Fwd: 18.2457, Diss: Psycholing/Syntax: Lorimor: 'Conjunctions and Grammatical Agr...'

[bingfu Lu]

Dear colleagues,
   
  This paper sounds interesting to me, since I am doing some investigation on the relation between the distance and the relational marking (cases, co-indexing, agreement etc) of the head and its dependents.   In many cases, the more distant the two constituents are, or the more deviated from its canonical position the dependent is, the more needed the relational marking is. Such examples are ample; for instance, in Chinese, when an adjective serves as an adverbial of the verb, if it is adjacent to or precedes the verb, the adverbial marker ¨Cde (similar to English ¨Cly) is optional; if it is separated from the head verb, or postponed after the verb (non-canonical position), the marker-de is necessary, as shown below.
  (1) a. Ta zai tushuguan renzhen(-de) zhao ziliao.  (Chinese)
            He in  library       cautious-ly   search data
           ¡®He is cautiously searching data in the library.¡¯
       b. Ta renzhen*(-de) zai tushuguan zhao ziliao.
  (2) a. Ta jianjian(-de) kangfu-le.
  he gradual(-ly) recuperate-PFCT
  ¡®He gradually recuperated (from an illness)
  b. Jianjian*(-de), ta kangfu-le
  c. Ta kangfu-le, jianjian*(-de).
   
  Similar data are ample cross-linguistically. To cite some from English:
   (3) a. He climbed (up) the mountain.              b. He climbed steadily *(up) the mountain. 
  (4) a. He was my lover *(for) 20 years.              b. He was 20 years my lover.
  (5) a. I took three years *(of) Chinese.              b. I took Chinese *(for) three years. 
  (6) a. John believes (that) Mary will win. 
  b. John believes wholeheartedly *?(that) Mary will win.
  b.        *(That) Mary will win, John believes wholeheartedly.
   
  The number agreement in the dissertation seems to be a counter-example to the above tendencies. 
  My first assumed explanation is that information redundancy works here. When the dependent is separated from its head word, or deviated from its canonical position, it tends to be forgotten if the marker is informationally redundant; it tends to be used  if it is not redundant.  However, redundancy is an issue of degree.  Such an explanation seems unattractive. 
  My second assumed explanation is related to the formal markedness.  When the number agreement is dropped in English, it is actually using an extra marker ¨Cs on the verb, in contrast to the zero agreement form.  In other words, though  ¨Cs of singular third person of agreement is taken as unmarked in the sense that it is the most unconditioned, it is formally marked.  Such a contradiction between the formal and conditional unmarkedness leads to the malfunction of the above mentioned tendencies.
   
  I need more data both for and against the tendencies.
     
  Bingfu Lu
  Institute of Linguistics
  Shanghai Normal University
  China

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  Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:55:24 -0400
From: LINGUIST Network <linguist at LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Subject: 18.2457, Diss: Psycholing/Syntax: Lorimor: 'Conjunctions and Grammatical Agr...'
To: LINGUIST at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG

LINGUIST List: Vol-18-2457. Tue Aug 21 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 18.2457, Diss: Psycholing/Syntax: Lorimor: 'Conjunctions and Grammatical Agr...'

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Date: 21-Aug-2007
From: Heidi Lorimor < hlorimor at umw.edu >
Subject: Conjunctions and Grammatical Agreement




-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:53:49
From: Heidi Lorimor [hlorimor at umw.edu]
Subject: Conjunctions and Grammatical Agreement
E-mail this message to a friend:
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Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
Program: Department of Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2007 

Author: Heidi Lorimor

Dissertation Title: Conjunctions and Grammatical Agreement 

Linguistic Field(s): Psycholinguistics
Syntax

Subject Language(s): Arabic, North Levantine Spoken (apc)


Dissertation Director(s):
Elabbas Benmamoun
J Kathryn Bock

Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation investigates the factors involved in producing agreement,
using evidence from conjoined subjects in English and Lebanese Arabic.
Specifically, the goal was to test psycholinguistic and syntactic theories
of agreement by examining the relative contributions of lexical number,
notional number, adjacency, and linear word order in agreement with
conjoined subjects, and contrasting English agreement patterns with
Lebanese Arabic, which allows closest conjunct agreement with postverbal
subjects. 

Corpus data and sentence production experiments were used to test
hypotheses about the mechanisms involved in producing agreement. A search
of American English sentences from the World Wide Web revealed that
speakers often produce singular verbs with conjoined subjects (28% singular
verbs overall), but less often when the conjunctions involved animate or
plural nouns. To investigate these patterns experimentally,
English-speaking participants heard, repeated, and completed subject noun
phrases as full sentences, thus producing a verb. The experiment produced
results similar to the corpus search, with conjunctions involving singular,
abstract nouns eliciting more singular verbs than plural verbs. 

In a second study involving both Lebanese Arabic and English speakers, a
picture description task manipulated the position of the subject relative
to the verb and revealed that singular verbs were much more frequent with
postverbal (versus preverbal) subjects and that lexically plural nouns were
stronger enforcers of plural agreement than conjoined singular subjects in
both Lebanese Arabic and English. Adjacency also played a role, as plural
nouns in furthest conjunct position did not enforce plural agreement in the
same way as plural nouns that were linearly adjacent to the verb. These
results indicate that notional information, lexical plurality, adjacency,
and linear (surface) word order play significant roles in the computation
and production of agreement. The results also shed light on the nature of
closest conjunct agreement and on the number of stages involved in
producing grammatical agreement. 





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