An Event-Related Potentials Study on the Syntactic Transfer Effect of Late Language Learners

This study explored the syntactic transfer effect of the non-local subject-verb agreement structure with plural head noun after two intensive phases of input training with event-related potentials (ERP). The non-local subject-verb agreement stimuli with the plural head nouns, which never appeared in training phases, were used for the stimuli. A total of 26 late L1-Chinese L2-English learners, who began to learn English after a critical period and participated in our previous experiments, were asked back to take part in this syntactic transfer experiment. Results indicated that a significant ERP component P600 occurred in the key region (the verb) of the sentences with syntactic violations in the experimental group, but none occurred in the control group. This demonstrated that there was a significant transfer effect of the input training. The possible theoretical explanation was provided and also the malleability of the late L2 learners was discussed.

EXPRESS: Misretrieval but not misrepresentation: A feature misbinding account of post-interpretive effects in number attraction.

Attraction effects in comprehension have reliably shown a grammaticality asymmetry in which mismatching plural attractors confer facilitatory interference for ungrammatical verbs but no processing cost for grammatical verbs (Tanner et al., 2014; Wagers et al., 2009). While this has favored cue-based retrieval accounts of attraction phenomena in comprehension, Patson and Husband (2016) offered offline evidence suggesting comprehenders systematically misrepresent number information in attraction phrases, leaving open the possibility for faulty NP representations later in processing. The current study employs two self-paced reading discourse experiments to test for number attraction misrepresentations in real-time. Specifically, the attraction phrases occurred as embedded direct object phrases, allowing for a direct test of the role of attractor noun number in head noun number misrepresentation (i.e. no number cue from verb). Although no on-line evidence for misrepresentation was found, a third single-sentence RSVP experiment showed error rates to offline probes corroborating the post-interpretive findings from Patson and Husband (2016), suggesting that a search in memory for associative features may not employ the same processes as the formation of dependencies in discourse comprehension. The findings are discussed in the framework of feature misbinding in memory in line with recent post-interpretive accounts of offline comprehension errors.

Agreement Attraction in Turkish: The Case of Genitive Attractor

Previous studies have shown that speakers may find sentences violating subject-verb agreement grammatical when the sentence contains a feature-matching noun phrase. This so-called agreement attraction effect has also been found in genitive possessive structures such as 'the teacher's brother' in Turkish (Lago et al., 2019), which is in contrast with its absence in similar constructions in English (Nicol et al., 2016). This discrepancy has been hypothesized to be a result of the association between genitive case marking and subjecthood in Turkish, but not in English. In the present research, we test an alternative explanation in which Turkish number agreement attraction effects are due to a potential confound in Lago et al.'s experiment, as a result of which subject head nouns were locally ambiguous between the possessive and the accusative case. We hypothesized that this ambiguity may have inhibited the availability of the head noun as an agreement controller as the accusative is a non-subject case in Turkish. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a speeded acceptability judgment experiment and our results suggest that case-ambiguity does not play a role in agreement attraction, and thus lends credibility to the claim that genitive noun phrases may function as attractors in Turkish due to the association between genitive case and subjecthood.

Default is Different: Relations and Representations in Agreement Processing

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 CP case. I show that the agreement processing pro?fie for CP subjects differs from those of NP subjects. This suggests that agreement confi?gurations with similar morphology and semantics may be processed using different strategies when embedded in different syntactic structures.

An LFG analysis of AANN constructions

This chapter examines the construction exemplified in the title, consisting of the singular determiner a followed by an adjective, a numeral, and a plural noun (abbreviated as AANN). Building on work by Dalrymple and King (2019), Hristov captures the syntactic structure and functional properties of this construction by assuming a standard NP analysis at constituent-structure, coupled with concord and index agreement within the NP at functional-structure. It is proposed that the numeral, which acts as a modifier, agrees with the plural concord of the head noun, while the determiner proper (the article) is exceptionally allowed to agree with the N′ string staggering ten dissertations in terms of index (singular when a single-unit reading is available). Thus, without altering the formal apparatus of LFG, this proposal has the advantage of explaining a number of previously unexplained contrasts and of being able to cover a wide range of related constructions.

Romance N Prep N constructions in visual word recognition

N Prep N constructions such as Sp. bicicleta de montaña ‘mountain bike’ are very productive and frequent in Romance languages. They commonly have been classified as syntagmatic compounds that show no orthographic union and exhibit an internal structure that resembles free syntactic structures, such as Sp. libro para niños ‘book for children’. There is no consensus on how to best distinguish lexical from syntactic N Prep N constructions. The present paper presents an explorative eye-tracking study on N Prep N constructions, varying both lexical type (lexical vs. syntactic) and preposition across three languages, French, Spanish and Portuguese. The task of the eye-tracking study was a reading aloud paradigm of the constructions in sentence context. Constructions were fixated on less when more frequent, independent of lexical status. There was also modest evidence that a higher construction frequency afforded shorter total fixation durations, but only for lower deciles of the response distribution. The (construction-initial) head noun also received fewer fixations as construction frequency increased, and also when the head noun was more frequent. The second fixation durations on the head noun also revealed an effect of lexical status, with syntactic constructions receiving shorter fixations at the 5th and 7th deciles. The probability of a fixation on the preposition decreased with preposition frequency, but first fixations on the preposition increased with preposition frequency. The prepositions of Portuguese, the language with the richest inventory of prepositions, received more fixations than the prepositions of French and Spanish. The observed pattern of results is consistent with models of lexical processing in which reading is guided by knowledge of both higher-level constructions and knowledge of key constituents such as the head noun and the preposition.

Numeral Systems in Various Fula Lects

The paper presents the analysis of Fula numeral system. Fula is an Atlantic language, dispersed throughout a vast territory in Sub-Saharan Africa. It has over 20 differently-sized lects subdivided into three zones - Western, Central and Eastern. The research included collecting the language data on six major lects, two from each zone. Then this data was analyzed from the point of view of internal and external syntax of ordinal, cardinal, distributive and fraction numerals. The comparative analysis of Fula numeral system on inter-lect scale has never been reflected in earlier Fula studies. Apart from a unique collection of numeral data from all language zones of Fula, the paper presents comparative analysis of such data, including, but not limited to, phonetic and contact-induced variabilities. The sources of structural and lexical loans in the system are listed wherever possible, because the disperse nature of Fula lects means that the contact languages and the ensuing changes can be different for each lect. Special attention is paid to the numeral bases, which can be somatic, commercial of a combination of the two. The Fula numeral system has never been analyzed from this point of view, and the contact changes to it are of great linguistic interest. Also cardinal numerals in Fula can change their form depending on the personality parameter of head noun. This system is unique for Fula and, more specifically, to its numeral system, and is properly described for the first time. Some parts of the Fula numeral system, like distributive and fraction numerals for some lects, have been found underrepresented and poorly described, which leaves room for further research, both field one and typological.

The general noun-modifying clause construction beyond Eurasia

I aim to provide a typological investigation of the General Noun-modifying Clause Construction (NMCC) in languages other than those of Eurasia. I show that the five properties proposed by Matsumoto et al. as potentially correlating with the General NMCC are rather areal features which are falsified by the data of languages from Africa and Europe. The semantic interpretability condition and the syntactic licensing condition of the General Noun-modifying Clause Construction need reconsidering. Semantically, I argue that the interpretability of the General NMCC depends both on the semantics of the head noun and that of the modifying clause because they show close interaction with each other. Syntactically, I propose three general syntactic properties of the languages with the General NMCC, i.e. (1) no relative pronouns or relative pronouns in competition with a general clause marker, (2) complex subordinate locutions composed of the general clause marker(s) (and a head noun), and (3) unified verb forms in subordination.

Dependency length minimization and its limits: a possible role for a probabilistic version of the Final-Over-Final Condition (to appear in Language)

A prominent principle in explaining a range of word order regularities is dependency locality, i.e. a principle that minimizes the linear distances (dependency lengths) between the head and its dependents. However, it remains unclear to what extent language users in fact observe locality when producing sentences under diverse conditions of cross-categorical harmony (such as the placement of verbal and nominal heads on the same vs different sides of their dependents), dependency direction (head-final vs head-initial) and parallel vs. hierarchical dependency structures (e.g. multiple adjectives dependent on the same head vs nested genitive dependents). Using 45 dependency-annotated corpora of diverse languages, we find that after controlling for harmony and conditioning on dependency types, dependency length minimization (DLM) is inversely correlated with the overall presence of head-final dependencies. This anti-DLM effect in sentences with more head-final dependencies is specifically associated with an accumulation of dependents in parallel structures and with disharmonic orders in hierarchical structures. We propose a detailed interpretation of these results and tentatively suggest a role for a probabilistic principle that favors embedding head-initial (e.g. VO) structures inside equally head-initial and thereby length-minimizing structures (e.g. relative clauses after the head noun) while head-final (OV) structures have a less pronounced preference for harmony and DLM. This is in line with earlier findings in research on the Greenbergian word order universals and with a probabilistic version of what has been suggested as the Final-Over-Final Condition more recently.

СЪС ИЛИ БЕЗ ПРЕДЛОЗИ: КОЕ Е ВЯРНОТО / WITH OR WITHOUT PREPOSITIONS: WHICH IS TRUE

The article focuses on the competition between noun phrases in which the head noun is modified by either a relative adjective, noun qualitative modifier or a prepositional phrase. Several tests are proposed to distinguish between phrases with noun qualitative modifier and compounds consisting of two nouns. The type of the prepositions that occur in the prepositional phrases is characterised, and the conclusion is drown that the semantic dependency in the three competing structures is the same, although it is overtly expressed only through the prepositions. Keywords: noun qualitative modifier, syntactic alternations with prepositional phrases, identification of compounds, Bulgarian language