Journal
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Volume 42, Issue -, Pages 1043-1074Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12591
Keywords
Sentence processing; Agreement attraction; Marking and Morphing; Notional plurality; Dynamical systems modeling
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We present a self-organizing approach to sentence processing that sheds new light on notional plurality effects in agreement attraction, using pseudopartitive subject noun phrases (e.g., a bottle of pills). We first show that notional plurality ratings (numerosity judgments for subject noun phrases) predict verb agreement choices in pseudopartitives, in line with the Marking component of the Marking and Morphing theory of agreement processing. However, no account to date has derived notional plurality values from independently needed principles of language processing. We argue on the basis of new experimental evidence and a dynamical systems model that the theoretical black box of notional plurality can be unpacked into objectively measurable semantic features. With these semantic features driving structure formation (and hence agreement choice), our model reproduces the human verb production patterns as a byproduct of normal processing. Finally, we discuss how the self-organizing approach might be extended to other agreement attraction phenomena.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available