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Accuracy of deep learning model translation is a key index to evaluate the application performance of engineering English translation. In this paper, an automatic error detection system for English translation is proposed. In the particular task of grammar detection, researchers have gradually shifted their attention from statistical methods to neural network methods. Three deep learning algorithm models are established, and the multitask performance of the model is better than that of the conditional random field model and the LSTM-CRF model. The reason is that the multitask learning model of auxiliary tasks is included to some extent, which solves the problem of data sparsity and enables the model to be fully trained even under the condition of uneven label distribution. Thus, it performs better than other models in the task of syntax error detection. It realizes the word spelling error check based on the dictionary and uses the thought of editing distance to prompt the word error found, which can automatically check a large number of translations. On the basis of analyzing the sentence structure characteristics of engineering English translation, this paper realizes the detection of subject-verb agreement errors and analyzes the main word of the subject corresponding to the predicate verb by constructing the syntactic structure tree of the sentence, so as to realize the judgment of subject-verb agreement errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical knowledge plays a crucial role in the process of Writing. Most ESL learners encounter several grammatical errors in their writing skills. For this reason, they produce different grammatical errors, particularly in their essay writing. This present study attempts to analyze the dominant grammatical errors and the causes of the errors committed by the ESL students of the English department at the South Eastern University of Sri Lanka. The study was conducted by collecting authentic data on this topic. The data was gathered from the sixteen chosen ESL students by distributing a Google form, conducting an interview, and administering an essay writing test to assess their errors. After finishing the data collection, the grammatical errors were classified into eleven categories based on the distribution of the questionnaire and the essay writing test. Those identified grammatical errors were capitalization, spelling, punctuation, article, preposition, verb tense, question, subject-verb agreement, word order, word choice, and pluralism. The current study investigated that the causes of errors were first language interference, lack of vocabulary knowledge, unawareness of tenses, poor speaking skills in the English Language, and less writing practice. Meanwhile, the dominance of the first Language was considered the major cause of the students' errors in Writing. At the end of this study, some beneficial suggestions suggested that the lecturers and students must make some efforts to reduce grammatical errors in Writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are non-native speakers able to process their second language in a native-like way? The present study used the Event-Related Potentials' (ERPs) method to address this issue by focusing (1) on agent vs. agentless intransitive sentences and (2) on person vs. number agreement morphology. For that purpose, native and high proficiency and early non-native speakers of Spanish were tested while processing intransitive sentences containing grammatical and ungrammatical subject–verb agreement. Results reveal greater accuracy in the agent (unergative) condition as compared with the agentless (unaccusative) condition and different ERP patterns for both types of verbs in all participants, suggesting a larger processing cost for the agentless sentences than for the agentive ones. These effects were more pronounced in the native group as compared with the non-native one in the early time window (300–500 ms). Differences between person and number agreement processing were also found at both behavioral and electrophysiological levels, indicating that those morphological features are distinctively processed. Importantly, this pattern of results held for both native and non-native speakers, thus suggesting that native-like competence is attainable given early Age of Acquisition (AoA), frequent use and high proficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning French grammatical morphology (GM) poses great challenges for students, both in first and second languages (Lefrançois et al., 2008). This study examines the potential of a plurilingual method for teaching French GM in a first-year secondary school in Quebec. Implementing a pedagogical translanguaging approach (Cenoz & Gorter, 2020; Garcia et al., 2017) and including language awareness activities (Auger, 2014), this method also includes metacognitive dictations (Nadeau & Fisher, 2014) and an integrated approach (Allal, 2018). Using dictations and written production as pretests and posttests, we compared the effects of this plurilingual method with a monolingual method for various grammatical features, namely, subject-verb agreement, adjectives, past participle with to be, /E/ verb endings. We found that the plurilingual method supports learning over time for two specific features, adjectives and the past participle with to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The suggested diachronic pathway can be summarised as follows: (16) HT

The article discusses, The 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference or COP26 was held in Glasgow, Scotland, between 31 October and 12 November 2021 under the presidency of the The United Kingdom. The main aim of the conference was to accelerate action towards achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement (2015) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Subject–verb agreement errors are common in sentence production. Many studies have used experimental paradigms targeting the production of subject–verb agreement from a sentence preamble (The key to the cabinets) and eliciting verb errors (... *were shiny). Through reanalysis of previous data (50 experiments; 102,369 observations), we show that this paradigm also results in many errors in preamble repetition, particularly of local noun number (The key to the *cabinet). We explore the mechanisms of both errors in parallelism in producing syntax (PIPS), a model in the Gradient Symbolic Computation framework. PIPS models sentence production using a continuous‐state stochastic dynamical system that optimizes grammatical constraints (shaped by previous experience) over vector representations of symbolic structures. At intermediate stages in the computation, grammatical constraints allow multiple competing parses to be partially activated, resulting in stable but transient conjunctive blend states. In the context of the preamble completion task, memory constraints reduce the strength of the target structure, allowing for co‐activation of non‐target parses where the local noun controls the verb (notional agreement and locally agreeing relative clauses) and non‐target parses that include structural constituents with contrasting number specifications (e.g., plural instead of singular local noun). Simulations of the preamble completion task reveal that these partially activated non‐target parses, as well the need to balance accurate encoding of lexical and syntactic aspects of the prompt, result in errors. In other words: Because sentence processing is embedded in a processor with finite memory and prior experience with production, interference from non‐target production plans causes errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sum, what this study thus demonstrates is that argument disambiguation plausibly played a role in the emergence of the English dative alternation, but that the history of this phenomenon constitutes a prime case of complex interactions and changes between multiple argument disambiguation strategies for different argument relations. 3 The dative alternation in a corpus of Middle English 3.1 Data and methodology This study uses a subset of the I Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English i (PPCME2), covering about 1 million words in 43 texts produced between 1150 and 1500. A significant main effect is found for both Agent-Recipient ambiguity/atypicality and Agent-Recipient ambiguity, in that both non-ambiguous instances in both cases are more likely to show DOC syntax, whereas clauses with Agent -R ecipient/ R ecipient-Theme ambiguity boost the chances of the PC (bottom row of Figure 2). Keywords: constituent order; dative alternation; disambiguation strategies; Middle English; prepositional marking EN constituent order dative alternation disambiguation strategies Middle English prepositional marking 3 33 31 02/14/22 20220201 NES 220201 1 Introduction This paper presents a cognitive linguistic approach to language change, and particularly to the question how syntactic variation can come about and be maintained. 2.2 Argument disambiguation in the history of the English dative alternation The emergence of the English dative alternation as a systematic and pervasive case of variation is commonly located in Middle English. [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores the phenomena we dub «hyper-agreement»: number agreement between the main verb and an argument of the subordinate clause in biclausal structures (me gustan que los planes salgan bien, lit. ‘me like3pl that plans work out’). At an empirical level, it focuses on structures with dative experiencers required by a psych-verb and shows that hyper-agreement is possible with both finite and non-finite subordinate clauses. In light of these data, it is argued that Agree (Chomsky, 2000, 2001) must not violate the Single Case Constraint (Nevins, 2004). The analysis put forward combines this constraint with the hypothesis that person and number are independent Probes (Rigau, 1991, among others). This proposal accounts both for the unlocking effect on the subordinate clause and for the fact that the long-distance agreement is restricted to partial agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject (S) in Spanish sentences may appear post-verbally and even sentence-finally following an object (O). Further, in post-verbal SO/OS pairs, the first element asymmetrically c-commands the second element. Previous analyses of the VOS phenomenon encounter difficulties in accounting for this asymmetric c-command relation and/or for Case and subject-verb agreement involving the VOS subject. We argue here that these Spanish SO/OS pairs operate in parallel to English double-objects (Larson 1988). Based on the work of Phillips (1997) and others, we propose a top-down approach to sentence derivation which resolves the problems with VOS sentences encountered by other analyses and which allows uniform subject-verb agreement and Case marking in both null subject and postposed subject sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the question of whether and how growing up with more than one language shapes a child's language impairment. Our focus is on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual (Turkish–German) children. We specifically investigated a range of phenomena related to the so-called CP (Complementizer Phrase) in German, the hierarchically highest layer of syntactic clause structure, which has been argued to be particularly affected in children with SLI. Spontaneous speech data were examined from bilingual children with SLI in comparison to two comparison groups: (i) typically-developing bilingual children, (ii) monolingual children with SLI. We found that despite persistent difficulty with subject-verb agreement, the two groups of children with SLI did not show any impairment of the CP-domain. We conclude that while subject-verb agreement is a suitable linguistic marker of SLI in German-speaking children, for both monolingual and bilingual ones, 'vulnerability of the CP-domain' is not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of computer technologies by writing students has increased, but language teachers and researchers have expressed doubts about their effectiveness and feasibility. In the field of writing assessment, this study examined the effectiveness of Criterion as an automated essay evaluation (AEE) system while addressing two research questions: (a) What types of feedback did Criterion provide to Korean EFL learners? and (b) With respect to their English writing study, how did Korean EFL learners perceive Criterion feedback? Analyses on engineering students' essays and perception survey data were mainly conducted quantitatively. Results showed that Criterion feedback on the students' essays was effective for correcting missing articles and number/subject-verb agreement errors and reducing repetitive words. The overall student perception of Criterion feedback was positive. However, vague feedback on organization and development and repeating words; and inaccurate feedback on mechanical errors, mostly spelling errors and articles; and the lack of feedback on errors need to be dealt with as they decrease the reliability of the AEE system as an instructional tool. The results and findings of this study were discussed while offering implications for future avenues of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a study of the effectiveness of indirect correction of written error or indirect written corrective feedback in the promotion of the accurate use of subject-verb agreement in the third person singular among students with an elementary level of linguistic competence who learn English as a foreign language at the school level. The sample consisted of 39 8th grade students at a private school in the Biobío region, Chile, who were given a pre-test, an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test. The results show that the correction technique represents an effective tool for the improvement of the grammatically accurate use of subject-verb agreement even when students have a basic level of competence in the foreign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how competent speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) sound depending on variable number inflection of infinitive verbs (INF). Recent research has shown high rates of inflected infinitives in syntactic contexts in which it is prescriptively optional, such as adverbial clauses (CANEVER, 2012, 2017). According to that work, inflected infinitives also occur in nonstandard contexts, such as complements of auxiliary verbs, which can be taken as cases of hypercorrection. Informed by these findings and given the prestige usually associated with overtly marking verbal agreement in Brazil (SCHERRE; NARO, 2006, 2014), this study uses a modified matched-guise task (LAMBERT et al., 1960) in order to check whether speakers sound more educated, more intelligent and more formal in their INFflex-guise, and whether these perceptions vary significantly according to the syntactic context, the grammatical person and listeners' social characteristics (e.g. age). Results show that speakers are judged as more competent-sounding in their uninflected (INFø) guises, contradicting the initial hypothesis. However, further analyses show that this effect is stronger in the hypercorrect context as opposed to the syntactic context in which INFflex is more frequent. These results indicate a relation between frequency of occurrence in production and sociolinguistic perception, with higher rates of use translating into more neutral perceptions. Moreover, older respondents presented stronger reactions to INFflex guises, while younger respondents' judgments tended to be more neutral. Such age effects suggest a change in progress in the sociolinguistic perceptions associated to (INFflex). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: A number of studies on the acquisition of non-null subject languages in child grammars have suggested that while overt subjects are mainly used with finite forms, null subjects co-occur with non-finite forms. The purpose of this study is to explore the proposed relationship between subject realization and verbal morphology in a simultaneous bilingual context. Design/Methodology/Approach: Longitudinal case study Data and Analysis: The present study analyses longitudinal data from an English-Turkish bilingual child (2;4–3;9), with special reference to the distribution of finite forms and the suppliance of overt subjects on the one hand, and subject drop and the use of non-finite forms, on the other. The English/Turkish data comprise 37 recordings collected regularly for nearly 18 months. Findings/Conclusions: English-Turkish bilingual data show that the majority of the overt subjects in the English language of the bilingual child occur both with inflected and uninflected verb forms. At a time the child has consistent and productive suppliance of overt subjects in his English, he uses uninflected verb forms with overt subjects, suggesting that the proposed association discussed in the literature does not necessarily hold. Moreover, around the same time the bilingual child's Turkish presents robust evidence for the productive and systematic use of inflected forms as well as omission of subjects. Originality and significance/implications: These data, based on a less commonly studied language pair, English-Turkish, challenge previous research that postulates an association between overt subjects and finite forms versus null subjects and non-finite root forms. Overall, there appears to be a relationship between the acquisition of subject–verb agreement in the bilingual child's Turkish and the correct suppliance of overt subjects in his English, suggesting language-particular devices for the realization of person deixis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single-route models of morphosyntax posit that inflected word processing involves associative memory-based storage, whereas dual-route models propose rule-governed composition as an alternative to storage-based mechanisms. We test these accounts via their divergent predictions on whether word frequency affects processing of regular morphosyntactic inflections (as in the single-route model) or not (dual-route model). To date, the only study to test this using electroencephalography (EEG) comes from Allen, Badecker, and Osterhout (2003), who report no interaction between word grammaticality and word frequency. We conceptually replicate and extend Allen et al. (2003) with generalized additive mixed modeling, which retains per-trial and per-time sample information to avoid loss of statistical power from event-related potential-style averaging of trials while avoiding the assumption that the time course of word processing is identical across all words and individuals. In our EEG study, 51 English native speakers read sentences that either did or did not contain a determiner-noun agreement violation (e.g., this school / *schools) or a subject-verb agreement violation (e.g., the child runs/*run) based on a manipulation of a critical word. We follow the generalized additive mixed modeling procedure from prior research, with word frequency in the British National Corpus as a continuous predictor. We replicated Allen et al.'s (2003) reported main effects of frequency and grammaticality. Critically, we found no significant interaction between frequency and grammaticality. These results support Allen et al. (2003) in aligning with the dual-route model's account of composition-like mechanisms in inflected word processing. • We use EEG to examine whether word frequency interacts with grammar processing. • This tests whether grammar is based only on item memory or also uses composition. • Our generalized additive mixed modeling improves on traditional ERP-based analyses. • We did not find a significant interaction of word grammaticality by word frequency. • These results align with past EEG findings in supporting dual-route grammar models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports the findings of a study in which we investigated the possible effects of word order on the acquisition of case marking. In linguistic typology (e.g. Greenberg, 1963) a very strong correlation has been shown between dominant SOV (subject object verb) word order and case marking. No such correlation exists for SVO (subject verb object) languages. It is possible then that the mind is more likely to expect case marking when confronted with a language with SOV word order but not necessarily so if the language has SVO word order. We tested this hypothesis with 54 naive learners of Latin with English as a first language (L1). The participants were divided into two groups. One received a 100-word input treatment in Latin that contained only simple SOV sentences, and the other received the same input treatment except that the word order of the treatment sentences was SVO. After the treatment, a surprise self-paced reading test that contained grammatical and ungrammatical case-marked sentences was administered. Participants read test items that matched the word order of the treatment they received (i.e. SOV learners read SOV sentences, and SVO learners read SOV sentences). Results showed a significant slowing down on ungrammatical sentences for the SOV group but not for the SVO group. However, on a test of basic sentence comprehension in which case marking was the cue to determine who did what to whom, we found no distinction between the groups. We discuss these findings in light of how typological universals work in languages and what they could mean for language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • The grammaticality asymmetry in agreement attraction is driven by response bias. • Symmetrical effects of agreement attraction arise when bias is neutralized. • This symmetry supports a representational account of agreement attraction. • Current cue-based models do not predict symmetrical attraction. • Methods and analyses that account for bias are crucial for judgment studies. Abstract Memory access mechanisms such as cue-based retrieval have come to dominate theories of the processing of linguistic dependencies such as subject-verb agreement. One phenomenon that has been regarded as demonstrating the role of such mechanisms is the grammaticality asymmetry in agreement attraction , which is the observation that nouns other than the grammatical controller of agreement can influence the computation of subject-verb agreement in ungrammatical, but not grammatical, sentences. This asymmetry is most often accounted for via the dynamics of retrieval interference. We challenge this interpretation, arguing that the asymmetry largely reflects response bias. Three forced-choice judgment experiments show that neutralizing response bias results in a decrease in the size of the grammaticality asymmetry, or its elimination altogether. Together with the response time patterns in these experiments, this result favors an account that attributes attraction effects to a continuous and equivocal representation of number, rather than to the dynamics of retrieval interference. We implement a model of grammaticality judgments that links a continuous representation of number to the rate of evidence accumulation in a diffusion process. This model accounts for the presence or absence of the grammaticality asymmetry through shifts in the decisional starting point (i.e. response bias), and highlights the importance of monitoring for response bias effects in judgment tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work on Scots syntax tends to assume that do-support follows the English pattern (e.g., Görlach, A Textual History of Scots) despite the fact that Scots exhibited variability between do-support and verb-raising for much longer than English (e.g., Jonas, "Residual V-to-I"). Do-support is still not categorical in all dialects of Modern Scots, and this variability highly correlates with a phenomenon present in Scots but not in (Standard) English: the Northern Subject Rule (NSR) (e.g., Smith, "Negative do in Buckie Scots"). This paper builds on de Haas's (De Haas, "Morphosyntactic variation in Northern English") claim that the -(i)s inflection, employed in Scots NSR varieties to establish subject-verb agreement in environments where Standard English would employ do-support, is in fact a default inflection, while the ø-inflection found where plural pronouns are immediately adjacent to the finite verb is true subject-verb agreement. It will argue that do-support in Scots is more likely to be a transfer from English than an independent development. The variability in the development of Scots do-support is argued to be due to Scots retaining other means of establishing subject-verb agreement, the NSR and verb-raising. Thus, do-support was either acquired for a different function, i.e., as a negation or question marker, or the variability is due to do-support entering a three-way grammar competition to express the same function as the NSR and verb-raising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research shows that cross-linguistically, subject–verb agreement with complex noun phrases (e.g., The label on the bottles) is influenced by notional number and the presence of homophony in case, gender, or number morphology. Less well-understood is whether notional number and morphophonology interact during speech production, and whether the relative impact of these two factors is influenced by working memory capacity. Using an auditory sentence completion task, we investigated the impact of notional number and morphophonology on agreement with complex subject noun phrases in Dutch. Results revealed main effects of notional number and morphophonology. Critically, there was also an interaction between morphophonology and notional number because participants showed greater notional effects when the determiners were homophonous and morphophonologically ambiguous. Furthermore, participants with higher working memory scores made fewer agreement errors when the subject noun phrase contained homophonous determiners, and this effect was greater when the subject noun phrase was notionally singular. These findings support the hypothesis that cue-based retrieval plays a role in agreement production, and suggests that the ability to correctly assign subject–verb agreement—especially in the presence of homophonous determiners—is modulated by working memory capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing work shows that readers often interpret grammatical errors (e.g., The key to the cabinets *were shiny) and sentence-level blends ("without-blend": Claudia left without her headphones *off) in a non-literal fashion, inferring that a more frequent or more canonical utterance was intended instead. This work examines how interlocutor identity affects the processing and interpretation of anomalous sentences. We presented anomalies in the context of "emails" attributed to various writers in a self-paced reading paradigm and used comprehension questions to probe how sentence interpretation changed based upon properties of the item and properties of the "speaker." Experiment 1 compared standardised American English speakers to L2 English speakers; Experiment 2 compared the same standardised English speakers to speakers of a non-Standardised American English dialect. Agreement errors and without-blends both led to more non-literal responses than comparable canonical items. For agreement errors, more non-literal interpretations also occurred when sentences were attributed to speakers of Standardised American English than either non-Standardised group. These data suggest that understanding sentences relies on expectations and heuristics about which utterances are likely. These are based upon experience with language, with speaker-specific differences, and upon more general cognitive biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subject-verb agreement provides insight into how grammatical and semantic features interact during sentence production, and prior studies have found attraction errors when an intervening local noun is grammatically part of the subject. Two major types of theories have emerged from these studies: control based and competition-based. The current study used an subject-object-verb language with optional subject-verb agreement, Persian, to test the competition-based hypothesis that intervening object nouns may also cause attraction effects, even though objects are not part of the syntactic relationship between the subject and verb. Our results, which did not require speakers to make grammatical errors, show that objects can be attractors for agreement, but this effect appears to be dependent on the type of plural marker on the object. These results support competition-based theories of agreement production, in which agreement may be influenced by attractors that are outside the scope of the subject-verb relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of whether dyslexic children suffer from syntactic deficits that are independent of limitations with phonological processing. We looked at subject-verb agreement errors after sentence subjects containing a second noun (the attractor) known to be able to attract incorrect agreement (e.g., "the owner(s) of the house(s) is/are away"). In the general population, attraction errors are not straightforwardly dependent on the presence or absence of morphophonological plural markers but on their syntactic configuration. The same would be expected for dyslexic children if their syntactic problems are not phonological in nature. We also looked at the possible effect of system overload on syntactic processing by comparing auditory and written presentation of stimuli and stimuli with high and low frequency attractors. Dyslexic children produced more agreement errors than age-matched controls, but their errors were distributed in the expected manner and did not align with the presence of morphophonological number markers in the subject overall. Furthermore, there was no effect of either presentation mode or attractor frequency on the number of agreement errors. Our results confirm the existence of syntactic difficulties in dyslexia and suggest that they are not due to a phonological deficit or to verbal working memory limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent ERP research with adults has shown that the online processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations is mediated by the relative perceptual salience of the violation (Dube et al. 2016). These findings corroborate infant perception research, which has also shown that perceptual salience influences infants' sensitivity to grammatical violations (Sundara, Demuth & Kuhl 2011). This raises the possibility that similar effects may manifest in school-aged children. To investigate this possibility, we recorded ERPs while 9-11-year-old English-speaking children (n = 24) listened to sentences with grammatical versus ungrammatical subject-verb agreement (i.e., third-person singular). Ungrammatical verbs differed in their relative perceptual salience due to the overtness of the error—errors of commission (i.e., superfluous -s) versus errors of omission (i.e., absent -s), and the position of the violation—utterance-medial versus utterance-final. Overall, the violations elicited an N400 effect, indicating that children were sensitive to the grammaticality differences. However, this effect was only significant for errors of commission, and utterance-position did not play a role. These results differ from those of adults, where both errors of omission and commission elicited a P600 effect, which was larger in utterance final position. These findings suggest that the relative perceptual salience of the grammatical violation influences the processing of S-V agreement in both children and adults, but the processing strategies differ, with children relying more on local, shallow processing rather than global, deep processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animacy influences the patterns of subject-verb agreement marking in many languages, including Persian and Inari Saami. In Persian, animate plural subjects trigger plural agreement on the verb, whereas inanimate subjects may or may not trigger agreement. The variation is governed by factors such as personification, agency and distributivity. In Inari Saami, verbs fully agree with human subjects and verbs partially agree with inanimate subjects. Verbs may or may not agree with subjects referring to animals. We argue that the intricate interaction between biological animacy and grammatical agreement in these two languages warrants careful consideration of the tripartite distinction between biological animacy in the world, our conceptualization of animacy and formal animacy features in the grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sentence typically has two parts, the subject and the predicate. The subject is a noun or a pronoun and the predicate part is a verb. The verb and noun complement each other and this is termed as subject verb agreement. The subject verb agreement is assumed to emerge with age. Western studies have shown that the subject verb agreement would develop in children as young as 5 years, while the development is assumed to be late in children whose native language is different. The present study was carried out with the aim of studying the subject-verb agreement in typically developing children between 8-11 years. The children were divided into three groups (with a spacing of 1 year between the groups). Sentence judgment task was administered on the participants. The performance showed a graded improvement. Children between 10-11 year could perform better compared to the other two groups. There was a statistically significant improvement seen in between the three groups as evident on Mann Whitney U test [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the feature-based extension of Chomsky's approach to projection which entails some form of Spec-Head agreement and thus faces both theoretical and empirical problems. It states that Chomsky's original approach, coupled the application of the Spell-Out rule can account for the facts that motivated an analysis of Spec-Head agreement.

Using collocation-based approaches, semantic prosody analyses of lemmas like alleviate and cure yield judgments of negative prosody, which contradict common sense. This poses a challenge to the concept of semantic prosody and the principle of co-occurrence. To solve such contradictions, this paper proposes a new approach to semantic prosody analysis named 'prosody concord'. The approach adopts collostruction as the locus of analysis on the basis of the explication of the unit of meaning model, and uses a mechanism for semantic prosody determination that incorporates multiple sources of information such as interactions of words, collocations, colligations and semantic preferences. Case studies of the lemmas budge, credibility, cause and alleviate show that the proposed approach can solve the contradictions and provide a consistent means for semantic prosody analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to provide novel theoretical and empirical evidence that the null subjects traditionally labelled as pro and PRO, rather than being inherently distinct, are manifestations, differentiated in the course of the derivation, of what is underlyingly a single underspecified nominal pro-form, which we will call UPro. Included under this UPro are pro, OC PRO and also the various types of 'non-obligatory control' (NOC) PRO, including arbitrary PRO (PROarb). The interpretive and distributional distinctions lurking behind these labels result from how UPro interacts with its structural environment and language-specific rules of morpho-phonological realization. Specifically, OC PRO labels a rather specific interpretation that arises in embedding contexts where a syntactic OC relationship with an antecedent can be established. Different types of pro and NOC PRO, on the other hand, involve 'control' by (typically) silent representations of discoursecontextual elements in the clausal left periphery. Finally, PROarb arguably involves the failure to establish a referential dependence, which we will formalize in terms of a failure to Agree in the sense of Preminger (2014). Crucial evidence motivating the approach proposed here will be adduced from Sundaresan's (2014) "Finiteness pro-drop Generalisation", which reveals an otherwise unexpected complementarity of OC PRO and pro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper provides empirical evidence in favour of Martí Girbau's (2003, 2010) quantifier phrase analysis (QP of N) of the partitive construction, which is based on the analysis of verbal agreement in a large data set from the BNC (British National Corpus) and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). The competing binominal N of NP analysis, advocated by some, predicts that there is number agreement with the first nominal element. In order to account for verbal agreement along these lines, two further principles, that of proximal agreement and possibly that of notional agreement, are needed. The agreement patterns with the partitive construction as observed in the corpus can be explained in a more elegant way when the NP is analysed in terms of a quantifier phrase followed by a nominal head (QP of N): verb number is predicted in 95.74% of the cases (compared to 54.24% when the binominal analysis is adopted), agreement in the remaining 4.26% exceptional cases falling out of further semantic and lexical considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammaticalization is often considered to reflect frequent co-occurrence of certain elements in certain positions. This paper tests the frequency-based account of the grammaticalization of person agreement, comparing the grammaticalization of person agreement in Tabasaran, a Lezgic language, with the syntax of free pronouns in closely related Agul. Our assumption is that the situation in Agul, where person marking is not grammaticalized, approximately reflects a diachronic stage prior to the grammaticalization of person marking in closely related Tabasaran. We find little evidence in support of a frequency-based approach, at least when frequency is treated in terms of global frequencies. We do, however, identify a highly frequent verb that already in Agul appears to regularly associate with the pattern that has generalized to become person agreement in Tabasaran. We suggest specific information structural configurations associated with this verb, which have provided the impetus for the development. More generally, we show that while global measures of frequency may not yield the correct predictions, investigating the syntactic constructions associated with individual lexical items may be more revealing, and provide a more realistic model for reconstructing the paths of syntactic change involving the generalization of existing and quite local patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the grammaticalization of person agreement is a widely-cited and apparently uncontroversial topos of grammaticalization theory, the striking differences in the outcome of subject pronoun, and object pronoun grammaticalization, remain unexplained, and the relevant literature continues to assume a unified grammaticalization pathway. This paper argues that the grammaticalization of object pronouns is fundamentally different to that of subject pronouns. More specifically, although object pronouns may be rapid early grammaticalizers, often losing prosodic independence and cliticizing to a verbal head, they do not advance further to reach the stage of obligatory agreement markers typical of subject agreement. Typically, object markers remain at the stage of Differential Object Indexing, where their realization is conditioned by a bundle of semantic and pragmatic factors exhibiting close parallels to those operative in Differential Object Marking. Evidence from language typology, and from the diachrony of person markers across two millennia of Iranian languages, is adduced to back up these claims. Thus the widely-assumed grammaticalization cline for the grammaticalization of agreement needs to be reconsidered; for object agreement, there is evidently an attractor state, that of Differential Object Indexing, beyond which object agreement seldom proceeds. Finally, explanations grounded in discourse data are proposed, which also account for why obligatory object agreement in the category of person is so rare, while gender and number agreement for objects is far less constrained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the grammaticalization of subject agreement appears to be a diachronic near-universal, there has been little agreement on usage-based motivations for this crosslinguistic tendency. Three usage-based approaches – Givón’s NP detachment under topicalization, Ariel’s accessibility theory, and a set of accounts in terms of frequency-driven morphologization – are examined here in the light of corpus data from the Oceanic language Vera’a. The high frequency of overt pronouns in 1st and 2nd person subjects, as well as formal reduction in some 1st-person pronouns, observed in the corpus seem suggestive of grammaticalization of subject agreement in speech-act participants (SAPs). Yet, the remaining variation between pronominal and zero forms and the distribution of reduced forms do not appear to reflect functional factors in the way of topicalization or accessibility. Overall, frequency-driven accounts appear to fare better in explaining the Vera’a facts, in particular the distribution of 1st person zero subjects and the formal reduction of 1st person subject pronouns. The overall high levels of subject pronouns, however, are not fully accounted for by any of the three approaches; I suggest that, in addition to genre effects, the deictic and shifting nature of reference to speech-act participants may be a relevant factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]