We explore the language production process by eliciting subject-verb agreement errors. Participants were asked to create complete sentences from sentence beginnings such as The elf's/elves' house with the tiny window/windows and The statue in the eirs/elves' gardens. These are subject noun phrases containing a head noun and controller of agreement (statue), and two nonheads, a "local noun" (window(s)/garden(s)), and a possessor noun (elf's/elves'). Past research has shown that a plural nonhead noun (an "attractor") within a subject noun phrase triggers the production of verb agreement errors, and further, that the nearer the attractor to the head noun, the greater the interference. This effect can be interpreted in terms of relative hierarchical distance from the head noun, or via a processing window account, which claims that during production, there is a window in which the head and modifying material may be co-active, and an attractor must be active at the same time as the head to give rise to errors. Using possessors attached at different heights within the same window, we are able to empirically distinguish these accounts. Possessors also allow us to explore two additional issues. First, case marking of local nouns has been shown to reduce agreement errors in languages with "rich" inflectional systems, and we explore whether English speakers attend to case. Secondly, formal syntactic analyses differ regarding the structural position of the possessive marker, and we distinguish them empirically with the relative magnitude of errors produced by possessors and local nouns. Our results show that, across the board, plural possessors are significantly less disruptive to the agreement process than plural local nouns. Proximity to the head noun matters: a possessor directly modifying the head noun induce a significant number of errors, but a possessor within a modifying prepositional phrase did not, though the local noun did. These findings suggest that proximity to a head noun is independent of a "processing window" effect. They also support a noun phrase-internal, case-like analysis of the structural position of the possessive ending and show that even speakers of inflectionally impoverished languages like English are sensitive to morphophonological case-like marking.

This thesis explores the mental representation of subject-verb agreement, and the factors that can affect the determination of agreement in language production. It reports nine experiments that used a task in which participants produced sentence completions for visually presented complex subjects such as “The greyhound which two lively rabbits were tempting”. Such completions typically agree with the head noun (greyhound) as in “A greyhound which two lively rabbits were tempting is jumping” but sometimes agree with the local noun (rabbits) as in “A greyhound which two lively rabbits were tempting are jumping”. The first experiments examined the value of the concept of markedness in subject verb number agreement to see whether it has explanatory power for languages like Slovene with more than two number values. Results from two experiments employing complex sentence preambles including a head noun post modified by a prepositional phrase or a relative clause (e.g., “The nudist(s) near the sand dune(s)”) show that Slovene number agreement differs from number agreement in languages with no dual, but that it is not possible to simply state that the singular is the least marked and the dual the most. I argue that using languages with more complex number systems allows greater insight into the processes of correct and erroneous subject-verb agreement, and shows that it is necessary to dissociate susceptibility to agreement from error-causing status. To conclude, the concept of markedness seems unable to explain my results. Semantic effects in agreement are then examined using two comparison experiments in English. Experiment 3 shows that although English has only a two value system, speakers are sensitive to semantic differences in number. Experiment 4 explores the possible influence of speakers’ native language three-value number system on their two-value second language system. It shows that native speakers of English are more sensitive to semantic number differences in English than Slovene speakers of English. Experiment 5 explores gender agreement in Slovene (which has three genders) and shows that there is a complex pattern of agreement. As with number, there is not just one number value which is problematic: neuter and masculine are most confusable, but masculine errors are also common when feminine agreement would be expected, thus suggesting that speakers revert to two different defaults, masculine and neuter. Finally, the results of four experiments examining number and gender agreement in coordinated phrases are presented. Agreement in such phrases may be resolved (i.e. the verb agrees with the whole subject) but may instead agree with one conjunct. Agreement with one conjunct is affected byword order (agreement with the nearest conjunct is most common), coordinator (e.g., single-conjunct agreement is more common after “or” than “and”) and the gender or number of the conjuncts (e.g., dual number is associated with single-conjunct agreement). Taken together, my results suggest that agreement is affected by a complex interplay of semantic and syntactic factors, and that the effects of a three-valued system are quite distinct from those of a two-valued system.

The main purpose of this study is to increase the understanding of a third language’s possible effect on learners’ second language acquisition. There is research how a first language affects the acquisition of a second language and that research has shown that a first language does affect the learning of an additional language in different ways. Even though  it is proven that languages do influence each other in learning processes there is very little previous research that studies if and how a third language can be affected by or affect a learner’s second language. To investigate possible differences in error-making, the first research question is to investigate what kind of errors the students make. The most common errors that students make are when subject-verb agreement is noncontiguous. The second research question is to see if Swedish students who know Spanish make different errors in English subject-verb agreement than Swedish students who do not know Spanish. This study finds that there are slight differences in how Swedish students who know Spanish and students who do not know Spanish make errors with English subject-verb agreement. The difference is that the students who know Spanish make fewer errors with noncontiguous subject-verb agreement, especially in relative clauses and with coordinated verb phrases. The fact that these students make fewer errors with noncontiguous subject-verb agreement may be an indication that they have a greater understanding of this grammatical feature. / Lokalt ID: 2011vt4810

Swedish learners of English have problems in managing the subject-verb agreement rule (Källqvist and Petersson 2006, Estling Vannestål 2015). Studies show that extramural activities in English improve language acquisition and language production (Sundqvist 2009). The aim of the essay is to investigate whether extramural activities affect students’ ability to correctly apply the subject-verb agreement rule. A google questionnaire was handed out to 64 students in the course of English 5 in upper secondary school. The students were asked to answer questions about their extramural habits and to do a test on subject-verb agreement. The results indicate that students have knowledge of the subject-verb agreement rule to some extent and that extramural activities in English may possibly have some impact on the ability to correctly apply the subject-verb agreement rule. The results could also be due to the academic motivation. The results show that the difference across gender is negligible but that there is a slightly larger difference across preparatory programs and vocational programs.

The study of Spanish in contact with Wayuunaiki has received limited attention in generative and variationist analyses. In particular, the possible influence of this indigenous language on some parts of the Spanish language has not been investigated or has been only briefly addressed. This dissertation aims to fill this existing gap by studying two morpho-syntactic variables: (i) the distribution of null and overt subjects (NOS) as portrayed by the Null Subject Parameter and overt subject personal pronoun (SPP) expression as traditionally researched in variationist studies, and (ii) the issue of subject-verb agreement within the theory of features. To carry out these studies, we collected spontaneous data from 27 Wayuunaiki-Spanish bilinguals and five Spanish monolingual speakers. This Spanish monolingual group served as the vernacular benchmark. The NOS and SPP expression are among the most studied topics in Hispanic linguistics, but they have never been systematically researched in Guajiro Spanish. By analyzing these issues in our dissertation, we want to contribute new data to their study and to the properties and factors affecting them, in order to widen the knowledge of how they function in this Spanish language contact situation. In the generative analysis of the null/overt subjects we investigate whether the distinction that occurs in Wayuunaiki between stative and active verbs and the participants’ proficiency in Spanish have an impact on the distribution of NOS in Guajiro Spanish. In the variationist study, a number of independent variables widely believed to constrain variable SPP expression are factored into the investigation to find out how they behave in this particular language contact situation. These variables include person/number, TAM, switch reference, priming effects, etc. The second research topic is subject-verb agreement. This is only investigated from the generative grammar perspective, specifically by employing the concept of features to explain the nature of the subject-verb mismatches produced by the Wayuunaiki dominant Wayuunaiki-Spanish bilinguals. We specifically investigate whether the Spanish conjugation system poses a problem to the bilingual speakers’ ability to produce the native Spanish verb forms vis-à-vis the monolingual cohort and whether this ability is shaped by the participants’ proficiency in Spanish. The results of the three studies contribute to the field of Hispanic linguistics from three different perspectives. The study of NOS adds a new dimension to the pro-drop parameter: the possible role that Wayuunaiki’s double conjugation may play in the distribution of null and overt subject pronouns in Guajiro Spanish. The variationist study provides new data on the topic of SPP expression in a variety of Spanish which, in this specific case, has as contact language an understudied indigenous language. The analysis of the subject-verb mismatches that occur in Guajiro Spanish allows us to differentiate between the status of null and overt subjects with respect to subject-verb agreement and to differentiate between this contact variety and the Colombian vernacular benchmark.

The present study investigates changes in subject-verb agreement (SVA) errors in young Norwegian EFL learners’ written production from 8th to 10th grade. The study aimed to see if the frequency and type of SVA errors changed as the learners became more proficient. An error analysis was conducted on texts from the TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language) online corpus. The analysis included 52 texts from 26 students, giving two texts from each student, one from 8th grade (Y8) and one from 10th grade (Y10). The SVA errors in the data were identified and categorized by the variables: verb type, subject type, and distance between the subject and the verb. Errors involving the verb BE were categorized as suppletive agreement errors and sorted based on the verb tense since the verb BE marks agreement with suppletive forms in both the past and the present tense. Meanwhile, errors related to other verbs, including lexical verbs and auxiliaries HAVE and DO, were categorized as affixal agreement errors. The affixal agreement errors were further divided into omission errors where the 3rd person singular -s was missing and overgeneralization errors where the -s ending was erroneously used on a verb with a plural subject. Previous corpus-based studies on SVA errors suggest that young Scandinavian EFL learners (ages 14-16) make more overgeneralization errors than omission errors. The results from this study indicate that the students make more omission errors which can be explained by language transfer in 8th grade, and more overgeneralization errors as their English production has developed in 10th grade. Moreover, the overall frequency of the SVA errors in the data increased from 8th to 10th grade.

Persons with Swedish as their first language often find it hard to learn subject-verb agreement when studying English. In Swedish this grammatical difficulty does not exist and it is therefore hard to introduce to learners that have Swedish as their native language.This investigation is based on the texts of 28 ninth graders of whom four were interviewed. My interest was in finding out how the students reflect on their own written work with a focus on subject-verb agreement with a particular focus on the third person singular s.My study shows that the four interviewed students claim that they never reflect on grammar in their spontaneous writing and that they never consciously try to apply rules that they have studied in school through being offered grammatical explanations. Instead they make their grammatical choices intuitively, using their procedural knowledge.

Esta dissertação apresenta um estudo de natureza sincrônica e quantitativa da variação entre aplicação x não-aplicação da regra de concordância verbal de 3ª e 1ª pessoas do plural. Os dados são oriundos da variedade do português popular falada por pessoas idosas residentes na zona rural dos estados de São Paulo e Minas Gerais, na área correspondente às trilhas das bandeiras paulistas. A variação da concordância verbal de 3ª pessoa do plural constitui um fenômeno comum no português do Brasil e tem sido amplamente documentada pela literatura lingüística, a qual evidencia que formas como Eles fala x Eles falam podem ser encontradas na fala de pessoas de diversas regiões brasileiras e de diferentes graus de escolaridade. São poucos os estudos que tratam da variação da regra de concordância com sujeitos de 1ª pessoa do plural (Nós fala x Nós falamos), manifestada em variedades populares do português brasileiro. Adotando os pressupostos teórico-metodológicos da Sociolingüística e da Lingüística Funcional, nosso objetivo é descrever, analisar e explicar os padrões de concordância encontrados, buscando identificar os fatores lingüísticos (semânticos, gramaticais, discursivos) e sociais que condicionam a realização ou a não-realização da regra formal de concordância verbal. / This research presents a synchronic and quantitative study of the variation between application x non-application of the subject-verb agreement rule with the 3rd and 1st plural persons. The data were collected from Popular Portuguese spoken by elderly who live in the rural areas of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, in the regions that coincide with the historical route of the Bandeirantes (members of colonial exploratory expeditions). The variation of subject-verb agreement with the 3rd plural person is an ordinary phenomenon in Brazilian Portuguese, and it has been extensively documented by linguistic literature, which gives evidence that forms as Eles fala x Eles falam can be found in the speech of people of various Brazilian regions and of different education degrees. Few are the studies that deal with the variation of subject-verb agreement with the 1st plural person (Nós fala x Nós falamos), displayed in popular varieties of Brazilian Portuguese. Using the theories of Sociolinguistics and Functional Linguistics, our goal is to describe, analyze and explain the patterns of agreement found, searching for linguistic (semantic, grammatical, discursive) and social factors that condition the application or the non-application of the formal subject-verb agreement rule.

Esta dissertação apresenta um estudo de natureza sincrônica e quantitativa da variação entre aplicação x não-aplicação da regra de concordância verbal de 3ª e 1ª pessoas do plural. Os dados são oriundos da variedade do português popular falada por pessoas idosas residentes na zona rural dos estados de São Paulo e Minas Gerais, na área correspondente às trilhas das bandeiras paulistas. A variação da concordância verbal de 3ª pessoa do plural constitui um fenômeno comum no português do Brasil e tem sido amplamente documentada pela literatura lingüística, a qual evidencia que formas como Eles fala x Eles falam podem ser encontradas na fala de pessoas de diversas regiões brasileiras e de diferentes graus de escolaridade. São poucos os estudos que tratam da variação da regra de concordância com sujeitos de 1ª pessoa do plural (Nós fala x Nós falamos), manifestada em variedades populares do português brasileiro. Adotando os pressupostos teórico-metodológicos da Sociolingüística e da Lingüística Funcional, nosso objetivo é descrever, analisar e explicar os padrões de concordância encontrados, buscando identificar os fatores lingüísticos (semânticos, gramaticais, discursivos) e sociais que condicionam a realização ou a não-realização da regra formal de concordância verbal. / This research presents a synchronic and quantitative study of the variation between application x non-application of the subject-verb agreement rule with the 3rd and 1st plural persons. The data were collected from Popular Portuguese spoken by elderly who live in the rural areas of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, in the regions that coincide with the historical route of the Bandeirantes (members of colonial exploratory expeditions). The variation of subject-verb agreement with the 3rd plural person is an ordinary phenomenon in Brazilian Portuguese, and it has been extensively documented by linguistic literature, which gives evidence that forms as Eles fala x Eles falam can be found in the speech of people of various Brazilian regions and of different education degrees. Few are the studies that deal with the variation of subject-verb agreement with the 1st plural person (Nós fala x Nós falamos), displayed in popular varieties of Brazilian Portuguese. Using the theories of Sociolinguistics and Functional Linguistics, our goal is to describe, analyze and explain the patterns of agreement found, searching for linguistic (semantic, grammatical, discursive) and social factors that condition the application or the non-application of the formal subject-verb agreement rule.

This study develops a new approach to agreement variation in Standard Arabic (SA) and Rural Jordanian Arabic (RJA) based on the Probe-Goal framework of Chomsky (2000, 2001). The key patterns investigated are the variation in fullness of agreement in the SV and VS word orders, the relationship between agreement and clitic doubling, and the patterning of agreement with conjoined subjects. The thesis argues for a connection between agreement, clitic doubling, and word order. Full agreement on T (in person, number, and gender) causes the subject to move to [Spec, TP], deriving SV order. However, partial agreement on T (lacking person) creates only a partial copy of the subject in [Spec, TP]. This partial copy is realized as a pronominal clitic in some contexts (giving CLsVS word order) and as null pro in other contexts (giving VS word order). This approach enables a unified account of various differences in the patterning of agreement in SA and RJA. Turning to the more complex case of agreement with conjoined subjects, both varieties exhibit full resolved agreement with preverbal conjoined subjects. With postverbal conjoined subjects, however, there is variation: SA allows only partial agreement with the first conjunct while RJA allows partial agreement either with the first conjunct or with the entire conjoined phrase, depending on the features and the order of the conjoined nominals. The Probe-Goal framework augmented with Multiple Agree and the Continuity condition (Nevins 2007, 2011) will be employed to account for the choice between these two options in RJA. The more general theoretical conclusion is that the variation in agreement patterns is constrained by the internal hierarchical structure of φ-features on the probe. I propose that the probe has the same hierarchical structure as a pronoun (i.e. a DP). This proposal makes predictions about the range of possible variation in the features that are active in agreement and connects to broader issues such as the Pronominal Argument Hypothesis (Jelinek 1984) and the diachronic relationship between pronouns and agreement markers. / May 2017