Interactions of Gender and Number Agreement: Evidence from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian

Syntax ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zorica Puškar
Keyword(s):  
Number Agreement

scholarly journals Development of Dutch children’s comprehension of subject and object wh-questions

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 129-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iris Strangmann ◽  
Anneke Slomp ◽  
Angeliek van Hout
Keyword(s):  
Selection Task ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Discourse Context ◽  
Referent Selection ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Dutch Children

While Dutch welke ‘which’-questions are structurally ambiguous, number agreement cues can disambiguate them. Despite such agreement cues, children misinterpret object questions as subject questions (Metz et al. 2010, 2012; Schouwenaars et al. 2014). We investigated if adding another cue, specifically, topicality in a discourse context, helps the interpretation of which-questions in two groups of Dutch children (5;5, n = 15 and 8;5, n = 21). Using a referent-selection task, we manipulated number on the verb and postverbal NP to create unambiguous wh-questions. Moreover, the questions were preceded by a discourse which established a topic, relating either to the wh-referent or the postverbal NP referent. Nevertheless, both 5- and 8-year-olds misinterpreted object questions as subject questions, ignoring the number and topicality cues to resolve the (local) ambiguity of which-questions. Our results confirm the effect of a subject-first bias in children’s interpretation of wh-questions. We conclude that topicality, in combination with number agreement, is not strong enough to overrule this subject-first bias.

Nakh-Dagestanian Languages

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-145
Author(s):  
Dmitry Ganenkov ◽  
Timur Maisak
Keyword(s):  
General Information ◽  
Indigenous Language ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Verbal Nouns ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Classes ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sociolinguistic Status

The chapter is a survey of the Nakh-Daghestanian family (also known as East Caucasian), one of the indigenous language families spoken in the Caucasus. The family comprises more than 30 languages, some of which are spoken by only a few hundred people and remain unwritten and/or underdescribed. The chapter provides general information about the sociolinguistic status of Nakh-Daghestanian languages and the history of their research as well as their phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. The languages of the family have rich consonant systems and are morphologically ergative, head-final, with rich case systems, complex verbal paradigms, and pervasive gender-number agreement. Alongside the major transitive and intransitive lexical verb classes, verbs of perception and cognition with the dative experiencer subject usually comprise one or more minor valency classes with non-canonically marked subjects. Among valency-increasing derivations, the causative is the most prominent. The most typical subordination strategies are non-finite, making use of participles, converbs, infinitives and verbal nouns.

scholarly journals Conceptual effects on agreement: A corpus study of mismatch in English copular constructions

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Cecily Jill Duffield
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Information ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
Verb Number ◽  
Conceptual Relationship

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.

scholarly journals Gender and Number Agreement in the Oral Production of L1 Arabic Among Bilingual Arab-Americans

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 839-845
Author(s):  
Khalid Al-shammari
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Arab Americans ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Dominant Language ◽  
Oral Production ◽  
Everyday Communication

Bilingualism means the ability to communicate in two languages and in some cases,with better skills in one language versus the other. Most bilinguals have one language that ismoredominant than the other due to sequential acquisition.That is, the dominant language is used in everyday communication and in school. Heritage languages are immigrant languages

scholarly journals Number Agreement in British and American English: Disagreeing to Agree Collectively

Language ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Bock ◽  
Sally Butterfield ◽  
Anne Cutler ◽  
J. Cooper Cutting ◽  
Kathleen M. Eberhard ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Number Agreement

‘To Kill’ and ‘To Die’ (and Other Suppletive Verbs) in Uto-Aztecan

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason D. Haugen ◽  
Michael Everdell
Keyword(s):  
Language Family ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Plural Form ◽  
Suggestive Evidence ◽  
The Family ◽  
Replacement Process

Previous research has noted that verbal suppletion for ergative number agreement (i.e. agreement with the subjects of intransitives and the objects of transitives) is widespread throughout the Uto-Aztecan language family and is therefore reconstructable to Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA) (Langacker, 1977). However, no previous works have systematically surveyed the attested forms of suppletion in these languages nor posited specific proposals for reconstructions of particular suppletive morphs back to PUA. We redress this lacuna by surveying the suppletive verbs in the various subgroups of Uto-Aztecan and assessing which of those are sufficiently widespread to reconstruct to PUA. We argue for specific PUA reconstructions for two verbal domains: die and kill, arguing that there were three distinct suppletive verb stems for marking these functions: *muku die.sg, *ko(i) die.pl, and *mɨɁa kill.sg. The plural form of kill in PUA was derived by adding a causative suffix *-ya to the plural stem for die, yielding *ko-ya. Other suppletive verbs in the family are not as easily reconstructable to PUA due to variation in attested forms, although some semantic functions seem to be widespread enough to be reconstructable. The PUA forms serving those functions would have been altered in different ways at different times by a lexical replacement process endemic to cases of strong suppletion, i.e. incursion (Juge, 2000). We also consider the issue of potential areal contact involving suppletion patterns in the areas where Uto-Aztecan languages are spoken, finding limited but suggestive evidence for possible areal effects involving suppletion for verbal number agreement.

Making Syntax of Sense: Number Agreement in Sentence Production.

2005 ◽  
Vol 112 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen M. Eberhard ◽  
J. Cooper Cutting ◽  
Kathryn Bock
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Production ◽  
Number Agreement
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