The resolution of number conflicts in English and German agreement patterns
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3989291 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thomas Berg (0000-0001-5895-5457, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 1998-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/ling.1998.36.1.41 |
| OpenAlex | W1988386750 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 17 |
This paper examines the strategies native speakers of American English and German employ in resolving number conflicts in subject-verb agreement. These conflicts are created by the competition of syntactic and semantic principles. Significant differences are found between the two groups of subjects. The English speakers tend to follow the semantic principle in certain lexical items and in N(sg) of NP(pl) constructions but the syntactic principle in sentences with subject complements, in clefts, and, to a lesser extent, in pseudoclefts. The German speakers do almost exactly the reverse. These inconsistencies notwithstanding, semantic arguments are claimed to prevail in English and syntactic arguments in German agreement decisions. The cross-linguistic differences may be put down to the fact that the morphology and the word-ordering component are impoverished in English but not in German. This weakens the syntactic force in the former though not in the latter language. The semanticity of English and the syntacticity of German appear to extend beyond the realm of agreement. Evidence from other areas provides preliminary support for the hypothesis that the semantic slant is a more general characteristic of English and the syntactic slant a more general characteristic of German
Agreement · German · Linguistics · Resolution (logic) · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Gender Studies in Language · Mathematics · Philosophy · Second Language Acquisition and Learning · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Standardvariation
Pseudoclefts and Other Specificational Copular Sentences
Making Syntax of Sense
Verb Agreement in English Wh -Clefts
Nominal and pronominal gender
Effects of education on the production of plural morphology among bilingual speakers of Yucatec Maya and Spanish
‘NP’ doesn’t say it all
Specification, equation, and agreement in copular sentences
The production of gender agreement in native and L2 Spanish
A remark on Béjar & Kahnemuyipour 2017
Agreement, attraction and architectural opportunism
Opportunistic processing of language
The role of morphology in setting production biases in agreement
Distance Effects in Number Agreement
The Cross-linguistic Study of Sentence Production
The linguistics and psycholinguistics of agreement
Gender and number agreement in comprehension in Spanish
| Citations per year | 0.81 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2005 - 2020 (16) |
| Highly cited | No |