slioussar resume EN (Experimental study of several core concepts of theoretical morphology (on the material of russian) - regularity, syncretism, markedness), страница 3

Badecker and Kuminiak 2007;Dillon et al. 2013; Solomon and Pearlmutter 2004; Wagers et al. 2009) claims that the numberfeature on the subject NP is always represented unambiguously and correctly and attractionerrors arise when the subject NP is accessed via cue-based retrieval to determine the number ofthe agreeing verb because several nouns are simultaneously active.Experiments on agreement attraction have been useful to study many important questions:how agreement is produced and processed, whether this morphosyntactic operation can beinfluenced by semantics and phonology etc.

Here, we will focus on the ones directly relevantfor our studies. Firstly, in all examined languages, significant attraction effects were found onlyin the sentences with singular heads and plural attractors, but not in the opposite configuration.We will come back to this asymmetry in section 2.2.Secondly, data from languages with morphologically marked cases show that syncretism isan important factor. For example, in an experiment on German (Hartsuiker et al. 2003), subjects9like (2a), in which the form of the attractor is ambiguous between accusative and nominative,provoked significantly more errors than subjects like (2b), in which the attractor isunambiguously dative.(2) a. dieStellungnahme gegen dieDemonstrationentheF.NOM.SG positionagainst theACC.PL demonstrationsb.

dieStellungnahme zu denDemonstrationentheF.NOM.SG positionon theDAT.PL demonstrationsNotably, the syncretism factor has been examined only in production and never been examinedseparately from number: in (2a), the attractor is plural and morphologically ambiguous withnominative plural, and in (2b), it is plural and not ambiguous. This is possible to do in Russian,which has forms like večerinki ‘partyGEN.SG/NOM.PL/ACC.PL’. In one production and twocomprehension experiments (a speeded grammaticality judgement task and a self-paced readingtask), we compared number agreement attraction effects with eight types of subject NPsexemplified in (3)–(4).(3) a. trassa / trassyčerez polehighwayNOM.SG / NOM.PL across fieldACC.SG(=NOM.SG) — so-called systematic syncretismb.

trassa / trassyčerez poljahighwayNOM.SG / NOM.PL across fieldACC.PL(=NOM.PL) — so-called systematic syncretism(4) a. komnata / komnaty dlja večerinkiroomNOM.SG / NOM.PL for partyGEN.SG(=NOM.PL) — so-called accidental syncretismb. komnata / komnaty dlja večerinokroomNOM.SG / NOM.PL for partyGEN.PLNo effects were found with plural heads, as it was expected based on the previous findings.With singular heads, both in production and in comprehension syncretic genitive singular formswere found to trigger larger attraction effects than morphologically unambiguous genitiveplural forms. Accusative plural forms coinciding with the nominative plural were shown to bethe most effective attractors.These results have implications for different models of attraction and for other discussionsin morphology concerning ambiguity processing, different approaches to syncretism and theproblem of lexical insertion.

In particular, they show that syncretism does not simply boost theeffect of the plural feature — it is an independent factor. The paper argues that the results cannotbe explained as local coherence phenomena and suggests an explanation in terms of the cuebased retrieval approach to agreement attraction, with two notable modifications. First, thestudy shows that retrieval cues can tap into alternative feature sets of syncretic forms. Notably,10unlike in the previously discussed cases, this is possible although no parallel syntactic parsesare considered and no reanalysis is attempted. Second, it demonstrates that retrieval should relyon compound cues such as {nominative+plural} instead of a set of individual cues.3.2.

Gender agreement attractionPaper selected for the defense: (Slioussar, Malko 2016).As we noted in the previous section, in all studied languages, attraction effects were found tobe asymmetric. They can be observed when the head is singular, and the attractor is plural, butare much weaker or virtually non-existent in the opposite configuration. In the majority ofagreement attraction studies, this asymmetry is explained in terms of feature markedness.

Pluralis assumed to be the marked value of number feature, and the asymmetry is attributed to the tothe fact that attractors with a marked feature are more disruptive.However, many approaches to markedness have been proposed in the literature: the markedvalue of a certain feature can be determined based on frequency, presence of a non-zero affix,default use of a form (e.g., in impersonal sentences), various semantic tests etc. An overviewcan be found in (Haspelmath 2006). It is impossible to evaluate which approach ispsycholinguistically relevant looking only at singular vs. plural — other features should bestudied. We conducted one production and three self-paced reading experiments on genderagreement attraction in Russian (Slioussar, Malko 2016). There were very few productionexperiments (Badecker and Kuminiak 2007; Franck et al.

2008; Martin et al. 2014; Vigliocco,Franck, 1999) and no previous comprehension studies looking at gender.We compared sentences with subject NPs with different gender combinations, as in (5a-b).Badecker and Kuminiak’s (2007) study on Slovak was especially relevant for us. Both Slovakand Russian have three genders. Masculine is the most frequent, while neuter is used asgrammatical default (in impersonal sentences). Badecker and Kuminiak found that inproduction, feminine behaves as more marked than masculine and neuter, and masculine asmore marked than neuter.

Our production experiments observed the same pattern in Russian.(5) a. oknov pole / vo dvorwindowN to fieldN to yardMb. vyxod v les / v poleexitM to forestM to fieldNNumber agreement attraction studies found parallel patterns in production and comprehension,but our comprehension experiments revealed a different pattern: masculine, the most frequent11gender, triggered weakest effects. Thus, our study shows that different approaches tomarkedness are psycholinguistically relevant. There was another important finding: in thecomprehension experiments attraction was observed for all dependent noun genders, but onlyfor a subset of head noun genders.

This goes against the traditional assumption that the featuresof the dependent noun are crucial for attraction, showing the features of the head are moreimportant. We demonstrated that this approach could be extended to previous findings onattraction and that there existed other evidence for it.3.3. Prototypicality of inflections in agreement processingPaper selected for the defense: (Slioussar 2018b).The experiment presented in this section (Slioussar 2018b) is also dedicated to subject-predicategender agreement processing, but studies it without attraction, focusing on two factors: thegender of the noun and its inflectional class, or declension.

Russian nouns are inflected for caseand number, and, depending on the set of their inflections, are divided into several declensions.We will rely on the most widely accepted system presented in Table 1. As Table 1 shows, mostconsonant-final nominative singular forms (having zero inflection) are masculine, and mostfeminine nominative singular forms end in -a/ja, with 3rd declension consonant-final femininenouns (3D-F) being less usual, or non-typical.Declension andgenderPercentage of nounsin the RNC11st decl. F29% nouns1st decl. M1% nouns2nd decl.

M46% nouns2nd decl. N18% nouns3rd decl. F5% nounsirregular+indeclinable 1% nounsEnding in Nom.Sgand typicalityend in -a/ja, ‘typical F’end in -a/ja, ‘non-typical M’end in a C, ‘typical M’end in -o/e, ‘typical N’end in a C, ‘non-typical F’Exampleszhena ‘wife’djadja ‘uncle’syn ‘son’, gel' ‘gel’pole ‘field’mel' ‘shallow’Table 1. Declension and gender in Russian nouns (excluding substantivized adjectives).Many experimental studies found differences between nouns with more and less typicalinflections in a variety of languages (e.g.

Andonova et al. 2004; Bates et al. 1995; Gollan andFrost 2001; Spalek et al. 2008). However, these studies usually looked at the processing ofisolated nouns. Among the few sentence-processing studies, Caffarra et al. (2015) looked atItalian nouns with more and less typical endings presented in the same sentences. They werepreceded by articles, which carried gender information. Nouns from the two groups elicited1Slioussar and Samoilova (2015) identified the frequency of nouns with different grammatical characteristics inthe grammatically disambiguated subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus (http://www.ruscorpora.ru).12different ERP responses. Franck et al.

(2008) and Vigliocco and Zilli (1999) demonstrated forItalian, Spanish, and French that heads with regular inflections are more resistant to genderagreement attraction.Only one paper (Taraban and Kempe, 1999) addressed this problem in Russian, and nodifferences between 2nd declension masculine and 3rd declension feminine nouns were foundfor native speakers. The task involved selecting a correct verb form for different subject nouns.We decided to come back to this question using the self-paced reading method, which couldallow us tracing earlier processing stages. Materials were sentence sets in six experimentalconditions like in (6).(6)Xalat / kurtka / šinel’ + byl / byla potrepannym / potrepannoj + ot mnogoletnej noski.robe2D-M / jacket1D-F / overcoat3D-F + wasM/F shabbyM/F + from years-long wearFirstly, the influence of the two factors of interest could be detected only in the sentences withagreement errors, i.e.