scholarly journals Wrong place, wrong time: Children’s sensitivity to present tense spelling conventions

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Elise de Bree ◽  
Madelon van den Boer
Keyword(s):  
Literacy Development ◽  
Relative Frequency ◽  
Adolescents And Adults ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Verb Inflections ◽  
Past Tenses ◽  
Wrong Place

Abstract Spelling has been found to be influenced by the frequency with which certain orthographic patterns occur. We examined whether Grades 2–5 children were already sensitive to orthographic frequency in spelling present tense verb inflections that sound the same but are spelled differently. Children were asked to spell present tenses in two homophonous forms; both inflections are pronounced with final /t/ but are spelled with final -d (“ik vind,” I find) or -dt (“hij/zij vindt,” he/she finds). Previous research has shown that adolescents and adults make inflection errors based on the relative frequency within a pair; as “vind’ is more frequent than “vindt,” “vind” is often used incorrectly. The children showed low correct scores for third person singular spellings, and overall better performance for -d dominant verbs. Surprisingly, they did make errors related to homophone inflection but in the wrong place, marking the wrong time: homophone-based errors occurred in present tense non-homophone verbs and in past tenses. We take our findings to mean that the children were not sensitive to homophone dominance. Furthermore, the findings illustrate the importance of specific graphotactic patterns in literacy development and call for attention to these patterns in models and teaching of spelling.

Italian children's use of verb and noun morphology during the preschool years

2002 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard ◽  
M. Cristina Caselli ◽  
Antonella Devescovi
Keyword(s):  
High Accuracy ◽  
First Person ◽  
Opposite Pattern ◽  
Near Misses ◽  
Grammatical Development ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Single Feature ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Verb Inflections

Five groups of Italian-speaking children ages 2 to 7 years participated in tasks designed to assess their use of a range of grammatical morphemes. Present tense verb inflections and noun plural inflections reached ceiling levels by 4 years of age, whereas present tense copula forms and definite singular articles showed high accuracy levels by 5 years of age. Errors on present tense inflections were rarely infinitives. Instead, most errors could be characterized as ‘near misses’ – productions of forms that differed from the target by a single feature of person or number. Many of these one-feature errors were directional; first person forms were more likely to be replaced by third person forms than the reverse, and plural forms were more likely to be substituted by singular forms than the opposite pattern. Errors of this type are not handled by models of grammatical development that deal with broader constructs such as the availability or optionality of tense or finiteness.

scholarly journals The Quantitative Grammar and Poetics of Finite Verb Forms in the Guslʹ Dobroglasnaia by Simeon Polotsky

Slovene ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-169
Author(s):  
Fedor N. Dviniatin
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Future Tense ◽  
Total Percentage ◽  
Semantic Difference ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Past Tenses ◽  
The Third Person

The paper offers data on the quantity and structure of finite verbal forms in Simeon Polotsky’s collection Guslʹ Dobroglasnaia. The results are compared to data from twenty epinician odes by Mikhail Lomonosov and ten odes by Gavriil Derzhavin. We find 851 personal forms in Simeon’s collection, of which 214 belong to past tenses (73 to imperfect, 92 to aorist, 49 to past tense with l morpheme); 363 belong to present tense; 99 to future tense; 51 to imperative mood; 6 to conjunctive mood; and 118 to the forms with the da particle. The total percentage of past tenses in Simeon’s texts (25.1%) is close to the parameters appearing in Lomonosov’s and Derzhavin’s texts (21.4% and 23.5%, respectively), and the same is true for the percentages of non-indicative moods (20.5% vs. 19.1% and 20.5%). Simeon Polotsky’s texts contain fewer present tense forms than those written by the 18th-century poets (42.8% vs. 50.6% and 49.5%), but they contain more future tense forms (11.6% vs. 8.9% and 6.5%). Past tense forms in Simeon’s texts with l suffix include 29 forms of the third person with the auxiliary iestʹ verb, usually given in a rhyme position. In the aorist, the proportion of imperfective and perfective forms to the forms of the byti verb is 9:72:11; in imperfect, this proportion is 52:6:15; and in past tenses with l suffix, it is 8:38:3. We find 99 forms of the future tense, broken down as follows: 69 are forms of simple future; 12 are accompanied by imatʹ and similar forms; and 18 are accompanied by budet and similar forms (there is no semantic difference between these two last cases). Of the forms containing the da particle, 65 belong to present tense, 37 belong to future tense, and 16 are accompanied by byti forms.

scholarly journals How rarities likegoldcame to exist: on co-evolutionary interactions between morphology and lexical phonotactics

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
NIKOLAUS RITT ◽  
KAMIL KAZMIERSKI
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Past Tenses

We address the question of when, how and why highly marked rhymes of the structure VVCC (as ingold, falseorbind) came to be established in the lexical phonotactics of English. Specifically, we discuss two hypotheses. The first is that lexical VVCC clusters owe their existence to the fact that similar rhyme structures are produced routinely in verbal past tenses and third-person singular present tense forms (fails, fined), and in nominal plurals (goals, signs), The other is based on the insight emerging in morphonotactic research (Dressler & Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2006) that languages tend to avoid homophonies between lexical and morphotactically produced structures. We hold both hypotheses against a body ofOEDand corpus data, reconstruct the phases in which the lexical VVCC rhymes that are still attested in Present-day English emerged, and relate them to the phases in which productive inflectional rules came to produce rhymes of the same type. We show that the emergence of morphotactic models is indeed likely to have played a role in establishing VVCC rhymes in the English lexicon, since VVCC rhymes of the types VV[sonorant]/d|z/ began to establish themselves in lexical phonotactics at the same period in which they also started to be produced in inflection, and clearly before similar types that had no inflectionally produced analogues (i.e. VV[sonorant]/t|s/ as infault, dance). At the same time, we show that this does not necessarily contradict the hypothesis that homophonies between lexical and morphotactic rhymes are dispreferred. We argue that under the specific historical circumstances that obtained in English, natural ways of eliminating the resulting ambiguities failed to be available. Finally, we show that, once the phonotactically and semiotically dispreferred VV[sonorant]/d|z/ rhymes had been established, the emergence of morphotactically unambiguous rhymes of the types VV[sonorant]/t|s/ was to be expected, since they filled what was an accidental rather than natural gap in the phonotactic system of English (see Hayes & White 2013).

The effects of language impairment on the use of direct object pronouns and verb inflections in heritage Spanish speakers: A look at attrition, incomplete acquisition and maintenance

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
PEGGY F. JACOBSON
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Error Rates ◽  
School Age Children ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Verb Inflection ◽  
Heritage Spanish Speakers ◽  
Third Person ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Verb Inflections ◽  
Incomplete Acquisition

This study examined object clitic pronouns (OCPs) and verb inflections in twenty-five school-age children with typical development (TD) and twenty children with bilingual language impairment (BLI). MANOVA and ANOVA were used to explore differences according to grade level and language status (TD vs. BLI). Although children with BLI produced higher rates of grammatical errors overall, accuracy on number and gender assignment for OCPs was better for both groups in the higher grades. Although the rate of verb inflection errors did not differ for children with TD and BLI in the lower grades, a significant interaction yielded higher error rates on subject–verb agreement for third person singular and plural inflections in the later grades for children with BLI. Greater accuracy on OCP use in later grades weakens claims that bilingualism exacerbates language impairment. For BLI, whether incomplete acquisition or delayed development is the determining factor for verb inflection errors remains undetermined.

scholarly journals Morphological Spelling

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-45
Author(s):  
Hanna Rutkowska
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
William Caxton ◽  
English Spelling ◽  
Printing House

This study aims at contributing to the discussion on the role of the early printers in the regularisation and standardisation of the English spelling. It assesses the degree of early printers’ (in)consistency concerning morphological spelling, in particular the spelling of third person singular present tense (indicative) inflectional endings of verbs in six editions of The book of good maners (1487–1526), printed by William Caxton, Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde. The analysis suggests that early printers could have been interested in regularising spelling already before normative guidance from scholars became available in the form of grammars and spelling books, that is before the middle of the sixteenth century. However, the levels of the printers’ spelling consistency varied, depending on the particular printing house and edition.

Grammatical Morphology and the Role of Weak Syllables in the Speech of Italian-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 1363-1374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard ◽  
Umberta Bortolini
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
Input Processing ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Verb Inflections

Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to a group of younger control children in their use of auxiliary verbs, pronominal clitics, infinitives, present tense verb inflections, and articles. Differences favoring the control children were found for those morphemes that required the production of nonfinal weak syllables. On other grammatical morphemes, the two groups did not differ. A relationship was seen between the use of morphemes requiring nonfinal weak syllables and the use of nonfinal weak syllables that had no morpheme status. The findings are considered from the perspective of both prosodic production limitations and limitations in input processing.

Third-person singular zero in the Norfolk dialect A re-assessment

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Joby
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Present Evidence ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Present Tense

AbstractI use the results of my own research into the language use of the immigrant (or ‘Stranger’) communities in early modern Norwich to evaluate Peter Trudgill’s thesis that it was language contact in Norwich between the Strangers and the local English inhabitants that led to the emergence of third-person singular present tense zero (he go rather than he goes). I present evidence that third-person singular zero was already in use in Norwich and elsewhere in Norfolk by the time when Dutch- and French-speaking immigrants arrived in Norwich. The question then arises as to whether language contact did in fact play any role in establishing zero-marking as the norm in the Norfolk dialect, a process which was complete by about 1700. I argue is that if language contact did play a role in the success of zeromarking, it would have been in a manner different to that described by Trudgill.

“La marquise sortit à cinq heures”

PMLA ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 84 (6) ◽  
pp. 1644-1648
Author(s):  
Albert Chesneau
Keyword(s):  
Structural Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Nouveau Roman ◽  
The Ideal

Simple structural analysis applied to passages cited from the works of André Breton elucidates the reasons for his condemnation of the statement La marquise sortit à cinq heures (see his Manifeste du surréalisme, 1924) as non-poetic. This study demonstrates the opposition existing between the above-mentioned realist sentence, essentially non-subjective (third-person subject), non-actual (past tense predicate), contextual (context can be supposed), and prosaic (lack of imagery), and on the other hand a theoretic surrealist sentence, essentially subjective (first-person subject), actual (present tense predicate), and non-contextual, producing a shock-image. In reality, Breton's surrealistic phrase does not always contain all of these qualities at once. However, in contrast to the condemned phrase which contains none at all, it does always manifest at least one of these characteristics, the most important having reference to the evocative power of the shock-image. A final comparison with a sentence quoted from Robbe-Grillet, the theoretician of the “nouveau roman”, proves that even though it may appear objective, the surrealist phrase is really not so. In conclusion, the four characteristics of the ideal surrealist sentence—subjectivity, actuality, non-contextuality, and ability to produce shock-images—create a poetics of discontinuity opposed to the classical art of narration as found traditionally in the novel. (In French)

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