Trans-paradigmatic syncretism in case form processing in Russian

2013

Many studies discuss how morphological ambiguity influences processing. In particular, it is well known that attraction errors in subject-verb agreement are produced more often and cause smaller delay in comprehension if the form of the intervening noun coincides with the Nominative case form. This is the case in the German example die Stellungnahme gegen die Demonstrationen waren… 'the position against the demonstrations (Acc. Pl=Nom.Pl) were' as opposed to die Stellungnahme zu den Demonstrationen waren… 'the position on the demonstrations (Dat.Pl≠Nom.Pl) were'. However, the explanation of this phenomenon is a matter of debate. How are such errors produced or missed in comprehension, how are ambiguous forms represented so that they can influence this process?.. We offer a novel perspective on this problem by looking at novel data. We conducted two self-paced reading experiments exploring how Russian adjective forms ambiguous for case influence processing of case errors on the following nouns. We compare sentences containing errors like fil'my bez izvestnyh akterah 'movie. NOM.PL without famous. GEN.PL=PREP.PL actor. PREP.PL ' and fil'my bez izvestnyh akteram 'movie. NOM.PL without famous. GEN.PL≠DAT.PL actor. DAT.PL ' to grammatically correct sentences. Errors of the first type are detected later and their effect is less pronounced. The results help answering several questions that arise in connection with attraction errors in subject-verb agreement.

2000

that similarity between the attachment site 1 and the elements preceding the attachment site and/or intervening between the attachment site and the incoming element (the retrieval site) has an adverse effect on processing. According to Lewis, the difficulty arises due to the loss of distinctness of the retrieval cues (the properties of the retrieval site which are necessary for locating the attachment site): when the attachment site is preceded and/or followed by one or more similar elements, at the point where the attachment site has to be retrieved, the retrieval cues that are available for identifying the target element overlap between the target element and the interfering element(s), making the selection difficult.

Lingua, 2001

In German, oblique Cases (dative and genitive) require morphological licensing while structural Cases (nominative and accusative) do not. This difference can be captured by assuming that in German, NPs bearing oblique Case have an extra structural layer Kase phrase (KP) which is missing in NPs bearing structural Case. Focusing on dative NPs, we will show that the postulation of such a phrase-structural difference between oblique and structural case allows for a unified explanation of a wide array of facts both from the domain of grammar and from the domain of language comprehension. First, with regard to grammar, several asymmetries between dative NPs and nominative/accusative NPs follow if the former but not the latter are included within a KP-shell, including asymmetries with respect to function changing operations, clausal licensing, binding and topic drop, among others. Corroborating evidence for our analysis of dative Case in German will be provided by a comparison with data from English and Dutch. Second, when combined with certain independent assumptions about the human sentence parsing mechanism, the postulation of a KP for datives helps explain several recent experimental f'mdings with respect to on-line sentence understanding, including the facts that dative case is dispreferred in situations of local syntactic ambiguity and that dative case may erroneously override structural case during sentence comprehension but not vice versa. The work underlying this article has been supported by a grant by the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (Ba-1178/4-1) to the first and second investigator and to Jens-Max Hopf. Part of the results were presented 1998 at a workshop of the Sonderforschungsbereich Theorie des Lexikons at the University of Cologne and at the Workshop on Morphological Case at the University of Utrecht. We wish to thank both audiences for stimulating discussion, especially Denis Bouchard, Lyn Nichols, Albert Ortmann and Dieter Wunderlich. Thanks to Peter Suchsland and Ralf Vogel far clarifying discussion, to Susanne Trissler for a number of suggestions as well as to Frans Hinskens, Henk van Riemsdijk. Manrice Vliegen and Jan-Wouter Zwart for their help with the Dutch data and L~iszl6 Moln~rfi for his help with data from Afrikaans.

Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 2018

In progressive Case attraction, the Case of a head nominal overwrites the Case of a following coindexed relative pronoun. The reverse process is called ‘inverse’ Case attraction. There, the morphologically overt Case of a relative pronoun overwrites the Case of a preceding head nominal. Inverse Case attraction has been attested in languages like Ancient Greek, Latin, and in the history of different Germanic languages. For modern standard German, its existence has in general been denied. We first discuss current analyses which have nevertheless identified inverse Case attraction in modern German on the basis of historical data and experimental judgement studies. We then present four behavioral experiments on the processing of German sentences. Effects of inverse Case attraction in the comprehension of German are revealed in self-paced reading times. They are fundamentally different in structures allowing attraction of dative Case than in structures allowing attraction of accusative Case, with much stronger effects for dative than for accusative Case. The results are interpreted in a theory of Case that draws a syntactic difference between structural and inherent (‘lexical’) Case rather than along the lines of the familiar Case hierarchy.

Language and Information, 2007

Hee-Don Ahn and Sungeun Cho. 2007. Subject-Object Asymmetries of Morphological Case Realization. Language and Information 11.1 , 53-76. Case markers in Korean are omissible in colloquial speech. Previous discourse studies of Caseless bare NPs in Korean show that the information structure of zero Nominative not only differs from that of overt Nominative but it also differs from that of zero Accusative in many respects. This paper aims to provide a basis for these semantic/pragmatic properties of Caseless NPs through the syntactic difference between bare subjects and bare objects: namely, the former are left-dislocated NPs, whereas the latter form complex predicates with the subcategorizing verbs. Our analysis will account for the facts that (i) the distribution of bare subject NPs are more restricted than that of bare object NPs; (ii) bare subject NPs must be specific or topical; (iii) Acc-marked NPs in canonical position tend to be focalized.

This paper analyses constraints on inflectional syncretism and inflectional allomorphy using frequency information. Syncretism arises where one form is associated with more than one function, whereas inflectional allomorphy occurs where there is more than one inflectional class, and a single function is associated with two or more forms. If high frequency is associated with more differentiation on both sides, we expect, on the one hand, that a frequent function will have a high number of forms and, on the other, that a frequent form will have a high number of functions. Our study focusses on Russian nominals, in particular nouns, which exhibit both syncretism and inflectional allomorphy. We find that there is a relationship between frequency and differentiation, but that it is not exceptionless, and that the exceptions can be understood in terms of the use of referrals as default rules.

Conference on Comparative Diachronic Syntax, 2003

A familiar generalization: languages with rich case-marking have greater word-order freedom than those without. 1 (1) a. Puella girl: NOM puerum boy: ACC videt. seesThe girl sees the boy.'b. Puerum boy: ACC puella girl: NOM videt. seesThe girl sees the boy.'(2) a. The girl sees the boy. b. The boy sees the girl.

2004

Memory & Cognition, 2008

The term agreement designates the phenomenon in which the same grammatical category (or meaning) is formally marked in two or more words of a clause. Or, schematically, (X A) (Y A), where A is the exponent of a category common to both X and Y. In this way, coherence-both within and between sentence constituents-is explicitly expressed. Considering the central role that agreement plays in the grammatical descriptions of many languages, studying its possible role in online sentence processing is highly warranted and was the main aim of the present study. Cross linguistically, the most important grammatical categories involved in agreement are number, gender, person, and case. When an agreement construction is represented by (X A) (Y A), then the default assumption is that A expresses a single grammatical category-as in Finnish uus-i-ssa talo-i-ssa ("in [the] new houses")where-i-number (i.e., plural) and-ssa case (i.e., inessive). However, it is often the case that A simultaneously expresses more than one grammatical categoryas in Spanish las chic-as guap-as ("the beautiful girls"), where las denotes number (i.e., plural), gender (i.e., feminine), and species (i.e., definite)-or as in Finnish lapse-t juokse-vat ("[the] children are running"), where-t number (i.e., plural) and case (i.e., nominative),-vat number (i.e., plural) and person (i.e., third). Finally, the exponents of a given grammatical category need not be formally identical. That is, from the purely formal point of view, agreement can also be exemplified by constructions like (X A) (Y B). Agreement may appear in many syntactic constructions, such as adjectival modifier-head, possessive modifierhead, adposition-noun, subject-verb, object-verb, subject-predicate nominal, subject/object-participle, and so on. The modifier-head and the subject-verb constructions exemplify agreement within a constituent and between constituents, respectively. In this article, we investigate the reading process as applied to the case and number agreement in Finnish modifier-head constructions. In what follows, unless otherwise specified, the notion of agreement in Finnish will thus be restricted to case and number agreement in modifier-head constructions. Morphological Features of Finnish Next, we summarize relevant morphological features that show that Finnish is a suitable language to study casenumber agreement in modifier-head constructions. Finnish is a morphologically rich language in which case-number agreement is expressed by means of suffixes. There are two numbers-that is, singular and plural-and 15 cases of which approximately 12 are in productive use. Note that up to 70% of words in written text are case inflected. The phrase-level word order is rigid in Finnish, and the (adjectival) modifier always precedes its head noun, without any intervening words. In addition, the modifier strictly agrees with the case and number of its head noun (see Sulkala & Karjalainen, 1992). Cases can be placed on a continuum depending on whether the relations they express are concrete or abstract.