Plural Marking Research Articles

Explicit information and practice type can affect the L2 acquisition of plural marking

Abstract Previous research has indicated that explicit information (EI) about either the first language (L1) or second language (L2) along with task-essential practice can facilitate L2 learning (e.g., Fernández, 2008; McManus, 2022). However, little research has examined L1–L2 contrastive EI with L1/L2 practice. Targeting plural-marking accuracy, the present study sought to fill this gap by exposing 127 Japanese intermediate learners of English to six online treatment sessions across four conditions: (1) non-contrastive EI (pluralization rule explanation) + L2 practice, (2) contrastive EI + L2 practice, (3) as per Condition 2 + additional L1 practice (application of L2 pluralization to L1 through the Japanese suffix –tachi), and (4) using prepositions as a control, non-contrastive EI (prepositional rule explanation) + L2 practice. Accuracy was tested at pre/post/delayed intervals using an acceptability judgement task (reading) and a picture description task (writing). Statistical analyses demonstrated greater gains from the contrastive variables in the immediate post-test, with L1 practice appearing especially beneficial, despite improvements diminishing in the delayed post-test. Supplementary data from retroactive interviews and questionnaire responses indicated favourable orientations towards the intervention. The study advances understanding of how EI and practice type can be used to maximize L2 learning through web-based practices tailored to the nature of the learning problem.

Number fission from a formal and functional perspective

Abstract Modal verbs in German show phonologically unconditioned umlaut in the pres.pl versus pres.sg whose functional motivation is unclear. Based on a large sample of dialectological data, I explore the distribution of this umlaut as well as other irregularization strategies like contractions and/or consonant mutations in different paradigm cells. My observations point to the conclusion that these facets of irregularity are morphomic in that they serve no other function than signaling inflectional class coherence. A promising approach to capture these complex patterns of stem allomorphy is Information-based Morphology (IBM), an inferential-realizational approach to morphology developed in the context of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The concept of a stem space allows for expressing implicational or directed generalizations in stem formation and their mapping to phonology. In diachronic terms, however, transcategorial number marking, as proposed in the relevant literature, is a plausible functional motivation for the analogical extension of umlaut as a verbal plural marker.

FEATURE CHECKING AND SILENT NOUNS IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE NOMINAL AGREEMENT

This paper presents a work on nominal concord in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) structures, such as the following: (ia) “10 ovos caipira vermelhos” (10 egg-PL caipira red-PL / ‘10 red pasture-raised eggs’) and (ia’) “10 ovos [(do TIPO) caipira] vermelhos” (10 egg-PL (of-the TYPE) caipira red-PL / ‘10 red pasture-raised eggs’). Most of the data were collected from written sources that require the use of standard language concerning agreement, id est, the redundant plural marking in the constituents of the DP able to bear inflection. That is why the morpheme -s is marked in ovos and vermelhos (ia). Being so, why is the word caipira (ia) unmarked with the plural morpheme? Following Kayne’s (2005, 2019, 2021a, 2021b), Pesetsky’s (2007, 2013), Höhn’s (2016), and Pereira’s (2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2024) approach on structures with apparent mismatch of agreement, I argue that (ia) licenses a silent noun TIPO (TYPE), preceded by the preposition de (‘of’), as illustrated in (ia’). Therefore, caipira is inflected in singular, because it agrees in number with a singular silent noun. This analysis also applies to other structures that license the silent nouns TAMANHO (SIZE), TOM (HUE), and SOBRENOME (SURNAME). As a result, there is no “unagreement”, in the phrases at stake, but agreement between the adjective and a silent noun, in the DP-internal cartography.

Double plural marking and the building blocks of nominals

In this paper, I will discuss double plural marking found in various language mixing pairs such as Ewe English, Hiaki Spanish, Bantu English, Bantu French and Greek Turkish. I will contrast this double marking, a case of multiple exponence, to better studied cases of double marking of plurality in languages such as Amharic and Breton. I will argue that double marking can be treated uniformly as an instance of split plurality and offer an analysis within the framework of Distributed Morphology. This in turn means that there is no such thing as multiple exponence of grammatical plurality. I will then discuss why the plural, as opposed to other numbers, and why language mixing favor doubling. I will argue that double marking is favored in the context of the plural as plurality is manifold, being associated with two semantic primitives in the universal functional spine. Language mixing situations have been argued to show analyticity and thus double marking is favored in those.

MORPHOLOGICAL INTERFERENCE ON STUDENTS' WRITING AT THE ELEVENTH GRADE OF MAN KOTA PALANGKA RAYA

Interference is defined as the divergence from the norm of language usage that occurs as a result of multilingualism with regard to one or more other languages. Interference occurs when students are studying both the intended language and their first language in the same time. The incapacity of a person who is bilingual to differentiate between the components of the two languages that they are fluent in will lead to a successful error that is known as morphological interference. This occurrence also happens in MAN Kota Palangka Raya. This research was conducted to discover the various sorts of morphological interference created by the students at the eleventh grade of MAN Kota Palangka Raya in their English writing. The qualitative technique was used to analyse the data gathered for this research. The subjects were the students from XI MIPA 1 that consists of 34 students. In order to obtain the information, the researcher split the class into 7 groups, and each of those groups was given the assignment of writing an explanation text in English. There were 6 types of morphological interference: indefinite article, possessive, plural marker, simple past, past participle, and comparative adjective/adverb. The result showed that there were forty number of features that point to morphological interference. The dominant types that the students mostly errors in writing their Explanation Text in English was Past Participle. Followed by Plural Marker. Meanwhile Possessive has a small amount of errors, and students did not do many mistakes in writing the Indefinite Article.

Processing of Plural Marking in Nouns by German-Speaking Children With Normal Hearing and Children With Cochlear Implants: An Eye-Tracking Study.

Our goal is to understand how the different types of plural marking are understood and processed by children with cochlear implants (CIs): (a) how does salience affect the processing of plural marking, (b) how is this processing affected by the incomplete signal provided by the CIs, and (c) is it linked to individual factors such as chronological age, vocabulary development, and phonological working memory? Sixteen children with CIs and 30 age-matched children with normal hearing (NH) participated in an eye-tracking study. Their task was to choose the corresponding picture to an auditorily presented singular or plural noun. Accuracy, reaction time, and gaze fixation were measured and analyzed with mixed-effect models. Group differences were found in accuracy but not in reaction time or gaze fixation. Plural processing is qualitatively similar in children with CIs and children with NH, with more difficulties in processing plurals involving stem-vowel changes and less with those involving suffixes. Age effects indicate that processing abilities still evolve between 5 and 11 years, and processing is further linked to lexical development. Our results indicate that early implantation seems to be beneficial for the acquisition of plural as indicated by very small between-group differences in processing and comprehension. Processing is furthermore affected by the type of material (i.e., phonetic, phonological, or morphological) used to mark plural and less so by their segmental salience. Our study emphasizes the need to take into account the form of the linguistic material in future investigations at higher levels of processing.

Effects of parallel syntactic training in French plural spelling and German noun capitalization

French plural markers and German noun capitalization encode syntactic information. Both syntactic markers present the syntactic information needed reliably and saliently, and both are unrelated to phonology. A main difference between both is that French plural spelling is part of inflection morphology and encodes the plural morphemes in written French. German noun capitalization is not a morpheme or a grapheme, but an allograph licensed in a particular function of the sentence, the head of the NP. Although both are substantially different, studies have shown that syntactic training is effective at improving the spelling of these syntactic markers. The current study presents two intervention studies in Grade 4 (N = 176) to examine whether learners who become literate in German and French benefit from a syntactic training in French plural spelling and German noun capitalization. All participants were trained in both languages and tested at four test points. Instruction was provided through learner videos (10 × 10 minutes) shown in a classroom setting. In both languages, the main goal of the training was to raise awareness of the syntactic unit of the NP as well as the syntactic information encoded in spelling. The results show large, short-term and long-term effects of the French training. However, unlike in previous studies, no training effects were found in German when compared with the control group. The paper discusses the results with a focus on the detailed comparison of French plural spelling and German noun capitalization as well as the feedback of the participating teachers in order to provide hypothetical explanations of the mixed training results. The discussed findings have an impact on the conception of syntactic spelling, as well as its teaching and learning.

Nominalisation of phrasal verbs in the -ing forms with a plural marker (goings-on, coming outs): a study of nominal characteristics

Nominalisation of phrasal verbs in the -ing forms with a plural marker (goings-on, coming outs): a study of nominal characteristics

Event plurality and the verbal suffix ‑(a)bad in Australian Kriol

Abstract The verbal suffix ‑(a)bad is a frequent form in Australian Kriol and is well attested across all described varieties of the language. Despite the prevalence of this suffix, its precise semantics have so far gone undescribed in the literature. In this article, we present a semantic analysis of this suffix, drawing on data from a variety of Kriol spoken in the north-east Kimberley region of Western Australia. We argue that the diverse set of readings associated with ‑(a)bad can be best unified under an analysis of this form as a marker of verbal plurality (i.e. pluractionality). The suffix derives a set of plural events from a modified verb stem, which then interacts with aspect and argument structure to produce a wide range of readings, particularly readings of temporal, participant, and spatial plurality.

Associative plural marking in English varieties

We normally think of ‘plural’ in English in terms of reference to more than one, as in the use of the word dogs to refer to more than one dog. This is described as the ‘ordinary’ or ‘additive’ plural, which has referential homogeneity in the sense that every member of the group referenced by dogs is a dog. In contrast, there is another type of plural which is used for human groups and has referential heterogeneity, that is, each member of the referenced group is a separate individual.1 In addition, each of those members is associated in some way, typically as family, friend or habitual companion, with a prominent member of the group, hence the term ‘associative’ plural for the construction. The following description is from Moravcsik (2003). Associative plurals will be taken to be constructions whose meaning is ‘X and X's associate(s),’ where all members are individuals, X is the focal referent, and the associate(s) form a group centering around X. (pp. 470–471)

Processing of noun plural marking in German-speaking children: an eye-tracking study.

The ability to process plural marking of nouns is acquired early: at a very young age, children are able to understand if a noun represents one item or more than one. However, little is known about how the segmental characteristics of plural marking are used in this process. Using eye-tracking, we aim at understanding how five to twelve-year old children use the phonetic, phonological, and morphological information available to process noun plural marking in German (i.e., a very complex system) compared to adults. We expected differences with stem vowels, stem-final consonants or different suffixes, alone or in combination, reflecting different processing of their segmental information. Our results show that for plural processing: 1) a suffix is the most helpful cue, an umlaut the least helpful, and voicing does not play a role; 2) one cue can be sufficient and 3) school-age children have not reached adult-like processing of plural marking.

Grammatical Features in Indonesia English: A Study of Indonesian College Students

This study aims to expose detailed descriptions of the grammatical features of Indonesian English. Indonesian English refers to a newly recognised linguistic variety of English as proposed by Coleman (2017). The grammatical characteristics as the result of acquiring a new language lead to the presence of a new variety of Indonesian English. Applying descriptive qualitative research, the data were collected based on recordings of the speech of 24 college students on three different topics. Following the principle proposed by Cogo and Dewey (2012), this study reveals twelve grammatical features as the characteristics of Indonesian English. They are namely the over-generalisation and omission of the copula BE (i.e am, is, are), the use of Indonesian collocation and literal translation, subject–verb agreement, the omission of the plural marker 's', assigning different lexical meanings, inappropriate prepositions, the omission of possessive markers, the omission and addition of articles, the application of verb tenses, the use of Indonesian acronyms and abbreviations, the incorrect construction of passive forms, and the use of Indonesian lexical items. It is shown that one of the main factors in the emergence of this new English variant is the contact of the multiple languages used by the speakers.

Morphological and conceptual influences on the real-time comprehension of optional plural marked sentences in Yucatec Maya.

Psycholinguistic research often focuses on Indo-European and other commonly studied major languages, while typologically diverse languages remain understudied. In this paper, we examine the morphological and conceptual influences on the real-time comprehension of optional plural-marked sentences in Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of Mexico with a less commonly studied optional plural marking system. Fifty-one speakers of Yucatec Maya participated in a picture-sentence matching experiment carried out in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Pictures of one, two, or seven humans or animals depicting an intransitive action (conceptual number) were paired with auditorily presented sentences that had no plural marking, one plural, or two plurals (morphological number). Participants indicated by key press whether the picture and the sentence were an acceptable match, and decision time was recorded. In the analysis of decision (yes versus no) and accuracy, morphological and conceptual factors interacted. In the analysis of decision time, however, morphological plural marking, but not conceptual number, led to faster decisions. In light of previous work on the role of conceptual factors in the computation of number agreement, the interaction between conceptual and morphological factors suggests that a language with optional plural marking (or low "morphological richness") is associated with high conceptual influence on sentence comprehension. Importantly, the results of this study expand the empirical base of language types that have been investigated using psycholinguistic methods.

Verb agreement production in Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder

ABSTRACT Verb morphology difficulties have been widely attested in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) who speak English and other languages. This research contributes data on a variety of Arabic, a richly inflected Semitic language. The current study examined the production of subject-verb agreement morphology in three groups of 30 monolingual Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. Ten preschoolers diagnosed with DLD (M = 4;4 years) were compared to two groups of typically developing (TD) controls —10 language-matched (TD-LA) (M = 2;7 years) and 10 chronological age-matched (TD-CA) (M = 4;5 years). To elicit target productions, an action video depicting a total of 33 randomly ordered third-person verb stimuli (12 feminine singular, 9 masculine singular, and 12 plurals) was presented. The results confirmed significant differences in the correct use of third-person verb (gender and number) agreement between the children with DLD and the two comparison groups. The DLD group was more proficient with masculine forms than with feminine or plural markings. Qualitative error analyses revealed that this group had a proclivity to overgeneralize the masculine for other agreement markings. The findings are discussed in relation to relevant theories of typical and impaired language acquisition. The implications for assessing and treating verb morphological deficits are highlighted.

The Turkic middle voice system: deponency and paradigm reorganization

Abstract The goal of this paper is to recharacterize the distribution of two suffixes in Common Turkic, the reflexive -(I)n and the reciprocal -(I)š. Despite having quite distinct sources (the former as a suffix employed in the derivation of intransitive verbs, the latter a plural marker), these two suffixes have fallen into a somewhat overlapping distribution in the modern Turkic languages. They share a range of middle-like functions, and so they are characterized here as a bipartite middle voice system. Many of these functions have become peripheral, however, and the system increasingly consists of a class of verbs with deponent paradigms.

Associative plurals and their associates

Abstract This paper presents an integrated approach to the morphosyntax of the three nominal plural markers of Hungarian: multiplicative -k, possessive -i, and associative plural -ék. It explicates the relationship between the associative and multiplicative plural markers, and between the associative plural and the anaphoric possession marker -é. Central in the analysis proposed is the hypothesis that the marker -é consistently plays the role of a predicational relator formally licensing the silence of one of the two terms in the predication relationship that it mediates. The syntax underlying the associative plural involves an asyndetic coordination relation in which the content of a silent plural pronoun is specified by a complex noun phrase headed by the silent noun group. The analysis has im-plications for the syntax of number and demonstratives and for the licensing of silent nouns and pronouns.

The first person prefixes in South Ethio-Semitic

AbstractSouth Ethio-Semitic (SES) is a genealogical branch of Ethio-Semitic (ES), a subgroup of Semitic found almost entirely in Ethiopia and Eritrea. The paper considers two features characteristic of several South Ethio-Semitic languages. Firstly, the Prefix Conjugation displays a common 1sg/1plprefix in various SES languages. Secondly, an innovative 1plsuffix is often employed in the Prefix Conjugation. In forms with 1sg/1plsyncretism, this suffix takes over the functional load of the plural marker. Both features are innovative in SES, and their absence from a number of languages in each of the main subbranches suggests areal diffusion rather than a shared innovation going back to the Proto-SES level. In former studies, it has been suggested that the innovative 1plsuffix was borrowed from Cushitic and that its introduction has triggered the 1sg/1plsyncretism. This hypothesis is critically reassessed in the present paper, which considers in detail various patterns of 1sg/1plsyncretism and various patterns of its interaction with the 1plsuffix, and offers a tentative reconstruction of their emergence and spread in the languages in question.

Small complements of Ps and genitive case assignment

This paper deals with possessor case assignment in Samburg Izhma-Komi subjects and oblique nominals. The problem is that the case assigned to the possessor depends on the syntactic position of the enclosing nominal; possessors are genitive in subjects and nominative in obliques. This is not predicted by the current theories of case. Looking at morphosyntactic properties of P-complements in Samburg Komi such as possessive agreement within the complement, possessive agreement with the complement, and plural marking of the complement, I show that these complements are not full DPs. The possessor case-marking follows straightforwardly. Since P-complements are not DPs, as opposed to subjects, genitive cannot be assigned. Independently, I show that nominative is the case assigned in PPs. In absence of a D, the case associated with P is assigned to possessors in obliques. This analysis has several theoretical implications. First, I show that inherent cases are better analyzed as syntactic P-heads alongside free-standing postpositions. Second, I provide an argument in favor of DP-hypothesis. Finally, I show that not all arguments within a language must be full DPs.

French V-N compounds: Plural marking, headedness endocentricity/exocentricity continuum

The aim of this research is to provide a better understanding of French V-N compounds by studying their plural formation. French V-N compounds are usually seen as headless exocentric compounds whose plural formation is not syntactic. This is based on the assumptions that 1) the verb is the head of the compound, 2) the meaning of the compound is neither a type of V nor a type of N, 3) plural formation is unpredictable. It will be shown that 1) the function of the head of the compound is split between the V and the N, hence the compound cannot be endocentric, 2) the meaning of the compound is compositional, hence the compound cannot be exocentric, 3) plural formation is predictable, hence syntactic. V-N compounds have been collected, coded for plurality, then sorted and analyzed. Headedness and endocentricity/exocentricity are considered in the light of the distinction between grammatical and logical head. This study reveals that French V-N compounds, neither endocentric nor exocentric, provide evidence for a third type of compound and for the endocentricity/exocentricity continuum. Furthermore, in French, number and gender play different roles in compounding, the plural suffix may be unrealized and V-N compounds have a relative productivity.

Francoprovençal: a spatial analysis of ‘partitive articles’ and potential correlates in Swiss and Italian varieties

In this paper, we focus on partitive articles (PAs), i.e., determiners which, generally, have an indefinite interpretation, and on one of their potential correlates, i.e., invariable de, in Francoprovençal, a non-standardized, highly endangered Gallo-Romance language (cf. Zulato, Kasstan & Nagy 2018), and show the fine-grained spatial distribution of these elements in the Swiss and Aosta Valley (Italy) varieties. Presenting several maps based on fieldwork data from Valais (Switzerland) and the Aosta Valley (Italy), we demonstrate that the spatial distribution of PAs and de is more complex than reported in the literature: we complement the basic subdivision of Francoprovençal into two types, Francoprovençal A and B (cf. Kristol 2014, 2016), with a more nuanced picture, in which the morphosyntactic features of PAs play a crucial role: in Francoprovençal A, the presence of PAs depends on the syntactic context whereas, in Francoprovençal B, their presence is limited mainly to two areas, in which singular and plural PAs do not occur together (one area only has singular PAs whereas the other one only has plural PAs). We also show that there is no correlation between phonologically overt plural marking on nouns and absence of PAs; however, we found a correlation between overt sigmatic number marking on nouns and absence of PAs.