Subject Verb Research Articles

Processing Coordinate Subject-Verb Agreement in L1 and L2 Greek.

The present study examines the processing of subject-verb (SV) number agreement with coordinate subjects in pre-verbal and post-verbal positions in Greek. Greek is a language with morphological number marked on nominal and verbal elements. Coordinate SV agreement, however, is special in Greek as it is sensitive to the coordinate subject's position: when pre-verbal, the verb is marked for plural while when post-verbal the verb can be in the singular. We conducted two experiments, an acceptability judgment task with adult monolinguals as a pre-study (Experiment 1) and a self-paced reading task as the main study (Experiment 2) in order to obtain acceptance as well as processing data. Forty adult monolingual speakers of Greek participated in Experiment 1 and a hundred and forty one in Experiment 2. Seventy one children participated in Experiment 2: 30 Albanian-Greek sequential bilingual children and 41 Greek monolingual children aged 10–12 years. The adult data in Experiment 1 establish the difference in acceptability between singular VPs in SV and VS constructions reaffirming our hypothesis. Meanwhile, the adult data in Experiment 2 show that plural verbs accelerate processing regardless of subject position. The child online data show that sequential bilingual children have longer reading times (RTs) compared to the age-matched monolingual control group. However, both child groups follow a similar processing pattern in both pre-verbal and post-verbal constructions showing longer RTs immediately after a singular verb when the subject was pre-verbal indicating a grammaticality effect. In the post-verbal coordinate subject sentences, both child groups showed longer RTs on the first subject following the plural verb due to the temporary number mismatch between the verb and the first subject. This effect was resolved in monolingual children but was still present at the end of the sentence for bilingual children indicating difficulties to reanalyze and integrate information. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that (a) 10–12 year-old sequential bilingual children are sensitive to number agreement in SV coordinate constructions parsing sentences in the same way as monolingual children even though their vocabulary abilities are lower than that of age-matched monolingual peers and (b) bilinguals are slower in processing overall.

Subject-verb order variation with unaccusative verbs of change of location in Mexico and Southern Arizona

AbstractThe subjects of unaccusative verbs of change of location (e. g.,llegar, venir) may appear in pre-verbal and post-verbal position. However, most syntactic accounts of word order in Spanish suggest that VS is the canonical order for these verbs. This claim has been supported by some experimental data, but further insight on the mechanisms underlying this particular instance of variation can still be gained from its study from a variationist, corpus-based perspective. We investigate the SV-VS alternation in the spontaneous oral discourse of two populations, monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico City and Spanish-English bilingual speakers from Southern Arizona. Multivariate analyses reveal that the informative load of the subject, the animacy of the subject, verbal tense and aspect, and the presence or absence of an initial modifier, in this order, condition word order selection. The results also show that bilingual speakers from Southern Arizona are less flexible than monolinguals speakers in assigning word order to unaccusative verbs of change of location when the subject does not introduce new information, favoring SV almost categorically. A possible cause for this dissimilar behavior is the influence of English, where unaccusative verbs tend to appear pre-verbally, on the Spanish of these bilinguals.

Misinterpretations in agreement and agreement attraction.

It has been well established that subject-verb number agreement can be disrupted by local noun phrases that differ in number from the subject head noun phrase. In sentence production, mismatches in the grammatical number of the head and local noun phrases lead to agreement errors on the verb as in: the key to the cabinets are. Similarly, although ungrammaticality typically causes disruption in measures of sentence comprehension, the disruption is reduced when the local noun phrase has a plural feature. Using a forced-choice comprehension question method, we report two experiments that provide evidence that comprehenders were likely to misinterpret the number information on the head noun phrase when morphosyntactic number markings on the local noun phrase and verb did not match the head. These results are consistent with a growing body of research that suggests that comprehenders often arrive at a final interpretation of a sentence that is not faithful to the linguistic input.

The role of verbal prefixes and particles in aspectual composition

In this paper we provide an analysis of the function of Polish verbal prefixes and German verbal particles in aspectual composition of incremental theme predicates (ITP) such aseatanddrink. Incremental theme verbs (e.g.eat,drink) are well known for the fact that the referential properties of the incremental theme arguments (ITA) affect the telicity of the whole predication. In the Slavic languages, only prefixed incremental theme verbs result in a telic predication. Since in many cases prefixed verbs are perfective, it is often assumed that telicity results from perfectivity. We argue that grammatical aspect is not necessary for achieving a telic ITP, since there are perfective ITPs that do not result in a telic predication. Rather (a)telicity is dependent on the semantic content of the verbal prefix.

The impact of notional number and grammatical gender on number agreement with conjoined noun phrases

ABSTRACTMorphophonology influences subject–verb agreement in a wide variety of languages. Dominant models of agreement production [e.g. Marking and Morphing, Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., & Bock, J. K. (2005). Making syntax of sense: Number agreement in sentence production. Psychological Review, 112, 531–559. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.112.3.531 Competition models, Mirković, J., & MacDonald, M. C. (2013). When singular and plural are both grammatical: Semantic and morphophonological effects in agreement. Journal of Memory and Language, 69, 277–298. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2013.05.001 posit explanations for morphophonological effects that depend on ambiguity. The present study uses sentence completion tasks in Dutch (Experiment 1) and German (Experiment 2) that manipulate notional number and grammatical gender with conjoined noun phrases to investigate how morphophonology affects number agreement. Results show that speakers of both languages produced more singular agreement with items construed as more notionally singular, and with items containing two nouns with the same grammatical gender, even though, prima facie, grammatical gender should be irrelevant for subject–verb number agreement in these languages. Experiment 2 showed that the grammatical gender effect was not driven by morphophonological ambiguity. These results provide novel insight into how morphophonology, via cue-based retrieval, can affect subject–verb number agreement.

Untangling Synchronic and Diachronic Variation: Verb Agreement in Palmerston English

This paper examines documents and recordings from the past 100 years to analyse the factors that affect the selection of verb form in Palmerston English. Palmerston Island is a small island in the Cook Islands group that was settled by a small group in the 1860s, which included an Englishman, a Portuguese or Portuguese-creole-speaking man, and a small group of Cook Islanders. The descendants of this population speak a dialect of English, and early documents from the island were primarily also written in vernacular English. As is the case in many varieties of English around the world, present tense verb endings do not exactly follow the Standard English pattern of -s following a third person singular subject and bare verbs elsewhere. The variation in -s marking, both historically and synchronically, has been abstracted away in previous descriptions of the dialect. This paper describes for the first time the variant verb agreement patterns found at each stage of the dialect's history, examines various grammatical and social factors that contribute to the distribution of the forms, and uses a logistic regression analysis to model the interactions of the factors and their contributions to the output. This contributes to a growing literature on the -s alternation in English dialects, and is one of only a few studies that has been able to include data from multiple individuals and also from a relatively long historical timeframe. I find that significant predictors of third person verb forms include subject type, subject number, whether the verb is be or not, and at least in the later data, the proximity of the subject to the verb. I also find that the amount of individual variation among speakers is large enough that it almost obscures diachronic variation. This is a finding that has methodological implications for future research into the phenomenon in other varieties, for example casting doubt on the usefulness of ‘apparent time’ studies.

Children's Production of Subject-Verb Agreement in Hebrew When Gender and Context are Ambiguous.

Third and 5th grade Hebrew-speaking children performed two sentence completion tasks, one requiring the assignment of male, female, or gender-ambiguous names and the inflection of verbs for male-stereotyped, female-stereotyped, and gender-neutral activities, and the other task, of inflecting verbs for male- and female-stereotyped activities performed by children with gender-ambiguous names. The question of concern was whether when faced with the need to inflect verbs to match the conceptual gender of the sentence subject, the gender-stereotyped nature of the activities in question and children's own gender would play a role in resolving the dilemma created by gender-ambiguous names and contexts. In both parts of the study, we found that (1) children's own gender played a role in determining the pattern of verb inflection, and (2) children used their semantic knowledge regarding the gender-stereotyped nature of activities to inflect verbs so as to create subject-verb agreement. Hence, subject-verb agreement in children draws on both their grammatical and semantic knowledge.

Chinese‐Speaking Adults' Understanding of Argument Structure

AbstractSyntactic constructions roughly correspond to sentence meanings. Jiang and Haryu (2014) found that Chinese children can associate subject‐verb‐object (SVO) constructions with causative events at age 2, but do not always map subject‐verb (SV) constructions to noncausative events, even after reaching 5 years of age. The latter results may be attributed to the fact that Chinese allows argument‐dropping. That is, an SV sentence in Chinese sometimes includes an intransitive verb, but other times includes a transitive verb with the object dropped. This paper investigated Chinese adults' knowledge of syntax‐semantics correspondence. Experiment 1 found that Chinese adults did not always map SV sentences to noncausative events, while they almost always mapped SVO sentences to causative events. Experiment 2 found that they preferred to use SV and SVO constructions to describe noncausative and causative events, respectively. Chinese adults understand that causative and noncausative events should typically be described using transitive and intransitive constructions, respectively. However, when inferring to which event (causative or noncausative) the given sentence should be mapped, their performance seems to be regulated by actual SV sentence usage in Chinese.

Descriptive norms for 350 Chinese idioms with seven syntactic structures.

The most important forms of idioms in Chinese, chengyus (CYs), have a fixed length of four Chinese characters. Most CYs are joined structures of two, two-character words-subject-verb units (SVs), verb-object units (VOs), structures of modification (SMs), or verb-verb units-or of four, one-character words. Both the first and second pairs of words in a four-word CY form an SV, a VO, or an SM. In the present study, normative measures were obtained for knowledge, familiarity, subjective frequency, age of acquisition, predictability, literality, and compositionality for 350 CYs, and the influences of the CYs' syntactic structures on the descriptive norms were analyzed. Consistent with previous studies, all of the norms yielded a high reliability, and there were strong correlations between knowledge, familiarity, subjective frequency, and age of acquisition, and between familiarity and predictability. Unlike in previous studies (e.g., Libben & Titone in Memory & Cognition, 36, 1103-1121, 2008), however, we observed a strong correlation between literality and compositionality. In general, the results seem to support a hybrid view of idiom representation and comprehension. According to the evaluation scores, we further concluded that CYs consisting of just one SM are less likely to be decomposable than those with a VOVO composition, and also less likely to be recognized through their constituent words, or to be familiar to, known by, or encountered by users. CYs with an SMSM composition are less likely than VOVO CYs to be decomposable or to be known or encountered by users. Experimental studies should investigate how a CY's syntactic structure influences its representation and comprehension.

Subject�Verb Agreement in Turkish Agrammatic Broca�s Aphasia: Comparison of Person and Number Features

Subject�Verb Agreement in Turkish Agrammatic Broca�s Aphasia: Comparison of Person and Number Features

External arguments in transitivity alternations: A layering approach by Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Florian Schäfer

Reviewed by: External arguments in transitivity alternations: A layering approach by Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Florian Schäfer Malka Rappaport Hovav External arguments in transitivity alternations: A layering approach. By Artemis Alexiadou, Elena Anagnostopoulou, and Florian Schäfer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 320. ISBN 9780199571949. $115 (Hb). This monograph presents a comprehensive account of transitivity alternations involving the (non)expression of the external argument. It focuses on the causative alternation and both verbal and adjectival passives, drawing principally on data from English, Greek, and German, with reference to literature on other languages where available. Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou, and Schäfer (AA&S) have been responsible for many leading ideas in current analyses of transitivity alternations, and the present volume, couched in the distributive morphology and bare phrase structure frameworks, integrates a wealth of empirical generalizations from decades of literature on these alternations with the authors’ ideas on the syntactic construction of verb meaning. The integration of the cumulative insights from previous literature into a specific theory raises many questions of implementation that are directly addressed in the volume. Other ancillary issues are explored in depth without conclusive answers. The transitivity alternations under discussion are of particular theoretical relevance since they provide fertile ground for fleshing out ideas having to do with the decomposition of verb meaning. Two strands of research have given rise to ideas relating to the syntactic encoding of verb meaning; these merge in the analysis of the transitivity alternations in this book. The first motivation for lexical decomposition developed from observations about systematic relationships between morphologically related classes of words, which share a basic lexical form. The triplet in 1 is illustrative: English and other languages abound in such triplets, though in many languages the forms are distinct and morphologically related. (1) a. The soup is cool. b. The soup cooled. c. The chef cooled the soup. The event descriptions encoded in the sentences in 1 show systematic entailment relations among them and shared selectional restrictions on one of the arguments. These relations are captured by giving the sentences representations with a shared root and common substructures of structurally represented meaning involving primitive predicates such as CAUSE and BECOME. The representation associated with 1c contains that associated with 1b, which also contains that associated with 1a. These ideas can be traced back to the generative semantics literature (McCawley 1968, Lakoff 1970). The second conceptual source for verbal decomposition derives from purported asymmetries between the subject and object of verbs. The verb is claimed to be semantically closer to its internal arguments than its external argument, with the ability to dictate special meanings for its composition with the former but not the latter. These observations give rise to the idea that the subject is not an argument of the verb (later, root) but receives its theta-role from a functional category. This idea dates back at least to Marantz 1984 and was made particularly prominent and given a formal implementation in Kratzer 1996. The two strands of research have merged in approaches that take arguments to be introduced by functional categories which are assigned interpretations similar to those proposed for structures with the primitive predicates (Borer 2005, Pylkkänen 2008, Ramchand 2008, and others). What is traditionally taken to be verb meaning is then portioned out to meaning attributed to the root, sometimes contextually determined, and meaning attributed to the functional categories. Causatives, anticausatives, and adjectival and verbal passives are the perfect testing ground for such theories since they have been argued to be distinguished from one another in terms of the numbers of functional categories and the presence or absence of the external argument and the syntactic nature of its realization. [End Page 471] Ch. 1 introduces the range of data and the basic theoretical issues discussed in the book: the causative alternation, severing the external argument from the verb, the ontological categorization of roots, and the compositional construction of verb meaning. Ch. 2 lays out AA&S’s view that causatives and their anticausative counterparts do not differ in event complexity. This position contrasts with positions that suggest that there are two layers of v in a causative...

Subject Verb Agreement in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Saudi Dialect of Arabic (SA): A New Minimalist Account

Subject Verb Agreement in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Saudi Dialect of Arabic (SA): A New Minimalist Account Khalaf M. J. AlShammiry Abstract Using Chomsky’s theory of syntax, the Minimalist Program (MP) (1993, 1995, 2000), this paper presents a new analysis for the ongoing debatable word order variation in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and the Saudi dialect of Arabic (SA). It has been noticed that in SVO order, the subject agrees partially with the verb; whereas in VSO order, the subject fully agrees with the verb. In SA, the subject always fully agrees with the verb in both word orders. Previous studies have debated whether the preverbal subject is a subject or a topic or a focus. I argue that the noun in the MSA and SA is a subject which is either base generated in the case of the MSA or moved from inside the clause in the case of SA; making use of the distinction between al-jumlaalismiyya “ the nominal sentence” and al-jumlaal-fi?liyya “the verbal sentence” in Arabic, Abd Al-bidee (1996) and among others, I ague that there is a Head Phrase (HP) at the left periphery of the clause where the subject surfaces to check the nominal head feature of the HP and to mark the clause nominal. For this argument, I assume that the clitic onto the verb is either an agreement marker or a subject and the number feature is weak in MSA and strong in SA. In addition, before the syntax, the noun is split into an expletive and a noun or a clitic and the TP in SA has two specs. The two supporting pieces of evidence for my argument are the subject of the embedded clauses and the structure of the wh-questions in MSA. The contribution of the paper lies in the fact that it investigates the agreement issue in a dialect that is, to my knowledge, heretofore uninvestigated; and adds to our understanding of the syntax of the agreement asymmetry in MSA and SA. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jflcc.v4n2a8

On the syntactic status of I 'm sure

This study tests whether the syntactic status of the subject–adjective combination I’m/I am sure is similar to the subject–verb combination I think (i.e., whether it exhibits the same signs of grammaticalisation along two different parameters). More specifically, the study is concerned with the ability of I’m/I am sure to (i) occur in clause-medial and clause-final position, and with (ii) its preference for that-omission, by comparing the behaviour of I’m/I am sure with the results reported for I think in previous studies. The results show that I’m/I am sure behaves in a similar way to I think both in terms of its ability to occur in clause-medial and clause-final position, and in terms of its preference for that-omission. However, sure is both much less frequent than think in general, and is also proportionally less dominant among the class of adjectival predicates followed by that-clauses than think is among verbal predicates. This makes it difficult to argue that they have developed independently through the same frequency correlation. Instead, I argue that sure and think are part of the same grammaticalised constructional schema, and that the frequency of think could be seen to have an impact on the grammatical status of the parallel construction with sure.

Subject Verb Agreement in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Saudi Dialect of Arabic (SA): A New Minimalist Account

Subject Verb Agreement in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Saudi Dialect of Arabic (SA): A New Minimalist Account Khalaf M. J. AlShammiry Abstract Using Chomsky’s theory of syntax, the Minimalist Program (MP) (1993, 1995, 2000), this paper presents a new analysis for the ongoing debatable word order variation in both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and the Saudi dialect of Arabic (SA). It has been noticed that in SVO order, the subject agrees partially with the verb; whereas in VSO order, the subject fully agrees with the verb. In SA, the subject always fully agrees with the verb in both word orders. Previous studies have debated whether the preverbal subject is a subject or a topic or a focus. I argue that the noun in the MSA and SA is a subject which is either base generated in the case of the MSA or moved from inside the clause in the case of SA; making use of the distinction between al-jumlaalismiyya “ the nominal sentence” and al-jumlaal-fi?liyya “the verbal sentence” in Arabic, Abd Al-bidee (1996) and among others, I argue that there is a Head Phrase (HP) at the left periphery of the clause where the subject surfaces to check the nominal head feature of the HP and to mark the clause nominal. For this argument, I assume that the clitic onto the verb is either an agreement marker or a subject and the number feature is weak in MSA and strong in TA. In addition, before the syntax, the noun is split into an expletive and a noun or a clitic and the TP in SA has two specs. The two supporting pieces of evidence for my argument are the subject of the embedded clauses and the structure of the wh-questions in MSA. The contribution of the paper lies in the fact that it investigates the agreement issue in a dialect that is, to my knowledge, heretofore uninvestigated; and adds to our understanding of the syntax of the agreement asymmetry in MSA and SA. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v4n2a9

A case for two voices in Old Church Slavonic – reflexively marked OCS verbs

Old Church Slavonic data manifest significant similarities in the distribution and formal properties of anticausatives, reflexives, subject experiencer verbs, statives, and reciprocals, while their semantics may also be viewed as partly uniform. The structures representing the said classes of verbs are very frequent in the language, while passive structures, formed with analytic morpho-syntactic constructions, are relatively infrequent. Consequently, the expressions headed by anticausatives, reflexives, subject experiencer verbs, statives, and reciprocals (as well as dative impersonal structures) encroach on the area of semantics belonging in Modern Slavic to be the realm expressed in terms of passive morpho-syntax. The conclusion that can be drawn from this state of affairs is that Old Church Slavonic is characterized by the opposition of active and middle voices, while the passive voice is in its infancy.

Heritage and L2 processing of person and number features: Evidence from Spanish subject-verb agreement

This article reports on a study, with online measures, which investigated the processing of subject–verb (SV) agreement sentences by one group of heritage Spanish speakers (HSs), two groups of L2 learners of Spanish (L1 English) and one group of traditional Spanish native speakers. Experimental SV sentences manipulated person and number features with subjects and verbs in the present tense. Between-group statistical analyses indicated differential processing between the heritage and the L2 groups. The heritage group’s performance was more native-like than the L2 participants. Within-subject tests showed some similar patterns between heritage and L2 high-level processing, including delayed sensitivity to ungrammaticality after the verb region. We argue that the HSs were able to process basic grammar structures, just as traditional native speakers do. This suggests early bilingualism conferred an advantage to HSS when compared to L2 learners, in the control of basic agreement in Spanish.

Translating English non-human subjects in agentive contexts: A closer look at Dutch

While subjects of transitive action verbs in English and Dutch are typically realized as human agents (see Comrie 1989), both languages also feature instances of nonhuman agents in subject position. However, Vandepitte and Hartsuiker (2011) have shown that there are fewer options in Dutch and that translation issues present themselves in cases where both languages do not overlap. This paper wants to document overlap and differences in terms of non-prototypical subject realization by focussing on the strategies that are used in Dutch translations of six actions verbs (give, demonstrate, show, suggest, offer and tell) in combination with non-human subjects. Results reveal that a fair share of non-human subjects are also translated as such in the target language. Other strategies include occasional humanization of the non-human source text subjects, reduction of valency patterns with reduced agentivity vis-à-vis the English source-text sentences and shifts in the mapping of semantic roles onto syntactic functions.

Native language influence on the distributive effect in producing second language subject-verb agreement.

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the distributive effect when producing subject-verb agreement in English as a second language (L2) when the participant's first language either does or does not require subject-verb agreement. Both Chinese-English and Uygur-English bilinguals were included in Experiment 1. Chinese has no required subject-verb agreement, whereas Uygur does. Results showed that the distributive effect was observed in Uygur-English bilinguals but not in Chinese-English bilinguals, indicating that this particular first language (L1) syntactic feature is one significant factor affecting the distributive effect in the production of subject-verb agreement in L2. Experiment 2 further investigated the matter by choosing Chinese-English participants with higher L2 proficiency. Still, no distributive effect was observed, suggesting that the absence of distributive effect in Chinese-English bilinguals in Experiment 1 was not due to low proficiency in the target language. Experiment 3 changed the way the stimuli were presented, highlighting the singular or distributive nature of the subject noun phrases, and the distributive effect was observed in Chinese-English bilinguals. Altogether, the results show that the L1 syntactic feature of subject-verb agreement is one significant factor affecting the distributive effect in the production of subject-verb agreement in L2. More specifically, distributive effects rarely occur in L2 when L1 has no requirement on subject-verb agreement, whereas distributive effects are more likely to occur in L2 when the L1 also has required subject-verb agreement.

Raising, inversion and agreement in modern Hebrew

This paper focuses on the interaction between raising, subject–verb inversion and agreement in Modern Hebrew. It identifies, alongside ‘standard’ (i.e., English-like) subject-to-subject raising, two additional patterns where the embedded subject appears post-verbally. In one, the raising predicate exhibits long-distance agreement with the embedded subject, while in the other, a colloquial variant, it is marked with impersonal (3sm) agreement. The choice between the three raising constructions in the language is shown to be solely dependent on properties of the embedded clause. The data are discussed and analyzed against a background of typological and theoretical work on raising. The analysis, cast in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), builds on research on raising, selectional locality, agreement, subjecthood and information structure, as well as verb-initial constructions in Modern Hebrew.

Development of English to Yorùbá Machine Translation System for Yorùbá Verbs’ Tone Changing

In translating English sentences (text) to Yoruba sentences (text), some Yoruba verbs change tone from the bilingual dictionary low -tone to mid -tone when they are translated to Yoruba. They are called tone change verbs. These tone change verbs do pose some challenges in English to Yoruba machine translation. Most of the time it changes the meaning of the sentence. These changes usually depend on the positions of the nouns and pronouns in the sentence . The verbs in this category were collected from different Yoruba sentences that contain tone change verbs. Some re-write rules were designed for the two languages . The re -write rules were tested using JFLAP. Apart from re-write rules, there are other grammatical rules considered and the rules affected the Yoruba translations. The software was designed using unified modelling language (UML). The Rule-based approach was used for the translation. Python programming language was used for the software development. The python has natural language tool kits that are used for the sentence parsing. The system accept English sentence then discover the pattern for the sentence. The system was implemented and tested for twenty tone change verbs within the home domain. The two languages are subject verb object (SVO) sentence structure with some differences. The results show that the MT system can translate these tone change verbs. The system is efficient in its response time. IFEMT2 system was developed to handle the translation of tone changing verbs. IFEMT2 was used to compare with the Google translator. IFEMT2 system performs better than the Google translator. The Google translator could not adequately translate these tone change verbs.