Tangut verb agreement

The origin of vowel alternations in the Tangut verb 1

Like other Qiangic languages, Tangut has a complex verbal morphology. Based on comparative data from Qiangic languages, this article attempts at reconstructing the origin of the Tangut Ablaut system. In Tangut, some verbs have two stems, whose distribution is determined by the person of the agent and the patient. Stem 2 appears when the agent is first of second person singular and the patient i...

The emergence of creole subject-verb agreement

Conflicting cues and competition in subject–verb agreement

Traditional theories of agreement production assume that verb agreement is an essentially syntactic process. However, recent work shows that agreement is subject to a variety of influences both syntactic and non-syntactic, which raises the question of how these different sources of information are integrated during agreement production. We propose an account of agreement production in which sev...

Morphophonological influences on the construction of subject-verb agreement.

In three experiments, we investigated whether the production of subject-verb number agreement is affected by the phonological realization of grammatical information. Speakers repeated and completed German or Dutch noun phrases along the lines of The position against the demonstrations. We varied the number of the subject noun (position) and the local noun (demonstrations), as well as the number...

Honorifics: A sociocultural verb agreement cue in Japanese sentence processing

Case marking is the major cue to sentence interpretation in Japanese, whereas animacy and word order are much weaker. However, when subjects and their cases markers are omitted, Japanese honorific and humble verbs can provide information that compensates for the missing case role markers. This study examined the usage of honorific and humble verbs as cues to case role assignment by Japanese nat...