Attraction, in

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, is a type of error in language production that incorrectly extends a feature from one word in a sentence to another. This can refer to agreement attraction, wherein a feature is assigned based on agreement with another word. This tends to happen in English with subject-verb agreement, especially where the subject is separated from the verb in a complex noun phrase structure. It can also refer to case attraction, which assigns features based on grammatical roles, or in dialectal forms of English, negative attraction which extends negation particles.

Agreement attraction

Agreement attraction occurs when a verb agrees with a noun other than its

subject Subject ( "lying beneath") may refer to: Philosophy *''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing **Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness, or ...

. It most commonly occurs with complex subject

noun phrase A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently ...

s, a notable example of this appeared in the New Yorker: : Efforts to make English the official language is gaining strength throughout the U.S. The

head A head is the part of an organism which usually includes the ears, brain, forehead, cheeks, chin, eyes, nose, and mouth, each of which aid in various sensory functions such as sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Some very simple ani ...

of the subject noun phrase, "efforts", is plural, but the verb appears in a singular form because the local noun "language" in the interceding phrase is singular, and therefore attracts the production of the singular feature in "is". While Bock pointed to this example, it doesn't follow the more common pattern where the local nouns are plural and attract plural marking onto the verb, such as in the sentence: "The key to the cabinets were missing" The tendency for plural nouns to elicit attraction more often is caused by a marking plurality as a feature, where singularity is considered part of the default, and that activation of the noun plurality marker is what attracts the plural verb form activation. Agreement attraction not only appears with subject-verb agreement, but also with object-verb agreement in

WH-movement In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. An example in English is the dependency formed between ''what'' and the object position ...

in English. Take this ungrammatical construction: "Which flowers are the gardener planting" This sentence is ungrammatical because the subject "gardener" is singular, but "are" is plural, which was attracted by the plural noun object phrase "which flowers" that appear just before the verb due to WH-movement. Object attraction also appears in SOV constructions in Dutch, where agreement attraction occurs between the verb and the local object noun. "John gave his pencil to the teacher" - "his" refers to "John" as it is a possessive marker There can be a lot of confusion caused by words that are grammatically plural but conceptually singular such as "scissors", but also those that are grammatically and conceptually plural such as "suds", as well as words that are grammatically singular but can be conceptually plural such as "army".

Case attraction

Case attraction is the process by which a

relative pronoun A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause. An example is the word ''which'' in the sentence "This is the house which Jack built." Here the relative pronoun ''which'' introduces the relative clause. The relative clause modifies th ...

takes on (is "attracted to") the

case Case or CASE may refer to: Instances * Instantiation (disambiguation), a realization of a concept, theme, or design * Special case, an instance that differs in a certain way from others of the type Containers * Case (goods), a package of relate ...

of its antecedent rather than having the case appropriate to its function in the relative clause. For example, in the following English sentence, the relative pronoun has the appropriate case, the

accusative In grammar, the accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: "me", "him", "her", " ...

: :This is the boss of the man whom I met yesterday. The following erroneous sentence, on the other hand, has case attraction: :This is the boss of the man whose I met yesterday. Because the antecedent, " fthe man", is possessive, the relative pronoun has become possessive as well. Attraction is a theoretical process in Standard English, but it is common in the

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

of the

Septuagint The Septuagint ( ), sometimes referred to as the Greek Old Testament or The Translation of the Seventy (), and abbreviated as LXX, is the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the original Biblical Hebrew. The full Greek ...

and also occurs in the

New Testament The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...

References

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