scholarly journals What Counts in Grammatical Number Agreement?

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurel E. Brehm ◽  
Kathryn Bock
Keyword(s):  
Number Agreement ◽  
Grammatical Number

scholarly journals Conceptual effects on agreement: A corpus study of mismatch in English copular constructions

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Cecily Jill Duffield
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Information ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
Verb Number ◽  
Conceptual Relationship

Research on the production of subject-verb agreement has focused on the features of the subject rather than the larger construction in which subject-verb agreement is produced or how the conceptual relationship between subjects and predicates may interact in affecting subject-verb agreement patterns. This corpus study describes subject-verb number agreement mismatch in English copular constructions which take the frame of (SEMANTICALLY LIGHT) N + [REL] + COP + (SPECIFIC) PRED NOM, where the copula reflects the grammatical number of the predicate. Results suggest that speakers make use of conceptual information from the entire construction, and not just the subject, when formulating agreement morphology.

THE MULTIPLE FUNCTIONALITY OF THE PRONOUN ʾULĀʾIKA IN THE QURʾĀN

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-66
Author(s):  
Dror Yehudit
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Simple Sentence ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Demonstrative Pronoun ◽  
Anaphoric Pronouns ◽  
Left Dislocation ◽  
Demonstrative Pronouns ◽  
Grammatical Number

Demonstrative pronouns may function as deictic or anaphoric pronouns. The demonstrative pronoun ʾulāʾika in Arabic is the focus of this paper. It is argued that in the Qurʾān, besides being an anaphoric/resumptive pronoun, which primarily functions as the syntactic subject, it has three additional functions: (1) as a resumptive pronoun of the left-dislocation construction, helping in retrieving the predicate, which usually consists of a short clause following a ‘heavy’ subject. (2) Possibly it has the same function as ḍamīr al-faṣl, ‘separation pronoun’—namely, ʾulāʾika occurs in a simple sentence where it separates a definite subject and a definite predicate. It also occurs between subject and predicate, while both are constructed as relative clauses, and between a ‘heavy’ subject and indefinite predicate. (3) As a number marker in conditional clauses that are headed by the conditional particle man, and two kinds of number agreement are exhibited in the clause: singular and plural.ʾulāʾika in this case marks the transition from the grammatical-number feature associated with man to the notional number of man.

scholarly journals Processing subject–verb agreement in a second language depends on proficiency

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
NORIKO HOSHINO ◽  
PAOLA E. DUSSIAS ◽  
JUDITH F. KROLL
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
First Language ◽  
Conceptual Information ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Speech Planning ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
The Way

Subject–verb agreement is a computation that is often difficult to execute perfectly in the first language (L1) and even more difficult to produce skillfully in a second language (L2). In this study, we examine the way in which bilingual speakers complete sentence fragments in a manner that reflects access to both grammatical and conceptual number. In two experiments, we show that bilingual speakers are sensitive to both grammatical and conceptual number in the L1 and grammatical number agreement in the L2. However, only highly proficient bilinguals are also sensitive to conceptual number in the L2. The results suggest that the extent to which speakers are able to exploit conceptual information during speech planning depends on the level of language proficiency.

Age of acquisition and proficiency as factors in language production: Agreement in bilinguals

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
REBECCA FOOTE
Keyword(s):  
Language Production ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
Verb Number

Research on the production of subject–verb number agreement in monolinguals suggests differences between and within languages in how it proceeds as a function of morphological richness. When agreement morphology is relatively rich, the influence of conceptual number over grammatical number is less than when it is relatively poor. Within the framework of Eberhard, Cutting and Bock's (2005) marking and morphing account of agreement production, this finding is explained by how number features from the syntax and the lexicon are reconciled. This study asks: (1) Can this account of differences in agreement production as a function of morphological richness be extended to the case of bilinguals? (2) Do age of acquisition and/or proficiency modulate whether these differences surface in bilinguals? Agreement production was examined in early and late English–Spanish, and late Spanish–English bilinguals of varying proficiency. Higher-proficiency bilinguals patterned similarly to monolinguals, supporting the extension of the marking and morphing account.

scholarly journals What counts in grammatical number agreement?

Cognition ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurel Brehm ◽  
Kathryn Bock
Keyword(s):  
Number Agreement ◽  
Grammatical Number

scholarly journals Where syntax meets math: Right intraparietal sulcus activation in response to grammatical number agreement violations

NeuroImage ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 1741-1749 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Carreiras ◽  
Lindsay Carr ◽  
Horacio A. Barber ◽  
Arturo Hernandez
Keyword(s):  
Intraparietal Sulcus ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Grammatical Number

Reassessing gender in Ogbe-Oloma

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 387-403
Author(s):  
Ronald P. Schaefer ◽  
Francis O. Egbokhare
Keyword(s):  
Sound Quality ◽  
Form Class ◽  
Nominal Form ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
Gender System

Abstract We re-assess the gender system of Ogbe-Oloma, an Edoid village variety of Nigeria. System exponents are prefixes that define form class and reflect grammatical number. We find that eight agreement classes undergird fourteen genders, while seventeen nominal form classes frame twenty-five number inflections. Prefix mapping from inflection to gender is non-isomorphic. Mapping is however constrained by syllable shape, CV- versus V-, and alliterative sound quality of prefix consonant, not vowel. In addition, several number inflections trigger agreement in multiple genders leading to one gender that exclusively refers to nouns with human reference.

scholarly journals Development of Dutch children’s comprehension of subject and object wh-questions

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 129-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iris Strangmann ◽  
Anneke Slomp ◽  
Angeliek van Hout
Keyword(s):  
Selection Task ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Discourse Context ◽  
Referent Selection ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Dutch Children

While Dutch welke ‘which’-questions are structurally ambiguous, number agreement cues can disambiguate them. Despite such agreement cues, children misinterpret object questions as subject questions (Metz et al. 2010, 2012; Schouwenaars et al. 2014). We investigated if adding another cue, specifically, topicality in a discourse context, helps the interpretation of which-questions in two groups of Dutch children (5;5, n = 15 and 8;5, n = 21). Using a referent-selection task, we manipulated number on the verb and postverbal NP to create unambiguous wh-questions. Moreover, the questions were preceded by a discourse which established a topic, relating either to the wh-referent or the postverbal NP referent. Nevertheless, both 5- and 8-year-olds misinterpreted object questions as subject questions, ignoring the number and topicality cues to resolve the (local) ambiguity of which-questions. Our results confirm the effect of a subject-first bias in children’s interpretation of wh-questions. We conclude that topicality, in combination with number agreement, is not strong enough to overrule this subject-first bias.

Nakh-Dagestanian Languages

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-145
Author(s):  
Dmitry Ganenkov ◽  
Timur Maisak
Keyword(s):  
General Information ◽  
Indigenous Language ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Verbal Nouns ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Classes ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sociolinguistic Status

The chapter is a survey of the Nakh-Daghestanian family (also known as East Caucasian), one of the indigenous language families spoken in the Caucasus. The family comprises more than 30 languages, some of which are spoken by only a few hundred people and remain unwritten and/or underdescribed. The chapter provides general information about the sociolinguistic status of Nakh-Daghestanian languages and the history of their research as well as their phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. The languages of the family have rich consonant systems and are morphologically ergative, head-final, with rich case systems, complex verbal paradigms, and pervasive gender-number agreement. Alongside the major transitive and intransitive lexical verb classes, verbs of perception and cognition with the dative experiencer subject usually comprise one or more minor valency classes with non-canonically marked subjects. Among valency-increasing derivations, the causative is the most prominent. The most typical subordination strategies are non-finite, making use of participles, converbs, infinitives and verbal nouns.

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