Abstract
Subject-verb agreement mismatches have been reported in the L2 and heritage literature, usually involving infinitives, analyzed as default morphological forms for fully specified T-heads. This article explores the mechanisms behind these mismatches, testing two hypotheses: the default form and the surface-similarity hypotheses. It compares non-finite and finite S-V mismatches with subjects with different persons, testing whether similarity with other paradigmatic forms makes them more acceptable, controlling for the role of verb frequency. Participants were asked to rate sentences on a Likert scale that included (a) infinitive forms with first, second and third person subjects, and (b) third person verbal forms with first, second and third person subjects. Two stem-stressed verbs (e.g., tra.j-o ‘brought.3p.past’) and two affix-stressed verbs (e.g., me.ti-o ‘introduced.3p.past’), varying in frequency were tested. Inflectional affixes of stem-stressed verbs are similar to other forms of the paradigm both phonologically and in being unstressed (tra.j-o ‘brought.3p.past’ vs. trai.g-o ‘bring.1 p.pres’), whereas affixes of affix-stressed verbs have dissimilar stress patterns (me.ti-o ´introduced.3p.past’ vs. me.t-o ‘introduce.1p.pres’). Results show significantly higher acceptability for finite vs. non-finite non-matching, and for 1st vs. 2nd person subjects. Stem-stressed verbs showed higher acceptability ratings than affix-stressed ones, suggesting a role for surface-form correspondence, partially confirming previous findings.
Highlights
Introduction published maps and institutional affilSpanish has a generalized agreement between the subject and the verb, realized as systematic variation in the inflectional morphology of the verb depending on the features of the subject
Form-Person interactions are illustrated in Figure 4: 3rd person subjects had a significantly higher effect on rating for finite forms than for non-finite, as expected since finite forms include matching, but 1st person had a significantly higher effect on finite forms than on non-finite verbs
Post-hoc pairwise comparisons for verb form and person found that only finite forms had significant contrasts between 1st and 2nd person subjects (Bonferroni adjusted p = 0.0007), as well as 1st and 3rd and 2nd and 3rd (p < 0.0001) the latter two are not relevant for our purpose, since 3rd person subjects include matching S3-V3 and non-matching S3-VINF
Summary
Spanish has a generalized agreement between the subject and the verb, realized as systematic variation in the inflectional morphology of the verb depending on the features of the subject. In (1)a, -o encodes 1st person singular on the verb to match the person features of the subject, whereas in (1)b, the affix -e indicates 3rd person singular to match a 3rd person subject. The property of agreement is indirectly encoded in the inflectional morphology of the verb. Verbal morphology is not completely transparent in the sense that the same morpheme can encode different person/tense combinations, as seen in (2), where the affix for a 1st person, present tense is the same as the affix for a 3rd person preterit.
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