Appendix B Noun Class Agreement Morphology (Positive and Negative)

2022 ◽  
pp. 220-221
Author(s):  
András Bárány

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (s41) ◽  
pp. 37-65
Author(s):  
Julia Fernández-Cuesta ◽  
Nieves Rodríguez-Ledesma

Abstract One of the most characteristic features of the grammar of the Lindisfarne Gospel gloss is the absence of the etymological -e inflection in the dative singular in the paradigm of the strong masculine and neuter declension (a-stems). Ross (1960: 38) already noted that endingless forms of the nominative/accusative cases were quite frequent in contexts where a dative singular in -e would be expected, to the extent that he labeled the forms in -e ‘rudimentary dative.’ The aim of this article is to assess to what extent the dative singular is still found as a separate case in the paradigms of the masculine and neuter a-stems and root nouns. To this end a quantitative/statistical analysis of nouns belonging to these classes has been carried out in contexts where the Latin lemma is either accusative or dative. We have tried to determine whether variables such as syntactic context, noun class, and frequency condition the presence or absence of the -e inflection, and whether the distribution of the inflected and uninflected forms is different in the various demarcations that have been identified in the gloss. The data have been retrieved using the Dictionary of Old English Corpus. All tokens have been checked against the facsimile edition and the digitised manuscript in order to detect possible errors.


2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-346
Author(s):  
Julius-Maximilian Elstermann ◽  
Ines Fiedler ◽  
Tom Güldemann

Abstract This article describes the gender system of Longuda. Longuda class marking is alliterative and does not distinguish between nominal form and agreement marking. While it thus appears to be a prototypical example of a traditional Niger-Congo “noun-class” system, this identity of gender encoding makes it look morpho-syntactic rather than lexical. This points to a formerly independent status of the exponents of nominal classification, which is similar to a classifier system and thus less canonical. Both types of class marking hosts involve two formally and functionally differing allomorphs, which inform the historical reconstruction of Longuda noun classification in various ways.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 344-356
Author(s):  
Nadezhda Makeeva ◽  
Andrey Shluinsky
Keyword(s):  

AbstractThis article presents an overview of the numeral system in Akebu, a Kwa language of Togo. The Akebu numeral system is a decimal one and contains simple numerals from ‘1’ to ‘9’ and decimal bases for ‘10’, ‘100’, and ‘1,000’. The former have noun class agreement markers, while the latter do not. Only some noun classes are compatible with numerals, but among them there are both plural and singular classes.


Author(s):  
Cynthia Pamela Audisio ◽  
Maia Julieta Migdalek

AbstractExperimental research has shown that English-learning children as young as 19 months, as well as children learning other languages (e.g., Mandarin), infer some aspects of verb meanings by mapping the nominal elements in the utterance onto participants in the event expressed by the verb. The present study assessed this structure or analogical mapping mechanism (SAMM) on naturalistic speech in the linguistic environment of 20 Spanish-learning infants from Argentina (average age 19 months). This study showed that the SAMM performs poorly – at chance level – especially when only noun phrases (NPs) included in experimental studies of the SAMM were parsed. If agreement morphology is considered, the performance is slightly above chance but still very poor. In addition, it was found that the SAMM performs better on intransitive and transitive verbs, compared to ditransitives. Agreement morphology has a beneficial effect only on transitive and ditransitive verbs. On the whole, concerns are raised about the role of the SAMM in infants’ interpretation of verb meaning in natural exchanges.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Devet Goodness

Bantu languages are characterized with the presence of an initial element that appears after a noun class prefix. This initial element (also known as initial vowel, pre-prefix or augment) has attracted the attention of most Bantuists. One issue of concern with regard to this initial element (hereafter called the preprefix) is related to its form, its distribution and its function. A question often asked is concerned with what triggers its occurrence in Bantu languages. This paper seeks to examine the preprefix in Bantu so as to come to grips with what triggers its occurrence in different Bantu languages. The findings indicate that the preprefix in Bantu may be associated with phonology, morphology and syntactic contexts. It has been revealed that in some cases, the preprefix in Bantu is triggered by its phonological context, morphology in some contexts and syntax in other contexts. It has been revealed that of all these three criteria (i.e morphology, phonology and syntax) syntax plays a greater role in the manifestation of the preprefix. However, in this paper it is concluded that the occurrence of the preprefix cannot be associated with a single aspect. 


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Cecily Jill Duffield

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.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Culbertson ◽  
Hanna Jarvinen ◽  
Frances Haggarty ◽  
Kenny Smith

Previous research on the acquisition of noun classification systems (e.g., grammatical gender) has found that child learners rely disproportionately on phonological cues to determine the class of a new noun, even when competing semantic cues are more reliable in their language. Culbertson, Gagliardi, and Smith (2017) argue that this likely results from the early availability of phonological information during acquisition; learners base their initial representations on formal features of nouns, only later integrating semantic cues from noun meanings . Here, we use artificial language learning experiments to show that early availability drives cue use in children (67 year-olds). However, we also find evidence of developmental changes in sensitivity to semantics; when both cues types are simultaneously available, children are more likely to rely on phonology than adults. Our results suggest that early availability and a bias favoring phonological cues both contribute to children’s over-reliance on phonology in natural language acquisition.


1970 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Brown

This paper is concerned with two topics, the status of the syllable and the scope of redundancy rules, in generative phonology. We begin the discussion by examining material from Lugisu, a Bantu language of eastern Uganda, which will be used as the main language of exemplification. The simple noun in Lugisu is formed by the sequence: determiner, classifier, stem. The determiner is deleted before consonant-initial stems in some syntactic environments (and in isolation; examples 1 and 3, for example, show the sequence: classifier, stem). The first examples are from Meinhof's noun class 3 (Meinhof, 1932) where the determiner is /gu/ 3 and the classifier /mu/.


2007 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 166-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malillo Machobane ◽  
Francina Moloi ◽  
Katherine Demuth
Keyword(s):  

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