Making Syntax of Sense: Number Agreement in Sentence Production.

Abstract

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.

Verb inflections in agrammatic aphasia: Encoding of tense features☆

“…This study investigates the psycholinguistic underpinnings of aphasic verb inflection deficits using the framework of language production models (Bock & Levelt, 1994;Eberhard, Cutting, & Bock, 2005;Janssen, Roelofs & Levelt, 2002;Levelt, 1989Levelt, , 1999Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999;Roelofs, 2000). We focus on tense marking because tense substitutions are among the most frequent morphological errors in aphasia.…”

“…It is noteworthy that tense diacritic parameters are essentially identical for morphologically regular and irregular verbs. Other diacritic parameters, such as verb number for subject-verb agreement, are operational only during syntactic encoding and need not be specified during message formulation (Bock, 2004;Eberhard et al, 2005). Production of finite verbs is assumed to proceed by retrieving inflectional affixes or verb forms 1 that correspond to the selected diacritic features from the mental lexicon (for example, +PAST → Verb + D).…”

Conceptual effects on agreement: A corpus study of mismatch in English copular constructions

“…The phenomenon of subject-verb agreement plays a key role in both linguistic theory (e.g., Corbett, 2006) and psycholinguistic research (e.g., Eberhard, Cutting & Bock, 2005). While a vast amount of research of subject-verb agreement has been done, we still have an incomplete understanding of how speakers actually produce it.…”

Words with friends

“…One hypothesis attributes this to differences in how number information is marked on nouns or NP constituents at the grammatical-encoding level (e.g., Bock, 2004;Eberhard, 1997;Eberhard et al, 2005). The main idea is that most common nouns are unspecified for number, or else specified as grammatically singular by default.…”

“…Because subject-verb agreement errors tend to occur under predictable circumstances, they are well-suited for investigations of sentence production, especially the processes that link conceptual information to grammatical information during utterance formulation (Bock, 1995a;Bock & Middleton, 2011;Bock & Miller, 1991;Eberhard, Cutting, & Bock, 2005).…”