unexpected finding was that the ERP pattern to agreement violations was influenced by presentation order. Participants who had seen the syntactic block first showed a P600 effect to agreement violations, while participants who had seen the degradation block first showed an N400 effect. This finding might indicate that different strategies develop to process agreement violations, depending on the context in which they are embedded.

On Agreement with Numeral Phrase Subjects Including ≥5 in Old and Middle Polish

The paper addresses the topic of sentential agreement with numeral subjects such as pięć kobiet/pięciu chłopców ‘five women/five boys’ in Polish, and argues on the basis of historical data that the issues presented by such subjects shed light on the nature of syntactic agreement, in particular its connection to the nominative case. Numeral expressions with ≥5 have been argued in the literature to be intrinsically accusative and therefore their triggering default (3rd person singular neuter) agreement as subjects has been ascribed to their non–nominative status. While this hypothesis is viable for the Polish of the 17th century onwards, it is not applicable to the earlier 15th and 16th century stages. Based on historical evidence, where syntactic agreement with the numeral nouns is conspicuous by its absence and instead we find default agreement coexisting with semantic agreement (synesis), it will be argued that during that period the numeral nouns in direct case contexts were caseless due to the inaccessibility of their formal features to outside probing and that this constitutes the sole reason for the missing syntactic agreement with such subjects.

How robust is the language architecture? The case of mood

In neurocognitive research on language, the processing principles of the system at hand are usually assumed to be relatively invariant. However, research on attention, memory, decision-making, and social judgment has shown that mood can substantially modulate how the brain processes information. For example, in a bad mood, people typically have a narrower focus of attention and rely less on heuristics. In the face of such pervasive mood effects elsewhere in the brain, it seems unlikely that language processing would remain untouched. In an EEG experiment, we manipulated the mood of participants just before they read texts that confirmed or disconfirmed verb-based expectations about who would be talked about next (e.g., that “David praised Linda because … ” would continue about Linda, not David), or that respected or violated a syntactic agreement rule (e.g., “The boys turns”). ERPs showed that mood had little effect on syntactic parsing, but did substantially affect referential anticipation: whereas readers anticipated information about a specific person when they were in a good mood, a bad mood completely abolished such anticipation. A behavioral follow-up experiment suggested that a bad mood did not interfere with verb-based expectations per se, but prevented readers from using that information rapidly enough to predict upcoming reference on the fly, as the sentence unfolds. In all, our results reveal that background mood, a rather unobtrusive affective state, selectively changes a crucial aspect of real-time language processing. This observation fits well with other observed interactions between language processing and affect (emotions, preferences, attitudes, mood), and more generally testifies to the importance of studying “cold” cognitive functions in relation to “hot” aspects of the brain.

Negative indefinites (review)

Reviewed by: Negative indefinites Elena Herburger Negative indefinites. By Doris Penka. (Oxford studies in theoretical linguistics.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 264. ISBN 9780199567270. $45. In Negative indefinites Doris Penka focuses on three topics in the syntax and semantics of negation: negative concord, the split-scope readings of negative quantifiers in German, and the restricted distribution of quantifiers in Scandinavian. P argues that in each instance what looks like a negative quantifier is really an indefinite whose apparent negative force derives from a separate— at times tacit, at times overt—negation operator with which the indefinite enters an agreement relation. In addition to methodically making a case for analyzing negative quantifiers as NEGATIVE INDEFINITES, the book also discusses a large number of existing analyses and paradigms, offering a valuable and timely survey of some of the current literature. The first third of the book is devoted to negative concord, where what looks like one and the same expression (N-WORD) appears to have negative force in certain contexts and merely existential force in others. P rejects various previous accounts, including the view that so-called n-words like Spanish nadie or Russian nikto are negative quantifiers (e.g. Zanuttini 1991), the view that they are their negative polarity counterparts (e.g. Laka 1990, Ladusaw 1992), and the view that they are ambiguous between the two (Herburger 2001). Adopting Zeijlstra's (2004) approach instead, she analyzes n-words like nadie/nikto as existential quantifiers in need of syntactic agreement with an overt or tacit negation operator. P then extends the analysis to French, which poses particular challenges. Since the account of negative concord P adopts bears architectural resemblances to the negative polarity item (NPI) accounts of negative concord, it faces similar challenges. To explain the occurrence of n-words without negation (e.g. in elliptical answers and in preverbal positions in nonstrict negative concord languages like Spanish) it posits a silent negation operator. To constrain the distribution of this operator, P appeals to an economy condition that forces the insertion of a silent negation operator if the derivation would otherwise crash. Because P assumes that the negation with which the n-word agrees always takes scope over the event operator, her account does not capture the occurrence of n-words that appear in postverbal position without a negation and that are interpreted as narrow-scope negative quantifiers (Herburger 2001). In connection with the general resemblance of the negative indefinite and the NPI accounts of negative concord just pointed out, it is worth noting that P insists that negative concord and NPI [End Page 663] licensing are separate phenomena. One argument is that n-words do not fit neatly into van der Wouden's (1997) classification of NPIs. Another reason is that unlicensed n-words result in ungrammaticality, whereas unlicensed NPIs according to the analyses advanced by Kadmon and Landman (1993) and Lahiri (1998), for example, are merely pragmatically infelicitous. It may be, however, that the fact that the analyses in question rule out 1 as pragmatically bizarre and not as ungrammatical is a drawback of these analyses and not an independently established fact one should confidently base an argument on (Herburger 2011). 1. *She ever said that. Another reason a reader might remain a bit skeptical of P's assertion that negative concord has nothing to do with NPI licensing is examples where n-words are licensed in comparatives or by predicates like doubt. These require P to say that the relevant feature ([iNEG]) is not limited to (c)overt negation operators but can also appear on other elements, which happen to be NPI licensors. In one of the last chapters P discussed the various similarities of the account of negative concord she adopts with that put forth in Ladusaw 1992. In that context she makes important observations about how the unselective binding analysis of indefinites that Ladusaw adopts must be modified in order to capture all scopal interactions between the negation operator and the n-word. P herself, however, does not commit to any specific semantic analysis of indefinites. The second third of the book deals with the split-scope readings of negative and other downward-entailing quantifiers. The...

Radical pro drop and the role of syntactic agreement in Colloquial Singapore English

This article presents a re-working of Huang's (1984) parametric theory of null arguments through an in-depth examination of the so-called radical pro drop phenomenon and the role of syntactic agreement in Colloquial Singapore English/CSE, an English-lexified contact variety spoken in Singapore. We present a hitherto unnoticed observation that the otherwise liberal omission of the subject in CSE is blocked by the subject agreement –s appropriated from its English lexifier. Our central idea here is that meager agreement in CSE must be licensed/valuated by an overt NP through the specifier-head relation (Speas, 1994, 2006). This idea, coupled with Huang's theory of null arguments, captures the radical pro drop phenomenon in CSE. Our proposed analysis not only correctly predicts subject–object asymmetries with respect to reference and crossover effects in CSE but also derives the new observation that poor agreement in CSE blocks the generation of the empty category in subject position, but not in object position. We further compare our analysis with two recent alternative theories of the radical pro drop phenomenon presented by Neeleman and Szendröi (2007) and Saito (2007). We show that our analysis successfully circumvents the empirical problems CSE raises for these theories.

Negative Concord in Afrikaans: filling a typological gap

Many languages exhibit Negative Concord (NC), with multiple morphosyntactic instances of negation corresponding to one semantic negation. Traditionally, NC languages are distinguished as Strict and Non-strict (cf. Giannakidou 2000). In the former (e.g. Czech), multiple negative elements may or even must precede the finite verb, whereas in Non-strict NC languages, like Italian, only one negative element may precede the finite verb. In a recent analysis of NC (Zeijlstra 2004, 2008b), NC is analysed as an instance of syntactic agreement between one or more negative elements that are formally, but not semantically, negative and a single, potentially unrealized semantically negative operator. On this analysis, the difference between Strict and Non-strict NC languages reduces to the semantic value of the negative marker: in Strict NC languages, both negative indefinites and negative markers are semantically non-negative; in Non-strict NC languages, by contrast, only negative indefinites are semantically non-negative, negative markers being semantically negative. This analysis predicts the existence of a third type of NC language, namely one where negative indefinites are semantically negative, but negative markers are not. This paper demonstrates that a particular variety of Afrikaans (the standard) instantiates a language of exactly this type: while pairs of negative indefinites always yield a Double Negation reading in this variety, negative markers can be stacked incrementally without giving rise to a new negation.

Mixed agreement, the person feature, and the index/concord distinction

In mixed agreement, different agreement targets show different values for the same controller. This paper offers an explanation for the existence of mixed agreement that accounts for the following Polite Plural Generalization: universally, any second person ‘polite plural’ pronouns (e.g. French vous), used honorifically for a single addressee, control syntactic (plural) agreement on all person targets, while non-person-agreeing targets such as predicate adjectives vary across languages, between syntactic and semantic number agreement. Following Wechsler and Zlatic (The Many Faces of Agreement, CSLI Publications, 2003), person features exist only as features of referential indices (Index phi features), never as grammatical head features of the sort that are involved in adjective-noun concord (Concord phi features). Mixed agreement arises if the ‘polite plural’ or other pronominal controller is underspecified for Concord phi features. But a pronoun has a referential Index, which is necessarily marked with phi features, so any Index agreement targets will appear in the second person plural form. A diachronic explanation is offered for this bifurcation of agreement targets into Index and Concord targets: the former descend from incorporated pronouns while the latter have other sources.

Short-Term Memory, Agrammatism, and Syntactic Agreement

Short-Term Memory, Agrammatism, and Syntactic Agreement

Mixed Agreement with a Hybrid Pronoun in Latvian

This paper discusses mixed agreement triggered by hybrid pronouns. Hybrid pronouns considered in this paper show number discrepancy in that they are plural in form but singular in meaning. When predicates agree with these hybrid pronouns, the puzzle of number agreement arises: finite verbs show syntactic agreement, while predicate adjectives show semantic agreement. This is explained by three factors in grammar of agreement, the feature specification of agreement controllers, the types of agreement targets, and the Agreement Marking Principle that mediates the relation of two poles of agreement, controllers and targets. (University of Texas at Austin)

Polite plurals and adjective agreement

When an agreement controller such as a subject NP is a hybrid of contrasting syntactic and semantic features, the choice of syntactic versus semantic agreement depends on both the type of agreement target and the type of agreement controller. Two types of controller are contrasted: hybrid pronouns such as polite uses of the second person plural to refer to one addressee; and hybrid common nouns such as plurale tante. In some languages the pronoun type triggers singular on a predicate adjective and plural on the verb, while the common noun type triggers plural on both adjectives and verbs. The former pattern is explained in terms of underspecification of the pronoun: it is unspecified for the Concord number feature, to which adjectives are sensitive; but it carries a number feature on its referential Index, to which finite verbs are sensitive. An Agreement Marking Principle is proposed, according to which an agreement target checks the trigger for a syntactic phi feature, assigning that feature’s semantic interpretation to the trigger denotation if no syntactic feature is found.

Internal Structure of Clitics and Cliticization

AbstractThe role of the internal structure of clitics in cliticization has been investigated by many researchers up to now. In this study I look into three distinct types of analysis that have been proposed in the literature regarding this role and argue that they do not work for Greek. I further propose that the only role the internal structure of clitics can play in cliticization is via their phi-features, which render them active goals. However, I argue that the internal structure is crucial in another respect, namely in the incorporation of the clitic pronoun into its verbal host. This is because in order to incorporate, the clitic has to contain only a subset of the features contained in the incorporation host. Syntactic cliticization in Greek follows from syntactic agreement between the clitic pronoun and the phase head v*, which leads to movement of the clitic to the left edge of v* and to clitic incorporation into v*. Incorporation yields proclisis.

On French Negation

n/a

Multiple Case Sharing and Syntactic Structure

In this paper, I propose that multiple Case marking in Korean is a result of Case sharing among verbal head, Tense head and maximal projections in-between. I first show that multiple Case marking in floating quantifier constructions and inalienable possession constructions is not a uniform phenomenon and must be treated separately in syntax. Specifically, I argue that floating quantifiers show obligatory Case sharing whereas inalienable possessor may show optional Case agreement in certain derived contexts. I develop an analysis for the diverging Case patterns under the framework arguing that syntactic agreement is feature sharing. I adopt a series of arguments that Case agreement is T-feature agreement. I show that the current approach may capture a systematic correlation between underlying constituency and optional/obligatory Case agreement. I employ a Magnitude Estimation Task to obtain quantifiable psychological data for multiple Case marking constructions in Korean.

Processing Clitic Pronouns in Bulgarian — Evidence from Normal and Agrammatic Comprehension

Clitic clusters display a complicated interaction of prosodic and syntactic properties which de) termines their word order and stress patterns. In Bulgarian, short pronouns appear as unstressed verbal enclitics in positive utterances. Proclitic negation attracts the pronouns and forms with them a prosodic unit stressed on the second syllable, the pronoun. Theoretical linguistics charac) terizes the behaviour of object clitics in terms of “non)trivial chains” (Boskovic 2001) containing copies. The overt realisation of a higher or lower copy depends on phonological constraints like enclitisation requirements. In line with the slow)syntax)hypothesis (Burkhardt et al. 2008) and with the assumption that prosody)related processes may also compete for the same limited proc) essing resources of Broca’s aphasics (Avrutin et al. 1999), we test sensitivity to the phono) syntactic constraints negation imposes on the word order of personal and reflexive clitics. Results suggest that the pattern of agrammatic processing of clitic clusters resembles normal comprehen) sion but proceeds in a protracted manner. Employing a self)paced reading task and an experimen) tal design which reduces discourse)related interpretation processes, we also show that the syntac) tic functions of personal object clitics as syntactic object agreement markers in Bulgarian are relatively preserved in the aphasic group.

The role of feature-number and feature-type in processing Hindi verb agreement violations

This article presents studies of Hindi that investigate whether responses to syntactic agreement violations vary as a function of the type and number of incorrect agreement features, using both electrophysiological (ERP) and behavioral measures. Hindi is well suited to investigation of this issue, since verbs in Hindi mark agreement with the person, number, and gender features of the nominative subject noun phrase. In an ERP study evoked responses were recorded for visually presented verbs appearing at the end of a sentence-initial adverbial clause, comparing responses in a grammatically correct condition with four grammatically incorrect conditions that mismatched the correct agreement on different dimensions (Gender, Number, Gender/Number, Person/Gender). A P600 response was elicited in all grammatically incorrect conditions. No amplitude differences were found among the Gender, Number, and combined Gender/Number violations. This suggests that the feature distance between observed and expected word forms at the morphosyntactic level does not impact ERP responses, contrasting with findings on semantic and auditory processing, and suggests that the P600 response to agreement violations is not additive based on the number of mismatching features and does not reflect top-down, predictive mechanisms. A significantly larger P600 response was elicited by the combined Person/Gender violation, and two different violations involving the Person feature were judged as more severe and recognized more quickly in the behavioral studies. This effect is attributed to the greater salience of the Person feature at multiple levels of representation.

The representation of third person and its consequences for person-case effects

In modeling the effects of the Person-Case Constraint (PCC), a common claim is that 3rd person “is not a person”. However, while this claim does work in the syntax, it creates problems in the morphology. For example, characterizing the well-known “spurious se effect” in Spanish simply cannot be done without reference to 3rd person. Inspired by alternatives to underspecification that have emerged in phonology (e.g., Calabrese, 1995), a revised featural system is proposed, whereby syntactic agreement may be relativized to certain values of a feature, in particular, the contrastive and marked values. The range of variation in PCC effects is shown to emerge as a consequence of the parametric options allowed on a Probing head, whereas the representation of person remains constant across modules of the grammar and across languages.

The Relationship between Eye Gaze and Verb Agreement in American Sign Language: An Eye-tracking Study

The representation of agreement is a crucial aspect of current syntactic theory, and therefore should apply in both signed and spoken languages. Neidle et al. (2000) claim that all verb types in American Sign Language (agreeing, spatial, and plain) can occur with abstract syntactic agreement for subject and object. On this view, abstract agreement can be marked with either manual agreement morphology (verb directed toward locations associated with the subject/object) or non-manual agreement (eye gaze toward the object/head tilt toward the subject). Non-manual agreement is claimed to function independently as a feature-checking mechanism since it can occur with plain verbs not marked with overt morphological agreement. We conducted a language production experiment using head-mounted eye-tracking to directly measure signers’ eye gaze. The results were inconsistent with Neidle et al.’s claims. While eye gaze accompanying (manually/morphologically) agreeing verbs was most frequently directed toward the location of the syntactic object, eye gaze accompanying plain verbs was rarely directed toward the object. Further, eye gaze accompanying spatial verbs was toward the locative argument, rather than toward the object of transitive verbs or the subject of intransitive verbs as predicted by Neidle et.al. Additionally, we found a consistent difference in the height of directed eye gaze between spatial and agreeing verbs. Gaze was directed lower in signing space for locative marking than for object marking, thus clearly distinguishing these two argument types. Plain verbs occurring with null object pronouns were not marked by gaze toward the location of the object and always occurred with an overt object topic. Thus, Neidle et.al.’s analysis of null objects as licensed by agreement (manual or non-manual) was not supported. Rather, the data substantiated Lillo-Martin’s (1986) claim that null arguments for plain verbs are licensed by topics. To account for the observed patterns of eye gaze, we propose an analysis of eye gaze agreement for agreeing and spatial verbs as marking the ‘lowest’ available argument on a noun phrase accessibility hierarchy.

How semantics dictates the syntactic vocabulary

In this paper I argue that the set of formal features that can head a functional projection is not given by UG but derived through L1 acquisition. I formulate a hypothesis that says that initially every functional category F is realised as a semantic feature [F]; whenever there is an overt doubling effect in the L1 input with respect to F, this semantic feature [F] is reanalysed as a formal feature [i/uF]. In the first part of the paper I provide a theoretical motivation for this hypothesis, in the second part I test this proposal for a case-study, namely the cross-linguistic distribution of Negative Concord (NC). I demonstrate that in NC languages negation has been reanalysed as a formal feature [i/uNEG], whereas in Double Negation languages this feature remains a semantic feature [NEG] (always interpreted as a negative operator), thus paving the way for an explanation of NC in terms of syntactic agreement. In the third part I discuss that the application of the hypothesis to the phenomenon of negation yields two predictions that can be tested empirically. First I demonstrate that negative markers X° can be available only in NC languages; second, independent change of the syntactic status of negative markers, can invoke a change with respect to the exhibition of NC in a particular language. Both predictions are proven to be correct. I finally argue what the consequences of the proposal presented in this paper are for both the syntactic structure of the clause and second for the way parameters are associated to lexical items.

Aspect Agreement and Light Verbs in Chinese: The Sources of Distributivity

In this article I distinguish two types of sentence final particles (SFPs) and two types of predicates in Chinese in terms of the aspectual features [±dynamic]. I assume that aspect in Chinese projects a maximal projection, AspectP, which determines the temporal properties of predicates. It is argued that the predicates and the SFPs in Chinese sentences must agree in the [±dynamic] features in syntax. It is also argued that Chinese has two light verbs: the static light verb slv and the dynamic light verb dlv. These two light verbs, in conjunction with the lexical verbs, determine the event structures of the predicates in Chinese, and furthermore serve as the basis for the syntactic agreement of the aspectuality between the SFPs and the predicates. In this article I also compare the SFPs and predicates in Chinese and Japanese. Based on empirical evidence, I propose that Japanese lacks syntactic aspect agreement, in sharp contrast with Chinese.

A New Semantics for Number

No abstract.