AGREEMENT IN ATTRACTION

J. Carlos Acuña Fariña

• (…) there are at least two different levels at which
agreement must work, calling on two different kinds of
information. Speakers begin with messages, which
embody the conceptual relationships they intend to
communicate. The specific embodiments of concepts
within messages are collectively called notions,
comprising intended referents, ideas, states of affairs,
and relationships among them. These notional
components of messages carry features of the
concepts that they instantiate, but in order to be
communicated, they have to undergo linguistic coding
as words standing in particular structural relationships
to one another. Agreement may involve the notional
features of messages, or the linguistic features of
words and structures, or more likely both. (Bock et al.
2001: 84)
• Under the assumption of a tight connection
between grammar and processor (an
assumption which is rarely made ever since
the pioneering days of the derivational theory
of complexity, but which seems to us to be
the null hypothesis), the different derivational
steps assumed in linguistics should be
traceable in linguistic performance, and for
our concerns here, in the way speakers err
when producing agreement. (Franck, Lasso,
Frauenfelder & Rizzi 2006: 179)
 *The key to the cabinets are in the
kitchen

• “the aberrant outcome of a normal resolution

process”, “a kind of spurious resolution between
conflicting number specifications” (Bock et. al
2001: 85-86; cfr. Corbett 1983).
• proximity concord (Jespersen 1924; Kimball and
Aissen 1971; Quirk et al. 1985; Francis 1986; den
Dikken 2001: Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 500 ff.;
see Bock & Miller 1991 for review).
• (1) ?It´s part of one’s linguistic competence to be able to control and
interpret variations of word-order and grammatical structure of the kind
that are exemplified in the sentences cited above. (grammatically
judgement in original). (Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 500-01)

• (2) *The time for fun and games are over.

• (3) *The readiness of our conventional forces are at an all-time low.
• (4) *I don’t think it much matters where the final reinterment of these
• men are.
• (5) *The learning skills people have entering college is less than it
• should be. (Bock & Miller 1991):

• “… the illiteracy level of our children are appalling” (George Bush,

Washington, 23 January 2004)
• Eberhard et al. (2005): when the complex NP
contains a singular head and a plural modifier
(as in the key to the cabinets), there are as
many as 13% of agreement mistakes on the
verb in English. This points to an
architecturally-driven propensity
• (6a) The key to the cabinets… (IS LARGE)
• (6b) The keys to the cabinet… (*ARE LARGE)
•
• Seminal work led by Bock in the early 1990s
set this experimental agenda in motion
(Bock& Miller 1991; Bock & Cutting 1992;
Bock, Cutting & Eberhard 1992; and Bock &
Eberhard 1993).
 INITIAL FINDINGS
• 1. Asymmetry: [sg + pl], but not [pl + sg].
• 2. Distributivity:

• The bridge to the islands

• vs
• The key to the cabinets
 INITIAL FINDINGS
• 3. Phrasal modifiers vs clausal modifiers: more
att with phrases.
• (the same encoding cycle (Bock 1991; see also
Nicol 1995).

• 4. Short vs long postmodifier: no effects.

 INITIAL FINDINGS
• 5. ‘Palpability’ of local noun reference:

• The idea was that “the number of a relatively concrete

local noun may hold more sway over the judged number of
an abstract subject (as in the speech of the authors) than a
relatively abstract local noun does over the judged number
of a concrete subject (as in the mountain of the nomads)”
(Bock & Miller 1991: 66)
• No effects
 INITIAL CONCLUSIONS
• An inflectional account of agreement: feature
inheritance, copying or percolation (Gazdar et
al. 1985; Chomsky 1981): a controller which
possesses inherent features passes them on
to a target to establish an agreement relation.
This is done in a formally encapsulated
manner that is strongly reminiscent of cyclic
phases. Meaning waits.
 Further evidence
• 1. pseudo-plurals did not affect attraction rates (so the player
on the course did not attract (despite the local noun looking
like a plural) but the player on the courts did);

• 2. regulars (boys) and irregulars (men) attracted

approximately the same;

• 3. collectives like army or fleet did not attract whereas

ordinarily-inflected nouns like soldiers or ships did (Bock &
Eberhard 1993).
 Early corrections 1
• 1. Distributivity:

• First, Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Semenza (1995) showed that

Italian attraction patterns were sensitive to the distributivity
of the preambles. Then, Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Garrett
(1996) compared English to Spanish and found that Spanish
behaved like Italian, while English remained unaffected by
semantics.
 Early corrections 1
• Another theory: unification

• with rich morphology, the two constituents that participate

in an agreement relation may specify only partial
information about a single linguistic object (Kay 1985;
Barlow 1988, 1993; Pollard & Sag 1988). Unification then
occurs when compatible featural information on two sites
becomes merged (Shieber 1986; De Smedt 1990). On this
view, features are not copied or moved, but simply partially
shared.
 Early corrections 1
• Unlike English, Spanish and Italian have verbs which contain such
partial information directly and can therefore directly connect to
conceptual structure without any kind of mediation or control.
Hence the semantic (distributivity) effects.
• Vigliocco, Hartsuiker, Jarema, & Kolk (1996) obtained the same
pattern of results in French and Dutch, also two richly-inflected
languages.
• Recall that a problem for directional theories of agreement is that
sometimes the targets of agreement exhibit marking even when it
is absent from the source. For instance, in French one says je suis
heureux vs je suis hereuse (‘I am happy’) depending on the sex of
the referent of the subject pronoun, via a direct appeal to
pragmatics (as je does not mark gender).
 Early corrections 2
• Eberhard (1997): ‘imageability’ in English.

• Humphreys and Bock (1999; cited in Bock et al. 2001: 87)

found that plural verbs are used more frequently after subject
NPs such as The gang on the motorcycles than after others
such as The gang near the motorcycles. This is because the
former puts gang members into a one-to-one relationship
with motorcycles, thereby emphasizing their multiplicity.
Alos the initial conclusions about form
biasses had to be revised
• Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol (2002) on NPs
containing three nouns, as in (7)-(8):
•
• (7) *The computer with the programs of the experiment are
broken
• (8) *The computer with the program of the experiments are
broken.

• NO LINEAR PROXIMITY
 Form biasses
• Vigliocco & Nicol (1998):
•
• (9) *Are the helicopter for the flights safe?
• (10) *The helicopter for the flights are safe.

• suggest that attraction is computed on a hierarchical

structure rather than on the final surface order. That is,
they suggest that it occurs in a grammatical encoding
phase before words are linearised (Franck et al. 2002;
Franck et al. 2006). This basically accords with Bock &
Miller´s (1991) findings (the encapsulated, formal,
inflectional account).
• So,
• 1. the overall distributivity of the phrase (semantics)
counts,
• 2. but the collectivity of local nouns (semantics) does not
(as collectives do not attract).
• 3. inflectional morphology counts (soldiers vs army),
• 4. but so does supra-phrasal attraction (and even supra-
clausal, as attraction also affects NP-pronoun co-indexings;
Bock et al. 1999).
• As can be seen, experimental data soon showed what
linguistic theory had long found out on its own: namely,
that agreement is particularly sensitive to both semantic
and formal regulation simultaneously.
 REMEMBER THE GRAMMAR

• THE STAFF WANT A HIGHER SALARY

• A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY
• TWENTY DOLLARS IS TO MUCH
• EGGS AND BACON IS MAY FAVOURITE MEAL

• NURSELY WE: we seem a bit displeased with

ourself today; see Joseph, 1979; also Harley
and Ritter, 2002:507),
• Los chicos (3rd person) somos (1st person)
unos idiotas

• But:

• More than one person comes/*come usually

• Votre Majesté (fem) partira quand elle (fem)

voudra
• Your majesty will leave whenever she wants
•YOU CAN´T BLAME
ON THE BRITS!
 Two current views
• Marking & Morphing (Bock et al. 2001;
Eberhard et al. 2005; Bock et al. 2006).
• Reconciliation aligns morphological number
and phrase number.
• Then control: copying on the verb

• *the label on the bottles ARE …

• *the baby on the blankets ARE
 M&M
• 1. collectives don´t attract.
• 2. summation plurals (scissors, binolulars) do.
• 3. Invariant plurals attract less: scissors
(notionally singlular-like) and suds (notionally
plural-like)
• Markedness: activation boost.
 Maximal Input
• Vigliocco & Franck 2001; Vigliocco &
Hartsuiker 2002.
• a level of processing is not completely isolated from
interference from neighbouring levels, so grammatical
encoding (the second level) may be affected by the
previous conceptualisation stage and even by the
subsequent phonological encoding stage if circumstances
make that advantageous for processing (models differ in
how much interference they allow).
 Maximal Input
• Arbitrary and semantic gender; Vigliocco and
Franck (1999)

• agreement of gender between the subject and

the predicate
 Conflicting evidence
• attraction has been found to exist when object
NPs (both clitics and full NPs) intervene between
subject NPs and their agreeing verbs (Hartsuiker
et al. 2001). Since marking affects the entire
referential phrase and the object NP is another
referential phrase, the percolation path
envisaged to account for such effects would
actually be tantamount to a relaxation of the
notion of fully encapsulated cycles (making M&M
even more similar to Maximal Input)
 Conflicting evidence
• Hupet et al. (1998) and Thornton &
MacDonald (2003) have found semantic
effects by manipulating the plausibility of the
verb relative to the two nouns in complex NP.
• the album by the classical composers . . . BE
praised
• the album by the classical composers . . . BE
played
 Conflicting evidence
• 1. Local noun can exercise semantic influence
• 2. effects are obtained at the verb
ATTRACTION IN COMPREHENSION
• attraction in grammatical sentences
• Pearlmutter at al. (1999); Thornton &
MacDonald (2003)
• Longer RTs at the verb
 Acuña-Fariña et al. (submitted).
Number and gender
• 1.disruption, as in production, in cases of mismatch;
• 2. no asymmetry;
• 3. the fastest possible reaction times for number (even for
first pass and first fixation duration), in contradistinction to
the data from English, where only regression measures
yielded differential results (Pearlmutter et al. 1999);
• 4. Also surprisingly fast RTs for gender registered at the verb,
that is, at a location prior to the actual co-indexation site;
• 5. no semantic, distributivity effects, using the same materials
with which Vigliocco et al. (1996) obtained such effects in
production for the same language.
 No markedness
• Morphological richness
• Form precedes meaning in comp.
• Spanish has very rich dets
 Co-indexation speed
• Acuña-fariña (2009): E.R.P. Research, epicenes,
perception predicates in rich inflection languages
• form clues are privileged by parsers which may deal
with them at a rate of some ten or so per second.
• M&M: since gender tends to the arbitrary in Spanish, it
is difficult to see how gender effects may arise in a
system (designed with semantically grounded English-
style number in mind) where morphing interacts with a
previous marking stage based on the conceptual
features of the message. Can the feminine in mesa
(‘table’) be grounded in marking/meaning? I
 Co-indexation speed
• only blind copying operations of the kind that
have recently been discarded seem to offer any
hope of accommodating fast (indeed pro-active)
gender co-indexation bindings in the Romance
languages in comprehension (Hawkins (1994,
2004). Notice that this takes us back again to two
factors that interact opportunistically:
morphology (the Romance languages) and the
direction of encoding (comprehension vs
production).
 No distributivity
• Vigliocco et al. (1996) did find robust
plausibility effects. So?
• Berg (1998): 1. the richer the morphology the
stronger the encapsulation of agreement
operations from the interference of
conceptual properties of the message; 2. what
comes first: form or meaning.
 No distributiviy
• Lorimor, Bock, Zalkind, Sheyman & Beard
(2008) on Russian
• Foote & Bock (forthcoming) on Mexican and
Dominican.
• (For instance, syllable-final –s is now reduced or weakened
(or simply elided), and this can eliminate distinctions between
the second and third person singular forms in almost all
tenses and moods. Furthermore, syllable-final –n can also be
weakened or elided, making it difficult to distinguish between
third person singular and plural forms (see Lunn 2002). The
morphology of number on determiners and adjectives is also
being lost. Similar to Andalusian Spanish)
 Sum
• In sum, the varying cross-linguistic levels of semantic affectedness/encapsulation cannot be
predicted by any theory (linguistic or psycholinguistic) which does not incorporate the role and size
of morphology and the direction of encoding as essential parameters. The filtering of meaning
effects by an exuberant morphology (measured, for instance, as the magnitude of distributivity
effects) is congruent with the fact that morphological transparency boosts the signal and so
promotes accuracy. It also automatises the creation of phrasal packages even at the risk of garden
paths.
• Since agreement is not the only form of clause-building, languages which have less of it must
compensate for their attrition by making use of more direct conceptual influence.
• Since having a rich or a poor morphology is a matter of degree, the perennial tug-of-war between
semantics and encapsulation in agreement –with its typical cross-linguistic specificities- is naturally
accounted for. Both processing and the grammatizalisation of processing routines must necessarily
be conveniently opportunistic. This logic applies both cross-linguistically and intra-linguistically (as
it also depends on the direction of encoding).
• A clear general prediction is that notional effects should be stronger in English-style languages than
in Spanish-style ones. Another is that they should be less strong in comprehension than in
production even in the same language.
•YOUR TURN,
PLEASE.