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Rich Agreement in Basque: Evidence for Pre-verbal Structure Building

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Processing and Producing Head-final Structures

Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 38))

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Abstract

This chapter examines Basque, a head-final language with rich agreement, to investigate whether the parser uses agreement information in the auxiliaries to create syntactic predictions about upcoming sentence structure. The paper discusses how a combination of agreement and case marking information can act as a cue to predict the presence of an embedded clause. The study specifically investigates whether indirect cues provided by agreement mismatch between an auxiliary and an adjacent noun phrase are used in order to make inferences about upcoming structure and avoid garden-pathing. The role of agreement information in assisting pre-verbal structure building is examined and related to evidence from other head-final languages such as German and Japanese.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Both the absolutive and the ergative can have other syntactic functions and appear in different syntactic contexts. I am only stating the syntactic functions that are relevant for the present discussion. In order to learn further about the other contexts the reader is referred to Hualde & Ortiz de Urbina (2003, pp. 179f., 180f., 364f.).

  2. 2.

    Overall, it is not clear if the parser has a preference to interpret initially the ERG case over the ABS case in this kind of context when both case markings can have a subject role.

  3. 3.

    For an experiment that examines a purely ambiguous context with these two cases outside an agreement mismatch context, the reader is referred to Erdozia (2006).

  4. 4.

    These verbs are the so-called “trivalent ditransitives”, which can increase their valency with the addition of a dative-marked argument fulfilling the role of recipient or beneficiary. They all have therefore a transitive bivalent use. The dative argument of these verbs is doubly marked by case on the NP and dative affixes on the auxiliary (Etxepare, 2003, p. 411f.).

  5. 5.

    Note that in the matching conditions the NP-dative following the main auxiliary (region 5 ikasleari) also showed a weak significant effect. This result is not expected since the sequence of words is the same up to this region in both conditions (i.e., Maitanek ez dio ikasleari) and it is taken to be caused by experimental conditions, not by the experimental design.

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Acknowledgements

This work is part of a doctoral research grant awarded to the author by the Department of Research and Education of the Basque Government and from the Basque Government Research Project GIC07/144-IT-210-07. I would like to thank Nina Kazanina, Jon Ortiz de Urbina, Colin Phillips, J. Douglas Saddy, Juan Uriagereka, Amy Weinberg and Masaya Yoshida for their helpful comments at different stages of this work. All errors remain mine.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Leiden University, Postbus 9515, 2300, RA, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Leticia Pablos

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  1. Leticia Pablos
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Correspondence to Leticia Pablos .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Department of Modern Languages & Culture, Rochester Institute of Technology, 92 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, 14623, New York, USA

    Hiroko Yamashita

  2. Department of Language & Information Sci, The University of Tokyo, 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, 153-8902, Japan

    Yuki Hirose

  3. , Department of East Languages & Cultures, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champai, 707 S. Mathews, Urbana, 61801, Illinois, USA

    Jerome L. Packard

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Pablos, L. (2010). Rich Agreement in Basque: Evidence for Pre-verbal Structure Building. In: Yamashita, H., Hirose, Y., Packard, J. (eds) Processing and Producing Head-final Structures. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9213-7_1

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