Subject-Verb Agreement in Lasi and English: A Morphosyntactic Analysis

Abstract

This study investigates the phenomenon of verb agreement (subject-verb agreement) in Lasi and English. This study focuses only on transitive and intransitive verbs of simple tenses to analyze the subject-verb agreement in Lasi. The data have been collected through unstructured interviews with the Lasinatives. The X-bar theory of Haegeman (1994) has been applied as a theoretical framework. Descriptive and exploratory research designs (Creswell, 2014) are used in the study. The results of this study show that transitive verbs in Lasi agree with subjects in number,gender, and person in the present and future tenses, but not in the past. However, intransitive verbs do agree with their subjects in the past tense. English verbs show agreement with their subjects in the present simple tense, but their past and future tense inflections remain the same. The results show that Lasi allows omission of subjects in the surface structure; however, they are recoverable in deep structure.