The acquisition of inflectional prefixes in Nairobi Swahili

Annual Review of Language Acquisition ◽

10.1075/arla.3.06dee ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 3 ◽

pp. 139-179 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Kamil Deen

Keyword(s):

Bantu Language ◽

Data Support ◽

Subject Agreement ◽

Object Agreement

This study investigates the acquisition of inflectional prefixes in Swahili, an eastern Bantu language. The order of morphemes in adult Swahili is: Subject Agreement – Tense – (Object Agreement) –Verb Root – (derivational suffixes) –Mood Vowel. I present data from an original corpus of 4 Swahili-speaking children (ages 1;8-3;0) who were recorded in Nairobi, Kenya. An analysis of the children’s verbal utterances reveals that four clause types occur in the speech of all four children: a. Agr–T–Verb StemFull Clause b. Ø–T–Verb Stem[-SA] Clause c. Agr–Ø–Verb Stem[-T] Clause d. Ø–Ø–Verb StemBare Verb Stem Of these four, only full clauses and [-SA] clauses are permitted by adults in this non-standard dialect of Swahili. A review of five influential theories on the acquisition of morphosyntax (the Metrical Omission Model, Gerken, 1991; the Truncation Hypothesis, Rizzi, 1994; the Underspecification of T, Wexler, 1994; the underspecification of Agr, Clahsen et al. , 1996; and the underspecification of Agr and T, Schütze & Wexler, 1996) shows that the data support the Agr-Tense Omission Model (Schütze & Wexler, 1996) in showing that agreement and tense may be optionally and independently underspecified.

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Clitic or Agreement Restriction in Santali: A Typological Analysis

Acta Linguistica Asiatica ◽

10.4312/ala.10.1.9-33 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 9-33

Author(s):

Mayuri J. DILIP ◽

Rajesh KUMAR

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

Nominative Case ◽

Number Marking ◽

Other Hand ◽

Subject And Object ◽

Subject Agreement ◽

Object Agreement ◽

Two Parameters ◽

Feature Checking

This paper investigates the syntactic configuration of pronominal number marking in Santali. Syntactic, morphological and prosodic restrictions show that pronominal number markers have properties of an affix as well as a clitic. A marker is an affix due to the fact that it cannot participate in a binding relation with other arguments. A pronominal number marker also functions as a clitic since it is attached to prosodically the most prominent constituent. The arguments that trigger object agreement do not manifest one particular case, but instead indicate a dissociation between a case and object agreement. On the other hand, the argument with subject agreement manifests nominative case only, indicating an association between nominative case and subject agreement. Both subject and object agreement are sensitive to case that indicates a property of an affix. Keeping in view the distribution of the pronominal number markers, we analyze feature checking of the two parameters, namely agreement and case in Santali.

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Loci of agreement and deviations from the Mirror Principle in Hungarian verbs

Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America ◽

10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4897 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

pp. 379

Author(s):

Kevin Kwong

Keyword(s):

Linear Order ◽

Direct Object ◽

Hierarchical Order ◽

Subject Agreement ◽

Verbal Agreement ◽

Object Agreement ◽

Mirror Principle

In this revised account of Hungarian verbal agreement, I propose that the language’s locus of subject agreement is not T, unlike in current Minimalist analyses, but Pred (or Asp), just above direct object agreement in v. Furthermore, the surface linear order of affixes (stem – tense/mood – object agreement – subject agreement) does not conform to the hierarchical order of syntactic heads (V < v < Pred < T/M), thus violating the Mirror Principle, because local dislocation in postsyntactic morphology adjusts the initial linearization of the heads.

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Morphosyntactic Restructuring in Child Heritage Georgian

Heritage Language Journal ◽

10.46538/hlj.17.2.6 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 17 (2) ◽

pp. 234-263

Author(s):

Cass Lowry ◽

LeeAnn Stover

Keyword(s):

The United States ◽

Heritage Speakers ◽

Heritage Languages ◽

Oral Fluency ◽

Heritage Speaker ◽

Default Case ◽

Age Patterns ◽

Subject Agreement ◽

Object Agreement ◽

Person Agreement

This study investigates morphosyntactic restructuring in Heritage Georgian, a highly agglutinative language with polypersonal agreement. Child heritage speakers of Georgian (n = 26, age 3-16) completed a Frog Story narrative task and a lexical proficiency task in Georgian. Heritage speaker narratives were compared to narratives produced by age-matched peers living in Georgia (n = 30, age 5-14) and Georgian children and young adults who moved to the United States during childhood (n = 7, age 9–24). Heritage Georgian speakers produced more instances of non-standard nominal case marking and non-standard verbal subject agreement than their homeland peers. Individual morphosyntactic divergence was predicted by lexical score, but not by oral fluency or age. Patterns of divergence in the nominal domain included overuse of the default case (nominative) as well as over-extension of non-default cases (ergative, dative). In the verbal domain, person agreement was more consistently marked than number. Subject agreement exhibited more divergence from the baseline than object agreement, contrary to previous evidence from similar heritage languages (e.g., Heritage Hindi, Montrul et al., 2012). Results indicate that morphosyntactic production in child Heritage Georgian generally displays the same divergences as adult heritage-language grammars, but language-specific differences also underscore the need for continued documentation of lesser-studied heritage languages.

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Gender agreement alternation in Aqusha Dargwa

Studies in Language ◽

10.1075/sl.17018.gan ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 42 (3) ◽

pp. 529-561 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Dmitry Ganenkov

Keyword(s):

Russian Federation ◽

Information Structure ◽

Direct Object ◽

Gender Agreement ◽

The Caucasus ◽

The Matrix ◽

Transitive Verbs ◽

Subject Agreement ◽

Object Agreement ◽

Gender Features

Abstract The article discusses gender agreement alternation in Aqusha Dargwa (Nakh-Daghestanian, the Caucasus, Russian Federation). The phenomenon is observed in periphrastic verbal forms with transitive verbs where gender agreement on the auxiliary can show the gender features of either the ergative subject or the absolutive direct object. Considering existing analyses of the phenomenon in terms of information structure, I argue that agreement alternation cannot be captured by sentence-topic-oriented accounts. I also discuss a structural proposal developed by Sumbatova and Lander (2014) and show that their analysis cannot be maintained in full. Instead, I propose a modified analysis according to which only subject agreement, but not object agreement, results from a cross-clausal referential dependency between the ergative subject of the lexical verb and the absolutive subject of the matrix restructuring verb. On this view, agreement alternation may be assimilated to the familiar distinction between ergative and biabsolutive constructions found elsewhere in Nakh-Daghestanian.

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Ergativity in Indo-Aryan

10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.282 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Pritty Patel-Grosz

Keyword(s):

Morphological Marker ◽

The Past ◽

Case Marking ◽

Subject Agreement ◽

Theoretical Question ◽

Object Agreement

Case and agreement patterns that are present in Old, Middle, and New Indo-Aryan languages have been argued to require the following perspective: since ergative case marking and ergative (object) agreement in these languages are historically tied to having originated from the past perfective morphological marker ta, they can only be fully understood from a perspective that factors in this development. Particular attention is given to the waxing and waning of ergative properties in Late Middle Indo-Aryan and New Indo-Aryan, which give rise to recurring dissociation of case and agreement; specifically, object agreement in the absence of ergative case marking is attested in Kutchi Gujarati and Marwari, whereas ergative case marking without object agreement is present in Nepali. With regard to case, recent insights show that “ergative/accusative” may be regularly semantically/pragmatically conditioned in Indo-Aryan (so-called differential case marking). Pertaining to agreement, a central theoretical question is whether “ergative” object agreement should be analyzed uniformly with subject agreement or, alternatively, as a type of participle agreement—drawing on synchronic parallels between Indo-Aryan and Romance.

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Discrimination of monomer from multimer DNA disk-shaped toruses by freezeetch TEM

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100111161 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 42 ◽

pp. 210-211

Author(s):

George C. Ruben ◽

Kenneth A. Marx

Keyword(s):

Biochemical Data ◽

Dna Structures ◽

Ice Surface ◽

Double Stranded Dna ◽

Data Support ◽

Dna Organization ◽

Trivalent Cations

In vitro collapse of DNA by trivalent cations like spermidine produces torus (donut) shaped DNA structures thought to have a DNA organization similar to certain double stranded DNA bacteriophage and viruses. This has prompted our studies of these structures using freeze-etch low Pt-C metal (9Å) replica TEM. With a variety of DNAs the TEM and biochemical data support a circumferential DNA winding model for hydrated DNA torus organization. Since toruses are almost invariably oriented nearly horizontal to the ice surface one of the most accessible parameters of a torus population is annulus (ring) thickness. We have tabulated this parameter for populations of both nicked, circular (Fig. 1: n=63) and linear (n=40: data not shown) ϕX-174 DNA toruses. In both cases, as can be noted in Fig. 1, there appears to be a compact grouping of toruses possessing smaller dimensions separated from a dispersed population possessing considerably larger dimensions.

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