Plural Marking Research Articles

INFLECTION OF CADA AND NUMBER FEATURE VALUATION IN BP

<p>This research investigates nominal concord in structures of non-standard Brazilian Portuguese (BP) where <em>cada</em> is inflected with the plural morpheme <em>-s</em> while the phrases following it may not bear any plural marking. In order to account for this, I will consider that cardinals and silent nouns work as a boundary dividing the DP into two domains such that phrases to their left are marked with the plural morpheme while phrases to their right are unmarked, a pattern found across languages. Additionally, I will argue that DPs with <em>cadas</em> have a silent noun SET and that this silent noun conveys a set reading as well as valued plural features. In this case, <em>cada</em> is interpreted as either ‘such’ or ‘every’ rather than ‘each’ and is followed by a noun or a cardinal ≥ 2 (plus a noun). Accordingly, because <em>cadas</em> precedes SET, it is marked with <em>-s</em>. This plural silent noun is followed by a preposition, which allows its embedded NP to be singular.</p>

Attrition and Reactivation of a Childhood Language: The Case of Returnee Heritage Speakers

AbstractThis article discusses the dynamic nature of childhood bilingualism by analyzing oral speech from returnee heritage speakers (HSs) of Portuguese, who grew up in Germany, but moved to Portugal in childhood/adolescence. The first dataset from 14 speakers showed that the length of exposure to German predicted the rate of (in)accurate production of nominal inflection, indicating that the speakers’ morphological knowledge had not been sufficiently stabilized due to the return. The second dataset is from one returnee HS who was reimmersed in the German environment after a 4‐year stay in Portugal. The comparative analysis of the speaker's performance 13 months after moving away from Germany and 11 months after being reexposed to German revealed a significant decrease of inaccurate case, gender, and plural marking, which supports the hypothesis of restabilization of linguistic knowledge. Overall, the findings emphasize the effects of lack of exposure on the development of HSs’ bilingual competence.

The multi-valuation Agreement Hierarchy

This paper investigates multi-valuation, i.e. cases where one probe agrees with multiple goals thus obtaining multiple feature values. Focusing on number agreement, I look at the cross-linguistic patterns on multi-valued Ns in the nominal Right Node Raising construction (Nominal RNR) reported in Belyaev et al. (2015); Harizanov & Gribanova (2015); Shen (2016) as well as multi-valued Ts in TP RNR construction reported in Yatabe (2003); Grosz (2009; 2015); Kluck (2009). I show that three types of languages are attested: languages like Serbo-Croatian that show singular marking on both multi-valued Ns and Ts, languages like Russian that show plural marking on both multi-valued Ns and Ts, and languages like English that show singular marking on multi-valued Ns and plural marking on multi-valued Ts. No language is attested that shows plural marking on multi-valued Ns and singular marking on multi-valued Ts. I use this 3/4 pattern to argue that multi-valuation shows the effect of the Agreement Hierarchy discussed by Corbett (1979; 2006) among others.

Avokadosar och kepsar – ett epentetiskt s med olika funktioner

Two groups of words containing an s in the ending are discussed: firstly, non-standard plural forms ending in -sar, such as avokadosar ‘avocados’, frequently found in spoken Swedish, but deviating from the forms avokador or avokadoer, recommended by normative authorities, and secondly, so-called keps-words, traditionally analysed as English loan words, retaining the plural s, which, in some cases has been incorporated into the stem: cap + s → keps ‘hat’. The focus of interest is the role of the s. I argue that s in both groups is an epenthetic consonant. In sar-plurals, the s blocks hiatus, which is undesirable in Swedish. It also provides the syllable that follows with an onset and allows for the use of the default plural marker -ar. For keps-words I argue that s is epenthetic too, but in a different way. Prokosch’s law is important in Swedish phonology; basically, stressed syllables have to be long. When English short-syllable words, such as cap, are imported, they have to be adjusted accordingly. To supply the coda with an s – a reanalysis of the English plural marker –, is one way to achieve this. Not all keps-words can be explained this way, but the explanation holds for the majority of the examples.

Constraints on the use of the plural morpheme men in spoken Mandarin

Abstract This study returns to the oft-debated question of grammatical number and plurality in Modern Standard Chinese and attempts to shed new light on the constraints operating on the plural marker men by analysing its use in a corpus of half a million characters of spoken data. Data from the present research indicate that the plural morpheme men is less sensitive than previously assumed to a number of constraints outlined in the standard literature, including structural constraints involving NPs with quantifiers and explicit number expressions. At the same time, it is also more sensitive to a range of other factors that have hitherto been largely overlooked, including parallelism, the length of NP modifiers and lexical diffusion. The findings also suggest that the morpheme men is not used only to indicate plurality and collectivity but may have a number of other roles as well, such as functioning like a diminutive suffix and contributing to the organization of discourse and information structure.

Grammaticalization of the Plural Marker in Korean : From Object to Text to Stance

Grammaticalization of the Plural Marker in Korean : From Object to Text to Stance

Aquisição da linguagem e variação linguística em diálogo: investigando a produção e a compreensão da flexão verbal de terceira pessoa do plural no PB

Neste artigo, investigamos a produção e a compreensão da flexão verbal de terceira pessoa do plural por crianças adquirindo o português brasileiro (PB), levando em consideração que a informação morfofonológica de número apresenta-se variável na língua. Dados longitudinais de produção espontânea apontam para a alternância entre marcação redundante e não redundante no verbo e para a influência de fatores extralinguísticos, como classe socioeconômica e procedência geográfica. Dados experimentais obtidos em tarefa de compreensão sugerem o mapeamento da informação gramatical de plural ao conceito de pluralidade e o desenvolvimento no desempenho das crianças em função das faixas etárias testadas. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2018.v14n3a21334

The Acquisition patterns of Korean Plural Marker ‘–tul’ by Chinese Korean Learners

The Acquisition patterns of Korean Plural Marker ‘–tul’ by Chinese Korean Learners

Independence of syntactic and phonological deficits in dyslexia: A study using the attraction error paradigm.

This paper addresses the question of whether dyslexic children suffer from syntactic deficits that are independent of limitations with phonological processing. We looked at subject-verb agreement errors after sentence subjects containing a second noun (the attractor) known to be able to attract incorrect agreement (e.g., "the owner(s) of the house(s) is/are away"). In the general population, attraction errors are not straightforwardly dependent on the presence or absence of morphophonological plural markers but on their syntactic configuration. The same would be expected for dyslexic children if their syntactic problems are not phonological in nature. We also looked at the possible effect of system overload on syntactic processing by comparing auditory and written presentation of stimuli and stimuli with high and low frequency attractors. Dyslexic children produced more agreement errors than age-matched controls, but their errors were distributed in the expected manner and did not align with the presence of morphophonological number markers in the subject overall. Furthermore, there was no effect of either presentation mode or attractor frequency on the number of agreement errors. Our results confirm the existence of syntactic difficulties in dyslexia and suggest that they are not due to a phonological deficit or to verbal working memory limitations.

The Korean Native Speakers’ Production on the Korean Plural Marking Constrained by Animacy and Numerals

The Korean Native Speakers’ Production on the Korean Plural Marking Constrained by Animacy and Numerals

A new classifier-based plural morpheme in German Sign Language (DGS)

Abstract German Sign Language (DGS) displays variation in the simple plural, the form of which is conditioned by classes of phonological features within the lexicon. As a consequence, the overt realization of the plural marker is restricted to a small set of nouns specified for the appropriate phonological features, while the rest are left bare (Pfau & Steinbach 2005, 2006; Steinbach 2012). Pfau & Steinbach (2005) report a number of ‘alternative pluralization strategies’ available as repairs for this underspecification, including classifier constructions, spatial localization, and number and quantifier phrases. I propose a previously undescribed mechanism for plural marking, the ‘classifier-based plural morpheme’ (CLP), grammaticalized from the classifier system into a morpheme in the grammars of individual DGS signers. Elicitation data show that this morpheme attaches only to nouns which are specified for phonological features that restrict the realization of the canonical plural marker, adding a new option to the range of pluralization strategies available.

Choctaw as a Window into the Clitic/Agreement Split

AbstractThe Choctaw verb hosts argument‐referencing morphemes that could plausibly be analyzed as φ‐agreement affixes or argument‐doubling clitics. I argue that (almost) all the morphemes in question are clitics, on the basis of several state‐of‐the‐art tests. The bulk of the argumentation comes from two of the morphemes’ properties in particular: firstly, they participate in clitic‐climbing alternations, and secondly, they are able to license the extrinsic plural marker oklah, an element with the syntactic licensing conditions typical of floating quantifiers. Following much work proposing that clitics have the syntactic status of determiner heads in an A‐movement chain with their DP associate, I show that the properties just outlined follow straightforwardly from a clitic analysis, but would not be predicted under a φ‐agreement analysis.

The effect of morphosyntactic training on multilingual fifth graders’ spelling in French

ABSTRACTMany studies show that it is challenging to encode morphosyntactic information while writing. Spelling plurals is especially demanding in French as these are inaudible. Even by the end of primary school, monolingual French pupils still have difficulties marking plurals of some grammatical categories. We investigate (1) how multilingual pupils learning French as a second written language deal with silent plural markers and (2) the effects of a morphosyntactic training explicitly focussing on grammatical categories and their markers, as well as visualizing the plural agreement. 228 fifth graders were quasi-randomly assigned to an intervention (n = 137) and a control group (n = 91) based on the results of a spelling pre-test. The results of the pre-test show that multilingual learners have similar spelling patterns as French monolinguals. They pluralize nouns more accurately than verbs and perform lowest on adjectives. After the pre-test, both groups were trained over six sessions of 20 minutes. The control group participated in French listening comprehension activities. The post-test shows that the intervention group significantly improved in spelling plurals compared to the control group. A greater focus on morphosyntactic structures is highly effective especially in second language contexts where children might lack broad lexical knowledge.

The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek

Across languages, plural marking on count nouns typically gives rise to a multiplicity inference, indicating that the noun ranges over sums with a cardinality of 2 or more. Plural marking has also been observed to occur on mass nouns in Greek and a few other languages, giving rise to a parallel abundance inference, indicating that there is a lot of the relevant substance. It has been observed in the literature that both of these inferences disappear in downward-entailing environments, such as when a plural appears in the scope of negation (Tsoulas 2009; Kane et al. 2015). There are two main competing approaches in the literature that aim to account for the described pattern with respect to multiplicity inferences: the ambiguity approach (Farkas & de Swart 2010) and the implicature approach (Sauerland 2003; Spector 2007; Mayr 2015, among others). As discussed in Tieu et al. (2018), while both approaches can account for the upward- versus downward-entailing pattern of multiplicity inferences, they differ in what they predict with respect to the acquisition of these inferences and their relationship with implicatures. Tieu et al. (2014; 2018) investigated multiplicity inferences in English and reported evidence for the implicature approach. In this paper, we first show how the ambiguity approach and the implicature approach to the multiplicity inference can be extended to account for the abundance inference. We then report on an experiment that tests the predictions of the two approaches for multiplicity and abundance inferences in preschool-aged children and adult native speakers of Greek. Our results replicate the patterns reported in Tieu et al. (2014; 2018) for multiplicity inferences, and crucially reveal an analogous pattern for abundance inferences. Adults computed both kinds of inferences more in upward-entailing environments than in downward-entailing ones, and children computed fewer inferences overall than adults did. These results reflect an overall pattern of implicature calculation in line with a unified implicature analysis across the three kinds of inferences. By contrast, we discuss how they pose a challenge for the ambiguity approach.

A Statistical Explanation of the Distribution of Sortal Classifiers in Languages of the World via Computational Classifiers

ABSTRACTPrevious studies demonstrate that morphosyntactic plural markers and the structure of numeral systems have individually strong predictive power with regard to the usage of sortal classifiers in languages. We use these two factors as explanatory variables to train the computational classifier of random forests and evaluate the accuracy of their predictive power when selecting the existence/absence of sortal classifiers as response variable. Our results show that these two factors result in an excellent discrimination performance of random forests, even when taking into account sortal classifiers as an areal feature. However, the correlation between morphosyntactic plural markers and multiplicative bases is weaker than the correlation between sortal classifiers and plural markers plus multiplicative bases. We are thus able to provide novel insights with regard to probabilistic universals on sortal classifiers, and suggest an innovative cross-disciplinary approach to test the effect of implicational universals with computational methods.

Pseudo-Incorporation in Blackfoot

Blackfoot (Algonquian: Alberta) permits both morphologically transitive and intransitive verbs to take objects, but with different syntactic properties. This paper develops an analysis of the objects of morphologically intransitive verbs as pseudo-incorporated, in the sense introduced by Diane Massam. Diagnostic tests for the syntax and semantics of pseudo-incorporation are applied to objects of morphologically intransitive verbs. Regarding their external syntax, it is shown that pseudo-incorporated objects must be immediately post-verbal and form a VP constituent with the verb. As for their semantic properties, they are shown to be narrow-scoping, non-specific, indefinite, and cumulative in reference. With respect to their internal syntax, it is demonstrated that they can be modified by attributive adjectives and/or inflectional plural marking, but crucially they cannot host demonstrative determiners. By documenting pseudo-incorporated objects in Blackfoot, this paper contributes to the cross-linguistic evidence that incorporation can target phrasal constituents.

The plural interpretability of German linking elements

In this paper, we take a closer theoretical and empirical look at the linking elements in German N1+N2 compounds which are identical to the plural marker of N1 (such as -er with umlaut, as in Haus-er-meer ‘sea of houses’). Various perspectives on the actual extent of plural interpretability of these pluralic linking elements are expressed in the literature. We aim to clarify this question by empirically examining to what extent there may be a relationship between plural form and meaning which informs in which sorts of compounds pluralic linking elements appear. Specifically, we investigate whether pluralic linking elements occur especially frequently in compounds where a plural meaning of the first constituent is induced either externally (through plural inflection of the entire compound) or internally (through a relation between the constituents such that N2 forces N1 to be conceptually plural, as in the example above). The results of a corpus study using the DECOW16A corpus and a split-100 experiment show that in the internal but not external plural meaning conditions, a pluralic linking element is preferred over a non-pluralic one, though there is considerable inter-speaker variability, and limitations imposed by other constraints on linking element distribution also play a role. However, we show the overall tendency that German language users do use pluralic linking elements as cues to the plural interpretation of N1+N2 compounds. Our interpretation does not reference a specific morphological framework. Instead, we view our data as strengthening the general approach of probabilistic morphology.

Input-based tasks for beginner-level learners: An approximate replication and extension of Erlam & Ellis (2018)

Erlam & Ellis (2018) published, in Canadian Modern Language Review, an experimental study that investigated the effect of input-based tasks on the acquisition of vocabulary and markers of plurality by adolescent near-beginner learners of L2 (second language) French. The present paper reports an approximate replication of the original study with the aim of confirming or disconfirming the results.1 The research questions of both studies addressed the receptive acquisition of new vocabulary and the receptive and productive acquisition of markers of plurality resulting from instruction using input-based tasks. Both studies investigated near-beginner adolescent learners of French. The teacher, the students’ usual classroom teacher, was the same in both studies. In the replication study, a new, larger group of students were investigated, the length of the instruction was increased, involving the development of additional tasks, and productive as well as the receptive knowledge of the vocabulary items was assessed. The results of the replication study confirm and extend those of the original study. The teachers’ views about the role of input-based tasks with near-beginner learners remained constant in the two studies. The paper concludes with a discussion of the contribution that approximate replications can make to instructed second language acquisition research.

On binary features and disagreeing natural classes: Evidence from Cheyenne and Serbian

Abstract In this paper we offer new arguments for bivalence of morphological features. In the domain of person, we argue in support of the system using the features [±speaker] and [±hearer], on the basis of plural marking in Cheyenne. In the domain of gender, we argue in support of the system using the features [±masculine] and [±feminine], on the basis of gender agreement in Serbian coordinate structures. The property of binary systems crucial for our proposal is that they allow combinations of disagreeing feature values, given that in such systems every morphological category is represented as a combination of two values. Our main empirical goal is to show that some languages treat such combinations of disagreeing feature values (as well as combinations of agreeing values) as natural classes (e.g., Noyer, Rolf. 1992. Features, positions and affixes in autonomous morphological structure. Ph.D. dissertation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

The Study on Korean Native Speakers’ Understanding of Plural Copying -Revisiting Extrinsic Plural Marker on Verbs

The Study on Korean Native Speakers’ Understanding of Plural Copying -Revisiting Extrinsic Plural Marker on Verbs