number agreement
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Languages ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Nuria Sagarra ◽  
Nicole Rodriguez

Children acquire language more easily than adults, though it is controversial whether this faculty declines as a result of a critical period or something else. To address this question, we investigate the role of age of acquisition and proficiency on morphosyntactic processing in adult monolinguals and bilinguals. Spanish monolinguals and intermediate and advanced early and late bilinguals of Spanish read sentences with adjacent subject–verb number agreements and violations and chose one of four pictures. Eye-tracking data revealed that all groups were sensitive to the violations and attended more to more salient plural and preterit verbs than less obvious singular and present verbs, regardless of AoA and proficiency level. We conclude that the processing of adjacent SV agreement depends on perceptual salience and language use, rather than AoA or proficiency. These findings support usage-based theories of language acquisition.


Author(s):  
Yesi Cheng ◽  
Ian Cunnings ◽  
David Miller ◽  
Jason Rothman

Abstract The present study uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine nonlocal agreement processing between native (L1) English speakers and Chinese–English second language (L2) learners, whose L1 lacks number agreement. We manipulated number marking with determiners (the vs. that/these) to see how determiner-specification influences both native and nonnative processing downstream for verbal number agreement. Behavioral and ERP results suggest both groups detected nonlocal agreement violations, indexed by a P600 effect. Moreover, the manipulation of determiner-number specification revealed a facilitation effect across the board in both grammaticality judgment and ERP responses for both groups: increased judgment accuracy and a larger P600 effect amplitude for sentences containing violations with demonstratives rather than bare determiners. Contrary to some claims regarding the potential for nonnative processing, the present data suggest that L1 and L2 speakers show similar ERP responses when processing agreement, even when the L1 lacks the relevant distinction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Anna Aksenova

The agreement of subject and predicate in Russian is actually much less trivial than it might seem at first glance. This paper deals with the case when the subject is realized by a combination of a noun with a quantifier. I analyze a set of examples with the words двое, трое, пара, тройка, десяток, сотня, тысяча, миллион and миллиард where there is a variation in predicate number agreement. Using Random Forest, CIT and Logistic Regression algorithms I prove that collective (двое, трое) and non-collective (пара, тройка, десяток, сотня, тысяча, миллион, миллиард) quantifiers exhibit different patterns of agreement. The first group tends to trigger more plural agreement, while for the second one singular agreement is more typical. Moreover, the quantifier phrase position relative to the predicate can also influence the choice of number marker on the verb.


2021 ◽  
pp. 110-131
Author(s):  
Ana Paula S.P. Jakubów ◽  
Letícia M. Sicuro Corrêa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Utku Turk ◽  
Pavel Logacev

Previous studies have shown that speakers may find sentences violating subject-verb agreement grammatical when the sentence contains a feature-matching noun phrase. This so-called agreement attraction effect has also been found in genitive possessive structures such as 'the teacher's brother' in Turkish (Lago et al., 2019), which is in contrast with its absence in similar constructions in English (Nicol et al., 2016). This discrepancy has been hypothesized to be a result of the association between genitive case marking and subjecthood in Turkish, but not in English. In the present research, we test an alternative explanation in which Turkish number agreement attraction effects are due to a potential confound in Lago et al.'s experiment, as a result of which subject head nouns were locally ambiguous between the possessive and the accusative case. We hypothesized that this ambiguity may have inhibited the availability of the head noun as an agreement controller as the accusative is a non-subject case in Turkish. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a speeded acceptability judgment experiment and our results suggest that case-ambiguity does not play a role in agreement attraction, and thus lends credibility to the claim that genitive noun phrases may function as attractors in Turkish due to the association between genitive case and subjecthood.


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 1523-1551
Author(s):  
Anna Jessen ◽  
Lara Schwarz ◽  
Claudia Felser

AbstractThis study investigates native German speakers’ and bilingual Turkish/German speakers’ sensitivity to constraints on verbal agreement with pseudo-partitive subjects such as eine Packung Tabletten (“a pack of pills”). Although number agreement with the first noun phrase (headed by a container noun) is considered to be the norm, agreement with the second (containee) noun phrase is also possible. We combined scalar acceptability ratings with a stochastic constraint-based grammatical framework to model the relative strength of the constraints that determine speakers’ agreement preferences and subsequently tested whether these models could correctly predict speakers’ verb choices in a production task. For both participant groups, number match between the container noun phrase and the verb was the strongest determinant of both acceptability and production choices. The relative ranking of the constraints that we identified was the same for both groups, and the lack of age-of-acquisition effects suggests that constraints on variable subject–verb agreement, and their relative strength, are acquirable by both early and later learners of German. Group differences were seen in the absolute constraint weightings, however, with the bilinguals’ agreement preferences being more strongly influenced by number match with the containee phrase, indicating a comparatively greater reliance on surface-level cues to agreement (such as noun proximity) among the bilingual group.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalpana Khandale ◽  
C. Namrata Mahender
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 665
Author(s):  
Muhamad Nova ◽  
Francisca Titing Koerniawaty

In the professional sector, both spoken and written English communications become essential skills to be mastered by vocational students. However, as a non-native speaker, errors in writing are still faced as an obstacle for the students in applying their English capability. This research aimed at identifying the grammatical errors occurring in vocational students’ writing to overcome the error fossilization. The study was conducted in one vocational school in Denpasar, with a total of 45 students purposively selected. The study used a qualitative approach with a case study design. The data were gained by evaluating the students’ writing through an automated writing evaluation program and the type of writing evaluated in the study was application letter. Then, the data were analyzed through three phases; data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. As the result, there were 268 grammatical errors found in the students’ application letters. From their classifications, these errors were categorized into 17 types, with missing an article, misspelling, capitalization, incorrect number agreement, and incorrect preposition as the highest frequency of errors found. Keywords:  Application Letter, Grammatical Errors, Vocational Education 


Author(s):  
I Wayan Arka

The number system in Marori shows a three-way distinction (singular–dual–plural) with distributed and often underspecified (plural vs nonplural, or singular vs non-singular) marking. Nominal number is expressed via marking of free pronouns and certain nouns and their associated verbal indexing, with a three-way distinction in first and second bound pronominals, and a two-way underspecified distinction elsewhere. Verbal number is expressed by suppletive verbal root alternations, typically singular vs non-singular. Dual number/duactional can be expressed by a combination of non-singular and nonplural exponents. Number agreement is semantic in nature, with mismatches possibly expressing an inclusory meaning or a small plural/paucal meaning. While radically different from English in its number system, Marori is similar to English and other European languages in terms of the distribution of plural meanings under negation and other contexts.


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