Plural Verb Research Articles

Light Verb Constructions as Means of Expressing Semelfactive/Multiplicative Meanings in J.K. Rowling’s Discourse (on the basis of novels ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ and ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets’)

The article discusses the problem of light verb constructions in contemporary English on the basis of novels ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ and ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets’ by J.K. Rowling. We (the authors) state that most of light verb constructions denote either semelfactive or multiplicative meanings within the framework of Smith’s (1997) theory of aspect in which five situation types, namely states, activities, achievements, accomplishments, and semelfactives are distinguished. The aspectual meaning of a light verb construction is concentrated in its nominal component which can be proved by the existence of for, with-phrases like for a better look, where the verbal component is omitted. The singular of the deverbal noun indicates a semelfactive meaning, whereas the plural form expresses a multiplicative one. The verbal component in such constructions may be represented by ‘light’ verbs such as take, have, make, do, give or ‘heavy’ verbs like cast, draw, shoot etc. The qualitative characteristics of light verb constructions can be intensified by prepositive and postpositive modifiers such as quick, short, sharp etc. On the basis of novels ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ and ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets’ by J.K. Rowling 97 and 115 light verb constructions have been singled out and analyzed respectively. The results of the research contribute to the study of verbal plurality in English.

Subject–Verb Number Agreement in Bilingual Processing: (Lack of) Age of Acquisition and Proficiency Effects

Children acquire language more easily than adults, though it is controversial whether this faculty declines as a result of a critical period or something else. To address this question, we investigate the role of age of acquisition and proficiency on morphosyntactic processing in adult monolinguals and bilinguals. Spanish monolinguals and intermediate and advanced early and late bilinguals of Spanish read sentences with adjacent subject–verb number agreements and violations and chose one of four pictures. Eye-tracking data revealed that all groups were sensitive to the violations and attended more to more salient plural and preterit verbs than less obvious singular and present verbs, regardless of AoA and proficiency level. We conclude that the processing of adjacent SV agreement depends on perceptual salience and language use, rather than AoA or proficiency. These findings support usage-based theories of language acquisition.

Breves considerações sobre os nomes coletivos em Português Europeu

In this article we will address the issue of collective nouns in European Portuguese, focusing our attention on collective nouns that denote organized groups of humans. We will begin by questioning the definition of collective nouns, introducing, for this purpose, a distinction between collective reference and a general sense of group. Then we will explore the variability that characterizes collective nouns through the application of some grammaticality tests. Further on, we will argue that a collective noun can be interpreted not only as a single collective entity, as proposed by Raposo (2013), but also as a plural entity (Ritchie 2018), which grant access to the atoms that constitute it. Finally, we will present two semantic problems involving collective nouns. First, we will discuss the relationship that can be established between collective nouns and certain proper nouns. Second, a comparison between collective nouns and some other plural expressions will be explored. In short, we will defend collective nouns as entities that, in a unique way in relation to other nouns and nominal expressions, introduce a collective reference in discourse.

Algumas considerações sobre a produção e a aceitação de formas dos paradigmas vós/vocês após inquérito a estudantes da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto

As part of the debate about the vós/vocês paradigms, in European Portuguese, this study aims to expose a picture of the use and acceptance of linguistic forms of these paradigms by a group of Higher Education students. The results show a higher production of vocês, although vósis considered the politest one. Remark on some maintenance of convosco over com vocês and the tendency for the production and acceptance of third-person plural verbs with fifth-person posses-sive determiner. The production of vós is associated, by the majority, with older speakers and with defined geographical areas.

Nominal and verbal plurality in the Mandara and Ɓata subgroups of Central Chadic

This paper contrasts the strategies for marking nominal and verbal plurality in the Mandara and Ɓata subgroups of Central Chadic, and offers some thoughts on their possible origin and development. The Mandara subgroup generally uses an /-a-/ infix for verbs, and the suffix /-ak/-ax/-ah/ for nouns. The Ɓata subgroup uses an /-ə-/ infix for both nouns and verbs, as well as a suffix /-j/ (or /-n/) for nouns. In both groups, the strategies used also depend upon the structure of the verb root. Data is provided for several languages, including little-documented languages such as Nzanyi, Bacama and Glavda. The data suggests that vowel infixes may originally have been used for both nominal and verbal plurals throughout Chadic, but the development of specific nominal plural suffixes gradually made the use of vowel infix plurals redundant in nouns. The nominal suffix /-ak/-ax/-ah/ would then have been a subsequent innovation in the verbal system for verb roots in the Mandara whose structure was incompatible with an infix strategy.

On feature-based vocabulary selection mechanisms in late insertion: third person number agreement in the French future tense

We propose that feature bundles in syntactic computations coactivate subset vocabulary items in content-based access. Thus, in French, an inflectional node for the future tense bearing [Number: Plural] activates third-person singular -a underspecified for [Number: Ø] and third- person plural -ont specified for [Number: Plural]. These activations compete in externalization. [Number: Ø/Plural] defines a <-ont, -a> scale where plural-marked -ont carries more information than -a, allowing scalar inferencing in form selection. Given an activated Plural-marked -ont, -a (3ps.sg) is automatically interpreted as [–Plural] via scalar inferencing and becomes unsuitable for insertion. Thus, -ont (3ps.pl) must be selected when -a (3ps.sg) is eliminated. We tested our model assuming an interaction of cross-domain inferencing with morphological selection, using two experiments. In forced-paced reading and listening tasks, 19 native speaker subjects per task classified picture probes accompanying matching and mismatching subject-verb future tense agreement. Classification times for pictures semantically linked to the verb probed for an interaction between the processing of agreement morphology and the ongoing conceptual processing of the sentence. Classification times were modulated by the type of morphological mismatch. Singular verb form mangera (eat-fut.3ps.sg) in plural contexts slowed down picture classifications, whereas plural verb form mangeront (eat-fut.3ps.pl) in singular contexts did not. This specific interaction between purely formal agreement and conceptual-structure processing is unexplained by superset models of late insertion, or by interface relations, frequency, load of stored information, and phonological cohort activation. It suggests that domain-general principles of inference enrich domain-specific feature-based computations accessing vocabulary items through the coactivation of features.

Democracy, Constitution and Conflict: (Re)thinking articulations from the agonism

Contemporary liberal democratic societies are marked by complexity and the fact of pluralism and diverse visions of goods. How to articulate them, and how to provide solutions to conflicts? The current predominant perspective of liberal theory does so through the proposal of consensual possibilities; but from this perspective a problem arises: can there be consensus without prejudice to democratic practices and political action, which is an essential mark of a plural society, and which presupposes the non-exclusion of the other and equality as a constitutional foundation? Faced with this issue, there is a need to (re)think practices of expression of the plural, not excluding conflict, articulatory aspects and recognition of the different, as it marks a plural society, and its reflexes in the construction of a public space as a space for the expression of diversity and conflict, and, therefore, of the democratic. The hypothesis is that the conflictive condition can and should be understood as productive for the recognition of plural expressions both in politics and in law, both in democracy and constitutionalism, and from them not being extirpated, but transformed into agonism, acceptance and plural expression. The main objective is to analyze how the conception of agonism, conceived by Chantal Mouffe, can contribute to the understanding of necessary articulations and implications between law and politics, constitutionalism and democracy in order to build meaningful and productive perspectives. Thus, for the development of the research, contributions were sought in political theory and constitutional theory, whose foundation was given, especially, from Chantal Mouffe, Post and Siegel, and Vera Karam de Chueiri. The method used was deductive, testing assumptions to verify possible conclusions; the research technique was bibliographic, developed from research in works and articles. At the end of the research, the hypothesis was confirmed.

The effect of gestures on the interpretation of plural references

ABSTRACT During language comprehension, comprehenders build conceptual models of linguistic content. Despite their fundamental nature, relatively little is known about how plural expressions are realised in conceptual models. Specifically, it is unknown whether these models contain quantity information when it is left unspecified in the noun phrase. This paper reports two studies that investigate the effect of gestures on plural conceptual representations. Experiment 1 confirmed that small gestures evoke small set sizes and large gestures evoke large set sizes. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and showed that gestures seem to influence comprehenders' representations of number information rather than the amount of space a plural reference occupies. Taken together, these data suggest that when plurals are instantiated in comprehenders' minds, spatial information provided by gestures is used by comprehenders to make inferences about the quantity of objects in a plural set.

Verbal reduplication as an aspectual marker and manifestation of cultural values in Amondawa (Brazil, Amazon)

AbstractIn this paper we analyse verbal reduplication in the Amondawa language, focusing on the aspectual function. We argue that verbal reduplication may be linked to Amondawa’s cultural values, such as the counting system and the event-based concept of time. We analysed 100 verbal predicates, considering: (i) transitivity (active and stative intransitive and transitive), (ii) semantic properties (state, activity, achievements and accomplishments); and (iii) morphological structure. The results suggest that, for the Amondawa, verbal reduplication presents notions of pluractionality, notably aspectual, and reflects cultural values related to their ways of counting things in the world and their conception of time. Thus, in this language/culture, it is preferable to say that this phenomenon evidences a decomposition of the event into micro-events, rather than verbal plurality. In this sense, reduplication works as a kind of aspectual marker and not as a plural mark, in the strict sense, whether in nouns or verbs.

THE GRAMMATICAL ERRORS IN WRITING RECOUNT TEXT AT TENTH GRADE SMA NEGERI 4 PEMATANGSIANTAR

This research intended to find out the grammatical errors made by the students at tenth grade SMA Negeri 4 Pematangsiantar in writing recount text. The method of research was qualitative content analysis. The instrument of the research was the writer herself. The sample constituted 36 students or 15% of the total 249 population. The result of this research can be showed as follow: the grammatical errors in writing recount text at tenth grade SMA Negeri 4 Pematangsiantar the error of omission was 46 (35.5%), error of addition was 5 (3.8%), error of mis-formation was 77 (59.2%), and error of disordering was 2 (1.5%). The dominant errors that the students made were error of mis-formation, 77 (59.2%). It could happen because the lack of using simple past tense, misplacement of adjective words, incorrect usage of singular and plural verb, the wrongness of using personal pronoun, limited knowledge of vocabulary, the mistake of using the article, the wrong form of to infinitive verb, and carelessness

Nosotros como familia: the negotiation of group identity in a binational community of practice

ABSTRACT This research explores intercultural communication at a binational organization in the Mexico-U.S. border region where Mexican and Anglo staff use the first personal plural ‘nosotros' to (de)emphasize group membership(s), repair conflict, and inclusively define their community of practice. In collaborative intergroup contexts, a collective identity is constructed by emphasizing shared tasks, especially with ‘nosotros.’ In intergroup conflict, antagonistic features highlight opposition between groups using the exclusive first personal plural and deictic expressions of location. Lastly, conflict repair recognizes intergroup differences and appeals to affective relationships to establish a shared identity.

Child-Like Adults: Dual-Task Effects on Collective vs. Distributive Sentence Interpretations.

In this work, we consider a recent proposal that claims that the preferred interpretation of sentences containing definite plural expressions, such as “The boys are building a snowman,” is not determined by semantic composition but is pragmatically derived via an implicature. Plural expressions can express that each member of a group acts individually (distributive interpretation) or that the group acts together (collective interpretation). While adults prefer collective interpretations for sentences that are not explicitly marked for distributivity by the distributive marker each, children do not show this preference. One explanation is that the adult collective preference for definite plurals arises due to a conversational implicature. If implicature calculation requires memory resources, children may fail to calculate the implicature due to memory limitations. This study investigated whether loading Dutch-speaking adults' working memory, using a dual task, would elicit more child-like distributive interpretations, as would be predicted by the implicature account. We found that loading WM in adults did lead to response patterns more similar to children. We discuss whether our results offer a plausible explanation for children's development of an understanding of distributivity and how our results relate to recent debates on the role of cognitive resources in implicature calculation.

Higher Ground: Rev. Dr. William Barber II and the Political Content of Prophetic Form

This essay argues that Rev. Dr. William J. Barber’s message on “Higher Ground,” a speech delivered at a massive 2014 protest rally, reveals his intentional problematization of distinctions between the sacred and the secular. As Barber’s articulation of what Ashon Crawley calls “Blackpentecostal breath” spill over the boundaries posited by conventional categories—they are too ecstatic to be ordinary speeches, and too political to be traditional sermons—these plural expressions identify themselves as sounds that come from another world. If both content and form are understood as thought, it becomes apparent that these prophetic utterances critique the oppression wrought by contemporary social orders, announcing the reality of live-giving, just forms of social life. In place of the world that seems natural, Barber’s incantations presence a world to-come, a higher ground. Thus, while Barber’s sound is familiar as a signature of black Christian contexts, his public ministry asserts that aesthetic practices such as these contain a surplus, a transformative and collectivizing capacity. Barber’s ecstatic preaching, then, functions as a technology of transcendence which refuses putative divisions between the sacred and the secular, advancing in their place a moral worldview.

Postrzeganie Pawła przez Piotra na podstawie zaimka „nasz” w 2 P 3,15

The subject of an analysis in this article is the phrase from 2 Peter 3:15: “our beloved brother Paul”. The author examines the meaning of the Greek personal pronoun hēmōn (“our”) used by Peter, which illustrates how Peter perceived of Paul. Paul is not only called a “beloved brother” in faith but, above all, he is a “brother of office” in the sense of “brother of the apostolic office” held by the college of the Twelve Apostles.An analysis of singular and plural verbs found in 1 and 2 Peter shows that Peter does not use the pronoun hēmōn as pluralis majestaticus but as the real plural, because he speaks on behalf of the Twelve and represents them.

The representation and processing of distributivity and collectivity: ambiguity vs. underspecification

Sentences with plural expressions can receive at least two interpretations. For example, the sentence The boys hold a balloon could mean that the boys as a group jointly hold one balloon (the collective reading) or that each boy holds one balloon, which would imply that as many balloons were held as there are boys (the distributive reading). Building on Frazier et al. (1999), we show that the human processor favors collective readings. Crucially, the preference for collective readings is only observed when the distributive reading has to be established through the means of phrasal distributivity (e.g., triggered by distributive quantifiers), and the preference disappears in case of lexical distributivity (e.g., the distributive interpretation of win). The findings provide evidence for different mental representations of the two types of distributivity and shed light on why the processor exhibits a default preference for collective interpretations.

МОРФОЛОГІЧНІ ЯВИЩА В НОБЕЛЬСЬКОМУ ЄВАНГЕЛІЇ 1520 РОКУ

The article discusses morphological phenomena in the Nobel Gospel, the written monument from Polissia dating back to 1520. The monument was copied out in Church Slavonic with some features of the vernacular primarily exhibited in phonetics and orthography. The study attempts to reveal the morphological phenomena that characterize the impact of the vernacular and contribute to broader language variation in the manuscript. It describes some of the morphological phenomena in different parts of speech (the noun, the adjective, the verb). Morphological features are compared in different parts of the monument: the four Gospels and the afterword. The latter contains the synthetic perfect form. The study examines language contamination observed in the combination of phonetic features of Church Slavonic and morphological features of the Ukrainian language such as the final -мо/-мw in verbs. It is essential to take into account the Second South Slavic Influence on the morphological characteristics of the text, e.g. orthographic change of о -w in the endings -ови/-wâè of masculine singular nouns in the dative case or in the final -мо/-мw of the first person plural verbs in the present tense. The study demonstrates that the text morphology is influenced by orthographic and phonetic variants h – è, h – å typical of the language continuum in Polissia. The article explains the interaction between the hard and soft types of declension in singular masculine nouns in the dative case under the condition that nouns with the former base in *jǒ acquire secondary flections -ови/-wâè. To characterize the morphological features of the Ruthenian variant of Church Slavonic, the Nobel manuscript was compared with the monuments of the same confession dating from the previous period of the 14th–15th centuries. A comparison with the Peresopnytsia Gospel, which is a translation into the Ruthenian (Old Ukrainian) language performed in Volyn, dating from the middle of the 16 century, gives grounds to confirm the conclusion about partial morphological changes in the Church Slavonic Gospel from Nobel and systemic features of the Ukrainian language represented in the translation from Persopnytsia.

An Appositive Analysis of Mandarin Distributor GE

This article presents an alternative argument that Mandarin distributor GE (GEDIS) is a pro-form to be merged as an appositive to a plural nominal, verb or adverbial. GEDIS performs a distributive function of matching a set of individuals to a set of predications, thus requiring the obligatory cooccurrence of a distributive host, i.e., an antecedent plural nominal, verbal or adverbial phrase, and a distributive target, i.e., a following syntactic constituent that helps to separate the predication. The canonical syntactic position of GEDIS is immediately to the right of the distributive host. An appositive analysis of GEDIS is proposed to the effect that GEDIS is merged as an appositive to the distributive host. This new analysis improves upon the existing adjunct analysis, which takes GEDIS as a quantificational adverb that adjoins to VP or vP. The appositive analysis is further supported by the convincing view that GEDIS is a pronoun rather than an adverb and can be extended to cover two new facts about GEDIS, where the distributive host is a plural verb phrase or a plural adverbial phrase. The conclusion reached is that GEDIS is a pro-form that is semantically associated with and syntactically apposed to a plural antecedent in the capacity of a nominal, a verb or an adverbial.

Structured Plurality Reconsidered

AbstractIn this article, I address the question of the semantic analysis of structured plurals, that is, expressions like these children and those children, which seem to refer to pluralities of individuals divided into groups. In the first half of the article, I describe a variety of structured plural expressions and predicates they can combine with and I point out the difficulties faced by two extant approaches to the semantics of plurals: inflationary and cover-based semantics. In the second half of the article, I propose an alternative account which combines elements from both of them. The main novelty of my proposal is that, by capitalising on the background operation of certain pragmatic principles, it correctly formalises the fact that some interpretations of ambiguous sentences involving structured plurality are more accessible than others.

Interpreting plural predication: homogeneity and non-maximality

Plural definite descriptions across many languages display two well-known properties. First, they can give rise to so-called non-maximal readings, in the sense that they ‘allow for exceptions’ (Mary read the books on the reading list, in some contexts, can be judged true even if Mary didn’t read all the books on the reading list). Second, while they tend to have a quasi-universal quantificational force in affirmative sentences (‘quasi-universal’ rather than simply ‘universal’ due to the possibility of exceptions we have just mentioned), they tend to be interpreted existentially in the scope of negation (a property often referred to as homogeneity, cf. Löbner in Linguist Philos 23:213–308, 2000). Building on previous works (in particular Krifka in Proceedings of SALT VI, Cornell University, pp 136–153, 1996 and Malamud in Semant Pragmat, 5:1–28, 2012), we offer a theory in which sentences containing plural definite expressions trigger a family of possible interpretations, and where general principles of language use account for their interpretation in various contexts and syntactic environments. Our theory solves a number of problems that these previous works encounter, and has broader empirical coverage in that it offers a precise analysis for sentences that display complex interactions between plural definites, quantifiers and bound variables, as well as for cases involving non-distributive predicates. The resulting proposal is briefly compared with an alternative proposal by Križ (Aspects of homogeneity in the semantics of natural language, University of Vienna, 2015), which has similar coverage but is based on a very different architecture and sometimes makes subtly different predictions.

Collective preferences in Dutch revealed by a covered-box experiment

Abstract Sentences with plural expressions are compatible with distributive and collective interpretations. Adults generally prefer collective interpretations, whereas children do not. Dotlačil (2010) argues that the adult collective preference arises via an implicature. Adults can reason about alternative utterances with the distributive marker each, thereby ruling out distributive interpretations in favor of collective interpretations. Experiment 1 used the covered-box paradigm to investigate whether adults and children make the comparisons predicted by Dotlačil’s implicature account. Adults’ responses suggest that they made comparisons with internally generated alternatives, supporting the implicature account. Moreover, children seem to do so from around 11 years old onwards, after they have learned the distributive character of each. Experiment 2 excluded the possibility that our results in Experiment 1 were influenced by participants’ exposure to both collective and distributive pictures, making the collective interpretation more salient. Both experiments thus point towards an implicature underlying the adult collective preference.