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Transitivity and non-uniform subjecthood in agreement attraction

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Abstract

Research on human language converges on a view in which a grammatical “subject” is the most saliently encoded entity in mental representation. However, subjecthood is not a syntactically uniform phenomenon. Notably, many languages encode morphological distinctions between subjects of transitive verbs (i.e., verbs that require an object) and subjects of intransitive verbs. We ask how this typological pattern manifests in a language like English (which does not morphologically signal it) by examining the “distinctiveness” of transitive versus intransitive subjects in memory during online sentence processing. We conducted a self-paced reading experiment that tested for “attraction” effects (Dillon et al., Journal of Memory and Language, 69(2), 85–103, 2013; Wagers et al., Journal of Memory and Language, 61, 206–237, 2009) in the processing of subject-verb number agreement. We find that transitive subjects trigger attraction effects, but that these effects are mitigated for intransitive subject attractors (independently of the number of other noun phrases present in the intervening clause). We interpret this as indicating that transitive subjects are less distinctive and therefore less representationally salient than intransitive subjects: This is because a transitive subject must compete with another clause-mate core argument (i.e., a direct object), which draws on resources from the same pool of memory resources. On the other hand, an intransitive subject minimally only competes with a non-core argument (i.e., an oblique noun phrase); this consumes fewer memory resources, leaving the subject to enjoy greater spoils.

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Notes

  1. In models of sentence processing, interference of an attractor can occur when it is encoded, so-called encoding interference (Barker et al., 2001; Hofmeister & Vasishth, 2014; Kush et al., 2015; Nairne, 1990; Oberauer & Lange, 2008; Villata et al., 2018), and then can affect retrieval (Laurinavichyute et al., 2017). For instance, if two NP items share overlapping features, the distinctiveness of these items in memory is reduced.

  2. One potential limitation of our design is a possible garden-path effect in intransitive conditions, because the verb and preposition were presented to participants separately. Therefore, it is possible that participants may have initially analyzed intransitive structures as being transitive, before the preposition was subsequently presented. However, since no interference effect was observed in intransitive structures (which we would expect if they had been treated as transitive), our results do not appear to wholly reflect such garden-path effects.

  3. It is potentially also noteworthy that the set of verbs used in the current study had subjects that fulfilled the thematic role of agent. Subjects characterized by non-agent semantic roles such as patient or experiencer might indeed manifest distinct behaviors. If this is the case, one might expect patient subjects of unaccusative verbs (e.g., fall, arrive) to trigger dissimilar attraction profiles to agents subjects of unergative verbs (e.g., dance, work), and/or for subjects of psychological predicates (e.g., love, see) to pattern differently to those of action predicates (e.g., chase, build). Likewise, inanimate subjects of intransitive verbs that permit pseudo-passives (e.g., “The couch was slept on”) might behave differently from animate subjects of non-passivized counterparts (e.g., “The child slept on the couch”), especially given that animacy is understood as a central component of agency. We leave these considerations open for future research.

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Author Note

This research was presented at the Workshop on Linguistic Illusions in Sentence Processing (LISP), the Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing 2022, KASELL Fall Conference on English Linguistics, and at research groups at the University of Delaware and the National University of Singapore. We thank these audiences for their valuable feedback. This research was developed from part of a Ph.D. dissertation by Myung Hye Yoo. All data, analysis code, and research materials are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/NS6V4. Funding for this project was received from the University of Delaware (awardee: Rebecca Tollan).

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Funding for this project was received from the University of Delaware (awardee: Rebecca Tollan).

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  1. Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies, National University of Singapore, Block AS5, 7 Arts Link, Singapore, 117570, Singapore

    Myung Hye Yoo

  2. Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, University of Delaware, Newark, NE, USA

    Rebecca Tollan

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Yoo, M.H., Tollan, R. Transitivity and non-uniform subjecthood in agreement attraction. Mem Cogn 52, 536–553 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-023-01482-8

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