Plural Marking Research Articles

Judgement of countability and plural marking in English by native and non-native English speakers

ABSTRACTLearning whether English nouns are countable or not is a source of great difficulty for many ESL/EFL learners. In the present study, a grammaticality judgement task comprised of a range of nouns representative of the different facets of the countability system in English was distributed to 82 native speakers of English (NSs) and 98 non-native speakers (NNSs). Participant responses provided both quantitative and qualitative data for analysis. The findings indicate that there are significant differences between the judgements made by the NSs and NNSs both quantitatively and qualitatively. It is also evident from the data that the judgements made by the NNSs reveal poor awareness of countability and plural marking in English, an over-reliance on noun countability preferences (i.e. rigidly memorising whether a particular noun is countable or uncountable), and a certain illogicality in their explanations. The article culminates with a brief discussion of some pedagogical implications in relation to countability and plural marking.

Morphosyntactic features of the indefinite tot in old Romanian

This article establishes and discusses a series of morphosyntactic features of the indefinite tot ‘whole, all’ in old Romanian, relating them to modern Romanian: forms that disappeared from the language, a wider variety of singular and plural genitive-dative markers (synthetic, analytic and mixed), the more permissive word order and the possibility to occur in a structure with an undetermined noun. The description of the grammatical characteristics of the quantifier tot highlights a great variation: (i) between the synthetic, analytic and mixed realization of the genitive-dative case (toatei all.F.SG.GEN≡DAT ‘of/to the whole’ + genitive-dative noun, a/la/de toată A/LA/DE all.F.SG.NOM≡ACC ‘of/to the whole’ + nominative-accusative noun, a toată A all.F.SG.NOM≡ACC ‘of/to the whole’ + genitive-dative noun); (ii) between the (pronominal and adjectival) form with the final particle –a and the one without –a (tuturor, tuturora ‘of all / to all’; tuturor oamenilor ‘of/to all the people’, tuturora fraților ‘of/to all the brothers’); (iii) between the postposition and anteposition of tot relative to certain pronouns (ei toți, toți ei ‘all of them’); (iv) between structures with a determined and an undetermined noun (toate zilele, toate zile ‘all the days’). The comparison with the modern language shows that, in some cases, this variation has been eliminated, and in other cases, it is preserved.

The Interpretation of Plural Morphology and (Non-)Obligatory Number Marking: an Argument from Artificial Language Learning

ABSTRACTWe present an artificial language experiment investigating (i) how speakers of languages such as English with two-way obligatory distinctions between singular and plural learn a system where singular and plural are only optionally marked, and (ii) how learners extend their knowledge of the plural morpheme when under the scope of negation without explicit training. Production and comprehension results suggest that speakers of English did learn a system with only optional marking of number. Additionally, subjects did not accept an inclusive (“one or more than one”) interpretation of the plural when under the scope of negation, as in their native language, but rather assigned it an exclusive (“more than one”) interpretation. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the meaning assigned to plural morphology is sensitive to the architecture of the system. In a binary number system with obligatory number marking, plural morphology can sometimes receive an inclusive interpretation. However, in a system where plural marking is never obligatory, plural morphology has an exclusive interpretation.

THE ARABIC COGNATES OR ORIGINS OF PLURAL MARKERS IN WORLD LANGUAGES: A RADICAL LINGUISTIC THEORY APPROACH

This paper traces the Arabic origins of "plural markers" in world languages from a radical linguistic (or lexical root) theory perspective. The data comprises the main plural markers like cats/oxen in 60 world languages from 14 major and minor families- viz., Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Turkic, Mayan, Altaic (Japonic), Niger-Congo, Bantu, Uto-Aztec, Tai-Kadai, Uralic, and Basque, which constitute 60% of world languages and whose speakers make up 96% of world population. The results clearly show that plural markers, which are limited to a few markers in all languages comprised of �s/-as/-at, -en, -im, -a/-e/-i/-o/-u, and �, have true Arabic cognates with the same or similar forms and meanings, whose differences are due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of linguistic change. Therefore, the results reject the traditional classification of the Comparative Method and/or Family Tree Model of such languages into separate, unrelated families, supporting instead the adequacy of the radical linguistic theory according to which all world languages are related to one another, which eventually stemmed from a radical or root language which has been preserved almost intact in Arabic as the most conservative and productive language. In fact, Arabic can be safely said to be the radical language itself for, besides other linguistic features, sharing the plural cognates in this case with all the other languages alone.Keywords: Plurality, language families and relationships, radical world language, radical linguistic theory

L1 Korean and L1 Mandarin L2 English learners’ acquisition of the count/mass distinction in English

This study investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of the English count/mass distinction by speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese, with a focus on the semantics of atomicity. It is hypothesized that L1-Korean and L1-Mandarin L2-English learners are influenced by atomicity in the use of the count/mass morphosyntax in English. This hypothesis is tested in two experiments, one comparing Korean and Mandarin speakers in their L2 (English) and the other investigating count/mass morphosyntax in native Korean and Mandarin Chinese. In both experiments, participants are tested on their suppliance of plural marking with count and mass NPs. The findings are fully consistent with the view of atomicity as a semantic universal: learners overuse plural marking with mass atomic nouns such as furniture more than with mass non-atomic nouns such as water. Even though plural marking is associated with atomicity in Korean but not in Mandarin, the same patterns are observed in L1-Korean and L1-Mandarin L2-English learners. We conclude that learners’ performance is not due to L1-transfer, but rather to the role of the semantic universal of atomicity in L2-acquisition.

The development and typology of number suppletion in adjectives

AbstractThis paper looks at the cross-linguistically rare phenomenon of number suppletion in adjectives. I consider how such suppletion arises by looking at six known examples with a special focus on the Brittonic languages (Breton, Cornish and Welsh), which are discussed as an extended case study. Three generalisations are suggested on the basis of the typological study. First, adjectives denoting size (“small” and “big”) are at the centre of this phenomenon. Second, where the etymology of the adjectives is known, the plural member of the suppletive pair for “small” develops from a lexeme denoting something having been divided into or consisting of small parts. These lexemes can also be used with some singular nouns and in such cases they denote the component structure of the referent. Finally, adjectives with number suppletion tend to mark plural number consistently in environments in which plural marking is otherwise optional or rare.

Feature reassembly in the acquisition of plural marking by Korean and Indonesian bilinguals

This bidirectional study investigated the L2 acquisition of plural marking in L2 Indonesian by native Korean speakers and in L2 Korean by native Indonesian speakers. Indonesian and Korean are classifier languages with partially overlapping restrictions on how pluralization interacts with quantification, allowing us to test the acquisition of new L2 features vs. the preemption of L1 features that are not in the L2. We also examined how the contextual complexity of new L2 features impacts development. Seventy learners at three L2 Korean proficiency levels and 40 native controls participated in Experiment 1; 61 learners at three L2 Indonesian proficiency levels and 39 native controls participated in Experiment 2. All participants completed three tasks – a Sentence Completion Task, a Grammaticality Judgment Task and a Multiple-Choice Task. Whereas learners were largely able to overcome the difficulty of preemption, they were less successful in acquiring new L2 feature contrasts in more complex conditioning environments.

Plural Marking in Spoken and Written Narratives: A Corpus-based Study of Japanese Learners of English

This paper aims to present the results of a learner corpus study on spoken and written narratives by Japanese learners of English using Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann, 1998). PT assumes that there is a universal hierarchy of second language (L2) development and many studies (e.g., Di Biase, Kawaguchi, & Yamaguchi, 2015; Pienemann, 1998) have shown support for PT stages for English L2. However, few PT studies have addressed the issues of whether learners use linguistic structures in the same way in spoken and written tasks. The current study focuses on learners’ use of plural marking on nouns, since contradictory results have been reported for the developmental sequence of lexical plural -s and phrasal plural -s (Charters, Dao, & Jansen, 2011). The participants in this study comprised 291 university students learning in English programs in Japanese universities. Each of them performed spoken and written narratives using a picture book titled Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969) containing 24 wordless pictures. The learner corpus including both 291 audio-recorded and transcribed spoken narratives and 291 written narratives was compiled. The results of the analyses showed a connection between learners’ use of plural marker -s in speaking and that in writing, while a small number of students were found to perform differently in two different tasks. Moreover, this study demonstrated support for the developmental sequence of lexical and phrasal plural marking predicted in PT.

A Study on the Interaction between the Linguistic Typology of Object-Dominant vs. Action-Dominant Languages and Plural Markers in English and Korean

A Study on the Interaction between the Linguistic Typology of Object-Dominant vs. Action-Dominant Languages and Plural Markers in English and Korean

A Study on the Usage of Objectification Strategy by Korean Language Learners for Academic Purpose

This study aims to examine the usage of objectification strategy represented in academic texts produced by Korean language learners for academic purpose. To this end, the target of analysis for this study is 20 pieces of graduate school degree course class reports by Chinese learners of Korean language for academic writing majoring in humanities and social science at Yonsei University. Objectivity of academic text is a conversation mechanism for scientific description of scholarly research results that combines universality and validity. To secure the objectivity of academic text, the object of research rather than the subject of research is highlighted, and the stativity of research results is stressed rather than the movement of research action; in addition, the information is generalized, and an objectification strategy is used by quoting sources. Linguistic labels that implement an objectification strategy include consistent representations such as `-고 있다, -어 있다`, impersonal expressions such as `본고`, passive verbs and passive expressions such as `-게 되다`, complete complementizer + abstract noun, nominalized sentences ending with `-음`, `-ㄴ/는 것`, plural expressions such as `우리`, `-들`, and quotation sentences. Most advanced Chinese learners of Korean language effectively used the objectification strategy but were unskilled in some aspects compared to Korean native speakers, with errors in areas such as choosing consistent representation, exposing research subject, and using plural marker.

Pluractionals in Bole-Tangale languages (West-Chadic)

Abstract The paper provides an overview of verbal plural marking and its function in several Bole-Tangale-languages (West-Chadic A). Verbal plurals – or pluractionals – may express repeated action and/or distributivity in most of these languages. In some of the languages under consideration two verbal plural marking strategies can be identified: partial reduplication and infixation/gemination. While partial reduplication seems to be the most generally applicable device to express repeated action and/or plurality of action, the function of infixation/gemination seems to be more specialized towards distributivity.

Re-Contextualized Carnivals: A Brazilian Art Form in the Global Spaces of Festivalization

Re-Contextualized Carnivals:A Brazilian Art Form in the Global Spaces of Festivalization Daniel Gough (bio) Two recent public performances incorporating the carnival traditions of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, raise questions about the persistence of the city’s carnival as a marker of Brazilian national identity and the contested spatial dynamics of cultural performance in contemporary global cities.1 On August 5, 2016, the artistic portion of the Opening Ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro culminated with a stylized version of that city’s competitive carnival parades, a cooperative effort that included the participation of twelve of Rio’s most successful samba schools. On August 26, 2016, Chicago Samba, a Chicago, U.S.-based samba school and performance group, led a procession of spectators and dancers between thematic stages on that city’s Navy Pier during a “world-themed night” of the tenth Chicago Dancing Festival, an event billed as “Planet Chicago.” Decontextualized from both the Roman Catholic religious calendar and the usual urban settings of carnival, each performance blended elements of highly organized samba school parades and Rio’s resurgent street carnival celebrations. On the one hand, these performances demonstrated that carnival is a [End Page 199] flexible and living art form consisting of sonic, visual, and embodied elements that performers and directors re-contextualize freely. On the other hand, the Opening Ceremony and Planet Chicago performances indicated significant links between identity politics, cultural performance, and the repurposing of strategic urban locations as entertainment zones in large cities throughout the world. Because carnival is both a genre of cultural performance and a mode of urban sociability, these performances bring into focus the issue of urban musicality—the social, spatial, and symbolic ways that people live musically in fragmented and concentrated urban settings. I argue that the re-contextualized carnival parades illuminate how cultural performances in festivalized spaces can produce global city sociability through depicting and producing such urban musicality, processes through which meanings are both created and erased. This essay examines urban musicality in the Rio de Janeiro and Chicago performances through two lenses. I show, first, how each performance engaged carnival musicality as a marker of racial and ethnic plurality—an aspect of contemporary global cities that city boosters are quick to promote—even as they elided the histories of migration and structural racism that led to contemporary cultural diversity. Second, I interrogate how the re-contextualized carnivals demonstrated references to and continuities with grassroots carnival practices, exhibiting how cultural performances within the curated spaces of festivalization are not simply commercialized spectacles but rather constituent elements of urban cultural scenes permeated by global policy ideas and capital.2 In recent years, government administrators in Rio de Janeiro and Chicago have embraced globally circulating policy ideas about “creativity” and “creative economies” as strategies for economic growth and urban redevelopment. Hosting international cultural and sporting mega-events, redeveloping abandoned and/or underutilized infrastructures as leisure and cultural spaces, and branding neighborhoods as cultural and entertainment districts are some of the projects that have characterized a turn toward the “creative” as a supposed panacea for myriad economic and social challenges in cities throughout the world.3 While Rio de Janeiro and Chicago already have large cultural events that characterize local [End Page 200] public culture (e.g. music festivals, parades, sporting events), city administrators have recently devoted more attention to profit-generating and international events than their grassroots and/or local counterparts.4 For instance, both cities bid for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, and both host taxpayer-subsidized, for-profit music festivals (i.e. Rock in Rio and Lollapalooza) that cordon off public spaces for private use. These practices respond not only to economic pressures but also to broader urban marketing concerns. Rio de Janeiro and Chicago share similar challenges in that both are characterized by highly legible racial and social inequalities. Furthermore, discourses about persistent violence in both cities circulate in the national and global media, and efforts to reduce violence and address its root causes have been largely unsustainable.5 In such contexts, efforts to use “culture as a resource” in generating new “creative economies” and sociabilities are usually more efficacious as branding strategies...

The Development of Plural Expressions in a Malay-English Bilingual Child

In a postcolonial country such as Malaysia, English plays an important role in governance, education and popular culture. With English now becoming the lingua franca of the globalised world, many Malaysian urban families use English to speak to their children at home, in conjunction with the Malay language or other ethnic languages. Recognising the important relationship between the two languages, this paper investigates early bilingual development of Malay and English focusing specifically on the development of plural marking in a child raised simultaneously in these typologically distant languages. These two languages express plurals differently: Malay through various forms of reduplication and English by morphological marking on nouns. But how does the child manage to learn, simultaneously, such divergent systems? In order to shed some light on this question, a bilingual child growing up in these two languages was audio- and video- recorded in each language over 6 months, that is from 3 years 4 months (3;4) to 3 years 10 months (3;10). Results suggest that though the child appeared to develop two distinct systems of plurality in Malay and English, the two developing systems also manifested considerable cross-linguistic influence in both directions. Implications for the study of world Englishes are discussed.

Feature interpretability and the positions of 2nd person possessives in Brazilian Portuguese

Conceitos como interpretabilidade e valoração de traços-φ (Chomsky, 2001; Pesetsky and Torrego, 2007) têm desempenhado um papel central no estudo dos universais linguísticos. Neste respeito, em português padrão, assim como em outras línguas românicas, os pronomes possessivos carregam traços não interpretáveis de número, que são valorados via concordância nominal. No entanto, certos dialetos do português do Brasil (PB) mostram que o possessivo de 2.a pessoa, principalmente em posição posposta, não concorda em número com o nome. Por exemplo, no dialeto mineiro, um N no singular pode coocorrer com possessivo no plural, que se refere à 2.a pessoa do plural (‘de vocês’). Do mesmo modo, um N no plural pode coocorrer com possessivo no singular, que se refere à 2.a pessoa do singular. Para explicar esses fatos, argumentarei que, nesta gramática, os traços de número no possessivo de 2.a pessoa são (i) traços da pessoa e não do nome e são (ii) interpretáveis. Com base na primeira formulação, prediz-se que ‘seu’ seja o possessivo de 2.a pessoa do singular, e ‘seus’ do plural. Com base na segunda formulação, não se desencadeia concordância em número no possessivo. Além disso, seguindo Danon (2011) e Norris (2014), argumentarei que os cardinais dividem DPs do PB em dois domínios, sendo que os sintagmas situados acima de NumP são marcados com o morfema de plural em concordância nominal, enquanto os situados abaixo de NumP são impedidos de terem esta marca. Assim, pelo fato de o possessivo pré-nominal estar antes do cardinal, ele é obrigatoriamente marcado com o morfema de plural, enquanto o possessivo pós-nominal não tem esta marca. Livre da marca morfológica de concordância nominal, o possessivo pós-nominal de 2.a pessoa favorece a reanálise do ‘-s’ como indicador do número da pessoa.

Exclamatives and interrogatives with ‘ques’: the CP/DP hierarchy and the plural marking in Brazilian Portuguese

This paper examines exclamatives and interrogatives containing the wh-determiner ‘ques’ in dialectal Brazilian Portuguese. As opposed to standard BP, in these structures, ‘que’ is the only constituent of the DP marked for plural. In order to explain these facts, I will propose an analysis that accounts for the CP/DP-internal hierarchy as well as the DP-internal distribution of the plural morpheme.

Plural marking in French NA/AN combinations: What liaison can tell us

Abstract Our paper discusses different patterns of plural marking in N(oun)A(djective)/A(djective)N(oun)-combinations in phonic French. We first show, based on previous observations, that French has incomplete plural agreement in complex nominal phrases and that there is a striking asymmetry between AN-combinations (plural marking on the determiner and prenominal adjectives via liaison, where possible) and NA-combinations (usually, only plural marking on the determiner and infrequent liaison between N and postnominal A). In order to understand this discrepancy, we have analyzed all the occurrences of AN and NA in two French corpora and found a strong tendency for liaison in NA only to appear systematically and independently from register variation in “proper-name like” expressions such as Jeux Olympiques ‘Olympic Games’ ([ʒøzolɛ̃pik]). In a third step, we discuss this empirical finding and consider it synchronically as a case of morphophonological “proper name marking” (cf. Nübling 2005).

Nominal plurals in Antwerp Hasidic Yiddish: An empirical study

Abstract Yiddish is a Germanic Jewish language that is natively spoken by adults and children in segregated Hasidic communities around the world. The current study investigates the system of noun plurals as spoken by Hasidic adults living in Antwerp, Belgium. In the absence of evidence-based detailed grammatical descriptions of Antwerp Hasidic Yiddish, the aims of this study were (a) to arrive at a description of the plural system and (b) to detect if phonological regularities govern the selection of plural suffixation and stem change. An experimental pluralization task containing 87 singular nouns was administered to 100 Yiddish-speaking adults. Findings show that the system of noun plurals in Antwerp Hasidic Yiddish consists of plural markers that do not exist in Standard Yiddish (e. g. bikh-bíkhers ‘book-s’), combinations of existing markers (lip-lípenes ‘lip-s’) and loans from Dutch (ay-áyeren ‘egg-s’) – the ambient language. Nevertheless, suffixes that already exist in Standard Yiddish occur in a higher frequency than those that are specific to Antwerp. In order to investigate which phonological regularities govern the selection of plural suffix and stem change several factors in the inflected singular form were taken into account. Our results reveal an intricate system of some strong phonological regularities, islands of subregularities and exceptions that appear to be lexically determined.

ERRORS ON ORAL PRODUCTION MADE BY ENGLISH DEPARTMENT STUDENTS IN MICROTEACHING CLASS AT UNIVERSITAS MUHAMMADIYAH SURAKARTA

The objectives of this research are to describe the types of error, to analyze the frequency of error and to describe the source of error in oral productions made by English department students in microteaching class at Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta. The type of this study is descriptive qualitative research. The data of this research are utterances containing errors taken from Microteaching video. The data collection technique of this research is documentary study. There are 289 utterances containing error. The writer uses descriptive qualitative technique to analyze thedata. The writer uses theories from Clark and Clark, Dulay, Burt and Krashen and also Selinker to analyze the error. In the result of this study, the writer divided types of error into three classifications. They are speech error, morphological error, and syntactical error. Speech error (80,28%), in speech error divided into seven types, they are: filled pause (39,5%), repeats (18,34%), silent pause (10,73%), stutters (6,57%), interjection (2,08%), correction (1,73%), slip of tongue (1,38%). Morphological (13,84%) in morphological error divided into three types, they are: Omission of Bound morpheme {-s} as plural marker (2,77%), pronunciations (8,30%), vocabulary(2,77%). Syntactical error (5,88%), syntactical error divided into four types, they are: omission of modal {will} (1,38%), omission of preposition (1,38%), question construction (1,38%), incorrect word selection (1,73%). The sources of error arecognitive reason, psychological reason and social reason.

Portuguese or Portuñol? Language contact in Misiones, Argentina

In the extreme northeastern Argentine province of Misiones, vernacular Portuguese is the primary language of many rural communities, in bilingual contact with Spanish. The present study examines data from Misiones Portuguese and Spanish for evidence of morphosyntactic convergence in the absence of formal schooling in either language or sociolinguistic pressures to produce canonical varieties. Data from a corpus of vernacular Misiones Portuguese and the results of a speeded translation task reveal that even in this sociolinguistically permissive environment bilingual speakers maintain distinct morphosyntactic systems for Portuguese and Spanish (exemplified by nominal plural marking and first-person plural verbal inflection). The data also suggest that bilingual contact alone does not yield the degree of convergence required for the hybrid Portuguese-Spanish morphosyntaxis that has been reported, for example, in northern Uruguay.

LEARNER ERRORS IN WRITING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT MADE BY STUDENTS OF SMP AL ISLAM KARTASURA

The study aims at describing the learners’ error made by eighth grade students of SMP AL Islam Kartasura in their writing descriptive text; identifying the types of lexical error, syntactical errors, and discourse errors; explaining the frequency of each typeof errors; describing the dominant type of errors; and identifying the sources of error. The type of this research is descriptive qualitative research. In collecting the data, the writer uses elicitation and documentation technique. There are some steps ofcollecting the data; asking the students to write descriptive text, collecting the data in form of erroneous sentences and paragraph, identifying the composition, marking the types of error, and at last, listing the erroneous sentences and classifying them into the classification of errors. The collected data are analyzed using Dulay, Burt and Krashen classification of errors theory, frequency of each type of error using Slamet’s theory, and Brown’s theory for sources of error. The results of the research show that the eighth grade students of SMP AL Islam Kartasura make 291 errors in their composition which are classified into three categories of error based on the combination of linguistic category and surface strategy taxonomy. There are lexical errors that cover: misspelling 12,37% and literal translation (the use of Indonesian construction) 6,87%. Syntactical error consist of omission of {-s} as plural marker 4,12%, omission of {-s} as third singular person marker 10,31%, misselection of have instead of has 8,25%, the use of verb-ing in structure phrase 1,72%, omission of verb 2,40%, omission of be 1,5%, addition of be 2,40%, the use of prepositionin prepositional phrase 3,44%, omission of article 1,37%, addition of the article 1,72%, misordering in noun phrase 19,93%, misordering in phrase 1,37%, and the last is addition of unnecessary word 5,50%. Discourse errors is 2,06% that covercomponent of discourse in reference 2,06%. The writer also finds 2 dominant sources of errors, namely interlingual transfer and intralingual transfer.