Quantifying the cross-linguistic effects of syncretism on agreement attraction
Utku Turk, Eva Neu
Abstract
Agreement attraction errors, in which a verb erroneously agrees with an intervening noun rather than its grammatical head, are amplified by morphological syncretism in some languages (English, German, Russian) but not others (Turkish, Armenian), a cross-linguistic pattern without a principled account. We use surprisal and attention entropy from large language models as processing proxies to investigate this variation across four languages. LLM-derived measures replicate behavioral findings in English and German (syncretism modulates attraction), align with Turkish null results (no modulation), and partially capture Russian patterns. We discuss further directions for better understanding why syncretism affects agreement attraction differently across languages.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.