Agreement Attraction in Turkish: The Case of Genitive Attractors

Abstract

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.

Under no illusion: An acceptability study on Czech agreement attraction

“…Let us start with number agreement attraction in comprehension in its reading times reflex. This has been documented in English (Wagers et al, 2009;Tanner et al, 2014;Parker & An, 2018), German (Lago & Felser, 2018), Turkish (Lago et al, 2019;Turk & Logačev, 2021), Spanish (Lago et al, 2015), Armenian (Avetisyan et al, 2020), Arabic (Tucker et al, 2015), French (Franck et al, 2015), and Russian (Slioussar, 2018). These studies represent a substantial amount of evidence in favour of the effect bein robust and present across different languages, which has also been supported by a meta-analysis (Jäger et al, 2017).…”

Romanian (subject-like) DPs attract more than bare nouns: Evidence from speeded continuations

“…Additionally, Türk (2022) found fewer agreement attraction errors with genitive possessors in Turkish when the experiment included additional conditions that were less likely to give rise to agreement attraction. In the context of our 2AFC continuation task, it is possible that participants were sensitive to within-experiment statistics about whether the second noun in these constructions was activated when processing verbal agreement.…”

“…reflect differences in answering preferences occasioned by the different balance of nonsubject-like bare noun distractor/subject-like modified distractor conditions in Experiment 4. Hammerly et al (2019) and Türk (2022) show that response biases can change the qualitative pattern of agreement errors in acceptability judgment tasks (see also Laurinavichyute & von der Malsburg, 2023). Hammerly et al (2019) found that agreement attraction errors may vary with response bias, depending on whether participants expect the sentence they see to be ungrammatical to a lesser or greater extent.…”

Syntactic and semantic interference in sentence comprehension: Support from English and German eye-tracking data

“…There are some previous findings that indicate that overt case marking may modulate interference in the production literature (e.g., Badecker & Kuminiak, 2007;Nicol & Antón-Méndez, 2009) as well as in the comprehension literature (e.g., Slioussar, 2018) (cf. Avetisyan et al, 2020;Turk & Logacev, 2022). German has overt case marking (nominative, accusative, dative, or genitive) on determiners, nouns, and adjectives.…”