The emergence of attraction errors during sentence comprehension

1.2. WHAT THE THESIS IS NOT ABOUT 5
items and question tags.
(7) There were no doubts at any time.
(8) He had no doubts, had he?
Negative polarity items as well has positive question tags need to be licensed
by negation having scope over them. Hence, the grammaticality of (7) and (8)
suggests that the constituent negation no covertly moves into a position where it
c-commands the negative polarity item and, respectively, the tag. Alternatively,
one might assume the presence of a covert negative operator taking the required
scope. Be that as it may, negative attraction is clearly distinct from attraction
processes as discussed in this thesis. First of all, negative attraction is a matter
of interpretation rather than a matter of grammaticality. Furthermore, it results in
a grammatical sentence whereas attraction as a performance failure results in an
ungrammatical sentence (when occurring during language production).
The second phenomenon I want to mention is known as CASE ATTRACTION.
Case attraction has a diachronic as well as a processing perspective. Difficulties
in feature tracking are not restricted to number features—similar effects arise for
case features: The head noun of a relative clause occasionally adopts the case
feature of a coindexed relative pronoun. In language processing, this may happen
with case ambiguous NPs as in (9). In effect, feature transfer eliminates an
otherwise occurring garden-path.
(9) a. . . . daß man Schwierigkeiten, [ RC ], aus dem Weg gehen soll
that one difficulties.DAT out the way go should
‘that one should avoid difficulties’
b. . . . daß man Schwierigkeiten, [ RC ], aus dem Weg räumen soll
that one difficulties.ACC out the way put should
‘that one should remove difficulties’
relative clause (RC)
(i) die unangenehm sind
which.NOM unpleasant
‘which are unpleasant’
are
(ii) denen man gegenübersteht
which.DAT one faces
‘which one faces’
The second NP in (9) (Schwierigkeiten ‘difficulties’) is four-way case ambiguous.
The word form as such is compatible with nominative case, genitive case, dative
case and accusative case. The possibility of nominative case is ruled out since the