Epistemicity, social identity and politeness marking: A pragmatic analysis of Bajjika verbal inflections

Linguistics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abhishek Kumar Kashyap ◽  
Foong Ha Yap
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Discourse Context ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Eastern Group ◽  
Pragmatic Analysis ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Person Agreement

AbstractThis article examines the pragmatic uses of the verbal inflections in Bajjika, a Bihari language within the “eastern” group of the Indo-Aryan family. Previous studies have shown that Bajjika has a very complex system of verb-agreement, which is typical of Bihari languages but atypical of other Indo-Aryan languages. Of particular interest here is that Bajjika allows a maximum of two person-agreement slots in its verbal morphology: the first slot for markers that co-index with nominative participants, and the second slot for those markers that co-index with non-nominative participants as well as third person referents that are outside the discourse context (cf.

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.

Overt subjects in English: evidence for the marking of person in an English-Italian bilingual child

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUDOVICA SERRATRICE
Keyword(s):  
Significant Proportion ◽  
The Other ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Bilingual Child ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Person Agreement ◽  
The One ◽  
Finite Verb

Data from one English-Italian bilingual child (1;10–3;1) are presented in this study which challenge the hypothesis that the consistent realization of overt subjects in English is caused by the emergence of finite verbal morphology in the child's grammar. The argument is made for the emergence of subjects as an independent grammatical property of English, namely the marking of person deixis. Throughout the period of observation there is a significant proportion of overt subjects in the child's English utterances appearing both with finite and non-finite verb forms. Production of subjects stabilizes at 90% of obligatory contexts when no morphological correlates of finiteness have been acquired yet. While subjects are produced at significantly lower rates in Italian, we observe the consolidation of a number of inflected forms marking person agreement. The emergence of overt subjects in English on the one hand, and of subject–verb agreement in Italian on the other suggest that this bilingual child is grammaticalizing the all-important function of person deixis in language-specific ways: the same function is expressed by different forms in the child's two languages.

A Computer Corpus-Based Study of Subject Raising in Modern Portuguese

1997 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-400
Author(s):  
Mark Davies
Keyword(s):  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Clause Structure ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Comprehensive Data ◽  
Production Strategies ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Subject Raising

This study is the first comprehensive, data-based examination of subject raising in Portuguese, and is based on 4500+ tokens in more than 26,500,000 words of text from both the written and spoken registers of Brazilian and European Portuguese. We have suggested that there are important differences in raising between the spoken and written registers, which are related to presumably universal production strategies for the two registers. Evidence suggests that morphological factors such as subject-verb agreement play an important role in determining whether raising occurs with first, second, and third person subjects. In terms of differences between the European and Brazilian dialects, we find that split agreement (eles parece saberem) and obligatory coreference {me parece ver um fantasma) are both more common in European Portuguese. Finally, these last two facts, along with a number of related phenomena, suggest that there are important differences in the underlying clause structure of European and Brazilian Portuguese, which can further be extended to include other languages such as Spanish.

Subject-verb agreement in Newfoundland French

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth King
Keyword(s):  
Relative Pronoun ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Number Marking ◽  
The Third ◽  
Grammatical Variation ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Plural Subject ◽  
The Third Person

ABSTRACTIn Newfoundland French the verb does not agree in number with a plural subject in one particular construction–subject relative clauses–but rather displays default singular marking. Agreement is made with the subject relative pronoun, which does not have a morphological feature for number associated with it. This absence of a number feature results in a form consistently spelled out as homophonous with the third-person singular. Gender agreement transmitted in subject relatives containing a predicate adjective is evidence that number marking is at issue, not agreement in general. An exception to this pattern is the (variable) marking of plural agreement in the il y en a construction, explained in terms that are independent from the analysis of the default singular. Newfoundland French agreement is then compared with data from other French varieties, and the approach taken in this study is compared with those of other studies of grammatical variation.

The development of the portmanteau verbal morphology in Ecuadorian Siona

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-167
Author(s):  
Martine Bruil
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Linguistic Categories

Abstract Subject marking in the Western Tukanoan language Ecuadorian Siona is part of a complex system of portmanteau morphology that also marks tense and clause type. This system shows a remarkable number of regularities that hint that it might be possible to tease apart these functions. Synchronically, it is problematic to posit distinct markers for each of the three relevant linguistic categories, but diachronically, it is likely that these categories were expressed by distinct markers. This article reconstructs the pathway of the formal merger of these three linguistic categories, comparing the expression of Ecuadorian Siona’s system to the expression of these categories in other Tukanoan languages.

scholarly journals Production and Processing of Subject–Verb Agreement in Monolingual Dutch Children With Specific Language Impairment

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 952-965 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elma Blom ◽  
Nada Vasić ◽  
Jan de Jong
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Typical Development ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Test Sensitivity ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Listening Task ◽  
Dutch Children

Purpose In this study, the authors investigated whether errors with subject–verb agreement in monolingual Dutch children with specific language impairment (SLI) are influenced by verb phonology. In addition, the productive and receptive abilities of Dutch acquiring children with SLI regarding agreement inflection were compared. Method An SLI group (6–8 years old), an age-matched group with typical development, and a language-matched, younger, typically developing (TD) group participated in the study. Using an elicitation task, the authors tested use of third person singular inflection after verbs that ended in obstruents (plosive, fricative) or nonobstruents (sonorant). The authors used a self-paced listening task to test sensitivity to subject–verb agreement violations. Results Omission was more frequent after obstruents than nonobstruents; the younger TD group used inflection less often after plosives than fricatives, unlike the SLI group. The SLI group did not detect subject–verb agreement violations if the ungrammatical structure contained a frequent error (omission), but if the ungrammatical structure contained an infrequent error (substitution), subject–verb agreement violations were noticed. Conclusions The use of agreement inflection by children with TD or SLI is affected by verb phonology. Differential effects in the 2 groups are consistent with a delayed development in Dutch SLI. Parallels between productive and receptive abilities point to weak lexical agreement inflection representations in Dutch SLI.

Variable subject pronoun expression in Cabo-Verdean Creole

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrián Rodríguez-Riccelli
Keyword(s):  
Subject Domain ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Subject Pronoun ◽  
Subject Clitics ◽  
Subject Expression ◽  
Person Agreement ◽  
Formal Category ◽  
Person Marking

Abstract The Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC) subject domain has clitic and tonic pronouns that often amalgamate in double subject pronoun constructions; the possibility of a zero-subject and the formal category underlying subject clitics are disputed (Baptista 1995, 2002; Pratas 2004). This article discusses five variable constraints that condition subject expression across three descriptive and inferential analyses of a corpus of speech collected from 33 speakers from Santiago and Maio. Double subject pronoun constructions and zero-subjects were promoted by a persistence effect, though for the former this applied across nonadjacent clauses since double subject pronoun constructions are switch reference and contrastive devices resembling the doubling of agreement suffixes by independent pronouns in languages traditionally classified as pro-drop. Zero-subjects were favored in third-person contexts as previously observed by Baptista and Bayer (2013), and when a semantically referentially deficient (Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) DP antecedent was in an Intonational Unit that was prosodically and syntactically linked to the Intonational Unit containing the target anaphor (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). Results support reclassification of CVC subject clitics as ambiguous person agreement markers (Siewierska 2004) and suggest that CVC is developing a split-paradigm for person marking and subject expression (Wratil 2009; Baptista & Bayer 2013).

The Analysis of Social Deixis in A Night in Khanzadʼs Life

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-56
Author(s):  
Diman Ezzadin Khidhir ◽  
Suhayla Hameed Majeed
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Social Relation ◽  
Relative Power ◽  
Dominant Type ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Social Deixis

 Abstract        Pragmatics is branch of linguistics that studies language in context, therefore, there should be a relation between language and context that surrounds the utterance. One of the manifestations of this relation is social deixis. Social deixis is the linguistic expressions that show the status of the speaker, the addressee, or a third person or entity referred to, as well as the social relationships holding between them. Social deixis deals with forms of address and the way are used by the communicators.      This study aims to identify and analyse social deictic expressions in the play "A Night in Khanzad's Life" written by Hama Kareem Hawrami. This study helps the reader to understand the theme of the play more clearly through the use of social deictic expressions. It is concerned with both types of social deixis and how each type is related to the social identity, relative power and social relation between the characters.This study uses descriptive and qualitative method, because it identifies and analyzes both types of social deixis (relational and absolute) in the texts found in this play. The study is based on Levinson's theory on deixis (1983). The texts are taken from the play "A Night in Khanzad's Life".The steps to analyze the play are reading the play, finding the types of social deixis, analyzing and classifying the types. The dominant type that is used by the writer in this play is relational social deixis.

The Rich Agreement Hypothesis and Early Modern Danish embedded-clause word order

2003 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Sundquist
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Ambiguous Word ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Embedded Clause ◽  
Verb Raising ◽  
Person Agreement ◽  
The Impact

This article attempts to shed light on the issue of a possible link between the loss of ‘rich’ subject-verb agreement and the loss of verb raising in embedded clauses in earlier stages of the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Different versions of this so-called ‘Rich Agreement Hypothesis’ are compared in light of new diachronic data from the history of Danish. Examples of word order variation with and without verb raising over sentential adverbials were collected from a corpus of twelve sets of texts written in the Early Modern Danish period (ca. 1500–1700). Empirical results indicate that distinctions in person agreement in the verbal inflectional paradigm disappeared nearly 250 years before a significant decline in the frequency of verb raising. In order to explain a possible trigger for this change, the article closely examines the impact of structurally ambiguous word order and syntactic – not morphological – clues during acquisition.

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