The emergence of attraction errors during sentence comprehension

2.2. GRAMMATICAL AGREEMENT 27
not a counterexample for the markedness of plural. Plural is marked, either by
a morphological change of the noun itself (by means of affixation, stem change,
tone reduplication or a combination of some means) or elsewhere in the noun
phrase - by a plural word or a plural clitic (cf. subsection 2.1.3), while singular
elements often come without any particular marking.
There are also frequency differences. Overall, singular forms are more frequent
than plural forms. A corresponding analysis of the TIGER Treebank (Version
2) 19 revealed a singular rate of 69%. Finally, psycholinguistic data - asymmetries
in the acquisition and the processing of plural and singular - support the
assumption of markedness of plural as well (e.g., Guasti, 2002; Stemberger, 1985;
Bock and Eberhard, 1993; Eberhard, 1997). Last but not least asymmetries found
with regard to attraction errors which are the topic of the current investigation
point in the same direction.
2.2 Grammatical Agreement
Agreement is a widespread phenomenon in natural language. Mallinson and
Blake (1981) estimate that agreement phenomena can be found in about threequarters
of the world’s languages. Of course, the actual number of languages
showing agreement depends on the exact definition of agreement. Although agreement
appears straightforward on first sight, it turns out to be notoriously difficult
to capture in terms of a definition that covers all the variation that can be observed
both cross-linguistically and language-internally and excludes superficially similar
phenomena at the same time. Some of the common definitions are given
below in section 2.2.1. Section 2.2.2 introduces the basic terminology for the
description of agreement phenomena. Thereafter, section 2.2.3 addresses the exponents
of agreement. To give an impression of the cross-linguistic variation,
section 2.2.4 examines agreement patterns along the dimensions of possible controllers
of agreement, possible agreement targets, the range of agreement features
as well as the conditions imposed on certain agreement relations.
2.2.1 The Notion of Agreement
Although we seem to have clear intuitions about agreement, giving an exact definition
of agreement seems to be rather hard. This difficulty is witnessed by the
number of various and slightly diverging definitions of agreement (for a discussion
of definitional issues cf. Melčuk, 1993). In a first attempt, we can characterize
19 The TIGER Treebank is a joint project of the Universities of Stuttgart, Saarbrücken and Potsdam
(see http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/TIGER). The treebank contains 888,000 tokens
in about 50,000 sentences, extracted from the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau.