The lexical-syntactic representation of number

2009

Journal of Memory and Language, 1997

English speakers distinguish between one entity and more than one entity in virtually every utterance they produce. The distinction is present in the morphology of most nouns as well as in the basic grammatical dependency of subject-verb agreement. Three experiments employing a sentence production task explored the nature of the representation that underlies singular and plural count nouns in English and how that representation interacts with the processes that implement agreement during production. The results provide evidence that singular count nouns are unmarked or lack a grammatical feature for number while plural count nouns are marked or possess a feature. This asymmetry in markedness contributes to the greater incidence of plural agreement errors relative to singular errors observed in naturally occurring and experimentally elicited errors. In particular, the evidence suggests that agreement with singular count nouns is implemented by a default process whereas agreement with plural count nouns is implemented on the basis of unambiguous number information. ᭧ 1997 Academic Press Language exhibits oppositional relation-dency between nouns and verbs in English sentences, namely the dependency of subject-ships at all levels of linguistic representation. Oppositions at the lexical level such as good verb agreement. The goals of the experiments were to explore the nature of the representa-and bad, tall and short, and happy and sad differentiate conceptual categories. Opposition of number that underlies the opposing forms of singular and plural count nouns in tions at the phonological level, e.g., /f/ and /v/, /p/ and /b/ differentiate English words like English and to examine how that representation interacts with the processes that imple-fine and vine, pat and bat. Similarly, oppositions at the morphological level, e.g., cat and ment subject-verb agreement during language production. cats, horse and horses differentiate grammatical categories such as singular and plural num-THE MARKEDNESS OF SINGULAR NUMBER ber. The experiments reported here focus on the opposition of singular and plural num-Bock and Eberhard (1993) proposed that ber-an opposition that is present in virtually there is an asymmetry in the grammatical repall spoken utterances in English. It is reflected resentation underlying singular and plural not only in the morphology of most English count nouns such that plural nouns possess a nouns but also in a basic grammatical depenspecification of number but singular nouns do not. This proposal is consistent with a formalism about linguistic oppositions proposed by The work reported here was done as part of the author's doctoral dissertation and was supported by grants from Jakobson (1957). According to Jakobson, all the National Science Foundation (BNS 86-17659 and 90linguistic oppositions reflect a difference in 09611) and the National Institutes of Health (R01 the possession of a property. The linguistic HD21011) to Kathryn Bock. I thank my committee chairelement that possesses the property is the person, Kathryn Bock, and committee members Thomas marked element while the one that lacks the Carr, Rose Zacks, Barbara Abbott, and Carolyn Harford for their advice and support. I also thank Gail Mauner, property is the unmarked element.

Psychological Review, 2005

Grammatical agreement flags the parts of sentences that belong together regardless of whether the parts appear together. In English, the major agreement controller is the sentence subject, the major agreement targets are verbs and pronouns, and the major agreement category is number. The authors expand an account of number agreement whose tenets are that pronouns acquire number lexically, whereas verbs acquire it syntactically but with similar contributions from number meaning and from the number morphology of agreement controllers. These tenets were instantiated in a model using existing verb agreement data. The model was then fit to a new, more extensive set of verb data and tested with a parallel set of pronoun data. The theory was supported by the model's outcomes. The results have implications for the integration of words and structures, for the workings of agreement categories, and for the nature of the transition from thought to language.

Journal of Language Modelling 1.227-241, 2013

The Smith-Stark hierarchy, a version of the Animacy Hierarchy, offers a typology of the cross-linguistic availability of number. The hierarchy predicts that the availability of number is not arbitrary. For any language, if the expression of plural is available to a noun, it is available to any noun of a semantic category further to the left of the hierarchy. In this article we move one step further by showing that the structure of the hierarchy can be observed in a statistical model of number use in Russian. We also investigate three co-variates: plural preference, pluralia tantum and irregularity effects; these account for an item’s behaviour being different than that solely expected from its animacy position.

1993

Number is one of a small set of basic conceptual categories with relatively clear grammatical reflections and requirements. It must be called upon during fluent language production to create agreement between subjects and verbs, and the questions addressed in this paper concern how that is done. The number information that is used may be notional (whether the referent of the subject noun phrase is single or multiple), or lexical (whether the subcategorised number of the head of the subject noun phrase is singular or plural), or even morphophonological (whether the head of the subject noun phrase has the phonological features associated with plural inflections). Different views about language processes make contrasting predictions about the likelihood of contributions from each of these sources during normal speaking. In a series of experiments employing an agreement-error elicitation task, we examined the effects of variations in notional, lexical and morphophonological features on the implementation of agreement. The results suggest that verb agreement is dominated by lexical number.

Brain and language, 2002

Two experiments investigate the effect of number congruency using picture-word interference. Native German participants were required to name pictures of single objects (Nase 'nose') or two instances of the same object (Nasen 'noses') while ignoring simultaneously presented distractor words. Distractor words either had the same number or were different in number. In addition, the type of plural formation (same or different inflectional plural suffix) and the semantic relationship (same or different semantic category) between target and distractor were varied in Experiments 1 and 2. Results showed no effect of number congruency in either experiment. Furthermore, the type of inflectional suffix did not exert an influence on naming latencies in Experiment 1, but semantic relationship led to a significant interference effect in Experiment 2. The results indicate that selection of the number feature diacritic in noun production is not a competitive process. The implications of the results for models of lexical access are discussed.

Brain and Language, 2002

Two experiments investigate the effect of number congruency using picture-word interference. Native German participants were required to name pictures of single objects (Nase 'nose') or two instances of the same object (Nasen 'noses') while ignoring simultaneously presented distractor words. Distractor words either had the same number or were different in number. In addition, the type of plural formation (same or different inflectional plural suffix) and the semantic relationship (same or different semantic category) between target and distractor were varied in Experiments 1 and 2. Results showed no effect of number congruency in either experiment. Furthermore, the type of inflectional suffix did not exert an influence on naming latencies in Experiment 1, but semantic relationship led to a significant interference effect in Experiment 2. The results indicate that selection of the number feature diacritic in noun production is not a competitive process. The implications of the results for models of lexical access are discussed.

Oxford Handbook of Grammatical Number, 2021

Grammatical number is a cross-linguistically common agreement feature. In many languages, words that belong together syntactically have to agree in number. Number is observed between elements of the noun phrase, such as determiners, adjectives, and nouns, and in subject–verb agreement in verb phrases. Number marking on nouns is regarded as a syntactic feature, similar to gender or case, that is stored with a lexical entry’s syntactic representation, the so-called lemma, in the mental lexicon. In this chapter, we will review some findings from the psycholinguistic literature that have added to our understanding of what grammatical number is, how it is represented in the mental lexicon, and how it is processed by the language user.

Journal of Memory and Language, 1999

Coherence in language relies in part on basic devices like number agreement. To assess meaningbased (notional) versus form-based (morphological) control of number agreement, we examined how speakers created number agreement for collective nouns, which can carry conflicting notional and morphological number. The agreement targets were verbs and two types of pronouns, produced in the course of a sentence-completion task. Comparisons of the verbs and pronouns indicated that verbs tended to reflect the morphological number of the collective controller, whereas pronouns were more likely to reflect the notional number. This argues that the number features of pronouns may be retrieved under control from the speaker's meaning, while the number features of verbs are more likely to be retrieved under control from the utterance's form. The implication is that the retrieval of words during language production is influenced by two distinct types of information, consistent with an inflectional account of agreement.

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2017

Previous research has found an influence of semantic number (SINGLE, MULTIPLE) on grammatical processing of mass nouns in people with aphasia. This is the first study to investigate these effects in language-unimpaired individuals. In two experiments, participants had to decide which were the appropriate determiners (e.g. Experiment 1: a singularcountsome mass/plural count) for the name of mass and count noun pictures that were depicted either as single (one bulb of garlic mass , one cat count) or as multiple objects (three bulbs of garlic mass , three cats count). Semantic number congruency between depictions and determiners was manipulated for mass nouns. A semantic number congruency effect was found in both experiments with faster and more accurate determiner decisions in the number congruent (e.g. Experiment 1: MULTIPLE) compared to the number incongruent condition (e.g. Experiment 1: SINGLE). These results provide further evidence for an influence of semantic number information on lexical-syntactic processing of mass nouns.