arXiv subjects

Eva Neu

Publications and source records attributed to Eva Neu.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Quantifying the cross-linguistic effects of syncretism on agreement attraction

Agreement attraction errors, in which a verb erroneously agrees with an intervening noun rather than its grammatical head, are amplified by morphological syncretism in some languages (English, German, Russian) but not others (Turkish, Armenian), a cross-linguistic pattern without a principled account. We use surprisal and attention entropy from large language models as processing proxies to investigate this variation across four languages. LLM-derived measures replicate behavioral findings in English and German (syncretism modulates attraction), align with Turkish null results (no modulation), and partially capture Russian patterns. We discuss further directions for better understanding why syncretism affects agreement attraction differently across languages.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Interpretable dimensions support an effect of agentivity and telicity on split intransitivity

Intransitive verbs fall into two different syntactic classes, unergatives and unaccusatives. It has long been argued that verbs describing an agentive action are more likely to appear in an unergative syntax, and those describing a telic event to appear in an unaccusative syntax. However, recent work by Kim et al. (2024) found that human ratings for agentivity and telicity were a poor predictor of the syntactic behavior of intransitives. Here we revisit this question using interpretable dimensions, computed from seed words on opposite poles of the agentive and telic scales. Our findings support the link between unergativity/unaccusativity and agentivity/telicity, and demonstrate that using interpretable dimensions in conjunction with human judgments can offer valuable evidence for semantic properties that are not easily evaluated in rating tasks.

cs.CL↗