The emergence of attraction errors during sentence comprehension

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Introduction
Agreement is a widespread phenomenon across natural languages and has many
facets. All in all, it seems fair to consider subject–verb agreement as a prototypical
instance of agreement. Leaving certain complications aside which will
be discussed in the next chapter, the basic rule is rather simple: Subject NP and
corresponding finite verb have to accord in their agreement feature specifications.
Nevertheless, language users occasionally produce agreement errors. Even linguists
are not immune to agreement errors as illustrated by the examples below. 1
(1) * My work on speech errors have shown
(Fromkin’s Speech Error Database, Error ID 2783, speaker: V. Fromkin)
(2) * Die
the
Standardfälle, die Chomsky immer betrachtet, ist so ...
standard-cases which C. always considers is such
‘The standard cases which Chomsky always considers are such ...’
(Josef Bayer in a talk given at the University of Konstanz, 21.11.2006)
(3) * Firstly, the reference to Chomsky’s notions of E-Language (External(ised)
Language) and I-language (Internal(ised) Language) make clear that
we acknowledge these two aspects of language.
(Powell, 2005: ii) 2
1 For a collection of agreement errors in academic writing see Taylor (1993).
2 Powell, C. M. (2005). From E-Language to I-Language: Foundations of a Pre-Processor for
the Construction Integration Model. PhD Thesis, Oxford Brookes University
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