An LFG analysis of AANN constructions

This chapter examines the construction exemplified in the title, consisting of the singular determiner a followed by an adjective, a numeral, and a plural noun (abbreviated as AANN). Building on work by Dalrymple and King (2019), Hristov captures the syntactic structure and functional properties of this construction by assuming a standard NP analysis at constituent-structure, coupled with concord and index agreement within the NP at functional-structure. It is proposed that the numeral, which acts as a modifier, agrees with the plural concord of the head noun, while the determiner proper (the article) is exceptionally allowed to agree with the N′ string staggering ten dissertations in terms of index (singular when a single-unit reading is available). Thus, without altering the formal apparatus of LFG, this proposal has the advantage of explaining a number of previously unexplained contrasts and of being able to cover a wide range of related constructions.

The structure of plural last names in Spanish and other languages

Spanish plural last name noun phrases appear with a plural determiner and a singular or plural noun. Last names marked as singular are interpreted as a group, whereas plural ones are interpreted as collection of individuals (additive reading), although both behave like fully plural DPs. Based on a comparison with first names, I propose that last names involve a null nominal ‘group’ head dominated by an associative plural realized as the plural morpheme on the determiner. When the last name is plural, it has an additional NUM head that forces the additive reading. The last name number patterns are shown to be similar to those of N-N compounds, with which they share other similarities. The paper also surveys crosslinguistic pluralization patterns, proposing potential patterns of variation: the presence/absence of the null nominal and the structural location of the associative plural head.

Investigating Gaps in Police Narratives

Report writing is a major form of communication in the law enforcement; hence, professional writing skills are mandatory among the police. Though empirical studies suggest that police officers are confronted with inadequate report writing skills, little is known about how the report writing difficulties of the police manifest in their written narratives. Hence, using qualitative inquiry, this study analyzed, described, and interpreted the gaps or errors in written police narratives. One hundred twenty (120) police blotter narratives written by police investigators in three municipal police stations were analyzed to look into errors in grammar, mechanics, and lexis. Findings revealed that grammatical gaps are composed of errors on sentence construction, verb usage, connective, pronoun, plural noun, and preposition; mechanical gaps include errors on punctuation, capitalization, and spelling; and lexical gaps are inappropriate word choice and improper word form. These findings offer manifold academic and professional intervention ideas that would help address the report writing issues among the police.

Grammatical Errors in English Informal Essays by The Sixth Semester of English Literature Students

This research focused on Dulay's and Richard's theories about grammatical errors. This research purposed to (1) describe grammatical error types in English informal essay were made by the sixth semester of English Literature students in Makassar Islamic University and (2) find grammatical error causes in the informal essay were made by the sixth semester of English Literature students in Makassar Islamic University. The researcher used qualitative methods to analyse the types of error in students' questionnaires and essays based on Dulay's theory: omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. Meanwhile, the researcher also found error causes by Richard's theory, namely, interference, overgeneralization, ignorance of the rule restriction, incomplete rule restriction, and false concept hypothesized. This research demonstrated 210 errors in students' questionnaires and essays. First, fifty-two errors in omission: twenty-nine errors in the omission of the auxiliary verb, three errors in the omission of the ordinary verb, six errors omission of the noun, eight errors in the omission of a plural noun, two errors in the omission of gerund noun and four errors in the omission of the preposition. Second, ninety-three errors, in addition, those were: twelve errors in double marking, fifty-one errors in regularization, and thirty errors in simple addition. Third, fifty-one errors in misinformation last were fourteen errors in misordering, which were found in interference, overgeneralization, ignorance of the rule restriction, incomplete rule restriction, and false concept hypothesized. Keywords: Grammatical, Error, Informal Essays.

Gender and Number Marking in Amazigh Language

This article studies the derivational system of gender and number in Ait Atta variety of Amazigh language. Thus, the following claims are made: first, gender is overtly marked on feminine nouns by the prefixation of the gender morpheme t-. The paper argues that [t…t] is not a circumfix or a discontinuous morpheme, but it is an asymmetric inflection. In the derivational system of gender, large majority of nouns allow for gender opposition. However, mass nouns allow only for one lexically determined gender and number. Moreover, masculine has no overt realization in Amazigh language. Vocalic initial nouns fall into the category of masculine nouns. I argue that the initial vowel is a nominal marker. I submit that the noun, in general, consists of maximally three main parts: a prefix, a lexical base, and a suffix. Second, the majority of Berber noun stems involve, at least, one vowel in addition to the prefixal vowel (e.g. ‘a-ḍar’ foot, ‘a-funas’ bull, 'a-ɣrum’ bread). Third, when the plural noun is specified as [+feminine], it takes the gender morpheme t-. Fourth, number takes the form of a feature assigned lexically to the noun. The study provides a templatic analysis to account for internal noun change. It implements Lahrouchi and Ridouane (2016) analysis of diminutives and plurals in Moroccan Arabic and argues that sound plurals in Amazigh language are associated with standard Num projection, while id/istt-plurals are associated with lower in the structure with n projection.

Modeling Maltese Noun Plural Classes without Morphemes

Word and Paradigm morphology proposes that morphologically complex words are stored as wholes in the mental lexicon, and by doing so it avoids problems that are related to the notion of the morpheme. However, it is not yet clear to what degree it is possible to computationally model classification and production of complex word forms without morphemes.We take up this question by modeling the classification and production of the Maltese noun plural system. Maltese is a Semitic language that has two broad classes of plurals: concatenative ones and non-concatenative ones. We model the classification in two models, and the production in a third one. The first model for classification, the Tilburg Memory Based Learner (TiMBL), is a computational implementation of exemplar models. TiMBL is impartial as to the existence of morphemes in the mental lexicon, and allows us to directly compare the classification with and without morphemes. It turns out that the classification with and without morphemes of Maltese nouns is equally good. The second classification model is the Naive Discriminative Learner (NDL). NDL is a computational implementation of discriminative learning. It can be understood as an implementation of the Word and Paradigm model and thus eschews morphemes. It differs from TiMBL in its assumptions about learning, and they way in which the classifications are obtained. NDL, too, classifies Maltese nouns well. A classification task is very different from a production task, and therefore we used neural networks to model the production of plurals. In these models we address the question whether the production of a plural noun for a given singular can be modeled without recourse to morphemes. We used two neural networks architectures (LSTM and GRU) that have been applied to linguistic phenomena, and find that they are able to correctly produce plurals, without making use of morphemes.We conclude that the Maltese noun plural system can be modeled on the basis of whole words alone without morphemes. These results, therefore, support the Word and Paradigm theory of the mental lexicon.

Plurality and crosslinguistic variation: an experimental investigation of the Turkish plural

In English and many other languages, the interpretation of the plural is associated with an ‘exclusive’ reading in positive sentences and an ‘inclusive’ reading in negative ones. For example, the plural noun tulips in a sentence such as Chicken planted tulips suggests that Chicken planted more than one tulip (i.e., a reading which ‘excludes’ atomic individual tulips). At the same time, however, the corresponding negative sentence Chicken didn’t plant tulips doesn’t merely convey that he didn’t plant more than one tulip, but rather that he didn’t plant any tulip (i.e., ‘including’ atomic individual tulips). Different approaches to the meaning contribution of the English plural vary in how they account for this alternation across the polarities, but converge on assuming that (at least one of) the denotation(s) of the plural should include atomic individuals. Turkish, on the other hand, is cited as one of the few known languages in which the plural only receives an exclusive interpretation (e.g., Bale et al. Cross-linguistic representations of numerals and number marking. in: Li, Lutz (eds) Semantics and linguistic theory (SALT) 20, CLC Publications, Ithaca, pp 582–598, 2010). More recent proposals have, however, argued that the Turkish plural should in fact be analysed more like the English plural (e.g., Sağ, The semantics of number marking: reference to kinds, counting, and optional classifiers, PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 2019). We report two experiments investigating Turkish-speaking adults’ and preschool-aged children’s interpretation of positive and negative sentences containing plural nouns. The results provide clear evidence for inclusive interpretations of the plural in Turkish, supporting accounts that treat the Turkish and English plurals alike. We briefly discuss how an inclusive meaning of the Turkish plural can be integrated within a theory of the Turkish number system which captures some idiosyncratic properties of the singular and the agreement between number and number numerals.

Analyzing interspeaker variation in Maay

This paper advocates an approach to interspeaker linguistic variation that aligns with the ‘I-language’ view (Chomsky, 1986). On this view, the object of study in linguistics is mental grammar; language is understood as being internal to the individual, in contrast to the ‘E-language’ approach, where language is external to individual speakers. This paper considers a case study from Maay (a Cushitic language spoken in southern Somalia) in which interspeaker variation in a refugee community defies analysis in E-language terms. An I-language approach allows for a straightforward analysis of the observed variation, specifically in the domains of plural noun formation and vowel length alternations.

Multiplicity and Modifiers

A sentence with an adverbial modifier under negation like Mike didn’t wash the window with soap gives rise to an inference that Mike did wash the window. A sentence with a plural noun like Mike washed windows gives rise to a so-called ‘multiplicity’ inference that Mike washed multiple windows. In this note, we focus on the interaction between these two inferences in sentences containing both an adverbial modifier and a plural noun under negation, like Mike didn’t wash windows with soap. We observe that this sentence has a reading conveying that Mike didn’t wash any window with soap but that he did wash multiple windows (albeit not with soap). As we discuss, this reading is not predicted by any version of the implicature approach to the multiplicity inference, in combination with the implicature treatment of the inference of adverbial modifiers. We sketch two solutions for this problem. The first keeps the implicature approach to adverbial modifiers but adopts a non-implicature approach to multiplicity based on homogeneity. The second solution holds on to the implicature approach to the multiplicity inference but accounts for the inference of adverbial modifiers as a presupposition. In addition, it adopts the idea that presuppositions can be strengthened via implicatures, as proposed recently in the literature. Either way, the interaction between multiplicity and the inference of adverbial modifiers suggests that we cannot treat both as implicatures: if we want to treat either one as an implicature, we need to do something different for the other. We end by comparing the case above to analogous cases involving different scalar inferences and showing that the ambiguity approach to the multiplicity inference does not provide a solution to our problem.