engleski

Excluding Semantics in Coordination Agreement Strategies: A non-words production study in Croatian.

Building on a longstanding debate of the role of semantics in syntax and grounded in the analysis of the results of controlled psycholinguistic production experiment conducted within the EMSS project, we investigate the influence of semantics in agreement and, in particular, the sensitivity of various agreement strategies to semantic guidance in Croatian. Furthermore, favouring the constraint model in selecting agreement features, under which the features from the mental lexicon are selected under semantic guidance, over the control one, we investigate (i) how the deprivation of semantic features influences the selection process, and (ii) to what degree morphological markers on preverbal subjects can be treated as reliable and sufficient predictors of agreement on the verb. We test for this by fully excluding the semantic component - gender, from the recent Marušič et al. (2015) stimuli. On-line production experiment with non-words was created adapting the Marušič et al. factorial stimulus design to be tested on Croatian native speakers (n=30). Stimuli from the experiment were further used in a written grammaticality judgments task administered to another group of Croatian native speakers (n=30). In contrast to the original stimuli Coordination—Adverb—Auxiliary—Participle structured items were created, in order to reduce the potential of a blind suffix copy strategy. Non-words were created to substitute nominal roots in all 9 gender combinations (MM, FF, NN, MF, MN, FM, FN, NM, NF). Non-words were controlled for length, number of syllables and plausible syllable structures in order to reduce to a minimum the frequency and the word length as potential predictors of agreement. Three sets of non-words were created in total, one set for subject in model sentence and two for the coordination in stimulus. The two latter sets were created primarily due to syncretism between the nominative Npl suffix –a and Fsg suffix –a, leading to ambiguous -e agreement on the verb in FN and NF condition. Second set consisted of coordinated structures containing non-words and a prototypical plural- gender suffix (-i for Masculine, -e for Feminine and –a for Neuter) (n=26). Third set consisted of non-words created in the first set, with inserted frequent gender infix (-et- for Masculine, -ic- for Feminine and –enj- for Neuter) between the non-word and the suffix (n=26). Although this disambiguation is needed only with the suffix –a, we employed it systematically for all stimuli in all genders. Experiment consisted of 6 sentences in 9 conditions: (in total 54 sentences). 54 sentences of varying structures were added as fillers. By using gender, position, and presence of infix as main factors in analysis, we predict: 1. that the agreement in examples with non- words already in NN sequences, to which only ambiguous suffixes are attached (that can be understood as Npl and Fsg), would exhibit three-fold pattern of agreement (syntactic M and both N and F), and that the variation would be even greater in NF and FN sequences ; 2. agreement with masculine gender has been proven valid, but should not be treated as a default, rather as a syntactically driven agreement ; 3. greater proportion of agreement in coordinated structures with mixed gender driven by linear, rather than narrow syntactic hierarchical feature, points to the lack of semantic guidance ; 4. deducing all the factors (semantic and attraction) to a minimum a true highest conjunct agreement should appear.

morphosyntactic production; nonwords; pseudowords; psycholinguistics

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