Verb agreement avoidance
Author:
Morgan Joseph ’24Co-Authors:
Faculty Mentor(s):
Heidi Lorimor, Linguistics DepartmentFunding Source:
N/AAbstract
Why is it that humans use language the way we do? Humans communicate in numerous ways but one of the most significant components is language. We rely on the words we use and the sentences we compose to communicate but, we also avoid saying certain things, due to taboo or error avoidance. Previous experimental linguistic work has looked for agreement errors and ignored verb agreement avoidance. For example, “the label on the bottles are sticky” would be analyzed as an error, whereas, “the label on the bottles had been sticky” has no agreement at all, therefore, would be thrown out and assumed to have no impact on the data in an experiment.
It is known that humans avoid verbs, the real question is why do we avoid them? We examined data from agreement experiments that had already been collected, looking for patterns of verb agreement avoidance, and whether avoidance occurred in conditions where participants showed evidence of planning difficulty. We determined that difficulty planning does not correlate with verb agreement avoidance, but verb agreement avoidance is more common with certain conditions, such as when the verb comes after an adverb. We are still trying to understand why agreement avoidance happens, and what it means.