Attraction, in

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

, 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. It most commonly occurs with complex subject

noun phrase In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently oc ...

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 animals may ...

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. It serves the purpose of conjoining modifying information about an antecedent referent. An example is the word ''which'' in the sentence "This is the house which Jack built." Here the ...

takes on (is "attracted to") the case 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 The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark 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,' 'us,' and ‘the ...

: :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 English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

, but it is common in the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece 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 the

Septuagint The Greek Old Testament, or Septuagint (, ; from the la, septuaginta, lit=seventy; often abbreviated ''70''; in Roman numerals, LXX), is the earliest extant Greek translation of books from the Hebrew Bible. It includes several books beyond th ...

and also occurs in the

New Testament The New Testament grc, Ἡ Καινὴ Διαθήκη, transl. ; la, Novum Testamentum. (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events in first-century Christ ...

References

Grammar {{grammar-stub