Bock K, Eberhard K M, Cutting J C, Meyer A S, Schriefers H
Beckman Institute, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Cogn Psychol. 2001 Sep;43(2):83-128. doi: 10.1006/cogp.2001.0753.
In English, words like scissors are grammatically plural but conceptually singular, while words like suds are both grammatically and conceptually plural. Words like army can be construed plurally, despite being grammatically singular. To explore whether and how congruence between grammatical and conceptual number affected the production of subject-verb number agreement in English, we elicited sentence completions for complex subject noun phrases like The advertisement for the scissors. In these phrases, singular subject nouns were followed by distractor words whose grammatical and conceptual numbers varied. The incidence of plural attraction (the use of plural verbs after plural distractors) increased only when distractors were grammatically plural, and revealed no influence from the distractors' number meanings. Companion experiments in Dutch offered converging support for this account and suggested that similar agreement processes operate in that language. The findings argue for a component of agreement that is sensitive primarily to the grammatical reflections of number. Together with other results, the evidence indicates that the implementation of agreement in languages like English and Dutch involves separable processes of number marking and number morphing, in which number meaning plays different parts.
在英语中，像scissors（剪刀）这样的词在语法上是复数，但概念上是单数，而像suds（泡沫）这样的词在语法和概念上都是复数。像army（军队）这样的词尽管在语法上是单数，但可以被理解为复数。为了探究语法数和概念数之间的一致性是否以及如何影响英语中主谓数的一致性，我们针对复杂的主语名词短语（如The advertisement for the scissors）引出句子补全。在这些短语中，单数主语名词后面跟着干扰词，这些干扰词的语法数和概念数各不相同。只有当干扰词在语法上是复数时，复数吸引（在复数干扰词后使用复数动词）的发生率才会增加，并且没有显示出干扰词的数的含义的影响。荷兰语的配套实验为这一观点提供了一致的支持，并表明在该语言中也有类似的一致过程。这些发现支持了一个主要对数的语法反映敏感的一致成分。与其他结果一起，证据表明在英语和荷兰语等语言中，一致的实现涉及数标记和数变形的可分离过程，其中数的含义起着不同的作用。
