Developing Psycholinguistic Models of Subject-verb Agreement in Speech Production

MUH. DANIAL

20401109064

PBI 4

Many writers struggle with subject-verb agreement errors because they misidentify the subject of a sentence. This mistake leads to yet another one--choosing a plural verb based on an incorrectly chosen plural subject. The real subject is “hidden” somewhere in the sentence; it is actually singular. While most writers understand that a singular subject must have a singular verb and that a plural subject must have a plural verb, most do not understand the critical importance of locating the correct subject. Therefore, before concerning yourself with deciding if the verb should be plural or singular, decide if you have located the real subject of the sentence. To locate the subject more easily, try asking yourself the following question: Who or what is performing the action of the verb? Also keep in mind that nouns found in prepositional phrases are never subjects of the whole sentence.

Subject-verb agreement is assumed to be the marking of the verb in an utterance

as determined by properties of the subject. Psycholinguistic models of agreement

in speech production differ as to whether they treat this phenomenon as driven

primarily by syntactic processes or semantic influences. But these models are

based primarily on research in Indo-European languages. This paper suggests

that a useful approach to investigating the psycholinguistic mechanisms behind

agreement in speech production is to extend the research to more typologically

variant languages and more complex structures.

The study of sentence production investigates how speakers produce

grammatically well-formed utterances that communicate an intended message.

The successful production of an utterance entails that, during grammatical

encoding, the speaker must match not only lexical and morphological items to

conceptual information from the message she intends to convey, but also that each

of these items are compatibly integrated in a conventional syntactic structure that

can then be phonologically encoded. As with other areas of psycholinguistics,

research into sentence production is informed by data provided first through

observation of the linguistic phenomenon in question and then experimental

investigation and modeling of the phenomena under examination. As it is

assumed that the psychological mechanisms involved in speech production are the

same for all normal speakers, theories of these mechanisms must account for data

observed in a wide range of typologically variant languages.

So what is “agreement”? In theoretical linguistics, agreement is typically

understood as an asymmetric syntactic relationship in which the form of one

element (the “target”) in a sentence corresponds to the form of another (the

“controller”) (Corbett 2006). Typical examples include number marking on verbs

to correspond with the number of the subject, as in the English examples (1-2).

(1) The cat (sg) plays (sg)

(2) The cats (pl) play (pl)

Other features often considered as reflecting agreement in subject-verb relations

include person and gender (but see Corbett 2006:133-5 for discussion).

Within psycholinguistic studies of agreement production, one main

question concerns the extent to which agreement morphology is influenced by

information in the conceptual representation of the message rather than being

strictly the result of syntactic procedures as defined by a language’s grammar. In

other words, do targets (verbs) “look into” the conceptual message to access the

notional values of agreement features, such as whether or not the referent is

conceived of as singular or plural with regard to the number feature, or do they

simply copy the grammatical values from the corresponding controlling elements

(subjects) in the sentence, that is, whether or not the lexical item referring to the

controlling element is specified as singular or plural1? Thus, data of interest to

studies of agreement production often include examples in which there is a

mismatch between the notional value of the feature and the grammatical value of

the feature. Example of such mismatch with regard to the number feature include the English noun scissors, in which the referent is notionally singular but

grammatically plural, or family, which is grammatically singular but may, in some

dialects, have a notionally plural value (being conceived of as a set of indivual

members). Cases in which agreement morphology reflect the grammatical number

of the controlling referent (the scissors ARE) are taken to be evidence for

agreement production being governed by syntactic processes. On the other hand,

when agreement morphology reflects the notional value of the controlling referent

(the family ARE, in some dialects), we have evidence that conceptual information

is relevant to the agreement production process.

On one side of the debate are production models that describe agreement

as being driven primarily by syntactic procedures. One such model is the Marking

and Morphing model (Eberhard, Cutting & Bock 2005). The Marking and

Morphing model assumes a grammatical encoding process that includes roughly

two components: functional assembly, during which lexical entries are accessed

and matched to grammatical functions as marked by the conceptual message, and

structural integration, at which point agreement morphology is added to the

lexical forms that have been accessed, and those forms are integrated into the

appropriate constituent structure. Agreement processes operate under syntactic

guidance with respect to hierarchical representations of sentence structure, where

features are transmitted or copied from the controller to the target. During

subject-verb agreement production the agreement target (verb) has no access to

the conceptual representation of the controlling referent, but only to the

grammatical value of the features as marked on the lexical form (the subject noun

phrase, after it is encoded lexically).

For the conclusion, Subject-verb agreement is assumed to be the marking of the verb in an utterance as determined by properties of the subject. Psycholinguistic models of agreement

in speech production differ as to whether they treat this phenomenon as driven

primarily by syntactic processes or semantic influences. But these models are

based primarily on research in Indo-European languages. This paper suggests

that a useful approach to investigating the psycholinguistic mechanisms behind

agreement in speech production is to extend the research to more typologically

variant languages and more complex structures.

References

Berg, Thomas. 1998. “The Resolution of Number Conflicts in English and

German Agreement Patterns.” Linguistics 36(1): 41-70.

Bock, Kathryn, & Carol A. Miller. 1991. “Broken Agreement.” Cognitive

Psychology 23(1): 45-93.

Bock, Kathryn, & J. Cooper Cutting. 1992. “Regulating Mental Energy: