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JULY 7 2010, Retaken sept 14. Pending: Weschler 2006.

AGREEMET, ATTRACTIO AD ARCHITECTURAL OPPORTUISM

1. Introduction

Agreement has become a major challenge for both linguistic theory and psycholinguistics. As
Corbett (2006: 116) has noted, it has moved from a peripheral position in grammatical studies to
the centre stage. With the only exception of Cognitive Grammar (CG) and some recent, non-
dominant views inside the current phase-based version of the Minimalist Program which
contemplate it as a post-syntactic ‘PF-ish’ phenomenon (Bobaljik 2002; Putnam 2007), most
theories of language recognise something equivalent to an agreement phase or operation in the
creation of sentential messages. Disputes often arise as to how to embed agreement
computations inside a larger context containing further computations, but the autonomy of
agreement per se is now generally acknowledged. As to the reason why CG has not shown any
great interest in agreement, this appears to be because specially typically alliterative, redundant
agreement co-indexings of the form habitual in the Romance languages do appear to be ‘‘a clear
case of the victory of the indexical aspect of language over its iconic aspect’’ (Haiman,
1985:162). This would force cognitive grammarians to accept the existence of form without
meaning. Taylor (2002:332 ff.) has referred to agreement pairings as “dysfunctional”,
“manifestations of humans’ delight in (. . .) form-focused activities” to add: “To the extent that
they lack a symbolic-conceptual content, agreement patterns are an example of ‘pure
phonology’ (emphasis added).1
We have had to become reconciled with the importance of agreement because its reality is
too large to ignore. It occurs in one form or another in over 70% of the world´s languages
(Mallinson and Blake 1981), and even in the languages where it is not so conspicuous, like
English, its operations are central to the structure and the creation of predications (English
speakers actually confront the requirements of number agreement once every 16 words or so, or
once every five seconds; Eberhard 20005: 532-33). Furthermore, as Bock et al. (1999: 331)
note, even 4-year-olds use correctly agreeing verbs over 94% of the time in spontaneous speech
(Keeney & Wolfe, 1972): “This makes it all the more plausible to view agreement, in its typical
manifestations, as one of the automatic mechanisms of normal language production rather than a
nicety of carefully prepared speech”. A second reason to focus on agreement is that it presents
perhaps the greatest challenge to both linguists and psychologists. It spans domains (the NP, the

1
Langacker (1991:289 ff.) has in fact denied that agreement is non-symbolic. In his view, it serves the
function of signalling grammatical relationships, like modification (“I would only reiterate in this regard
that serving a specifiable grammatical function is perfectly consistent with being meaningful”, p. 308).

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clause, the sentence, the discourse) which usually impose constraints that should cause objects
inhabiting those domains to be fairly different from one another (compare gender agreement in
Det-Noun combinations to gender agreement in long-distance pronominal anaphora). It exhibits
different features (like person, number and gender) in different languages, and features interact
with domains in such a way that there may be different features involved depending on the
domain even inside the same language (as in Spanish, where gender is marked on determiners
and adjectives but not on verbs). Although some believe that all forms of agreement have a
nominal origin (Lehman 1988), so that agreement should always be seen as an operation where
features migrate from a nominal controller to a target, the well-established view of the structure
of the clause as starting in some kind of inflection phrase created around the verb challenges
that idea, especially in pro-drop languages, where directionality might well be seen as going
from the verb to the optional subject pronoun instead (Ferguson & Barlow 1988: 12).
Directionality is in any case not contemplated in unification-based accounts (like GPSG or
LFG), where agreement is seen simply as a declarative checking of features, that is, a side-effect
of the fact that different elements of the sentence can encode information about a single formal
entity, provided that that information is consistent (Weschler 2006. CHECK). This view
contemplates agreement as either a “long component”, a “discontinuous morpheme” or a matter
of “morpheme harmony” (Ferguson & Barlow 1988: 13). The greatest puzzle is no doubt the
basic, fundamental nature of agreement: is it a syntactic operation proceeding on encapsulated
rails (Gazdar et al. 1985; Shieber 1986; van Riemsdijk & Williams 1986: 302; Chomsky 1995:
II; den Dikken 2001; Bock & Cutting 1992; Bock & Eberhard 1993; Bock, Nicol & Cutting
1999; Bock, Eberhard, Cutting, Meyer & Schrieffers 2001)? Or is it, conversely, a semantic one
(Dowty & Jacobson 1989; Barlow 1992; Pollard & Sag 1988; Wechsler & Zlatic 2003;
Vigliocco et al. 1995, 1996a, 1996b; Haskell & MacDonald 2003)? It may be both things at the
same time:

(…) there are at least two different levels at which agreement must work, calling on
two different kinds of information. Speakers begin with messages, which embody the
conceptual relationships they intend to communicate. The specific embodiments of
concepts within messages are collectively called notions, comprising intended
referents, ideas, states of affairs, and relationships among them. These notional
components of messages carry features of the concepts that they instantiate, but in
order to be communicated, they have to undergo linguistic coding as words standing in
particular structural relationships to one another. Agreement may involve the notional
features of messages, or the linguistic features of words and structures, or more likely
both. (Bock et al. 2001: 84)

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Corbett (2006: 3) and Eberhard et al. (2005) view it as the major interface problem between
morphology and syntax, a fact that makes it difficult to understand if viewed only from “the
heartland of either component” (Corbett 2006: 3). In sum:

(…) agreement may be ‘‘disarmingly simple in appearance’’ but also a ‘‘morass for
linguistic and psycholinguistic theories’’ because, in fact, it ‘‘is not only syntactic, not
only semantic, and not only pragmatic, but all of these things at the same time’’
(Eberhard et al. 2005: 531).

Over the past few years, psycholinguistic research on agreement has come into its own. In a
previous piece of research (Acuña-Fariña 2009), I tried to show that such work is relevant to
linguistic theory in a very direct kind of way. Indeed, the central question of whether a certain
linguistic phenomenon is more of a syntactic object than a semantic one in linguistic
computations can be addressed (also) in the laboratory by examining, say, different patterns of
brain waves or, in reading studies, different optical signatures. If, based perhaps on such
theoretical constructs as Pesetsky´s (1995) Earliness Principle and Chomsky´s (1999, 2001)
Phase Impenetrability theory, agreement is seen as a distinct phase in a serial, cyclic chain, then
semantic manipulations should not affect any early measure of processing in experiments. After
all, the spirit of such theoretical proposals is to rein in the domain of application of syntactic
operations like uninterpretable feature deletion, and obvious processing constraints seem to lie
behind them (admittedly or not). Take, for instance, Chomsky (2001:13)´s idea that probe-goal
computations (e.g. controllers and targets in agreement) must be local ‘‘in order to minimise
search’’, or the belief that in order to reduce the ‘‘computational burden’’ (1999:9) derivations
should be phase-bound, and that ‘‘phases must be as small as possible, to minimise memory’’
(2001:14). In this framework, phases are very easily seen as processing units. The Fodorian
logic is that, once syntactic phases are completed, the phonological and semantic operations can
start, and the previous syntactic computations are no longer available. The basic insight is that
the language faculty can only process limited amounts of structure at one time, so locality and
phases ensure that everything proceeds step by step without long searches in memory. The
opposite view to that entails that the mind is much more capable, and that, fitted with the
powers of parallel computation and massive interactivity, it is not constrained by serial
determinism.
Agreement is a tempting scenario in this controversy. This is the reason why prominent
linguists and psycholinguists have joined hands to issue explicit admonitions to join linguistic
theory and experimental practice precisely with the facts of agreement in mind:

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Under the assumption of a tight connection between grammar and processor (an
assumption which is rarely made ever since the pioneering days of the derivational
theory of complexity, but which seems to us to be the null hypothesis), the different
derivational steps assumed in linguistics should be traceable in linguistic performance,
and for our concerns here, in the way speakers err when producing agreement. (Franck,
Lasso, Frauenfelder & Rizzi 2006: 179)

Franck et al. themselves actually use evidence from three experiments of elicited spoken
production in French and Italian to modify the way AGREE and MOVE relate to each other in
Minimalism. Just to illustrate, they argue that the robustness of agreement in S–V structures (as
opposed to V–S structures) is due to the fact that features are checked twice in that
configuration: (1) via AGREE, (as is standard since Chomsky 1995), and (2) in the local Spec-
head configuration, after movement of the subject. In V–S structures, by contrast, only one
check is conducted (AGREE), explaining perhaps why agreement to the right of the verb is
generally less consistently coded (compare some men are at the door and there´s some men at
the door). Carminati (2005) has examined the disambiguating potential of the features in
Greenberg’s (1963) Feature Hierarchy (Person > Number > Gender) and argued for a Feature
Strength Hypothesis. In her view, there is a correlation between the cognitive strength of a
feature and its disambiguating power: the more cognitively important the feature is (say, person)
the better it is at disambiguating the pronoun that carries it. Theorising about agreement is also
informed by work on agrammatism. Thus, for instance, studies showing tense to be affected in
aphasia but agreement in person, gender and number unaffected are interpreted to mean that the
higher nodes in the tree have been pruned from the speaker´s mind (Friedmann 2002, 2005;
Friedmann & Grodzinsky 1997, 2000). Such negative behavioural evidence would presumably
indicate that agrammatic aphasics fail to project the tree up to its highest node, a fact that would
lend support to the theory of Split Inflection (Pollock 1989), and particularly to the view that
subject agreement is checked below the node in which tense is checked. If, besides, subject-
verb agreement recovers before tense does, then such a view gains even further credence.
Finally, also merely by way of illustration, in principle the distinction between tag pronouns and
reflexive pronouns, and how they agree with their antecedents, is conspicuous enough to merit a
separate syntactic analysis (Chomsky 1981), yet experimental work by Bock et al. (1999: 340,
342) has shown that at least on some measures of processing the mind treats both kinds of
antecedent-pronoun co-indexings in the same way.

Here I intend to focus on another kind of negative evidence that comes from the world of
psycholinguistics: the by now large body of studies on attraction. Attraction is “the aberrant
outcome of a normal resolution process”, “a kind of spurious resolution between conflicting
number specifications” (Bock et. al 2001: 85-86; cfr. Corbett 1983). It occurs when competition
between two or more NPs inside a larger complex NP causes agreement mistakes of the kind

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*the key to the cabinets are in the kitchen.2 The first noun is the head and its modifier –a
spurious controller- is usually called the local noun or intervener. This phenomenon is well-
known in traditional grammar, where it is usually labeled proximity concord (Jespersen 1924;
Kimball and Aissen 1971; Quirk et al. 1985; Francis 1986; den Dikken 2001: Huddleston &
Pullum 2002: 500 ff.; see Bock & Miller 1991 for review). As Wagers et al. (2009) note, it can
be seen even in well-edited texts like The (ew York Times. Huddleston & Pullum (2002: 500-
01) quote the following example as occurring in “a textbook by an eminent linguist”:

(1)
?It´s part of one’s linguistic competence to be able to control and interpret variations of
word-order and grammatical structure of the kind that are exemplified in the sentences
cited above. (grammatically judgement in original)

These are a few other real and perhaps clearer cases from spoken English (from Bock &
Miller 1991):

(2) *The time for fun and games are over.


(3) *The readiness of our conventional forces are at an all-time low.
(4) *I don’t think it much matters where the final reinterment of these
men are.
(5) *The learning skills people have entering college is less than it
should be.3

According to Eberhard et al. (2005), when the complex NP contains a singular head and a
plural modifier (as in the key to the cabinets), there are as many as 13% of agreement mistakes
on the verb in English. This points to an architecturally-driven propensity, not to the classic
chance performance mistake that occurs once every million words or so. That is precisely the
reason why attraction has received so much attention in the literature.
The remainder of this work is as follows. First, in section 2 I review the most relevant
findings in the psycholinguistic literature. This implies coming to terms with two basic families
of rival models: the formal and the notional. In section 3 I focus on the two latest instantiations
of these models, Marking & Morphing (Bock et al. 2001; Eberhard et al. 2005) and Maximal

2
The term ‘attraction’ is used here and in psycholinguistics more generally as referring to such mistakes.
As Franck et al. (2006: 175) note, it has a certain “family resemblance to gramatical principles of locality
according to which certain kinds of interveners block local grammatical relations” in various forms of
generative grammar (where attraction is seen as a driving force to movement). It may refer to any
morphological feature but number is by far the most studied one, followed by gender.
3
Here is another interesting example cited in Corbett (2006: 223): “… the illiteracy level of our children
are appalling” (George Bush, Washington, 23 January 2004)

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Input (Vigliocco et al. 1995; Vigliocco et al. 1996; Vigliocco & Franck 2001; Vigliocco &
Hartsuiker 2002). Finally, in section 4, entitled ‘Morphology and architectural opportunism in
attraction’, I try to show that no existing model can account either for the latest findings in the
psycholinguistic literature or for the classic mixture of formal encapsulation and semantic
interference that characterises the grammar and the processing of agreement. In essence, it will
be argued that agreement cannot be properly understood unless models incorporate an adequate
measurement of the role and size of the morphological component of every language studied, as
agreement operations are continuously sensitive to this. The general idea, that I extend from
Berg (1998) and Acuña-Fariña (2009), is that a strong morphosyntactic component blocks
(instead of facilitates) semantic interference, and that languages opportunistically use more or
less semantics in establishing agreement ties depending not only on morphological richness but
also on the direction of encoding (production vs comprehension).

2. Attraction
In typical studies of attraction, participants are presented with preambles which contain complex
noun phrases such as (6) below, and they are simply required to repeat them and then complete
them forming a complete sentence by adding a verb or a verb and a predicate. Agreement
mistakes often arise.

(6a) The key to the cabinets… (IS LARGE)


(6b) The keys to the cabinet… (*ARE LARGE)

Seminal work led by Bock in the early 1990s set this experimental agenda in motion (Bock&
Miller 1991; Bock & Cutting 1992; Bock, Cutting & Eberhard 1992; and Bock & Eberhard
1993). The driving force from the very beginning was to see whether semantics interfered with
the agreement process or, conversely, whether this was blindly driven by morphosyntactic
information. This pioneering badge of work (especially Bock & Miller 1991) established a
number of important findings. First, in English there was a strong mismatch effect in the sense
that mistakes were much more numerous when the two NPs mismatched in number than when
they did not. Secondly, the mismatch effect was solely confined to the [singular NP1+ plural
NP2] configuration, not to the opposite setup. Thirdly, when single-token preambles like the
bridge to the islands or the key to the cabinets were compared to multiple-token preambles like
the label on the bottles (underlyingly, one key or bridge versus many labels), no differences
arose. That is, the underlying semantic distinction (Fiengo & Higginbotham 1981; also
Kurtzman & MacDonald 1993) did not produce more mistakes in the case where inherent
numerosity was more obvious. In the fourth place, experimenters wanted to make sure that

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memory was taken care of, so half of the preambles included prepositional phrase post-
modifiers, and half included clausal (both subject- and object-relative) postmodifiers. It turned
out that attraction was stronger with the phrasal modifiers. In line with the view that the basic
unit of encoding is the clause, they reasoned that phrasal attraction was stronger because it
involves nouns in the same encoding cycle (Bock 1991; see also Nicol 1995, and, for
neuropsychological evidence, Nicol et al. 1996). In the fifth place, they also systematically
varied the amount of material separating the head and the local noun, so there was a short-
postmodifier version of each preamble, as well as a long-postmodifier version. This length
manipulation was intended to further test the memory issue. No effects arose. Finally, since they
studied subject-verb agreement ties and subjects are known to be sensitive to animacy and
topicality, they manipulated the “palpability” of the referent of the local noun. The idea was that
“the number of a relatively concrete local noun may hold more sway over the judged number of
an abstract subject (as in the speech of the authors) than a relatively abstract local noun does
over the judged number of a concrete subject (as in the mountain of the nomads)” (Bock &
Miller 1991: 66). Again, no such semantic effects could be found. These results led to an
inflectional view of agreement (as opposed to a semantic view), which was further buttressed by
another set of findings: 1. pseudo-plurals did not affect attraction rates (so the player on the
course did not attract (despite the local noun looking like a plural) but the player on the courts
did); 2. regulars (boys) and irregulars (men) attracted approximately the same; and 3. collectives
like army or fleet did not attract whereas ordinarily-inflected nouns like soldiers or ships did
(Bock & Eberhard 1993). All this paved the way for links with the linguistics literature on such
notions as directionality, feature inheritance and/or feature copying and feature percolation
(Gazdar et al. 1985; Chomsky 1981). In general, the inflectional account of agreement became
also a copying account whereby a controller which possesses inherent features passes them on to
a target to establish an agreement relation. This is done in a formally encapsulated manner that
is strongly reminiscent of cyclic phases in linguistics.
Importantly, the conclusions regarding the null effects of semantic manipulations (the
distributivity issue) had to be modified soon. First, Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Semenza (1995)
showed that Italian attraction patterns were sensitive to the distributivity of the preambles. Then,
Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Garrett (1996) compared English to Spanish and found that Spanish
behaved like Italian, while English remained unaffected by semantics. This cross-linguistic
disparity launched another research hypothesis with linguistics underpinnings: a unification
view of agreement seemed to be fit at least for languages where predicates contain rich
morphological information, allowing even the dropping of controllers altogether. The idea is
that with rich morphology the two constituents that participate in an agreement relation may
specify only partial information about a single linguistic object (Kay 1985; Barlow 1988, 1993;
Pollard & Sag 1988). Unification then occurs when compatible featural information on two sites

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becomes merged (Shieber 1986; De Smedt 1990). On this view, features are not copied or
moved, but simply partially shared. The basic insight is that, unlike English, Spanish and Italian
have verbs which contain such partial information directly and can therefore directly connect to
conceptual structure without any kind of mediation or control. Hence the semantic
(distributivity) effects.4 Vigliocco, Hartsuiker, Jarema, & Kolk (1996) obtained the same pattern
of results in French and Dutch, also two richly-inflected languages. Soon, however, Eberhard
(1997) proved that the Bock et al. series of null findings for English was due to the fact that the
materials in those pioneering experiments were hard to ‘imagine’. With a better control of the
imageability of her own materials, she obtained distributivity effects even in English. In fact,
distributive construals also occur when a collective noun occurs in head position and refers
mostly to the individual members of a group rather than the group itself. Humphreys and Bock
(1999; cited in Bock et al. 2001: 87) found that plural verbs are used more frequently after
subject NPs such as The gang on the motorcycles than after others such as The gang near the
motorcycles. This is because the former puts gang members into a one-to-one relationship with
motorcycles, thereby emphasizing their multiplicity.
Eberhard´s research undermined the cross-linguistic explanation, but the two rival views of
agreement operations (copying vs unification) have nevertheless essentially survived till the
present day (with important modifications; see below). One thing remained clear, though:
contrary to initial expectations, agreement operations were sensitive to at least some semantic
manipulations in all the languages studied. It soon became evident that also some of the formal
constraints uncovered by Bock et al´s work had to be modulated or refined. Franck, Vigliocco,
& Nicol (2002) compared attraction patterns in NPs containing three nouns, as in (7)-(8):

(7) *The computer with the programs of the experiment are broken
(8) *The computer with the program of the experiments are broken

and found that, when the three nouns are part of the same clause (the same unit of encoding), the
more interfering one is the one closer to the head and farther away from the agreeing verbal site
(programs). This indicates that attraction is not driven by linear proximity (as traditional
grammar would have us believe), but rather by syntactic depth. Vigliocco & Nicol (1998)
obtained the same attraction data for English declaratives and interrogatives, as in (9)-(10):

(9) *Are the helicopter for the flights safe?


(10) *The helicopter for the flights are safe.

4
Recall that a problem for directional theories of agreement is that sometimes the targets of agreement
exhibit marking even when it is absent from the source. For instance, in Spanish one says (yo) estoy
preocupado vs (yo) estoy preocupada (‘I am worried’), depending on the sex of the referent of the subject
pronoun, via a direct appeal to pragmatics (as yo does not mark gender).

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Such findings suggest that attraction is computed on a hierarchical structure rather than on the
final surface order. That is, they suggest that it occurs in a grammatical encoding phase before
words are linearised (Franck et al. 2002; Franck et al. 2006). This basically accords with Bock
& Miller´s (1991) findings (the encapsulated, formal, inflectional account). However, attraction
has also been attested for phrases situated outside the subject NP. For instance, Hartsuiker,
Antón-Méndez & Van Zee (2001) found it in object pronouns intervening between subject NPs
and their predicates in Dutch (see also Fayol et al. 1994 for French and Hemforth & Knoieczny
2003 for German). It must be conceded that attraction rates have nevertheless generally been
stronger for within-subject modifiers than for these other phrases (Franck et al. 2002), but,
together with the distributivity data, this points to the fact that strict, formal feature
copying/percolation cannot be the sole mechanism implementing agreement (Wagers et al.
2009).
Note that the overall distributivity of the phrase (semantics) counts, but the collectivity of
local nouns (semantics) does not (as collectives do not attract). Note also that inflectional
morphology counts (soldiers vs army), but so does supra-phrasal attraction (and even supra-
clausal, as attraction also affects NP-pronoun co-indexings; Bock et al. 1999). As can be seen,
experimental data soon showed what linguistic theory had long found out on its own: namely,
that agreement is particularly sensitive to both semantic and formal regulation simultaneously.
Hence its established position in the literature as an interface problem (Berg 1998; Corbett
2006; Acuña-Fariña 2009). For instance, collectives often show grammaticalised semantic
agreement especially in British English (the staff want to stay out of that; Bock et al. 2006), but
they show formal agreement inside the NP (*these staff want to stay out). This conforms nicely
with Corbett´s Agreement Hierarchy, whereby semantic interference becomes more probable
the more (structural) distance intervenes between controllers and targets (Corbett 2006: 206 ff.;
also Sauerland & Elbourne 2002: 289-91). This mixture of notional interference and formal
regulation (via domains) is in fact the main characteristic of agreement. More: so-called number
transparent nouns like number or series (Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 501 ff.; also Berg 1998)
tend to opt for a semantic override in English (a number of issues arise/*arises), like so many
measure terms (five pounds is a ridiculous amount), and coordinated constructions (eggs and
bacon is my favourite meal). In Spanish, a rich-inflection language, the feature of person allows
semantic overrides at times: los chicos somos unos idiotas (‘the boys-3sg we-are-1pl idiots’;
meaning ‘we boys are idiots’). But in more than one person comes/*come usually, for some
reason only the featural specification of the head noun (which contradicts the overall
specification of the phrase) prevails, against all logic. And in the French sentence in (11),
despite distance providing an obvious opportunity to refer to a male referent (the king) using a
semantically congruent masculine pronoun, form continuity prevails again: the king (referred to

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via arbitrary gender with the NP votre majesté) is co-indexed by feminine elle (Grevisse 1964:
405–406; see Corbett 2006:227 ff.):

(11) Votre Majesté (fem) partira quand elle (fem) voudra


Your majesty will leave whenever she wants

So, what is the explanation for this constant, seemingly arbitrary tug-of-war between
semantics and form routinization in agreement (see Corbett 2006 for extensive evidence)? Can
over 70% of the world´s languages really be at the mercy of such whimsical architectures? If, as
Ouhalla (2005: 667, 683) claims (surely rightly), agreement is about making ‘roots’ visible to
the computational system, then we are talking about a very central part of linguistic
computations. It is therefore unlikely that that part is left unregulated. Note that the existence of
mismatches is not the problem: to understand them one merely needs to recognize that
conceptualization and form have certain levels of autonomy, so the same form, say committee or
staff, may be conceptualised as singular, or plural, or maybe even as both things at the same
time, even as the form remains constant. Resolution –via agreement- is therefore a given: the
problem is, rather, not to be able to discern a principled pattern of resolution of mismatches in
the world´s languages in an area that is at the core of most of them (Corbett 2006: 238 ff.). It
seems profoundly counterintuitive that there should not be one.

3. Marking and Morphing versus Maximal Input


Psycholinguists now have two main theories to deal with the complexities of agreement.
The two have evolved from the initial inflectional and unification accounts. The heir to the
formal account is Marking & Morphing and has been developed by Bock and collaborators
(Bock et al. 2001; Eberhard et al. 2005; Bock et al. 2006). The heir to the semanticist view is
Maximal Input, developed by Vigliocco and collaborators (Vigliocco & Franck 2001; Vigliocco
& Hartsuiker 2002). Let us review them in turn.
With production in mind, according to M&M (Bock et al. 2001), agreement starts in a
marking stage whereby the conceptualization of the message directly assigns a number feature
to referential subject NPs. The idea that NPs may be notionally controlled directly comes from
the distributivity facts: NPs may take plural agreement, despite having singular heads, when
they encode a highly accessible distributive construal (Eberhard, 1997; Humphreys & Bock,
1999; Vigliocco et al. 1995; Vigliocco et al. 1996). To this experimental fact one may add the
actual grammatical (ie. not erroneous) facts: the many cases of semantic overrides that English
is famous for: number transparent nouns, measure terms, coordinations ad sensum, etc. (Berg
1998; Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 499 ff.; Acuña-Fariña 2009). Note that this message-based
number marking falls on the subject, not on the verb, at least in English. The reason for this is

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that the English verbal system is so improverished that verbs are deemed unlikely to bear
number indices themselves (see also Bock et. al. 1999: 341).5 This means that they come by
their number specifications via number morphing:

Expanding on a proposal by Lapointe and Dell (1989), we assume that in English the
number marking of the subject function controls the number features of the subject
noun phrase. The subject noun phrase itself is assembled when the morphological
representations of words and inflections are bound to specific positions within the
phrase (during constituent assembly … ), analogous to Garrett’s (1988) positional
level. At this point, the specifications of number in the lexicon are morphologically
instantiated and, if necessary, reconciled with the number features on the subject. This,
along with the implementation of agreement operations, constitutes number morphing.

Reconciliation is needed because sometimes the morphological number specifications of


constituent nouns may mismatch the number of the whole noun phrase assigned –previously-
during marking (as in collectives, for instance). Such conflicts are resolved by adjusting the
number specification of the whole phrase. This “adjustment (sometimes called percolation in
formal linguistics; see Vigliocco & Nicol 1998) is the compromise component of number
morphing, and it aligns morphological number and phrase number” (Bock et al. 2001: 91).
According to Bock et al. , given the asymmetry in attraction (plurals attract but singulars do
not), in English, an important feature of morphing is that only specified number matters
(Eberhard 1997). Number morphing has a second stage, termed control, which occurs when the
number specification of the subject phrase is finally transmitted to the verb. Importantly,
according to Bock et al., when distributive construals (the label on the bottles) result in incorrect
plural agreement on the verb, the “plural verbs are not products of attraction, … , but of notional
plurality in the message”. If I understand this point correctly, in *the label on the bottles ARE …
only marking is at play. In *the baby on the blankets ARE, conversely, morphing causes true
attraction via control.
As can be seen, a hybrid model like this can account for many different findings: semantic
overrides are the direct consequence of marking. Inflectional and structural effects are dictated

5
This view of agreement is consonant with the established account in Minimalism, involving a functional
agreement projection (Chomsky 1995: ch. II). As this is conceived, since the person and number features
of this projection need values, these are copied from where these values reside: in the VP-internal subject
NP. In this AGREE operation, the probe of AGREE looks for a goal with matching features within its
local c-command domain (Chomsky, 2000), and, once AgrS receives these features from the subject NP,
the verb moves to this AgrS position to receive its morphological specification of number and person.

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by morphing. The model is a little constrained, though, in that there are some negative
predictions that follow from it: for instance, attraction should not occur when local notional
plurals are not also grammatically plural (collectives). Conversely, it should occur for
grammatical plurals that are not strongly notionally plural (summation plurals like scissors or
binoculars). This is what they found in their experiments. Notice that these restrictions seem to
hinge on a structural dimension: semantics does not intervene if it is housed in the local noun
alone, although it does intervene if the head noun is collective or the entire phrase is marked as
notionally plural (Franck et al. 2008). In the local noun position, therefore, only blind
inflectional processes are allowed. Additional evidence for this inflectional view of
morphing/attraction comes from the fact that not all plural forms cause the same rate of
attraction mistakes. Regardless of their underlying notional plurality, nouns like suds (notionally
plural) and scissors (notionally singular, or more singular-like) create attraction due to their
plural morph; however, these invariant plurals attract less than ordinary plurals which have a
singular counterpart (car, cars). This suggests that plurals are marked and, being so, they are
sensitive to some kind of activation boost. That would explain the erroneous feature percolation
relative to plural + singular combinations.
Although M&M differs from earlier formal models in making room for fast access to
meaning through marking, the model also contains the classic encapsulation that is
characteristic of Fodorian views of language in general. Contrary to this, Maximal Input
(Vigliocco & Franck 2001; Vigliocco & Hartsuiker 2002) aligns itself beside proposals that
have been put forward to account for the influence of extrasyntactic factors in processing, such
as constraint satisfaction models (e.g., McDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994;
Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard & Sedivy, 1995) and the competition model (e.g., Bates
& McWhinney, 1989). These models share the view that a level of processing is not completely
isolated from interference from neighbouring levels, so grammatical encoding (the second level)
may be affected by the previous conceptualisation stage and even by the subsequent
phonological encoding stage if circumstances make that advantageous for processing (models
differ in how much interference they allow). In general, a strong emphasis is placed on the idea
that the grammatical encoder takes all of the information available from conceptual structures.
Vigliocco and Franck (2001: 370-71) in particular make the careful observation that not all
processing is subject to interference in an unconstrained kind of way, since there are home
domains for specific processes (Berg 1998):

(…) agreement [S-V agreement] is computed during grammatical encoding, a stage in


which the unfolding representation is syntactic in nature, as suggested by slips of the

12
tongue and other types of evidence. For example,6 Garrett (1980) observed that errors
occurring during this process, that is, word exchanges that cross phrasal and clausal
boundaries [as in examples [12] and [13]], do not show semantic/conceptual
constraints. Instead, they show a strong grammatical class constraint:

(12) I have to fill up the gas with car


(13) Older men choose to tend younger wives

By making a distinction between primary and secondary sources of information, however, they
intend to make room for a modicum of interference that allows them to juggle the notoriously
complex facts of agreement with the necessary flexibility. Taking advantage of the existence of
both arbitrary gender and semantic gender in French and Italian, they have contrasted two
hypotheses: Minimal Input and Maximal Input. Minimal Input means that agreement between a
subject NP and a predicative adjective in gender is “a purely syntactic operation, irrespective of
whether the gender of the noun is conceptually motivated or just a formal property of the noun
(and therefore (…) oblivious to the conceptual information)” (p. 369). This proposal is really
parsimonious in that it assumes that the same processes apply for both nouns with and without
conceptual gender. It also assumes that, in cases of mismatch, agreement is grammatical rather
than notional. By contrast, Maximal Input means that “accuracy is achieved by taking advantage
of information from other levels when available” (p. 370). Such information is “additional” but
nevertheless beneficial since it protects against information loss. On this view, when semantic
information is congruent with grammatical information, agreement should be more accurate.
Vigliocco and Franck (1999) found significantly fewer errors in the agreement of gender
between the subject and the predicate when gender was semantic than when it was merely
arbitrary. Another prediction stems from this hypothesis, namely that when the conceptual and
morphosyntactic information mismatch, the two types of information may interfere and compete
with each other, rendering encoding more difficult. This was ingeniuously tested using epicene
nouns like vittima (‘victim’) in their (2001) study. Epicenes have arbitrary grammatical gender
but can refer to both male and female referents. So for instance vittima is femenine but may
refer to a man. In the first two experiments (in Italian and French) speakers were presented with
a sentential context as in (14):

(14) Un camion ha investito Fabio/Fabiola che correva in bicicletta ascoltando musica


[A truck hit Fabio/Fabiola who was riding a bike while listening to music]

Then they were given a sentence preamble such as (15):

6
Grammatical encoding is the home domain of S-V agreement. By contrast, pronoun-antecedent ties are
resolved primarily in the semantics of the message, according to Vigliocco & Franck (2001). This is not
too unlike M&M.

13
(15) La vittima dello scontro
[The-fem victim-fem of-the-masc crash-masc]

and they were finally required to choose one of the two forms (masculine and feminine) of an
adjective in order to complete the preamble. Each head noun was used with two different local
nouns, one with matching gender and one with mismatching gender. Note that, in contrast to
previous studies (Vigliocco & Franck 1999; Vigliocco & Zilli 1999), the conceptual information
was a property of the discourse model, not of the noun itself. Mistakes were significantly more
common when the conceptual information was incongruent with the syntactic information than
when the two types of information were congruent, indicating that the conceptual information
available was taken into account.7

4. Morphology and architectural opportunism in attraction


As can be seen, the two major existing psycholinguistic theories of attraction have evolved to
meet the interface facts of agreement by becoming very much more nuanced, and also by de
facto becoming not too dissimilar. M&M captures inescapable semantic interference by
allowing semantics to sanction referents at the initial marking phase as either singular or plural
at the phrase level, even before the phrase is assembled. Encapsulation is taken to prevail during
the assembly phase itself. Maximal Input captures morphological effects by recognising that S-
V agreement operations unfold primarily in the home domain of grammatical encoding, after
conceptual inputs and before phonological spell-out. Semantic effects at this stage are explained
by simply relaxing the level of encapsulation of each phase, allowing conceptual influences
from the previous encoding cycle if beneficial and penalising them if detrimental (Berg 1998).
However, there are a number of problems with both accounts. In the first place, M&M, being a
formal account in origin at least, is easier to falsify since formal accounts have typically neater
predictions. Two sets of data in particular are hard to reconcile with this model. The first is the
fact that attraction has been found to exist when object NPs (both clitics and full NPs) intervene
between subject NPs and their agreeing verbs (Hartsuiker et al. 2001). Since marking affects the
entire referential phrase and the object NP is another referential phrase, the percolation path

7
Vigliocco and Zilli (1999) examined the attraction patterns of two agrammatic speakers of Italian
who were presented with the same materials used in Vigliocco and Franck (1999). The patients produced
significantly more gender agreement errors than age- and education-matched non-language-impaired
speakers for nouns with arbitrary gender, and they did not differ from controls for nouns with conceptual
gender. According to them, this indicates that the redundant and congruent conceptual information is used
during encoding by the patients.

14
envisaged to account for such effects would actually be tantamount to a relaxation of the notion
of fully encapsulated cycles (making M&M even more similar to Maximal Input).8 In the
second place, the encapsulation part of M&M rests on two series of findings: of semantic effects
if these reside in the head noun or the entire NP, and of morphological effects if these reside in
the local noun. However, Hupet et al. (1998) and Thornton & MacDonald (2003) have found
semantic effects by manipulating the plausibility of the verb relative to the two nouns in
complex NP. For instance, in an experiment where either the two nouns could be plausible
passive subjects (the album by the classical composers . . . BE praised) or only the head noun
could be so (the album by the classical composers . . . BE played), there were more agreement
errors when both nouns were plausible subjects than when only the head noun was plausible
(Thornton & MacDonald 2003). There are two problems with this finding: first, it indicates that
the local noun can exercise semantic influence; second, and maybe more importantly, effects are
obtained by manipulating a position (the verb) where, in M&M terms, all kinds of agreement
decisions (reconciliation) are supposed to have been left behind and the verb´s agreeing form is
supposed to be merely inhereted via control (Wagers et al. 2009). In fact, this is consonant with
two other facts of grammar: first, that inheritance (or percolation or copying) is problematic in
the case of absent controllers (see fn 4); and second, that often the mereology feature of a
subject NP (like a collective) cannot be determined until the verb is chosen: the committee is old
vs the committee are old (in the second case, for instance, the committee may be newly
composed of people who happen to be old; cf. Sauerland & Elbourne 2002). In such cases, even
truth conditions are affected.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to existing models of attraction comes from the fact that
their predictions are supposed to apply both to production and to comprehension (Wagers et al.
2009). However, clearly models developed with production in mind, as research in
comprehension has only barely begun, and it is evident that in reversing the direction of
encoding the interference dynamics may change accordingly: in production, message features
may spill into form (this constituting a whole research agenda); in comprehension this is less
likely (Berg 1998; Acuña-Fariña 2009). A good thing about comprehension studies is the fact
that they make it possible to study attraction in grammatical sentences (Wagers et al. 2009;
Acuña-Fariña et al., submitted). One of the first studies of this kind was conducted by Nicol,
Forster and Veres (1997). By using a maze task and a whole sentence grammaticality judgement
task, they showed that a mismatching plural local noun interfered with the agreement process in
the form of increased processing time on the verb. The authors suggested that a plural feature
percolates from the local noun to the head noun in comprehension just as it is supposed to do in

8
A way out of this dilemma would be to work out –counterintuively in my mind- a way to argue that
object and subject phrases share a merged node at some level during the derivation. Franck et al. (2006)
claim something like that.

15
production. However, there are obvious limitations to the methodology employed. A tighter
control of methodological issues was provided by Pearlmutter et al (1999), with two self-paced
reading studies and one eyetracking study in which they replicated the mismatch effect.
Interestingly, eye-tracking revealed no effects for first pass reading times, but significantly more
regressions from the verb region for mismatching local nouns. Additionally, Thornton &
MacDonald (2003) also replicated the plausibility effects of their production study (see above:
the album by the classical composer was praised/played …) in an accompanying self-paced
reading experiment in which they obtained longer RTs at the verb when both nouns were
plausible subjects than when only the head noun was plausible. The mechanism suggested to
adapt these congruent data from comprehension to the much more established data from
production is a ‘head overwriting’ operation whereby the feature on the legal head noun is
‘overwritten’ with the feature of the attractor (Pearlmutter at al. 1999; Wagers et al. 2009).
However, Wagers et al. (2009) have recently reasoned that there is in fact no attraction
in comprehension and that the effects obtained in previous research are spurious: they are not
syntactic but morphological, a side effect of the fact that plurals are harder to process than
singulars, on their own. In their view, the added difficulty of the plural “is particularly
problematic for on-line experiments in which the attractor region is immediately adjacent to the
verb, as the strongest effects of plural processing complexity would likely be felt here” (p. 210).
The theoretical significance of this methodological issue is important: in percolation/copying
terms, attraction unfolds independently of the verb due to architectural requirements affecting
the way referential NPs are projected. If attraction is due to the faulty representation (marking)
of subject number, then not registering it in grammatical sentences would mean that it is the to-
be-produced verb that causes it in the production studies. Wagers et al. point out that this is the
case and that it suggests that attraction is due to a faulty access to the NP´s features at the
moment of reactivating them at the verb (not to automatic percolation in a step-by-step syntactic
derivation of the NP piece of structure). Partly aware of that, Acuña-Fariña et al. (submitted)
conducted an eye-tracking experiment in Spanish in which they manipulated both number and
gender. By using eye-tracking (and eliminating certain limitations of Pearlmutter et al´s (1999)
study), they hoped to provide the best possible record of the reading data. By adding a gender
manipulation, two other positive things were made possible: 1. since gender belongs with the
stem of the noun in Spanish, it should not induce any extra level of difficulty relative to any
base form (as is the case, hypothetically, of plurals vs singulars in English); and 2. since gender
appears on adjectives but not on verbs, the co-indexation site occurs after the verb (a copula),
with some distance between the attractor and that site, a fact that is likely to dissolve any local
morphological effect. What they found was the following: 1.disruption, as in production, in
cases of mismatch; 2. no asymmetry, as effects were obtained for mismatching singulars as well
(albeit much less strong); 3. the fastest possible reaction times for number (even for first pass

16
and first fixation duration), in contradistinction to the data from English, where only regression
measures yielded differential results (Pearlmutter et al. 1999); 4. Also surprisingly fast RTs for
gender registered at the verb, that is, at a location prior to the actual co-indexation site; 5. no
semantic, distributivity effects, using the same materials with which Vigliocco et al. (1996)
obtained such effects in production for the same language.
This pattern of results is difficult to accommodate by any existing model. In the first
place, it casts doubts on the markedness theory of attraction, a theory nowadays taken almost for
granted (Bock & Eberhard 1993; Eberhard 1997; Vigliocco et al. 1995; Vigliocco et al. 1996;
Antón-Méndez et al. 2002; Eberhard et al. 2005; Wagers et al. 2009; Haskell, Thornton &
MacDonald 2010). Note, however, that the little known data from the Romance languages is
consistent with this observation: Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Semenza (1995) and Franck et al.
(2006) did not find strong asymmetry in Italian either, and Franck et al. (2002) could not find it
in French. It is remarkable that Vigliocco et al. (1996) did find a robust effect in Spanish in their
production experiment with the same materials. Why should a plural vs singular contrast matter
less in a comprehension experiment in Spanish than in all the experiments on production in
English? One likely reason is that in a language fraught with morphological specifications of all
kinds of features (person, gender and number being marked on determinatives, adjectives,
participles, nouns and verbs), the sg vs pl contrast is not the same kind of conspicuous event it is
in English. A short phrase such as nosotros los ricos altos y guapos contains eleven
morphological features of all kinds in Spanish, but only one –of number- in English (‘us tall and
handsome rich guy-s’). Additionally, when it comes to gender, for most nouns there is no base
form that is gender-less in Spanish, where a gender specification must be part of the lemma for
each word. Another likely reason for the absence of a plural markedness effect may be the fact
that, unlike Vigliocco et al´s experiment with the same materials, this was a comprehension
experiment, where form precedes meaning. We will come back to this. Finally, a third potential
reason is that, to make morphology matter even more, Spanish NPs house highly informative
determiners: el (sg, masc), la (sg, fem), los (pl, masc), las (pl, fem; all meaning ‘the’). This
paves the way for our next point.
A problem with existing theories of attraction and agreement is that they are an all-or-
nothing affair. However, the facts of agreement are typically probabilistic. In a number
completion study in English and German, Berg (1998) obtained consistent differences between
the two languages. Thus, for instance, ‘number transparent’ nouns (series, number, lot, etc)
tended to establish semantic agreement in English (a series of reports were issued) but formal
agreement with the head in German (a series of reports was issued). However, results were
tendencies, never absolute or near absolute laws. There were plenty of cases where the statistical
pattern met with exceptions. Acuña-Fariña (2009) did a little pilot study in a comparison of
Spanish and English and replicated these findings. Some of the outliers in both studies had to do

17
with differing levels of lexicalisation, as seems to be the case with an expression such as a
bouquet/bunch of (roses), which is usually conceptualised as a unity and therefore triggers
agreement with the head noun even in English. The fact that agreement systems are much more
nuanced than usually believed (even inside one language, that is, disregarding the obvious
complexity revealed by typology: cfr. Corbett 2006) is evident in the attraction data concerning
determiners. The Franck et al. (2008) data referred to above is particularly informative. Franck
et al. wanted to manipulate the morphophonology of both the noun and the article in complex
NPs, as this differs across languages in its transparency/cue reliability. They compared Italian,
Spanish, and French. Thus, for instance, Italian nouns tend to be highly reliable as the o/a
distinction that codes masculine vs feminine can be observed in 80% of the nouns in that
language. By contrast, determiners are less reliable since when the noun starts with a vowel, the
article is contracted independently of the noun’s gender (e.g., l’armadio, ‘the wardrobe’-M;
l’aria, ‘the air’-F). In such cases, (about 25%), the article is ambiguous with respect to gender in
its morphophonology. In Spanish, with many nouns like animal (masc), adolescente
(masc/fem), or felicidad (fem), the o/a contrast is informative in only some 68 % of the nouns.
Then there are a few nouns like mano (‘hand’) which end in –o but are feminine and even nouns
which end in –a but tend to be masculine (agua ‘water). By contrast, determiners are to be
trusted almost without exception: la mano (fem) está sucia (fem), ‘the hand is dirty’). What
Franck et al. found was a picture of almost perfect opportunism: encoders tended to trust the
noun preferentially in the three languages, but that preference was neatly modulated by its
reliability: they were sensitive to the nouns alone in Italian, both to the nouns and the articles in
Spanish, an they were particularly observant of the articles in French (as nominal endings have
largely eroded in this language). That attraction is so opportunistic adds another dimension to
the fixity of the semantics vs syntax debate in agreement by making this classic tug-of-war only
part of the story.9

Back to the Acuña-Fariña (submitted) comprehension findings in Spanish. The second


relevant aspect of that piece of research was the sheer co-indexation speed. Remember that the

9
With opportunistic agreement in mind, it is interesting that in an E.R.P. study by Wicha Moreno &
Kutas (2003), in which they wanted to see how informative articles are in Spanish, gender agreement
between a precedent article and a picture´s referent had a reliable effect, and this proved to be
independent of semantic fit. According to Friedmann & Biran (2003), in Hebrew gender is not accessed
in single-word naming because bare nouns are allowed, whereas in languages in which a noun must be
produced as a full NP, gender is accessed in single-word tasks. These authors hypothesize that gender is
accessed iff the noun is incorporated into a syntactic tree that includes an agreement phrase. This
architectural opportunism is not rare: in a study of subject- vs object-control predicates in Spanish,
Betancort, Carreiras & Acuña-Fariña (2006) found that lexical knowledge was used by the parser to
anticipate the direction of control in verbs but not in prepositions. The authors speculated that the parser´s
choices were driven by the fact that lexical control in verbs is fixed and reliable, whereas that of
prespositions is much more open to pragmatic manipulation. With preposition the best heuristic turned
put to be a preference to prefer local searches (recency) which favoured the object-control group.

18
existing data from comprehension in English (Pearlmutter et al. 1999) revealed the classic
mismatch effect, but only in relatively late measures. Acuña-Fariña (2009) searched for cross-
linguistic differences in the processing of agreement in the psycholinguistic literature
(reviewing especially eye-tracking and E.R.P. studies) and concluded that fast, shallow, non-
strategic coindexations were very characteristic of Spanish and Italian, but less so of English.
For instance, evidence from the processing of epicenes in Italian (Cacciari et al. 1997) showed
that epicenes preferentially ‘bond with’ (Garrod & Terras 2000) pronouns of the same
morphological gender, even in contexts strongly biassed pragmatically to favour the other
gender (say, the noun vittima (victim, fem) preferred a feminine pronoun to a masculine one
even in the context of a certain boy having a car crash).10 He observed that sometimes blind
obedience to alliterative form even led readers to garden path in Spanish (sometimes form
continuity crosses a phrasal boundary and illegally binds non-constituents together). This new
attraction study also in comprehension confirms this general pattern: in rich-inflection
languages, form clues are privileged by parsers which must deal with them at a rate of some ten
or so per second. This happens –let us not forget- precisely in the direction of encoding where
such form clues reach minds before anything else does (like meaning): comprehension. Such
speed makes unification theories less appealing, as it is difficult to see how the ulterior check
that unifies independently assigned featural marks can be conducted within such short time
windows. The gender data is particularly revealing, as it is registered as if in advance: that is, at
a region before the co-indexation site (the morphology of the adjective) appears on the scene.
The same can be said about the idea that attraction (and agreement in general) is a matter of
reactivating a previously encountered referent only at the point where a consistent mark
instructs language-users to do so (a cue-retrieval (memory) process, as in Solomon &
Pearlmutter 2004; Badecker & Lewis 2007; Wagers et al. 2009). If anything, the speed revealed
here and elsewhere (Acuña-Fariña 2009) in Spanish comprehension is reminiscent of pro-active
strategies in the gap-filling literature (Stowe 1986; Swinney, Ford, Frauenfelder, & Bresnan
1988; Tanenhaus, Boland, Garnsey & Carlson 1989; Boland, Tanenhaus & Garnsey 1990; see
also Betancort, Carreiras & Acuña-Fariña 2006). Is M&M (Eberhard et al. 2005; Bock et al.
2001, 2006) the solution then? Ignoring the significance of objects interfering in S-V attraction
(see above), the problem with this view is that, since gender tends to the arbitrary in Spanish, it
is difficult to see how gender effects may arise in a system (designed with semantically
grounded English-style number in mind) where morphing interacts with a previous marking
stage based on the conceptual features of the message. Can the feminine in mesa (‘table’) be
grounded in marking/meaning? In sum: only blind copying operations of the kind that have
recently been discarded in the attraction literature seem to offer any hope of accommodating fast

10
It is surely relevant that this happens at the rightward edge of Corbett´s (1979, 2006) Agreement
Hierarchy, that is, with pronouns and long distances, where semantic interference is usually strongest.

19
(indeed pro-active) gender co-indexation bindings in the Romance languages in comprehension
(Hawkins (1994, 2004). Notice that this takes us back again to two factors that interact
opportunistically: morphology (the Romance languages) and the direction of encoding
(comprehension vs production).

These two forces are evident, finally, in the third conspicuous aspect of the Acuña-
Fariña et al. findings: the absence of a distributivity effect. At first sight, this is shocking given
that using the same materials and the same language Vigliocco et al. (1996) did find robust
plausibility effects. Remember that even English ended up showing such effects once materials
were carefully controlled (Eberhard 1997). This disconfirms the thesis that distributivity is more
to be expected in the Romance languages because their rich morphology provides more
opportunities to consult meaning representations activated by the frequent cues via (distributed)
unification (Vigliocco et al. 1995, 1996; Bock et al. 1999, 2001). In fact, today, the very
opposite idea makes perfect sense: namely, that the richer the morphology the stronger the
encapsulation of agreement operations from the interference of conceptual properties of the
message.11 I take this idea to originate in the Berg (1998) study mentioned above. Remember
that Berg did a completion study in English and German in which he showed that English
grammaticalises interference far more than German does in agreement operations. The reason
for this, he suggested, is that the strong morphosyntactic component of German grammar keeps
semantics at bay. There are two factors to keep in mind: one is the direction of encoding, since
whatever is to be kept at bay must be activated before morphosyntactic operations may be
affected by it. In production, what is activated first is meaning. Hence the Vigliocco et al.
findings of distributivity effects in Spanish in a production study and the absence of such effects
in the Acuña-Fariña et al. study in comprehension (same materials, same language). The second
factor is the semantic blocking component: the rich morphology:

Given the competitive nature of the system, one major factor determining the
strength of the semantic force at the syntactic stage is the strength of the syntactic
force in its home domain. If the syntactic influence is relatively weak, it may be
overridden by the semantic influence. (…) this appears to be a fair description of
the English system. What, then, weakens the syntactic factor in this language?
Agreement presupposes a morphology to express the relationship between target
and controller. As is well known, the inflectional morphology of English is highly
impoverished (…). Thus there is hardly any opportunity for (syntactically based)
agreement processes to operate in English. It is a general cognitive principle that
frequency impacts upon the strength of a phenomenon. The less frequently it
occurs, the weaker it is. As a consequence, the limited opportunity that the
11
Notice that the idea that rich marking on the verb may make it easier to consult meaning
representations directly is strange in itself given the fact the the representations to be consulted have to do
with numerosity (and, as in Polish, gender), but numerosity is not inherent (Booij 1996) in verbs.

20
language provides for expressing syntactically based agreement relationships
involves a weakening of the syntactic force. (…) The situation is quite different in
German. (Berg 1998: 60).

Acuña-Fariña (2009) showed this logic to be correct in a comparison of English and


Spanish with similar materials to those of Berg. The same conclusion can be applied to the
findings of a recent production study by Lorimor, Bock, Zalkind, Sheyman & Beard (2008) on
attraction in Russian, another richly-inflected language. This language was less, rather than
more, affected by semantic interference than English. Haskell et al. (2010) examined English
corpora and concluded that English does tend to grammaticalise semantic interference. They
point out that a process similar to structural priming contributes to the error asymmetry of
English attraction data via speakers’ past experiences with related agreement constructions
which contain singular phrases that agree in plural with predicates (like Berg´s category 3
construction (a series of / a bunch of + PLURAL, etc) mentioned above).12 With the role of
morphology and the direction of encoding in mind, the absence of notional effects in the Acuña-
Fariña et al. (submitted) study is in fact doubly right: first, Spanish must be less affected by
notional interference due to its strong, well-oiled morphosyntactic component; second, in a task
which starts with redundant form continuity (comprehension), the conceptual properties of the
sentential message cannot be active before the form comes, but must be necessarily made
possible by that pre-existing form. Hence meaning has fewer opportunities to interfere.
The last piece of evidence for this view of attraction and agreement (involving
morphology, direction of encoding and architectural opportunism) comes from a recent
production attraction study by Foote & Lock (forthcoming) in which they contrasted two
varieties of South-American Spanish, Mexican and Dominican, with English, which acted as the
baseline for comparison. It turns out that whereas Mexican has preserved the rich morphology
of European Spanish, Dominican is losing it (like French or Brazilian Portuguese). For instance,
syllable-final –s is now reduced or weakened (or simply elided), and this can eliminate
distinctions between the second and third person singular forms in almost all tenses and moods.
Furthermore, syllable-final –n can also be weakened or elided, making it difficult to distinguish
between third person singular and plural forms (see Lunn 2002). The morphology of number on
determiners and adjectives is also being lost (Holm, Lorenzino, & De Mello, 1999; Pérez-
Leroux, 1999; Toribio, 2000). In their first experiment they observed larger distributivity effects
in English and in the Spanish variety with poorer morphology (Dominican). In the second, when
participants produced sentences with null-subjects (and therefore did not repeat the
morphologized preambles), there were large notional effects in the two varieties of Spanish,

12
Revealingly, the corpora used by Haskell et al. did not show the opposite pattern: plurals agreeing in
singular with their predicates.

21
suggesting that it is the morphological realization on subject NPs in particular, and not general
language type, that drives agreement computations. This suggests a far more nuanced account of
agreement operations than has been contemplated by any existing model or theory. It also
suggests a much more opportunistic and therefore effective and realistic account in that
probabilistic results are inescapable even inside the same language.

In sum, the varying cross-linguistic levels of semantic affectedness/encapsulation


cannot be predicted by any theory (linguistic or psycholinguistic) which does not incorporate
the role and size of morphology and the direction of encoding as essential parameters. The
filtering of meaning effects by an exuberant morphology (measured, for instance, as the
magnitude of distributivity effects) is congruent with the fact that morphological transparency
(on whatever constituent this resides the most) boosts the signal and so promotes accuracy. It
also automatises the creation of phrasal packages even at the risk of garden paths. Since
agreement is not the only form of clause-building, languages which have less of it must
compensate for their attrition by making use of more direct conceptual influence. There is
nothing counterintuitive in that given that the whole purpose of language is the conveyance of
concepts from one mind to another to start with, so occasions to bypass form are desirable as
long as there is no information loss. Since having a rich or a poor morphology is a matter of
degree, the perennial tug-of-war between semantics and encapsulation in agreement –with its
typical cross-linguistic specificities- is naturally accounted for. Both processing and the
grammatizalisation of processing routines must necessarily be conveniently opportunistic. This
logic applies both cross-linguistically and intra-linguistically (as it also depends on the direction
of encoding). A clear general prediction is that notional effects should be stronger in English-
style languages than in Spanish-style ones. Another is that they should be less strong in
comprehension than in production even in the same language.

22
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