MUH. DANIAL
20401109064
PBI 4
Many
writers struggle with subject-verb agreement errors because they misidentify
the subject of a sentence. This mistake leads to yet another one--choosing a
plural verb based on an incorrectly chosen plural subject. The real subject is
“hidden” somewhere in the sentence; it is actually singular. While most writers
understand that a singular subject must have a singular verb and that a plural
subject must have a plural verb, most do not understand the critical importance
of locating the correct subject. Therefore, before concerning yourself with
deciding if the verb should be plural or singular, decide if you have located
the real subject of the sentence. To locate the subject more easily, try asking
yourself the following question: Who or what is performing the action of
the verb? Also keep in mind that nouns found in prepositional phrases
are never subjects of the whole sentence.
Subject-verb agreement is assumed to be the marking of the verb in
an utterance
as determined by properties of the subject. Psycholinguistic
models of agreement
in speech production differ as to whether they treat this
phenomenon as driven
primarily by syntactic processes or semantic influences. But these
models are
based primarily on research in Indo-European languages. This paper
suggests
that a useful approach to investigating the psycholinguistic
mechanisms behind
agreement in speech production is to extend the research to more
typologically
variant languages and more complex structures.
The
study of sentence production investigates how speakers produce
grammatically
well-formed utterances that communicate an intended message.
The
successful production of an utterance entails that, during grammatical
encoding,
the speaker must match not only lexical and morphological items to
conceptual
information from the message she intends to convey, but also that each
of
these items are compatibly integrated in a conventional syntactic structure
that
can
then be phonologically encoded. As with other areas of psycholinguistics,
research
into sentence production is informed by data provided first through
observation
of the linguistic phenomenon in question and then experimental
investigation
and modeling of the phenomena under examination. As it is
assumed
that the psychological mechanisms involved in speech production are the
same
for all normal speakers, theories of these mechanisms must account for data
observed
in a wide range of typologically variant languages.
So
what is “agreement”? In theoretical linguistics, agreement is typically
understood
as an asymmetric syntactic relationship in which the form of one
element
(the “target”) in a sentence corresponds to the form of another (the
“controller”)
(Corbett 2006). Typical examples include number marking on verbs
to
correspond with the number of the subject, as in the English examples (1-2).
(1)
The cat (sg) plays (sg)
(2)
The cats (pl) play (pl)
Other
features often considered as reflecting agreement in subject-verb relations
include
person and gender (but see Corbett 2006:133-5 for discussion).
Within
psycholinguistic studies of agreement production, one main
question
concerns the extent to which agreement morphology is influenced by
information
in the conceptual representation of the message rather than being
strictly
the result of syntactic procedures as defined by a language’s grammar. In
other
words, do targets (verbs) “look into” the conceptual message to access the
notional
values of agreement features, such as whether or not the referent is
conceived
of as singular or plural with regard to the number feature, or do they
simply
copy the grammatical values from the corresponding controlling elements
(subjects)
in the sentence, that is, whether or not the lexical item referring to the
controlling
element is specified as singular or plural1? Thus, data of interest to
studies
of agreement production often include examples in which there is a
mismatch
between the notional value of the feature and the grammatical value
of
the
feature. Example of such mismatch with regard to the number feature include the
English noun scissors, in which the referent is notionally singular but
grammatically
plural, or family, which is grammatically singular but may, in some
dialects,
have a notionally plural value (being conceived of as a set of indivual
members).
Cases in which agreement morphology reflect the grammatical number
of
the controlling referent (the scissors ARE) are taken to be evidence for
agreement
production being governed by syntactic processes. On the other hand,
when
agreement morphology reflects the notional value of the controlling referent
(the
family ARE, in some dialects), we have evidence that conceptual information
is relevant to
the agreement production process.
On
one side of the debate are production models that describe agreement
as
being driven primarily by syntactic procedures. One such model is the Marking
and
Morphing model (Eberhard, Cutting & Bock 2005). The Marking and
Morphing
model assumes a grammatical encoding process that includes roughly
two
components: functional assembly, during which lexical entries are
accessed
and
matched to grammatical functions as marked by the conceptual message, and
structural
integration, at which point agreement morphology is
added to the
lexical
forms that have been accessed, and those forms are integrated into the
appropriate
constituent structure. Agreement processes operate under syntactic
guidance
with respect to hierarchical representations of sentence structure, where
features
are transmitted or copied from the controller to the target. During
subject-verb
agreement production the agreement target (verb) has no access to
the
conceptual representation of the controlling referent, but only to the
grammatical
value of the features as marked on the lexical form (the subject noun
phrase, after it
is encoded lexically).
For the conclusion, Subject-verb
agreement is assumed to be the marking of the verb in an utterance as
determined by properties of the subject. Psycholinguistic models of agreement
in speech production differ as to whether they treat this
phenomenon as driven
primarily by syntactic processes or semantic influences. But these
models are
based primarily on research in Indo-European languages. This paper
suggests
that a useful approach to investigating the psycholinguistic mechanisms
behind
agreement in speech production is to extend the research to more
typologically
variant languages and more complex structures.
References
Berg,
Thomas. 1998. “The Resolution of Number Conflicts in English and
German
Agreement Patterns.” Linguistics 36(1): 41-70.
Bock,
Kathryn, & Carol A. Miller. 1991. “Broken Agreement.” Cognitive
Psychology
23(1): 45-93.
Bock,
Kathryn, & J. Cooper Cutting. 1992. “Regulating Mental Energy:
Performance
Units in Language Production.” Journal of Memory and
Language
31(1): 99-127.
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