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Papers by carlos acuña fariña

Brain Sciences

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the relationship between grammars and processing syste... more The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the relationship between grammars and processing systems in light of the various forms of experimental research (especially of an electrophysiological nature) that has been conducted in the last fifteen years or so. First, the notion of ‘processing strategy’ or ‘heuristics processing’ is considered followed by a discussion of structures of great morphosyntactic complexity that parsing systems seem to tackle by simply respecting complex grammatical laws, instead of by resorting to shortcuts. Then, grammatical illusions and what these can teach us about the processing of grammar are considered. It is argued that illusions allow us to discern a few explanatory principles that may redefine the way we see parser–grammar relations. Among these is the idea that how long illusions last in the online-to-offline transition depends in part on their ‘templatability’, that is, the ease with which they become gestaltic templates. Another key idea is that...

Copenhagen studies in language, 2006

Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2020

Galician has been in contact with Spanish since the very origins of both languages. Galician and ... more Galician has been in contact with Spanish since the very origins of both languages. Galician and Spanish are strongly structurally, genetically and typologically related. As the intensity of the contact has been growing and the number of bilingual speakers has been steadily increasing along the 20th century, more and more grammatical Spanish features entered into Galician. In this study, we analyse how the borrowing of Spanish morphological patterns that hypercharacterize the expression of various morphosyntactic features of some verbs causes a restructuring in the grammar of an urban variety of Galician mainly spoken by bilinguals. The incorporation of those Spanish borrowings also seems to provoke an increase in the complexity of the grammar of this Galician variety. We reflect on whether what seems to be a complexification from the point of view of an isolated grammar may be considered a simplification from the point of view of a bilingual mind/speaker.

Journal of Linguistics, 2011

Emotional nouns affect attachment decisions in sentence completion tasks

Alejandro Cuza & Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes (eds.), Language Acquisition and Contact in the Iberian Peninsula. Berlín: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 187-213, 2018

This contribution is intended to show that agreement is a schematic construction (Culicover & Jac... more This contribution is intended to show that agreement is a schematic construction (Culicover & Jackendoff 2005: 192; Steels 2011: 27; Hoffmann 2013: 310), of the core kind (like Goldberg ́s argument structure constructions), and that this construction shares with the rest of the constructicon the very same cognitive principles that structure it: categorization, metaphorical extension, metonymy, Gestalt formation and prototypicality effects, usagebased self-structuring, and portions of idiosyncrasy which nevertheless show signs of resting on independently identifiable general cognitive principles. Like all constructions, agreement has a symbolic nature, with a form side (formal co-variance) and a meaning side (‘Unify’). Besides those general dimensions, two particular facts about the grammar of agreement need to be accounted for: the first is the Agreement Hierarchy (Corbett 1979; 2006); the second is the fact that, given vast cross-linguistic differences in the size of the morphologi...

Open Mind

The comprehension of subject-verb agreement shows “attraction effects,” which reveal that number ... more The comprehension of subject-verb agreement shows “attraction effects,” which reveal that number computations can be derailed by nouns that are grammatically unlicensed to control agreement with a verb. However, previous results are mixed regarding whether attraction affects the processing of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences alike. In a large-sample eye-tracking replication of Lago et al. (2015), we support this “grammaticality asymmetry” by showing that the reading profiles associated with attraction depend on sentence grammaticality. In ungrammatical sentences, attraction affected both fixation durations and regressive eye-movements at the critical disagreeing verb. Meanwhile, both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences showed effects of the attractor noun number prior to the verb, in the first- and second-pass reading of the subject phrase. This contrast suggests that attraction effects in comprehension have at least two different sources: the first reflects verb-triggere...

Folia Linguistica

In this paper I try to establish bidirectional links between the grammar and the processing (espe... more In this paper I try to establish bidirectional links between the grammar and the processing (especially production) of agreement in order to provide the broad strokes of a psychologically viable theory of agreement. I start by arguing that full encapsulation and full interactivity in agreement operations are not realistic options. The question therefore becomes how much of each should be posited on principled grounds. It is further argued that in language production agreement ‘leaks’, in the sense that conceptual structure is ready to interfere in the establishment of agreement ties, and that that interference is neatly modulated by morphological strength, in the sense that morphology acts a barrier to it. I suggest a series of components that a theory of agreement must contain if it is to be psyscholinguistically realistic. Among these: a. constant conceptual pressure (leaking) and varying degrees of morphologisation both inter- and intra-linguistically (blocking); b. constructiona...

Journal of Neurolinguistics

Functions of Language, 2016

Essentially, noun phrases are beams of formal features, like case or arbitrary gender, and semant... more Essentially, noun phrases are beams of formal features, like case or arbitrary gender, and semantic features, like number, animacy, or biologically-based gender. This means that when such nominal elements are embedded in the structure of the sentence, their features interact with that structure in many ways. The main purpose of this work is to explore some of those interactions psycholinguistically, as well as to provide a set of explanatory principles that account for a substantial number of results reported in the psycholinguistic literature. It will focus mostly on agreement. Towards that goal, firstly a distinction will be made between the storing of nominal features and the computation of those features; secondly a comparison of the features of number and gender will be made; thirdly, it will be seen how the processing and the production of featural information interacts with the strength of a language’s morphological component; fourthly, the cross-linguistically different degr...

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 1995

The aim of this paper is to provide syntactic evidence that left-dislocated NPs (LDs) do not belo... more The aim of this paper is to provide syntactic evidence that left-dislocated NPs (LDs) do not belong inside the structure of the sentences with which they are usually associated. It is argued here that the relationship between LDs and these sentences is merely a semantic one of co-reference and that, therefore, no formal, structural liaison exists between them. The analysis that contemplates the left-dislocated constituent as a sister of a lower clausal node inside the highest S node is consequently abandoned in favour of a discourse-oriented interpretation. According to this, left-dislocation is best seen as involving structurally independent co-referential units in discourse.

Journal of Neurolinguistics, 2015

ABSTRACT Previous studies have provided evidence of the brain's sensitivity to gender agr... more ABSTRACT Previous studies have provided evidence of the brain's sensitivity to gender agreement violations using the technique of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Other studies have explored ERP patterns evoked by emotional words in isolation. This study investigates the time course of the processing of emotional words embedded in a sentence context using a gender agreement violation task. Overall, the results show an early component (N1) elicited by pleasant words, a left anterior negativity (LAN) evoked by gender agreement violations, and a late positivity (P600) which was sensitive to the emotionality of words and to the grammaticality of the sentence, with no interaction between these two factors. Such findings provide evidence on the temporal course of syntactic anomalies and affective word properties in the context of the sentence.