Subject Verb Research Articles

The Subject–Object Asymmetry Revisited: Experimental and Computational Approaches to the Role of Information Structure in Children’s Argument Omissions

In two studies, we investigated the relation between information structure and argument omission in German child language in order to quantify to what extent the subject–object hypothesis (i.e., subjects are omitted more often than objects) is influenced by discourse pragmatics. Twenty four children took part in an elicited production study in which they produced transitive subject–verb–object and object–verb–subject sentences. Both constructions are instances of a topic-comment information structure. The results showed that 3;6 year-old children omitted subjects and objects alike when the arguments assumed topics status and were placed in utterance-initial position. In a second study, we then assessed whether a model of language learning implemented with a recency bias (resulting in learning from the end of utterances) would produce similar omission rates of initial arguments. The model was found to be sensitive to the frequency with which both word orders occurred in the input: initial objects were omitted more often than initial subjects, the pattern found in German caregiver speech. The results suggest that argument omission is heavily influenced by information structure and that a subject–object asymmetry per se does not exist.

Online Processing of Subject-Verb-Object Order in a Diverse Sample of Mandarin-Exposed Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Grammatical comprehension remains a strength in English-exposed young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet limited research has investigated how preschool children with ASD process grammatical structures in real time, in any language. Using the eye-movement measures of Intermodal Preferential Looking, we assessed online processing of subject-verb-object (SVO) order in seventy 2- to 5-year-old children with ASD exposed to Mandarin Chinese across the spectrum, whose vocabulary production scores were dramatically delayed compared with the typical controls. With this Mandarin-exposed sample, we tested the extent to which children with ASD require (a) highly consistent input and/or (b) good discourse/pragmatics for acquiring grammatical structures. Children viewed side-by-side videos depicting reversible actions (e.g., a bird pushing a horse vs. a horse pushing a bird), and heard an audio matching only one of those actions; their eyegaze to each video was coded and analyzed. Both typically developing children and children with ASD demonstrated comprehension of SVO word order, suggesting that core grammatical structures such as basic word order may be preserved in children with ASD across languages despite radical differences in language environment, social/pragmatic abilities, and neurological organization. However, children with ASD were less efficient in online sentence processing than typical children, and the efficiency of their online sentence processing was related to their standardized language assessment scores. Of note is that across both Mandarin Chinese and English, some proportion of minimally verbal children with ASD exhibited SVO comprehension despite their profoundly impaired expressive language skills. Autism Res 2019, 12: 1829-1844. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Grammar is a strength in the language comprehension of young English learners with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Eye-movement data from a diverse sample of Chinese preschoolers with ASD indicated similar grammatical strength of basic word order in Chinese (e.g., to understand sentences like "The bird is pushing the horse"). Moreover, children's proficiency of sentence processing was related to their language assessment scores. Across languages, such knowledge is even spared in some minimally verbal children with ASD.

The relative effect of recasts on L2 Korean learners’ accuracy development of two different forms and its relationship with language analytic ability

This study explored the relative effect of recasts on second language (L2) Korean learners’ accuracy development of the object relative clauses (RCs) and the honorific subject–verb (S-V) agreement in Korean and its relationship with language analytic ability (LAA). Forty-five L2 Korean learners participated in the study and five Korean native speakers participated as their dyadic partners. The learners were assigned into the recast group ( n = 27) and the control group ( n = 18). The recast group received recasts to their errors of the target forms from an interlocutor, a native Korean speaker, during their engagement in four communicative activities, but no recasts were provided to the control group. Three language tests (i.e. a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest) to measure accuracy development and a LAA test were applied to both groups. The study found that recasts benefited L2 Korean learners’ accuracy development of both forms, but their effects were not equal: recasts were more effective for the object RCs than the honorific S-V agreement. In addition, the results showed that LAA had a positive effect on the extent to which the learners benefited from recasts.

Référents évolutifs, anaphores et constructions détachées : étude diachronique de recettes de cuisine

EnglishThis article examines French cooking recipes published between the 17th and the end of the 20th century, thus approaching, along the centuries, the question of referents which undergo transformations and may lose their material identity, while still allowing a coreferential relation contributing to local coherence in discourse. In this respect, this diachronic comparison has led to a distinction between what has been called classical and modern recipes, on the one hand, and between devices common to both classical and modern recipes, and devices specific to classical recipes, on the other hand. The former devices include the use of pronouns, generally functioning as direct objects, or, conversely, their omission. The latter include the use of less constrained referential chains, and of initially-placed passive compound participles, which often co-occur with an active form of the same verb in the preceding context, and are also frequently non-standard, according to the rule stipulating that the non-finite form should refer to the subject of the main verb. It is argued that, though non-referential, these participial constructions, also endowed with connecting and framing roles, played a major part in masking ontological changes in referents, before disappearing from modern cooking recipes where, as far as their connecting and framing roles are concerned, they were in some way replaced by typesetting features such as numbered paragraphs. francaisDans cet article, nous analysons un corpus constitue de recueils de recettes de cuisine publies entre le xviie siecle et l’epoque contemporaine. Cette comparaison au fil des siecles a tout d’abord amene a degager deux grandes familles de recettes, classiques et modernes. Elle a ensuite permis de dissocier, dans l’elaboration d’une apparente continuite referentielle, des procedes generaux ou constants (tel le recours a des pronoms, frequemment objets directs, ou, a l’inverse, a leur absence) et des procedes particuliers ou specifiques aux recettes de cuisine qualifiees de classiques – tel le recours a des chaines referentielles « molles » ou, encore, a des constructions participiales composees passives, souvent en « coexistence » avec, dans le contexte precedent, une formulation active du meme verbe, d’une part, et en infraction a ladite regle de coreference selon laquelle le support d’une forme non finie doit etre le sujet du predicat premier, d’autre part. A ete particulierement soulignee l’association privilegiee entre les referents evolutifs et les constructions detachees de cette sorte, neanmoins supplantees par des elements typo-dispositionnels en francais moderne.

The Effects of Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures in Teaching Subject–Verb Agreement among Rural Sarawak Learners

Even after undertaking years of formal education to acquire the language in schools, having a poor command of English remains a problem faced by most Malaysians, especially students in rural schools of Sarawak. Based on the error-analysis carried out by recent research, subject–verb agreement (SVA) is one of the most frequent errors committed by students. To overcome this problem, teachers should significantly improve students’ mastery of SVA in the English language through effective teaching methods. Therefore, this research was conducted to explore the effects of Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures in teaching SVA among rural Sarawak learners. In this study, 35 Form 4 students were selected from a secondary school in the Belaga District, Sarawak as the research participants. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used as data collection tools. Overall, findings demonstrated that students showed positive feedback after the intervention was implemented. Results of this research will hopefully provide insights to secondary school students, teachers and the community in the cooperative teaching and learning of grammar.

RESEARCHING STUDENTS’ ORAL PERFORMANCE: What’s wrong with their use of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation?

This study was conducted to investigate errors in oral performance among the third year English Education Department students of UIN Ar-Raniry. It was aimed at two folds of research objectives. First, it sought to investigate the most frequently-committed error of the third year English Education Department students of UINAr-Raniry. Second, it attempted to identify the causes of students’ errors in their oral performance. This study employed qualitative research methods. The participants of this study were 20 students registering in Public Speaking Course. To investigate the students’ errors, a speaking test was used as a research instrument. The test was in the form of individual speaking performance on a topic of “Do we need native speakers in our Tarbiyah Faculty?” The participants were required to speak about the issue, which lasted for 10 minutes each. 20 oral performances were transcribed to enable the analysis of the errors. To analyze the student’s oral performance errors, the content analysis was used. This process was followed by analyzing the different aspects of language: grammar, pronunciation, and categories of error causes in communication. The results revealed that puzzling vowel insertion was the most commonly committed error (316/62.7%) compared to shifts in tense (10/2.0%), word order (19/3.8%), subject verb agreement (14/2.8%), and case of referent (15/3%). These errors were identified to have been caused by interlanguage factor. In an effort to respond to these compelling issues in the students’ speaking performance, lecturers who teach English at the University are required to give their maximum attention in order to improve their students’ oral performance.

Being a Participant Matters: Event-Related Potentials Show That Markedness Modulates Person Agreement in Spanish.

The present study uses event-related potentials to examine subject–verb person agreement in Spanish, with a focus on how markedness with respect to the speech participant status of the subject modulates processing. Morphological theory proposes a markedness distinction between first and second person, on the one hand, and third person on the other. The claim is that both the first and second persons are participants in the speech act, since they play the speaker and addressee roles, respectively. In contrast, third person refers to whomever is neither the speaker nor the addressee (i.e., it is unmarked for person). We manipulated speech participant by probing person agreement with both first-person singular subjects (e.g., yo…lloro “I…cry-1ST PERSON-SG”) and third-person singular ones (e.g., la viuda…llora “the widow…cry-3RD PERSON-SG”). We also manipulated agreement by crossing first-person singular subjects with third-person singular verbs (e.g., yo…∗llora “I…cry-3RD PERSON-SG”) and vice versa (e.g., la viuda…∗lloro “the widow…cry-1ST PERSON-SG”). Results from 28 native speakers of Spanish revealed robust positivities for both types of person violations, relative to their grammatical counterparts between 500 and 1000 ms, an effect that shows a central-posterior distribution, with a right hemisphere bias. This positivity is consistent with the P600, a component associated with a number of morphosyntactic operations (and reanalysis processes more generally). No negativities emerged before the P600 (between 250 and 450 ms), although both error types yielded an anterior negativity in the P600 time window, an effect that has been argued to reflect the memory costs associated with keeping the errors in working memory to provide a sentence-final judgment. Crucially, person violations with a marked subject (e.g., yo…∗llora “I…cry-3RD PERSON-SG”) yielded a larger P600 than the opposite error type between 700 and 900 ms. This effect is consistent with the possibility that, upon encountering a subject with marked features, feature activation allows the parser to generate a stronger prediction regarding the upcoming verb. The larger P600 for person violations with a marked subject might index the reanalysis process that the parser initiates when there is a conflict between a highly expected verbal form (i.e., more so than in the conditions with an unmarked subject) and the form that is actually encountered.

The Bottleneck Hypothesis in L2 acquisition: L1 Norwegian learners’ knowledge of syntax and morphology in L2 English

The Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2008, 2013) proposes that acquiring properties of the functional morphology is the most challenging part of learning a second language. In the experiment presented here, the predictions of this hypothesis are tested in the second language (L2) English of Norwegian native speakers. Two constructions are investigated that do not match in English and Norwegian: One involving functional morphology, subject–verb (SV) agreement, which is obligatory in the L2 but non-existent in the first language (L1), and one involving syntax, verb-second (V2) word order, which is obligatory in the L1, but restricted to specific contexts in the L2. The results of an acceptability judgement task indicate that the participants struggled more with identifying ungrammatical SV agreement than ungrammatical word order. We conclude that the findings lend tentative support to the Bottleneck Hypothesis.

Which Questions Do Children With Cochlear Implants Understand? An Eye-Tracking Study.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the processing of morphosyntactic cues (case and verb agreement) by children with cochlear implants (CIs) in German which-questions, where interpretation depends on these morphosyntactic cues. The aim was to examine whether children with CIs who perceive the different cues also make use of them in speech comprehension and processing in the same way as children with normal hearing (NH). Method Thirty-three children with CIs (age 7;01-12;04 years;months, M = 9;07, bilaterally implanted before age 3;3) and 36 children with NH (age 7;05-10;09 years, M = 9;01) received a picture selection task with eye tracking to test their comprehension of subject, object, and passive which-questions. Two screening tasks tested their auditory discrimination of case morphology and their perception and comprehension of subject-verb agreement. Results Children with CIs who performed well on the screening tests still showed more difficulty on the comprehension of object questions than children with NH, whereas they comprehended subject questions and passive questions equally well as children with NH. There was large interindividual variability within the CI group. The gaze patterns of children with NH showed reanalysis effects for object questions disambiguated later in the sentence by verb agreement, but not for object questions disambiguated by case at the first noun phrase. The gaze patterns of children with CIs showed reanalysis effects even for object questions disambiguated at the first noun phrase. Conclusions Even when children with CIs perceive case and subject-verb agreement, their ability to use these cues for offline comprehension and online processing still lags behind normal development, which is reflected in lower performance rates and longer processing times. Individual variability within the CI group can partly be explained by working memory and hearing age. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7728731.

THE ANALYSIS OF GRAMMATICAL PROBLEMS AND GENERIC STRUCTURE OF NARRATIVE TEXT WRITTEN BY THE ELEVENTH GRADUATE STUDENTS OF LANGUAGE PROGRAM AT SMAK ST.KLAUS WERANG-WEST FLORES

The study was intended to analyze grammatical problem and generic structures of narrative text written by the eleventh grade students of Language program at SMAK St. Klaus–West Flores in the academic year 2016/2017. The data were mainly collected through assigment on narrative written text and itervies and were analyzed descriptively using Dulay’lingistics taxonomy (1982) and Fink’ category (2005). The result of data analysis revealed that the students committed errors in their narrrative writing, namely article, possessive case, omission of – ed, regularization by adding –ed, simple present tense used in place of simple past tense, omission of –be, pluralization, pronoun, preposition, omission of main verb, subject verb agreement, word order, diction, spelling, passive form, adverb, conjunction, double marking, and modals. The cause of error was interference, lack of vocabularies, and motivation, and teacher’ ability/qualification.

Input and literacy effects in simultaneous and sequential bilinguals: The performance of Albanian–Greek-speaking children in sentence repetition

Aim: The present study examines input and literacy effects in simultaneous and sequential bilinguals with the aim of (a) investigating the differences between bilingual and monolingual populations and (b) disentangling the individual contribution of different factors in bilingual syntactic abilities. Methodology: A sentence repetition task (SRT) in Greek with eight structures (Subject Verb Object [SVO], negative clauses, clitic structures, complement clauses, coordinated sentences, adverbial clauses, wh-questions and relative clauses) was employed. All bilinguals additionally participated in a standardized expressive vocabulary task in Greek to measure their lexical ability. Data: Sixty 8–10-year-old children (20 monolingual, 20 simultaneous and 20 late sequential bilinguals) were tested. Findings: The analysis showed that (a) monolinguals outperform sequential bilinguals in sentence repetition, (b) clitic structures are highly problematic for all participants, (c) vocabulary and syntactic skills are closely related for simultaneous but not for sequential bilinguals, (d) home language practices in the early years affect SRT performance and (e) sequential bilinguals benefit from literacy practices that support syntactic skills in the language tested. Overall, we found that the effect of input overrides the effect of a traditionally categorical factor in bilingualism: age of onset (AoO) of exposure to L2. Originality: The contribution of this study includes (a) the examination of syntactic abilities in bilinguals in connection with language input early in life and at the time of testing, (b) the non-pervasive role of age of exposure to the L2 in SRT performance and (c) the role of literacy measures as key factors affecting syntactic skills in bilinguals. Implications: Quality of input and literacy in particular have been shown to affect bilingual syntactic skills, suggesting that enhancing literacy exposure as a language policy for bilinguals has a significantly positive impact on language development.

Error Analysis of Written Academic Essays of Fijian Undergraduate Students: A Case Study

<em>The purpose of the present study was to examine errors of written academic essays of Fijian undergraduate pre-service and in-service students at the Fiji National University Lautoka campus. Previous studies have focused only on pre-service undergraduate students but this paper takes into account in-service students as well which is a new dimension and knowledge to existing literature. The study mainly focused on eighteen errors as classified and adapted from Darus and Ching (2009) with the top six errors discussed in this paper. Twenty writing samples were analysed with the top errors for pre-service students being mechanics, subject verb agreement, redundancy, prepositions, tense and vocabulary choice while in-service students had errors in mechanics, redundancy, tense, articles, incomplete structures, word form and clarity. The authors found that carelessness and failure to recognize important words in the sentences as the main reasons for the errors. The paper recommends that remedial lessons on usage of articles, word formation, and prepositions are required in the course curriculum to improve upon the areas mentioned.</em>

The Writings

The Writings Bradley C. Gregory, Brent A. Strawn, Stephen D. Ryan, and Christopher T. Begg 773. [Wisdom Literature] O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ of Wisdom: A Redemptive-Historical Exploration of the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2017). Pp. xxi + 407. Paper $19.99. ISBN 978-1-62995-291-8. R.'s book examines the OT wisdom literature redemptive-historically as both providing insight into the great questions of human life and as pointing toward Christ. The first chapter introduces readers to the terminology of wisdom, its background in the ANE, and its literary forms. Subsequent chapters discuss standard introductory topics as well as the contents of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and Song of Songs. R. adopts traditional notions of authorship, arguing that Jeremiah wrote Lamentations and ascribing the other four books to the time of Solomon.—B.C.G. 774. Lance R. Hawley, Metaphor Competition in the Book of Job (JAJ Sup 26; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018). Pp. 256. $113. ISBN 978-3-525-53135-8. H.'s monograph, originally a dissertation at the University of Wisconsin (advisor: Ron Troxel) furthers some ideas put forward by Carol Newsom in her The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (see OTA 27 [2004] #708) by investigating how the metaphors used by Job, his friends, and God compete in the book. In this way, H.'s study "seeks a way forward for understanding the nature of the Joban discourse by assessing the interlocutors' use of metaphor, examining their patterns of cognition as they depict their understanding of the world and Job's particular situation via metaphor" (p. 15). The first chapter, "The Book of Job as a Conceptual Network," introduces the study and the notion of the Book of Job as a network of signified concepts operating on both literary and cognitive discourse levels. This is followed by a second chapter dealing with method and theory: "Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Joban Discourse." Chap. 3, "Speech Metaphors in the Joban Dialogue," treats a metaphorical target domain, i.e., that of speech (including a treatment of silence), while chap. 4, "Animal Metaphors in the Joban Discourse," takes up the metaphorical source domain of animals. Chap. 5, "Yahweh's Animal Images as a Response to Job," argues that the divine speeches are not metaphorical per se but that Yhwh's constant employment of animal imagery "removes the ground from Job's understanding of the world. One might suppose that this act of reframing necessarily sets off a chain reaction of conceptual reorganization in Job's brain, but his brief and ambiguous response to the divine speeches is insufficient evidence of this" (p. 209). A final chapter concludes the study ("Conclusion: Dynamics of Metaphor Coherence in the Joban Discourse") and summarizes H.'s results with regard to metaphorical coherence (perceptible or otherwise) and the three primary ways metaphor competition functions in Job: elaboration, extension, and questioning. A list of Works Cited and four indexes (ancient sources, authors, subjects, and conceptual metaphors) round out the volume.—B.A.S. 775. [Psalms] Christina Kumpmann, Schöpfen, Schlagen, Schützen: Eine semantische, thematische und theologische Untersuchung des Handelns Gottes in den Psalmen (BBB 177; Göttingen: V&R unipress/Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2016). Pp. 466 + 4 col. graphs. €75. ISBN 978-38471-0530-5. K.'s semantic, thematic, and theological study of the actions of God in the Book of Psalms is a revised version of her 2015 University of Bonn dissertation directed by Ulrich [End Page 248] Berges. In ten chapters K. analyzes the 1,767 psalmic verses in which God is the subject of a finite verb or participle. The textual basis of her study is the literal Elberfelder German translation of the Psalter checked against the Masoretic Text. The study is precisely focused and excludes consideration of stative or passive verbs and of the larger context of the psalm. With the aim of better understanding the portrayal of God in the Psalms K. treats in turn ten principal categories of divine action: verbs for doing or acting (handeln), creating (schöpfen), ruling (König sein/herrschen), acting powerfully or violently...

Waking Up Safer? An Anesthesiologist’s Record

This author travelogue through modern anesthesia describes the arduous training of anesthesiologists and some momentous events in the development of the specialty, both of which have led to the sophistication of current practices and promises of an even safer future. The book contains historic vignettes, biopic stories, and science commentaries. Reading it is educational and entertaining.The author is an accomplished anesthesiologist, who trained in both South Africa and the United Kingdom and who currently serves as the Anesthesiology Department Chairman at Pennsylvania State University. His observations on the specialty and his personal reflections provide an international perspective that will particularly interest U.S. anesthesiologists. Passages on anesthesia care in the 1980s at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, and a lengthy report on the first heart transplant by Christian Barnard there in 1967 will fascinate most readers. Dr. Mets moves back and forth between anesthesia and anaesthesia, resident and registrar, operating rooms and theaters, and other parallels of the U.S. and international healthcare systems that he intimately understands.Themes of this book include the steady progression of anesthesia safety over two centuries, the personality quirks of many surgery and anesthesia innovators, and important lessons that clinicians can learn from anesthesia mishaps. Numerous case descriptions prove interesting and elucidating. Practicing anesthesiologists will recognize similar occurrences in their own careers.Dr. Mets summarizes his philosophy as, “Inherently dangerous, anesthesia has matured into an essentially safe practice. It was not always so. Nor in every instance—things can still go terribly wrong.” His stories explain and support this view.Anesthesiologists will applaud many dramatic and positive statements: “The balance between life and death . . . is the practicing anesthesiologist’s daily concern.” “Anesthesiologists are the only true clinical pharmacologists in medical practice.” “We call delivering an anesthetic: flying the anesthesia machine.” The book portrays a dynamic specialty with skilled clinicians who protect patients during surgical operations.A chapter on the history of anesthesia is easier to read than most introductory textbooks. A wide-ranging chapter on drugs, equipment, and monitors is linked together by the concepts of balanced anesthesia and the need for patient safety. The final chapters on a day in a large academic surgical suite and future directions for anesthesiology are positive and in sync with the practices and thoughts of most specialty leaders. The author concludes: “The future of anesthesia lies in the developing field of perioperative medicine,” and “Expect a much safer surgical experience in the future.”Overworked in this book, as in anesthesia literature generally, are the similarities of anesthesia administration and flying an airplane, and anesthesia safety and parachutes. Nonanesthesiologist readers may find them novel and helpful, while many anesthesiologists will roll their eyes and wish for fresher metaphors.This book is a quick and recommended read for anesthesiologists. Many will jump among sections as they spot items of interest. Nonanesthesiologist readers with science backgrounds may prefer to read it from beginning to end, because chapters logically follow previous ones. Numerous footnotes and some technical terms may annoy readers without science backgrounds, the large group whom the author hopes to attract. These readers may skip pages, or put the book down entirely, when they read, “a packet of acetylcholine mediators is released into the synaptic cleft, and moves across to bind to a nicotinic acetylcholine receptor on the skeletal muscle fiber.” Although lay readers have choices among publications with either a history focus or anesthesiologist tales, this one stands out as broader and more entertaining.The writing style is generally quick, unadorned, and easy to read. Sometimes it excites: “My training progressed by leaps and bounds, trial and error, complications occurring regularly.” A few subject–verb mismatches interrupt the flow, and errors catch the eye. For instance, the American Board of Anesthesiology defines “OSCE” as Objective Structured Clinical Examination, not Observed Standardized Clinical Evaluation as the book reports.Readers who know the author will particularly enjoy the clever book cover, an adaptation of the painting “Ether Day 1846” hanging in the Ether Dome at the Massachusetts General Hospital, site of the first public demonstration of anesthesia. Those who do not know him can guess which person depicted represents the author. This cover art showing observers of an anesthesia milestone captures the essence of the book.Waking Up Safer? An Anesthesiologist’s Record meets the authors desire to do “the rich history of anesthesia justice” and to “wake you up to the magic and mystery of anesthesia and its consequences.” The notation that it was “specifically written for the lay person to explain the much misunderstood practice of anesthesiology” will await marketplace judgment.

The Effects of Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures in Teaching Subject–Verb Agreement among Rural Sarawak Learners

Even after undertaking years of formal education to acquire the language in schools, having a poor command of English remains a problem faced by most Malaysians, especially students in rural schools of Sarawak. Based on the error-analysis carried out by recent research, subject–verb agreement (SVA) is one of the most frequent errors committed by students. To overcome this problem, teachers should significantly improve students’ mastery of SVA in the English language through effective teaching methods. Therefore, this research was conducted to explore the effects of Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures in teaching SVA among rural Sarawak learners. In this study, 35 Form 4 students were selected from a secondary school in the Belaga District, Sarawak as the research participants. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used as data collection tools. Overall, findings demonstrated that students showed positive feedback after the intervention was implemented. Results of this research will hopefully provide insights to secondary school students, teachers and the community in the cooperative teaching and learning of grammar.

On subjects of necessity verbs in Latvian

The analysis of data extracted from the Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian reveals that the non-modal variant of vajadzēt is mostly used with pronouns, especially those referring to the speaker. The modal variant of vajadzēt, on the contrary, is similar to the debitive in that the majority of their dative subjects are non-participants of the speech act, mostly represented by substantives which can be not only animate but also inani-mate. In those cases where the modal vajadzēt and the debitive have the speaker as their subjects, they are more likely to receive dynamic meaning. If the subject corresponds to the addressee or non-participants of the speech act, the most frequent interpretation is a deontic one. Epistemic meaning is relatively more common with the modal vajadzēt than with the debitive irrespective of the subject type.
 

한국어 피동사의 상적 의미와 특성 연구

This paper aims to study aspectual meanings and features of the Korean passive verb. The aspect of a passive verb will change with meaning. When expressing the meaning of result, a passive verb is used as an Achievement and when expressing the meaning of possibility, it is used as a State. A passive verb derived from an Achievement, an Accomplishment or a Semelfactive could express the meaning of result, while a passive verb derived from an Activity could not. In addition, the subject of a passive verb that expresses the meaning of possibility could be a target argument or a tool argument, and the latter does not involve the passive meaning. Through this discussion, we can better understand the meanings of Korean passive verbs and how aspectual features vary depending on their meanings.

Analysis of Errors Made by First Year Secondary School Students in Writing English Sentences: A Case Study of Libyan EFL Students

The aim of this study is to identify, classify and explain the reasons behind the written errors and difficulties encountered by First Year Secondary School Students, Al-Jufra Region, Libya. A random sample of students and teachers is selected. The sample is thirty students and ten teachers. The data is collected through three tools: written task by students and two questionnaires; one for the teachers and one for the students. The data is analyzed by using a descriptive method. The findings reveal that First Year Secondary School Students encounter difficulties in writing English sentences including verb tense and form, subject verb agreement, word order, prepositions, articles, plurality and auxiliaries. It is also revealed that students are not motivated enough to engage into written activities. These writing errors are mainly due to first language (L1) interference. The study concludes with some recommendations that will help First Year Secondary School Students to minimize their writing difficulties.

STUDENTS’ PROBLEMS ON S-V AGREEMENT IN TOEFL AND THEIR PROPOSED SOLUTIONS

This article is presented to discover the students’ problems in subject-verb (S-V) agreement and provides pedagogical solutions to these problems. This study employed descriptive design. There were two instruments used to collect data. The first instrument was a test. It consisted of 10 items with two different types of questions. The second instrument was an open-ended questionnaire consisting of two questions. The participants were 25 social science students of a private university in Yogyakarta. The data included in this study were 10 students’ works which were randomly selected. The result shows that the students' problems in S-V agreement came from their misunderstanding on: future continuous tense, singular-plural subject, appositive, the use of present participle as adjective, the use of simple present tense, the use of either … or … to show one subject, the presence of double subjects, and the use of both to show double subjects. To encounter these problems, the teacher is suggested to teach the students about the essential elements of a sentence first rather than teaching other aspects. The essential elements are subject and predicate. In short, the students must understand well that a sentence, at least, must consist of one subject and one predicate (verb). After understanding the essential elements of a sentence, the students can be taught to understand other supporting aspects which also become the causes of students’ problems in S-V agreement.

De deux structures méconnues des langues balkaniques (et micrasiatiques) – Essai de description sommaire

On two odd linguistic structures from the Balkans (and Asia Minor) – an attempt at a descriptive overview. This contribution is an attempt to present in broad lines two structures encountered in the Balkans and Asia Minor. Both areas are an integral constituent of the Balkan Sprachbund – although unnoticed by Sandfeld and most others (sporadic allusions are to be found only in the Romanian literature). This is probably because they are not part of learned or literary usage. The structures are:A) a speaker S, parent or relative of Y, addresses Y while using a term (a) which defines his own family position vis-a-vis Y (instead of the term referring to Y – Alb. babi ku je? “Father, where are you? – a father speaking to his;(daughter on the telephone).B) a speaker S uses a term which defines his own family position vis-a-vis Y as a subject of a first-person verb; this kind of construction cannot be rendered in English phrasing – for lack of morphological cases in English, but could be transposed into Latin as *mater te video or Russian as * мать вижутебя (here the speaker is the mother).The languages reviewed here are Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Romanian (incl. Moeso-Romanian), Romani, Serbian, Turkish. However, Aromanian, Goran, Judeo-Spanish, Kajnas (or Bobostin), Megleno-Romanian, Pomakian and Župan have not been investigated. It is neither ascertained nor excluded that these structures could be interrelatedThis contribution suggests that it is still possible to reveal widely shared, but so far overlooked, linguistic structures, even in a well explored area, such as the European continent. This leads us to observe that they are perceptible only by researchers who are native speakers of at least one of the languages at stake, and to question classical methods of investigation from the outside.