Processing agreement in Hindi: When agreement feeds attraction

Previous studies have demonstrated robust agreement attraction effects in subject-verb agreement languages. It is an open question whether such attraction effects extend to languages whose agreement systems differ from this prototypical agreement pattern. To address this question, we conducted four forced-choice completion experiments investigating agreement processing in Hindi. Hindi has a mixed-agreement system, where subject-verb agreement and object-verb agreement occur in complementary structural contexts. We observed clear attraction effects in both subject and object agreement contexts. But we found little evidence that the distractor NP’s role, case or syntactic prominence modulated attraction. Rather, attraction occurred when the distractor was itself an agreement controller. We propose a Controller Coding account where Hindi speakers actively identify whether an NP is an agreement controller and encode this information in memory, with agreement interference arising primarily when multiple NPs are encoded as agreement controllers.

The Processing of Linguistic Prominence

Prominence, the expression of informational weight within utterances, can be signaled by prosodic highlighting ( head-prominence, as in English) or by position (as in Korean edge-prominence). Prominence confers processing advantages, even if conveyed only by discourse manipulations. Here we compared processing of prominence in English and Korean, using a task that indexes processing success, namely recognition memory. In each language, participants’ memory was tested for target words heard in sentences in which they were prominent due to prosody, position, both or neither. Prominence produced recall advantage, but the relative effects differed across language. For Korean listeners the positional advantage was greater, but for English listeners prosodic and syntactic prominence had equivalent and additive effects. In a further experiment semantic and phonological foils tested depth of processing of the recall targets. Both foil types were correctly rejected, suggesting that semantic processing had not reached the level at which word form was no longer available. Together the results suggest that prominence processing is primarily driven by universal effects of information structure; but language-specific differences in frequency of experience prompt different relative advantages of prominence signal types. Processing efficiency increases in each case, however, creating more accurate and more rapidly contactable memory representations.

The syntax of possessor prominence in Maithili

Maithili (Indo-Aryan; India; Nepal) has a complex agreement system in which many terms and non-terms, including subjects, objects, obliques, extra-clausal ‘deictic referents’, and, crucially, possessors within any of these can potentially control agreement on the verb. Agreement is partly determined by grammatical function and argument structure, but in many instances the functional prominence of the agreement controller—determined by focus and referential features, including respect—overrides syntactic prominence. This is particularly clear when possessors internal to an argument or adjunct can control agreement, even though viable alternatives appear to be available. The functional prominence of the internal possessor also appears to have a syntactic correlate: the possessor that controls agreement may be in a more prominent position within the phrase headed by the possessed nominal, and this is what enables it to participate in clause-level syntactic processes.

Topic-Continuity and Topic-Shift Effects in Spanish Discourse

Differences in use among referring expressions are usually explained on the basis of the cognitive accessibility of their antecedents, where antecedent accessibility has been operationalized differently in the literature; i.e. as a grammatical role, as syntactic prominence or as antecedent distance. On these grounds, it has been proposed that personal pronouns prefer topical antecedents whereas demonstratives prefer non-topical antecedents. This paper investigates the referring properties of Spanish demonstratives and direct object personal pronouns with the aim to unveil their differences and similarities. My analysis shows that these two expressions are very similar referentially when a narrow view of discourse context is considered. However, important differences show up when a broader notion of context is thrown into the picture; i.e. contexts that extend beyond the immediate previous sentence and beyond the immediate local topic of discourse. Based on my corpus evidence and on previous research on the pragmatic interpretation of referring expressions, I claim that direct object personal pronouns and demonstrative noun phrases crucially differ in the way they contribute to discourse coherence; the former playing the role of topic continuity markers and the latter focalising referents that reintroduce suspended or declining topics and marking (sub)-topic shifts in the discourse.

Agent prominence in symmetrical voice languages

It has been argued in the literature that morpho-syntactically agents are universally more prominent than patients. At first sight, this claim seems to be challenged by so called symmetrical voice languages because these languages show no preference for agents to be the privileged syntactic argument (PSA). They do thus not display an obvious syntactic prominence of agents. However, this paper will argue that even symmetrical voice languages show instances of agent prominence. These instances are not reflected in a default linking of agents to PSA function, but rather in a slightly more subtle manner: First, agents always function as binders to reflexive pronouns, regardless of position or grammatical function. Second, agent properties like volitionality, ability and control are reflected in verbal morphology, even in undergoer voice construction in which the agent is not the PSA. This is the case in potentive, stative, and causative construction.

Syntactic prominence in Icelandic Experiencer arguments: quirky subjects vs. dative objects

As has often been demonstrated, Icelandic Quirky Subjects largely behave like canonical nominative subjects and unlike topicalized objects. Among verbs selecting for Quirky Subjects, experiential predicates with a dative Experiencer subject and a nominative Stimulus object are the most common type. Recently, several studies have proposed a sub-class within this group of dat-nom-verbs, characterized by an alternation in their argument mapping. Here, both the dative Experiencer and the nominative Stimulus can occur as either the syntactic subject or object.This paper empirically investigates this class as well as the extent to which its alternation is determined by semantic and pragmatic factors.

Influence of relational and referential coherence on the distribution of coordinated verb-second clauses in German and Dutch

This paper investigates, from the point of view of role and reference grammar, the formal and the functional side of SLF (‘subject gap in finite/frontal clauses’) coordination on the basis of a bidirectional parallel German-Dutch corpus. The main research question is how relational and referential coherence are mapped to the syntactic structure of SLF and coordination constructions alternating with it. A typology of the alternative constructions is proposed. Since both relational and referential coherence at the discourse level, as well as the nexus types at the syntax level, are composed of more or less prominent states of affairs, the paper defines a relative concept of prominence on both these grammar levels and examines whether and, if so, how this concept influences the mapping between discursive and syntactic structure. In particular, it looks at absolute and relative frequencies so as to find potential trends in this mapping. There is a tendency that the more prominent the discursive states of affairs are, the more syntactically prominent the chosen coordination alternative is. The states of affairs linked by the interclausal coherence relation seem to affect the distribution of the coordination alternatives both in German and in Dutch. The state of affairs expressed by the information-structural status of the first subject seems to affect at least the distribution of two types. To a certain extent, both German and Dutch strive to iconically map discursive to syntactic prominence.