Subject Pronouns Research Articles

Acquisition during normative code-mixing: Trinidadian children’s varilingual pronoun usage

While monolingual English speakers acquire most pronouns by age 5, acquisition amid prevalent, normative code-mixing, such as in Trinidad, is underexplored. This study examines how Trinidadian 3- to 5-year-olds express third-person subject, object, reflexive and possessive pronouns and factors influencing pronoun choices. Seventy-five preschoolers produced pronouns via a word elicitation task conducted in Trinidadian English Creole and Trinidad and Tobago English. Responses were coded for children’s age, gender, district and socioeconomic status; task language; grammatical gender/number; and response form. Conditional inference trees facilitated statistical analysis. When choices were available, children exhibited variable production, with Creole forms often dominant. Grammatical gender influenced whether English or Creole pronouns were selected. Task language influenced possessive pronoun choices, indicating developing sociolinguistic competence. The non-significance of other variables suggests widespread mixing of English and Creole pronouns. Findings underscore the importance of describing understudied populations, especially where variation is inherent, to ensure accurate language assessment.

Asymmetries in child foreign language acquisition: production and interpretation of L2 English subjects

Child language acquisition in foreign language contexts with limited exposure is often a slow process where initial stages of development last longer than in L2 contexts or in adult learners. Exploring this context may provide insights into the nature of the acquisition process and how it is reflected in the data. This study explores young learners’ subject pronoun interpretation and realization in their non-native English. Thirty-seven 9-10 year-old Catalan/Spanish foreign language learners of English were tested on their grammatical knowledge of subjects (interpretation and production tasks). Whereas children show null subjects transferred from their L1 in the interpretation task, rates of null subjects are lower in production. The asymmetries found appear to be linked to the nature of the production of pre-learned structures, which masks the null subject grammars of the learners in this task. Our data contribute to the characterization of foreign language development in an early learning context.

A Historical-Variationist Analysis of Subject Pronoun Expression in 19th and Early 20th Century Arizonan Spanish

This diachronic study is a variationist analysis of subject pronoun expression (SPE) in two key Spanish-language Arizonan newspapers, El Fronterizo (1878–1914) and El Tucsonense (1915–1957), following Tucson’s annexation to the United States through the Gadsden Purchase, a period of great social change during which the Spanish-speaking population in the city underwent a gradual process of anglicization. Since some research on SPE in Spanish in the United States suggests that English-Spanish bilingualism increases the use of overt subject personal pronouns (SPPs) because of their almost categorical use in English, this study’s main aim is to track the initial stages of such progression in a period when social bilingualism was steadily extending in Tucson. In this respect, our results show that the presence of overt SPPs does increase over time in the data analyzed; however, lower rates of overt SPPs in contemporary Tucson and Phoenix spoken Spanish raise the possibility that the percentage surge in the aforementioned period is rather due to the offline written nature of the newspapers, which, for instance, weakens the effect of online constraints, such as switch reference, ambiguous TAM endings, and non-reflexive verbs. Even so, regression analyses with the mixed-effects statistical software Rbrul reveal that the linguistic factor groups shaping SPE in the diachronic data are essentially the same ones found operating in contemporary varieties of Spanish.

Double Subject Pronoun in the Dowsari Dialect of Saudi Arabic

Double Subject Pronoun in the Dowsari Dialect of Saudi Arabic

Variable First Person Singular Subject Expression in Spoken Valencian Catalan

In this paper, I analyze first person singular subject pronoun expression in spoken Valencian Catalan varieties. I present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 7 interviews from the corpus Parlars, examining 1sg subject rates regarding tense markings (syncretic vs. non-syncretic forms), verb type, and discourse type (monologues vs. conversations). It will be shown that the factor of morphological syncretism as well as verb type influence 1sg subject expression rates. Differently from what has been observed in some previous studies on Spanish, cognitive verbs are not associated with particularly high 1sg subject expression rates, but verbs of saying are. Looking at frequent verb forms in the spoken interviews, it will be shown that (jo) dic ‘(I) say’ plays an important role, direct speech being a commonly used mechanism in the data examined here. Furthermore, discourse type (monologue vs. conversation) affects subject expression rates. These results suggest that 1sg subject expression is influenced by an interaction of verb morphology, verb type and specific verb forms, but that subject expression rates and the factors influencing them vary depending on particular pro-drop varieties, discourse types and the type of data. Looking at the contexts in which the strong pronoun jo ‘I’ is used with verbs of saying in spoken Valencian Catalan, I argue that subject expression triggers a perspectival, rather than referential shift in several cases.

Preliminary description of Ngen pronominal elements

The paper provides a preliminary description of the pronominal elements of Ngen, a South Mande language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire. Pronominal elements are divided into three groups by morpho-syntactic characteristics: subject pronouns, personal pronouns in non-subject positions, and pronominal predicative markers (PPM). Subject pronouns and PPMs express not only person and number but also tense, aspect, modality, and polarity. PPMs differ from pronouns in their syntactic features: they are obligatory in the sentences with a full-fledged subject NP, while personal pronouns are not. The PPM are used to express the past tense, perfect, and habitual, while the basic subject pronouns are used to express the progressive and future tense.

Aboutness in a second language text: A large-scale study on topic reactivation by L2 Italian learners

Objectives: The study reports adult L2 Italian learners’ and native speakers’ (NS) choices between null and overt subject pronouns in a written illustrated story. The aim of the study is to ascertain whether learners have different perceptions of the aboutness topic compared with NS. Methodology: A total of 338 adult L2 Italian learners having different L1s filled in the blanks of a written story by choosing between the null pronoun and the third-person pronoun lui “he.” Data and analysis: The outcome variable was learners’ and NS’ choices between null and overt pronominal subject. Independent variables were: “anaphora” (“null” or “pronominal”) and “position” (“intrasentential,” when the antecedent and the gap were in the same sentence, and “intersentential,” when the antecedent and the gap were in two separate sentences). Findings: When the antecedent and the gap occurred in adjacent scenes of the story separated by punctuation, L2 learners—unlike NS—tended to reactivate the overt subject pronoun. Learners’ proficiency, L1, length of instruction, and knowledge of verb morphology significantly modulated the results. Originality: Punctuation in written texts strongly affects the likelihood that L2 learners use anaphoric means to reactivate the topic. L2 learners’ perception of aboutness in discourse is less robust and more affected by topic shifts and interruptions. Implications: Null subjects in texts should be dealt with upfront in second language instruction. Syllabi should deal with the difference between the use of overt and null pronouns in discourse.

A Rhetorical Strategy Of Ethical Appeals In Tgb Muhammad Zainul Majdi’s Moderate Discourse Of Da’wah Nusantara In Bali

The goal of this qualitative descriptive study is to understand how TGB Muhammad Zainul Majdi employed the rhetorical device of ethos (ethical appeals) to establish power/credibility and moderate speech. As a result, the researcher chose to focus on one of TGB Muhammad Zainul Majdi's most fascinating talks, specifically one that was given in Bali and attended by people from various socioeconomic classes, educational backgrounds, and even religious backgrounds. This is also a da'wah from the Archipelago TGB Muhammad Zainul Majdi in relation to the opening of the Wikondo pavilion. Discourse analysis is the data analysis technique that is being employed. It consists of three parts: transcription of speech from video sources, coding of language elements, and classification and inference. Based on the results of the document analysis of the transcription of speech using discourse analysis, it was found that TGB Muhammad Zainul Majdi used the similitude approach to conduct ethical appeal and attract listeners. In that case, similitude is widely used by employing the subject pronoun we, both inclusive and also inferential subject pronoun we. Then moderate speech to convey the message wisely and well is born from the delivery of TGB Muhammad Zainul Majdi.

Students’ Problems in Using English Pronouns at Junior High School Number 15 Jambi

This study aims to find out what are the students' problems in using English pronouns in using personal and possessive pronouns at SMP Negeri 15 Jambi. In this study, this research used qualitative research. The subjects of this study were class VIIG students of SMP Negeri 15 Jambi in the academic year 2021/2022. All problems in the use of pronouns have been categorized and identified, namely subject, object, possessive adjective, and possessive pronoun. In simple terms, the students face more problems in using object pronouns. This can be seen from the percentage results where the problem of using object pronouns is 35.2%, questions are answered incorrectly. Meanwhile, at least students face problems in using possessive pronouns by 14.4%. The result of this research found that the seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 15 Jambi mostly face the problem of using object pronouns, which is the most difficult thing for students because they do not really understand how to use object pronouns.

Dependency resolutions of null and overt subjects in English speakers’ L2 Chinese: Evidence for the cue-based model

This study investigates whether there are different first-language–second-language (L1–L2) dependency resolutions by focusing on less-studied crosslinguistic variances in L2 acquisition of Chinese, a null-subject language, by speakers of English, a non-null-subject language. The overt subject pronoun of a Chinese main clause has free orientation and its antecedent can be the subject or object of the preceding causal subordinate clause, depending on pragmatic biases. The null subject of a Chinese main clause, however, is subject-oriented, and this subject orientation is not affected by any pragmatic bias. English does not allow null subjects and, like Chinese, overt subject pronouns in English have free orientation. An acceptability judgement task and an interpretation task were adopted, and the results suggest that only the free orientation of overt subjects, but not the subject orientation of null subjects, is acquirable for English-speaking learners; they are found to be influenced by the pragmatic bias. This provides evidence for the cue-based model (Cunnings, 2017), which states that L1–L2 differences in dependency resolution can be explained in terms of L1–L2 differences in susceptibility to interference and L2ers’ over-reliance on discourse-based/pragmatic cues. It is also observed that in L1 Chinese, competition between the target antecedent and distractors occurs during the reading of the sentence, while in L2 Chinese, this occurs after the reading of the sentence. These findings add to our growing understanding of different mechanisms in L1 vs. L2 dependency resolutions.

The Translation of Subject Pronoun I from English into Balinese in the Novel The Little Prince and Raja Cenik

Balinese language has various varieties for its subject pronoun I. Investigating whether the translator presents these varieties when translating the English subject pronoun I into Balinese using the novel The Little Prince and its Balinese translation Raja Cenik is the focus of this study. As the finding, the translator utilizes three different lexicons in translating the English subject pronoun I into Balinese. These varieties include Icang, Titiang and Gelah. The utilization of these three lexicons depends on the social status of the speakers and the interlocutors. Balinese language possesses a number of different linguistic registers. Each of the register addresses the social status of the speakers and the interlocutors. The finding of this study shows that culture and language are intricately interwoven to each other in the translation process.

Community Norms and Lexical Frequency Shape U.S. Bilingual Children’s Subject Pronoun Expression

Abstract This study explores variable Spanish subject pronoun expression (e.g., yo veo ~ veo) in Spanish-English speaking children in different regions of the United States (U.S.): Los Angeles (LA), California, and the Tri-Cities area of the state of Washington. We also compare the U.S. children to monolingual Spanish-speaking children in Mexico. Binary logistic regression analyses of 2,064 verb tokens produced by nine U.S. children and nine children in Mexico, ages 5;11 to 7 years old, show that the children are sensitive to linguistic factors that typically influence children’s Spanish subject pronoun expression in their respective communities. In addition, we find that the LA children’s subject pronoun expression is predicted by lexical frequency. A subsequent analysis of the LA children’s frequent verbs uncovers two phrases with high degrees of prefabrication, yo creo and yo no sé, which, we argue, obscure the LA children’s sensitivity to Reference, all while acting as central exemplars of a [1sg+cognitive verb] construction.

Aspects of the contribution of systemic functional linguistics to ESP, with particular reference to the physical sciences research article

The study of a small sample of physical sciences research articles shows that although the overall rate of passive forms has changed little in recent years, individual articles display a wide range. Almost two thirds of passive forms are mental processes, including mathematical processes which form over half of the total. Some articles use first person pronoun subjects readily, while others use them hardly at all. Three quarters of the verbs with first person pronouns subjects occur with mental processes with half being mathematical. Nominalization has been common in scientific writing since the 18th century, and increased during the 20th century. This is frequently used within the thematic structure to build up the argument structure of a text. These features can be studied from a number of different theoretical perspectives, but systemic functional linguistics provides a total theory of language which shows how they form part of the same unified structure.

A Estratégia da Posição do Antecedente em línguas românicas de sujeito nulo

This study investigates the interpretation of pronominal subjects in European Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. 30 native speakers of each language completed two multiple-choice tasks (speeded and untimed), which elicited their interpretation of null and overt subject pronouns in intrasentential contexts with the order matrix‑subordinate. The tasks had a 2x2 design, crossing the following variables: animacy of the matrix object (+ animate vs. - animate) and type of pronominal embedded subject (overt vs. null). Results indicate that the PAS is consistently followed in EP but not in Italian or Spanish. In these languages, this strategy is adopted in overt subject resolution only in contexts where the antecedents are [+ animate]. In the resolution of null subjects, Italian and Spanish exhibit optionality between subject and object antecedents. Hence, there is microvariation in the resolution of pronominal subjects in these languages. Possible reasons for this are discussed in detail.

Étude de l’agentivité dans le discours de femmes souffrant de trouble de stress post-traumatique dans les suites de violences conjugales

IntroductionIn the absence of appropriate care, psychotraumatic consequences (revival, hyperarousal, avoidance strategies, dissociation and other clinical forms of post traumatic symptoms) can take control of a large part of the subject's existence (psychological, physical, social) and affect the ability of the victim to regain ground on the intrusions that harass, and to take up new life projects. More objective than the current semiological and psychometric approaches, and in the absence of biomarkers that may be used in clinical practice, psycholinguistics opens up an epistemological renewal of the conception of trauma and its clinical consequences, in particular through the definition of the Psycho Linguistic Traumatic Syndrome (SPLIT). If such conceptions have been developed based on the analysis of traumatic accounts of subjects injured in war and attacks, other forms of psychotraumatic confrontations also deserve to be considered. In this paper, our objective was to better characterize the pronominal forms of agency in the traumatic and non-traumatic narratives produced by women victims of domestic and/or sexual violence. MethodsNineteen women aged 20 to 60 victims of domestic violence and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview) as well as a matched control group participated in the study. The subjects completed the French versions of Post Traumatic Checklist (PCL-5), Dissociative Experience Scale (DES) and Hospital and Anxiety Depression Scale (HAD). Traumatic and non-traumatic narratives were linguistically coded and scored on the SPLIT-10 scale. ResultsTraumatic narratives contained significantly more first person singular pronouns than the non-traumatic narratives of controls or the non-traumatic narratives of psychically injured people. Traumatic narratives contained significantly more of the direct object pronoun “me” as well as indirect object pronouns. In traumatic narratives, the frequency of use of the subject pronoun “I” tended to correlate negatively with the HAD-A, HAD-D and SPLIT-10, while the frequency of use of the direct object pronoun “me” tended to correlate positively with DES, HAD-A, HAD-D as well as SPLIT-10. Finally, traumatic narratives contained significantly more verbs in the passive voice than non-traumatic narratives. DiscussionThere was a gradient in the use of the first person singular pronoun that was inversely correlated to the degree of traumatic valence of the narratives: the control group used “I” less often than the psychically injured people who appeared to use this pronoun all the more as their narratives had a traumatic valence. In other words, even in the so-called “non-traumatic” narratives produced by subjects suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, the trauma seemed to be inscribed in the discourse, testimony to dissociation, as the seen in the correlation of this pronominal expression dimension of “I” with the SPLIT-10 scale. The use of the direct object complement was correlated with greater psycho-traumatic morbidity (dissociative, depressive and anxious) than the use of the “I”, the latter remaining however a pathological mark instead of the use of the pronouns “we” or “one”. Saying “I” translated less symptomatology than saying “me”, but it was when the subject said “we” or “one” that he appeared to have returned to a normal discourse, no longer suffering from the torments of reliving or pathological dissociation. The identification of linguistic markers deserves to be pursued in order to better objectively describe post-traumatic psychiatric disorders, to better identify them in clinical practice in the field and to monitor the efficiency of the recommended psychotherapies. More generally, we may put forward the hypothesis that the direct modification of the patient's language, thanks to the intervention of the practitioner, from a speech composed of linguistic markers testifying to the trauma towards a normalized speech could help to treat post-traumatic symptoms.

Control in a Norwegian grammar maze

AbstractCoreference processing of Control constructions and their pronoun-containing counterparts can be studied experimentally using priming or interference paradigms. We replicate findings in a priming study on non-finite Control constructions in Norwegian (Larsen & Johansson, 2020) and contrast them with their finite counterparts using interference effects in a grammatical maze (G-maze) design. We asked participants to read sentences word-by-word and to select the grammatically correct continuation from two options. When the ungrammatical option was a potential antecedent from within the sentence, we predicted interference, i.e., longer reaction times compared to an unrelated baseline. We observed a trend towards significant interference effects when a participant was presented with either of the potential noun phrase (NP) antecedents of PRO in competition with the infinitive marker (test position zero) during the processing of a Control sentence. This indicates reactivation of potential antecedents at the infinitive marker, and a reactivation position (PRO) near or at the infinitive marker. We also observed significant differences between Control constructions and their pronoun counterparts. A significant interference effect was recorded for Subject Pronoun constructions when either potential NP antecedent of the pronoun was presented in competition with the pronoun itself. A similar trend was recorded for Object Pronoun sentences.

The pragmatic functions of tu and lei in films: Converging patterns of address across translated and original Italian dialogue

Address pronouns are strategies employed to position participants and express interpersonal meanings in real-life communication and on-screen. They straddle two areas of typological contrast as languages differ in terms of presence/absence of grammatical address and subject obligatoriness. In Italian, a binary distinction is established between the informal T-pronoun tu and the formal V-pronoun lei, while English lacks a T/V distinction. Concurrently, whereas English is an obligatory subject language, subject pronouns are as a rule optional in Italian. As no research has tackled the pragmatics of expressed address pronouns in film dialogue and audiovisual translation from English, the study investigates the occurrence of tu and lei in a corpus of original and dubbed Italian films and their discoursal and interpersonal functions. These were found to include shift of focus of attention, turn management, contrast, conflict, politeness and character's identification, variably associated with each address pronoun. The qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal noticeable convergence between translated and original dialogue, with dubbing reflecting the pragmatic expressiveness of domestic Italian films, while showing no shining through of the source language. Address pronouns play a crucial role in Italian film language, adding pragmatic weight to characters’ turns and enriching the dialogue intradiagetically and extradiagetically.

The Difficulties that Tertiary English Students Confront when Translating Relative Pronouns

The study aims to alleviate the relative pronoun difficulties that Saudi students encounter whenever translating. The study’s significance is that it uncovers relative pronouns among Saudi Arabian college freshmen. The study seeks to address the question: what difficulties do Saudi students confront when translating relative pronouns? The researcher employed a descriptive analytical approach. The sampling unit of twenty-five undergraduate students, preferred from the boys’ section, were males in the first stage, attending university in the second semester of 2020 at the College of Arts and Sciences, getting a degree in English in Beljurshi, Al Baha University, and this study used a validated assessment of written Arabic sentences as a technique to gather a description of the research problem. The analysis was undertaken, and the issues that Saudi students had with relative pronouns were located and labeled as whose, who, whom, where, and where in the study. According to the study’s findings, “whom” obtained a high score and “which” received a low score. According to the discussion, the difficulties that students have are caused by a lack of the student’s failure to distinguish between subject and object pronouns, inaccuracy could be attributed to a lack of differentiation between relative pronouns, and the student’s inability to discern between relative value pronouns. The study suggests further research into other areas related to relative pronouns.

Subject pronouns in Spanish-English code-switching

Abstract While the Minimalist Program argues that Spanish-English code-switches between pronominal subjects and finite verbs are ungrammatical (Van Gelderen & MacSwan, 2008), the MLF/4-M models (Myers-Scotton, 1993; Myers-Scotton & Jake, 2000) predict their grammaticality when overt pronouns are obligatory in both languages (e.g., contrastive focus). In this study, we test the contrary predictions of these models using a code-switching production task. Thirty-eight Spanish-English bilinguals (31 female; Age: 18–23 years) completed a concurrent memory-loaded repetition task where visual primes forced broad or contrastive focus interpretations. We also examined the effects of switch direction, code-switching frequency, and language dominance. The results showed that code-switches between a Spanish overt pronoun and an English inflected verb were more accurately produced in the contrastive focus than the broad focus condition, lending support for the MLF/4-M models. No effect of code-switching frequency was found. Finally, higher Spanish dominance resulted in more accurate production of these code-switches.

A Morphosyntactic Analysis on Narrative Writing of the Fresh Year Students’s of Management Informatics AMIK MEDICOM

The purpose of the research is to analyze about morphology and sintactic structure in writing an English narrative essay. Morphology and Sintax are very important studies in learning English. Morphology is the study of how words are structured and how they are put together from smaller part, as morphemes are the smallest significant units of grammar. Meanwhile syntax discusses how sentences are structured. The purposes of this research are to cover the students morphosintactic errors operating on the students of the management informatics students’ narrative writing and how these errors affect the whole clause structure, the inflectional morphemes, derivational morphemes and the pattern of clause structure in the students narrative writing. The method used in this reserch is qualitative describtion where the data sources are taken from the fresh year students narrative writing. The finding revealse are two kinds of morphology, they are derivational and inflectional. Affixes such as suffixes, infixes, prefixes, ablaut and reduplication are kinds of derivational morphology, meanwhile plural, possessive, past time, progressive, comparative, and superlative are kinds of inflectional morphology. Syntactically, the errors occur becuse of not being aware how to build a phrase or a sentence in English. They write more than one verb in a phrase or a sentence which does not need but one. As well they are not sure about word order in English and how to build a simple sentence. They like to miss subject or object pronoun in their sentence. We can explain that by saying that all these forms do not exist in Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian Language), resulting in the tendency for the students to omit or add these forms in their writing. Too many clauses in one sentence often occur in their sentece.