Utku in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

Agreement attraction in Turkish.

Now out Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, "Agreement attraction in Turkish: the case of genitive attractors?" from our own Utku Türk, with co-author Pavel Logačev. The paper reports a speeded acceptability judgment task, whose results imply that genitives in Turkish, like possessives in English, are not lures for agreement attraction effects. Prior studies have suggested that they are, and speculated that this might because, in certain constructions, a genitive may mark a notional subject. But Utku argues that these results stem from a confound in the materials, which were ambiguous in a critical way. The abstract follows.

Speakers have been shown to find sentences with erroneous agreement acceptable under certain conditions. This so-called agreement attraction effect has also been found in genitive-possessive structures such as “the teacher's brother” in Turkish [Lago et al. (2019)], which is in contrast to its absence in similar constructions in English [Nicol et al. (2016)]. It has been hypothesised that this discrepancy is a result of the association between genitive case marking and being a controller in Turkish. We test an alternative explanation according to which Lago et al.'s findings are due to a potential confound in their experiment, as the morphology on all agreement controllers were locally ambiguous between possessive and accusative case. The results of our speeded acceptability judgment experiment suggest that the presence of case syncretism does not affect agreement attraction contrary to previous findings in the literature.