From emergence to acquisition

1997 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fethi Mansouri
Keyword(s):  
Information Structures ◽  
Linguistic Complexity ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Processing Strategies ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
And Gender

Abstract This paper concerns the emergence and development of agreement marking in Arabic interlanguage. It investigates the effect of competing structures (pragmatics, semantics and morphosyntax) on the development of Arabic subject-verb agreement morphology. It is hypothesised that Arabic Interlanguage morphology is constrained by the availability of processing strategies (Clahsen, 1986) and competing information structures (Bates and McWhinney, 1981; 1987) especially when dealing with complex agreement patterns. The results show that linguistic complexity (a) influences the types of processing strategies employed and (b) determines the order of acquisition of different agreement patterns. It is also revealed that when the three information structures compete for interpretation of speech, morphosyntax emerges as the least influential eventhough it seems that S-V agreement in Arabic, at least on the surface, is essentially a transfer of morphosyntactic features (person, number and gender) from the subject onto the verb.

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.

scholarly journals The evolution of subject-verb agreement in Eastern Tukanoan

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thiago Costa Chacon ◽  
Lev Michael
Keyword(s):  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
The Family ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Subject Agreement ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Diachronic Development

Abstract This article describes the evolution of past/perfective subject-verb agreement morphology in the Tukanoan family, reconstructing relevant aspects of Proto-Tukanoan verbal morphology and delineating the subsequent diachronic development of verbal subject agreement morphology in the Eastern branch of the family. We argue that suffixes that cumulatively expone past/perfective and person, number, and gender (png) subject agreement resulted from the fusion of post-verbal demonstratives/pronouns expressing png information with suffixes expressing past/perfective tam information. We propose that different png agreement categories developed at successive stages in the diversification of the family, with third person masculine singular subject agreement emerging before other png categories, followed by animate plural agreement, then finally by the development of third person feminine agreement. The result in Eastern Tukanoan was a cross-linguistically unusual agreement system that contrasts four agreement categories: (i) first and second person singular and third person inanimate (singular and plural); (ii) third person animate masculine singular; (iii) third person animate feminine singular; and (iv) third animate plural.

scholarly journals Salience-weighted agreement feature hierarchy modulates language comprehension

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Muralikrishnan ◽  
Ali Idrissi
Keyword(s):  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Common Mechanism ◽  
Positivity Effect ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Biphasic Effect ◽  
Subject Noun ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Plural Subjects ◽  
The Brain

AbstractThe brain establishes relations between elements of an unfolding sentence in order to incrementally build a representation of who is doing what based on various linguistic cues. Many languages systematically mark the verb and/or its arguments to imply the manner in which they are related. A common mechanism to this end is subject-verb agreement, whereby the marking on the verb covaries with one or more of the features such as person, number and gender of the subject argument in a sentence. The cross-linguistic variability of these features would suggest that they may modulate language comprehension differentially based on their relative weightings in a given language. To test this, we investigated the processing of subject-verb agreement in simple intransitive Arabic sentences in a visual event-related brain potential (ERP) study. Specifically, we examined the differences, if any, that ensue in the processing of person, number and gender features during online comprehension, employing sentences in which the verb either showed full agreement with the subject noun (singular or plural) or did not agree in one of the features. ERP responses were measured at the post-nominal verb. Results showed a biphasic negativity−late-positivity effect when the verb did not agree with its subject noun in one of the features, in line with similar findings from other languages. Crucially however, the biphasic effect for agreement violations was systematically graded based on the feature that was violated, which is a novel finding in view of results from other languages. Furthermore, this graded effect was qualitatively different for singular and plural subjects based on the differing salience of the features for each subject-type. These results suggest that agreement features, varying in their salience due to their language-specific weightings, differentially modulate language comprehension. We postulate a Salience-weighted Feature Hierarchy based on our findings and argue that this parsimoniously accounts for the diversity of existing cross-linguistic neurophysiological results on verb agreement processing.

scholarly journals Pronoun omission and agreement: An analysis based on ICE Singapore and ICE India

ICAME Journal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-118
Author(s):  
Iván Tamaredo ◽  
Teresa Fanego
Keyword(s):  
Subject Position ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Inhibiting Effect ◽  
Modal Auxiliaries ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Agreement Morphology

AbstractThis article deals with pronoun omission in subject position and its connection with subject-verb agreement in Indian English and Singapore English. Agreement morphology has been found to be a predictor and facilitator of pronoun omission cross-linguistically in that it aids in the identification and retrieval of the referents of omitted pronouns. The results of a corpus study partly confirm this trend, since they show that agreement morphology does have a weak facilitating effect in both varieties examined; that is, pronoun omission increases when the subject and the verb agree in person and number. However, this is only true for lexical verbs; non-modal auxiliaries (i.e., be, have, do), on the contrary, show a low percentage of omitted pronouns and no facilitating effect of agreement morphology. To account for this finding, the possible inhibiting effect on pronoun omission of the frequency of co-occurrence of pronouns and non-modal auxiliaries was also explored.

SENSITIVITAS ETIS MAHASISWA ATAS PENGGELAPAN PAJAK

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-195
Author(s):  
Nurma Risa
Keyword(s):  
Tax Evasion ◽  
Female Students ◽  
T Test ◽  
Study Program ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Political Sciences ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Management Students

This study aims to prove that there is a difference of perception about ethics on tax evasion in UNISMA Bekasi students, based on selected study program and gender. The sample of this research is the students who have fulfilled the subject of taxation, at the Faculty of Economics (FE) and Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (FISIP). Using independent t-test, the results showed that there was no significant difference of perception about tax evasion ethics between FE and FISIP students. But significant differences the perception of tax evasion ethics occur between accounting and management students at FE. Significant differences also did not occur between male and female students

Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

Commands in Wolaitta

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Azeb Amha
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Type ◽  
Positive Polarity ◽  
Present Contribution ◽  
Grammatical Categories ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Leave Taking ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Syntactic Properties

This chapter examines expressions of commands (imperatives) in Wolaitta and the ways in which the imperative is distinguished from statements and questions. Although each sentence type is formally distinct, imperatives and questions share a number of morpho-syntactic properties. Similar to declarative and interrogative sentences, imperatives in Wolaitta involve verbal grammatical categories such as the distinction of person, number, and gender of the subject as well as negative and positive polarity. In contrast to previous studies, the present contribution establishes the function of a set of morphemes based on -árk and -érk to be the expression of plea or appeal to an addressee rather than politeness when issuing a command. Instead, politeness in commands is expressed by using plural (pro)nominal and verbal elements. The imperative in Wolaitta is a robust construction which is also used in formulaic speeches such as leave-taking as well as in blessing, curses, and advice.

Inverse agreement in Hungarian

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
András Bárány
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Morphological Effect ◽  
Object A ◽  
Feature Sets ◽  
Explicit Analysis ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Object Agreement

This chapter turns to object agreement with personal pronouns in Hungarian. Pronouns are interesting because they do not always trigger agreement with the verb: first person objects never trigger object agreement (morphology), and second person pronouns only do with first person singular subjects. It is proposed that the distribution of object agreement is a morphological effect and argues that all personal pronouns do in fact trigger agreement, but agreement is not always spelled out. This means that Hungarian has an inverse agreement system, where the spell-out of agreement is determined by the relative person feature (or person feature sets) of the subject and the object. A formally explicit analysis of the syntax and the morphological spell-out of agreement is provided.

Living with Barren Truths: A Tale of Triumphalism and Tribulations of a Technology

2021 ◽  
pp. 097168582110159
Author(s):  
Sital Mohanty ◽  
Subhasis Sahoo ◽  
Pranay Kumar Swain
Keyword(s):  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

Science, technology and human values have been the subject of enquiry in the last few years for social scientists and eventually the relationship between science and gender is the subject of an ongoing debate. This is due to the event of globalization which led to the exponential growth of new technologies like assisted reproductive technology (ART). ART, one of the most iconic technological innovations of the twentieth century, has become increasingly a normal social fact of life. Since ART invades multiple human discourses—thereby transforming culture, society and politics—it is important what is sociological about ART as well as what is biological. This article argues in commendation of sociology of technology, which is alert to its democratic potential but does not concurrently conceal the historical and continuing role of technology in legitimizing gender discrimination. The article draws the empirical insights from local articulations (i.e., Odisha state in eastern India) for the understandings of motherhood, freedom and choice, reproductive right and rights over the body to which ART has contributed. Sociologically, the article has been supplemented within the broader perspectives of determinism, compatibilism alongside feminism.

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