Subject-verb Concord Research Articles

Analysis of errors in the writing of content in dissertations and their impact on the learning of foreign languages: A case study in Ghana

The average postgraduate student in Ghana has about 20 years exposure in English language, having been taught and instructed in English from primary to tertiary level. It is, therefore, not far-fetched to expect the postgraduate student to commit minimal to no errors in their L2 writings. The seeming consequential minimal scholarly attention on errors in postgraduate writings regardless of the many studies on students’ errors is therefore not surprising. This study is an attempt to identify, categorise and describe the errors in postgraduate dissertations in Ghana and highlight its implications for language teaching. This exploratory qualitative study carries out a content analysis of 20 randomly selected MA, MPhil and PhD dissertations published between 2020 and 2021. The data are analysed using the theory of Error Analysis. After critically assessing the dissertations, seven (7) categories of concord errors were identified and recorded. These are; subject-verb concord errors, inverted subject concord errors, concord errors associated with ‘has’ and ‘have’, determiner-noun errors, concord errors on numbers, noun-pronoun antecedent errors and compound subject concord errors. This implies that postgraduate students are prone to errors, hence, the need to introduce or intensify the teaching of English at the postgraduate level.

Concord Errors in Postgraduate Theses in Ghana: A Descriptive Analysis

The average postgraduate student in Ghana has about 20 years exposure in English language, having been taught and instructed in English from primary to tertiary level. It is, therefore, not far-fetched to expect the postgraduate student to commit minimal to no errors in their L2 writings. The seeming consequential minimal scholarly attention on errors in postgraduate writings regardless of the many studies on students’ errors is therefore not surprising. This study is an attempt to identify, categorise and describe the errors in postgraduate dissertations in Ghana and highlight their implications for language teaching. This exploratory qualitative study carries out a content analysis of 20 randomly selected MA, MPhil and PhD dissertations published between 2020 and 2021. The data are analysed using the theory of Error Analysis. After critically assessing the dissertations, seven (7) categories of concord errors were identified and recorded. These are; subject-verb concord errors, inverted subject concord errors, concord errors associated with ‘has’ and ‘have’, determiner-noun errors, concord errors on numbers, noun-pronoun antecedent errors and compound subject concord errors. This implies that postgraduate students are prone to errors, hence, the need to introduce or intensify the teaching of English at the postgraduate level.

Corpus-Based Investigation of S-V Concord Patterns of Nouns with Latin Plural Endings

English subject-verb concord can pose problems to learners such as omission of third person singular inflection and overextension due to linguistic typology, phonological and perceptual factors, syntax, and the number of nouns acting as the subject of the sentence, among others. A group of nouns that invites confusion is what Huddleston and Pullum (2002) call nouns with Latin plural endings whose singular forms are uncommon compared to their plural counterparts. This investigation aims to provide teachers with guidance on the general and genre-based agreement patterns of these nouns using the balanced Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). This study found that based on their agreement patterns these nouns can be classified into three groups: 1) nouns whose tendencies are line with prescriptive rules; 2) noun whose tendencies are ambivalent; and 3) nouns which might have already been “reclassified” by speakers. By genres, there was a strong preference to use “plural” verbs with these nouns in the written and the academic components of the corpus while “singular” verbs are preferred in the spoken components. The implications of the study for teaching and research were also provided.

Grammatical Errors in Indonesian University Students’ Posters in Yogyakarta

This study aims to investigate grammatical errors in posters published byIndonesianUniversitystudents’ inYogyakarta. The errors are classified based on the Surface Strategy Taxonomy by Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982) mixed with linguistic categories. Based on the data analysis on 97 posters from 7 universities inYogyakarta, there are 201 errors found. The highest frequency of errors is Omission in terms of number with 122 occurrences (60.69 %), followed by Omission in subject-verb concord with 45 errors (22.38 %), and Omission of preposition with 6 occurrences (2.98 %). In total there are 182 (90.56%) Omission errors, while the other errors only occur less than 10%. The result shows that there are tendencies to omit necessary items rather than add, misform, misorder, or misuse items.

COMPETENCE OF ESL STUDENTS IN GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURES

Knowledge of basic elements of English grammar facilitates communicative competence. Grammatical structure, therefore, constitutes a main component of English language study at all school levels in Nigeria. The purpose of the study is to evaluate the grammatical competence of senior secondary school three students as candidates of senior school certificate examination (SSCE). The study subjects were some one hundred regular senior secondary school certificate examination (SSCE) candidates in Makurdi town in central Nigeria. The test instrument comprises of thirty structural items adopted from a particular past SSCE English language paper 2 of West African Examination Council (WAEC). The data were analyzed with percentage and frequency statistics. The results of the data analysis show that the students are particularly weak in question tags, phrasal verbs, subject-verb concord, modal meanings, subjunctive mood, tense backshift, personal pronoun objective case, correlative conjunction and compound noun plurals. These deficiencies affect their communication in English and invariably their performance in senior school certificate English examination. It is therefore recommended that students at this level should be taught basic elements of grammar to aid their proficiency in communication. Article visualizations:

SOME PROBLEMS OF GRAMMATICAL AGREEMENT IN WRITTEN PRODUCTIONS OF SCIENCE STUDENTS OF ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES

Concord, also termed Agreement in English grammar, is an indispensable sentential element in daily language use. So its knowledge is instrumental to meaningful learned communication. A major type is subject-verb concord which has attracted detailed description in grammar and adequate focus in empirical studies on the usage problems of learners of English as a second language particularly at the tertiary school level in Nigeria. But other concord types have not had sufficient focus in such research works. The purpose of the study is to describe the other concord types using structural grammar approach and investigate the difficulties with their usage in the written productions of some science undergraduate students. The study subjects are two hundred and eighty-six students randomly drawn from among first-year students of an academic session in University of Agriculture, Makurdi. A research instrument, which has both essay- writing task and objective test, was administered to the students at the close of the session when they had had a use of English course, called Communication in English . Frequency and percentage statistical tools, in addition to extracts from the students’ works, are used to analyze the data. The findings show that the students construct sentences devoid of the following concord relationships: subject-complement, object-complement, distributive-number, pronoun-antecedent and concord of person. The identified linguistic incompetence adversely affects their communication in English. It is therefore recommended that the concord types studied here should be adequately taught and accompanied with sufficient practice exercises at the level of the English course for first-year university students so that they can gain mastery in the use of the items in communication. Article visualizations:

The Difficulties Ghanaian Senior High School (SHS) Students Encounter in Studying English Grammatical Concord

The Difficulties Ghanaian Senior High School (SHS) Students Encounter in Studying English Grammatical Concord Justine Bakuuro Abstract The major problem investigated in this study was the difficulties senior high school two students of Islamic and Wa senior high schools encounter in the use of English grammatical concord. The purpose of the study was to identify these concord learning challenges. The instruments used to collect data were intervention tests and questionnaire. The research design included pre-intervention, intervention and post-intervention. The study discovered that most of the students could not apply the rules of concord correctly. They had very serious problems with subject-verb concord. Most students applied concord rules correctly to a very large extend after they were taken through the rules guiding concord in the intervention procedure. In conclusion, this research has proved that an intervention procedure is very important in assisting students to overcome their concord learning challenges. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v5n2a3

Homogeneity in subject-verb concord in South African English

This paper explores the strategies employed by speakers of South African English for subject-verb concord using a large-scale methodology. It is argued that there is a complex interplay between broad types of agreement (e.g., syntactic vs notional agreement) and specific strategies for agreement (e.g., agreement with head noun vs ‘attraction’ agreement with the linearly closest noun). It is demonstrated that a particular type of notional agreement, namely ‘Atomic-Homogeneous’ agreement plays the largest role in South African English; although other types of agreements are also present in the data set. Since this type of agreement has not been widely reported on in the literature on American and British English, it may be that South African English represents a departure from agreement in these varieties. The paper also demonstrates the viability of large-scale methodologies for this type of research.

EFL LEARNERS’ GRAMMATICAL DEVIATIONS FROM CONCORD: What degree did they become mistakes and errors?

This article, based on the other part of the research entitled EFL Learners’ Concord Mastery and their grammatical Deviations carried out by the writer, aims at describing to what degree EFL learners have committed grammatical deviations from 3 types of concord: subject-verb concord (SVC), subject-complement concord (SCC), and subject-object concord (SOC) and to what extent those deviations became mistakes and errors. With the population of 120 EFL learners of three classes of the third year students of the English Department of the Faculty of Languages, Literature, and Arts of the State University of Padang, and with one class of them chosen as the sample comprising of 32 subjects by cluster-sampling technique, the data were gathered through a fifty-item test with one administration but with 4 versions of the answers. Thus, with 4 versions of grammatical deviations (GD): GD of version 1 (GD1), GD2, GD3, and GD4 taken from the answers of the test of version 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively, and the overall grammatical deviations (OGD) as the accumulation of the 4 versions of GD, and by using quantitatively descriptive method, it was found out that on the average the EFL learners’ GD1 was more than one-third of the total test items (TTI), and that of the OGD was nearly a half of TTI. Besides, after the split of OGD into mistakes and errors it was known the ratio between the two kinds of GD was about 2:5, or in every 7 GD there were 2 mistakes and 5 errors on the average. Furthermore, there were 3 types of grammatical errors (GE) found for each kind of concord: omission, addition, and misformation. Misformation had the greatest percentages of GE for SVC and SOC. Most of the GE of this type dealt with the use of plural verbs for singular ones, that of possessive adjective (their) for reflexive genitive (their own), that of reciprocal pronoun referring to 2 peeople (each other) for reciprocal pronoun referring to 3 people or more (one another) and that of object pronoun (them) for reciprocal pronoun referring to 3 people or more (one another). For SCC the omission type of the GE had the greatest, and most of them were absence of plural indicators –s/-es.

Subject-Verb Concord with Collective Nouns or the Count-Mass Distinction: Which is More Difficult for Polish Learners of English?

Two aspects of English syntax were chosen for closer analysis in the present paper, i.e., subject� verb concord involving collective nouns in the singular and the syntactic marking of noun reclas� sification from the category of uncountable nouns to that of countable ones with the help of the indefinite article. The study aims to find out which of them is more difficult for Polish learners of English and whether the degree of difficulty depends on the learners’ proficiency in the foreign language. The discussion is based on the results yielded by an empirical study in which interme� diate and advanced Polish students of English took part. The subjects had to complete partial

NONSTANDARD VERBAL PARADIGMS IN EARLIER WHITE SOUTHERN AMERICAN ENGLISH

This article presents an analysis of subject-verb concord in earlier white Southern American Vernacular English (SAVE). The data were taken from the Southern Plantation Overseers Corpus (SPOC), a collection of vernacular letters dating from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. Part one focuses on the effect of two internal linguistic constraints that govern the occurrence of present-tense verbal -s: The first constraint affects the auxiliaries have and be and predicts higher rates of -s when compared to lexical verbs. A second, functional constraint, which to the author's knowledge has not been investigated in other studies to date, operates on be, depending on its function as copula or other auxiliary verb. Part two investigates was/were variation in the early SAVE past-tense be paradigm. Separate analyses of all idiolects that combine to make up the community grammar of the overseers demonstrate that idiolects need to be considered in a sound interpretation and explanation of the results of group analysis.

Reversing the trajectory of language change: Subject–verb agreement with be in New Zealand English

This article examines the historical evolution of subject–verb concord in New Zealand English. We investigate the usage of the singular form of be with plural NP subjects (existentials and nonexistentials) over the past 150 years. The results demonstrate that the New Zealand English subject–verb concord system has undergone considerable reorganization during this time. Singular concord in nonexistentials occurred in early New Zealand English, but is now largely absent. In existentials, it steadily declined during the late 19th century, and then reversed this trajectory to become a well established feature of modern New Zealand English. Singular concord in New Zealand English existentials is now conditioned by a range of social and linguistic factors, and largely resembles other varieties in this respect.We are indebted to the ONZE team, particularly Elizabeth Gordon, Margaret Maclagan, and everyone involved in the collection and transcription of the corpora over the years. Thanks also to the students of Ling 203 2002 for their preliminary analysis of the data and lively discussion. Helpful feedback on this paper has been provided by David Britain, Elizabeth Gordon, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury, Peter Trudgill, Heidi Quinn, the audience at the New Zealand Linguistic Society conference, and three anonymous referees. The authors are listed in alphabetical order.

تأثير المعنى في كسر القواعد النحوية: مطابقة الفعل والفاعل

The purpose of this study is twofold: (i) to examine the extent to which English native speakers' abide by the grammar rule of concord that the verb must agree with its subject in number, and (ii) to highlight the implications of the obtained results for EFL teaching/learning process. For this purpose, a test consisting of 23 concord items was devised and presented orally and in writing to two different groups of English native speakers. The results showed that the majority of native speakers do not actually follow the formal rule of concord and resort to other kinds of concord under the pressure of semantic content. These findings have pedagogical implications for EFL teaching/learning process. EFL teachers, when teaching grammar, should take into consideration not only what traditional grammars say but also what native speakers actually say. تهدف هذه الدراسة إلى تحديد مدى التزام ناطقي اللغة الإنجليزية الأصليين شفوياً وكتابياً بالقاعدة الإنجليزية التقليدية التي تنص على وجوب مطابقة الفعل والفاعل في العدد. كما تهدف إلى تقييم مضاعفات هذا الالتزام أو عدمه على طبيعة اللغة نفسها وعلى تعلم هذه اللغة وتعليمها لغة أجنبية. وقد تكونت عينة الدراسة من ثلاثين طالباً إنجليزيا اختيروا بالطريقة العشوائية، وأعد لهذا الغرض اختبار بسيط يتألف من ثلاثة وعشرين سؤالاً ثم قدم للطلاب بطريقتين: الأولى شفوية والثانية كتابية. وقد أظهرت نتائج الدراسة أن معظم الناطقين الأصليين باللغة الإنجليزية لا يطابقون الفعل والفاعل في العدد في أحيان كثيرة (حسب القاعدة الإنجليزية التقليدية)، وإنما يعتمدون كثيراً على معنى الفاعل، وكان ذلك بارزاً في الاختبار الشفوي أكثر منه في الاختبار الكتابي. وبناءً على ذلك خلصت الدراسة إلى أن هناك اتجاهاً قوياً عند الناطقين الأصليين باللغة الإنجليزية (وربما غيرها من اللغات) إلى كسر القوانين والقواعد التقليدية التي وصفها علماء اللغة تحت تأثير المعنى والاستخدام اليومي، كما خلصت الدراسة إلى أنه ما دام معظم أصحاب اللغة الأصليين لا يلتزمون بالقواعد الموصوفة تقليدياً في كتب القواعد فإنه يجدر بمدرسي اللغة الإنجليزية لغة أجنبية أن يكونوا على دراية بهذه التطورات، وأن يأخذوها بعين الاعتبار في أثناء تدريسهم هذه اللغة لغة أجنبية.

The Northern Subject Rule in Ulster: How Scots, how English?

In diffusionist accounts of the Northern Subject Rule (NSR), this subject–verb concord system spread from Scotland via Ulster to North America and elsewhere. Thus, the NSR in Mid-Ulster English dialects of districts originally settled from England is attributed to diffusion from Ulster-Scots. But the NSR was also a feature of dialects of the North and North Midlands, the regions that contributed most of the English settlers to the Ulster Plantation. Since English and Scottish settlement patterns established in the seventeenth century have been reflected in Ulster dialect boundaries since then, the founder principle provides an alternative account of the persistence of the NSR in Northern Irish English. Usage in nineteenth-century emigrant letters indicates that the NSR was as strong in English-influenced dialects of Mid-Ulster as in Ulster-Scots and suggests that the NSR in Ulster may be a direct import from England as well as Scotland.The author thanks Anniken Telnes Iversen, Toril Swan, and Hilde Sollid for reading and commenting on various drafts of this article; Herbert Schendl, Graham Shorrocks, and Dieter Stein for providing references, questions, and answers; and Laura Wright and Lukas Pietsch for offering both kinds of help as well as furnishing copies of forthcoming work that proved interesting and useful. Thanks also to Jack Chambers for copies of his papers. I am also grateful to the anonymous referees for LVC. Their comments, objections, and suggestions have been accommodated as far as possible and the responses to them have, I hope, improved the result. In the usual way, responsibility for any remaining errors lies with me.

Subject-Verb Concord in a Postinsular Dialect

Most natives of Ocracoke, North Carolina, will attribute their roots to the Eng lish who began coming to the island at the start of the eighteenth century. Some Ocracokers will also admit to Scots or Scots-Irish ancestry, and some, especially those bearing Scottish names, are quite proud of it. Almost 300 years removed from the time of the first Anglo-American settlement on Ocracoke, the distinctions between English and Scots origins would seemingly be erased in all but name. To a great extent this is true, but the island of Ocracoke has only been in a postinsular stage of development for 40 years, previously cut off from the mainland except by small boat (Wolfram, Hazen, and Schilling-Estes 1999). This isolation has allowed one aspect of their grammatical system, their subject-verb concord system, to maintain almost the same patterns that existed in Scots English more than 600 years ago. In this quantitative study of the Ocracoke English subject-verb concord system, I present data and statistics from sociolinguistic interviews conducted with ancestral islanders to support the hypothesis that the subject-verb concord pattern of Scots English, although not the predominant pattern, has structurally persisted with only minor adjustments for more than 600 years. The subject-verb concord pattern was transferred from Scotland to Ulster, Ireland, and remained there for more than a century before it was transferred to the United States. The Scots-Irish who came to the United States carried with them the same pattern as their Scots ancestors but at reduced rates (Montgomery and Robinson 1996). The rates of the Ocracoke pattern are lower, but the pattern persists. I also hypothesize that the Ocracoke subject-verb concord system is the result of dialect mixing. The two contributing dialects are the eighteenth-century British system (the superstrate) and the eighteenth-century Scots-Irish system (the sub AUTHOR’S NOTE:I would like to thank Walt Wolfram for his patience with this article and the formative criticism he gave through his many readings. The research for this article was supported by an NSF grant (SBR-93-19577) directed by Walt Wolfram. I would also like to thank Michael Montgomery and the two JEngL reviewers for a number of insightful comments and criticisms on the current version of this article.

Subject-Verb Concord in a Postinsular Dialect: The Gradual Persistence of Dialect Patterning

Subject-Verb Concord in a Postinsular Dialect: The Gradual Persistence of Dialect Patterning

4. Subject-Verb Concord in Outer Banks English

4. Subject-Verb Concord in Outer Banks English

A Comprehensive Spanish Grammar

Foreword. Abbreviations. 1. Pronunciation. 2. The Article. 3. The Noun. 4. The Adjective. 5. Numerals. 6. Personal Pronouns. 7. Demonstrative Pronouns and Adjectives. 8. Possessive Pronouns and Adjectives. 9. Relatives. 10. Interrogative and Exclamatory Pronouns and Adjectives. 11. Indefinite Pronouns and Adjectives. 12. Impersonal Expressions. 13. The Adverb. 14. Comparative Constructions. 15. Prepositions. 16. Constructions with Verbs and Nouns. 17. Conjunctions. 18. The Verb - Conjugation. 19. Uses of the Tenses. 20. The Passive. 21. Use of the Moods. 22. The Impersonal Forms of the Verb. 23. Special Problems with Spanish Verbs. 24. Subject-Verb Concord. 25. Syntax of Negative Elements. 26. Word Order. 27. Affective Suffixes. Notes. Bibliography. Word Index.

On resolving disagreement: Linguistic theory and variation – There's bridges

ABSTRACTStudies of concord variation in English have found subject-verb concord to be particularly low in existential sentences such as There's bridges. Noting that these sentences are unusual because the subject NP is postverbal and is generally indefinite, we hypothesized that the unusual concord variation pattern was a result of structural differences associated with the restriction on the type of determiners preceding the postverbal NP. Using variationist methodology, we analyzed natural speech data from 31 speakers of standard Canadian English and found an overwhelming preference for singular agreement in existentials. Contrary to our predictions, this was not linked to a determiner-based structural distinction, but rather to the form of the copula (i.e., full or clitic) and the speaker's level of education. Our findings have implications for those theoretical studies of existentials that assume concord, because the effect of education suggests that this assumption reflects the bias of the higher educational level of the researchers.

Literary Dialect as Linguistic Evidence: Subject-Verb Concord in Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature

L'A. examine l'accord sujet-verbe tel qu'il etait effectue au 19 e siecle par sept auteurs du sud des Etats-Unis dans leur dialecte litteraire. Ces auteurs representent differents types litteraires, allant de la fiction historique au roman humoristique