Volume 10 (2019) Issue 2, pp. 183-206
The Acquisition of Subject-Verb Agreement Among Norwegian (Teenage) Learners of English: Focus on the Subject
Kristin Killie (Tromsø, Norway)
Abstract
Subject-verb agreement in English is a complex area that causes problems for learners. It is important to determine which aspects of this topic are most difficult to learn and automatize so that we can focus on these in the language classroom. The present paper aims to make a contribution by presenting data on subject-verb agreement among Norwegian adolescents (12–13 and 15–16 years old). The research question is whether learners make more mistakes with some types of subject than with others. A main finding is that there are more errors with noun subjects than with personal pronoun subjects. It is argued that this is the result of drilling of paradigms as well as high frequencies in the input and output. Another finding is that the error rate is particularly high when the subject consists of two or more conjoined noun phrases. This fact is explained in terms of ‘Agreement Attraction’ (Strang 1966). On the basis of the data, it is suggested that the teaching of subject-verb agreement should focus more on noun subjects, including conjoined subject noun phrases.
Key words: Second-language acquisition, English as a second language, subject-verb agreement, agreement attraction, Plural Markedness Effect
1 Introduction: Aims and Organization
The present paper investigates subject-verb agreement among Norwegian learners of English (henceforth frequently referred to as ‘S-V agreement’, or simply ‘agreement’). This is an area of the grammar which causes problems to L2 learners, including Norwegians, and we need more knowledge about the causes before we can suggest possible remedies. This study aims to make a contribution by investigating the following research question:
Do Norwegian learners of English make more agreement errors with some types of subject than with others?
The following hypotheses have been tested:
1. The proportion of agreement errors will be considerably lower with personal pronoun subjects than with noun subjects.
2. The proportion of agreement errors will be considerably higher with complex subjects than with simplex subjects.
Hypothesis 1 focuses on the nature of the head of the subject noun phrase (NP) and Hypothesis 2 on the complexity of the subject NP. It will be argued that both hypotheses are confirmed by the data and that this shows that the acquisition of S-V agreement among Norwegian learners of English is influenced by factors such as the rote learning of paradigms/drilling and input and output frequency, and that syntactic complexity makes it harder to choose the correct verb form. The study focuses on the primary verbs be, have and do.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces some important background and provides information about corpus and methodology. In Section 3, the data are presented and discussed, while section 4 summarizes the main points.
2 Background
2.1 The Acquisition of Subject-Verb Agreement
S-V agreement is an interesting area of research both from both a theoretical and pedagogical perspective: it is hard to learn and hard to teach. It is a common view among Norwegian teachers of English that Norwegians make quite a few errors in this area. This is perhaps not surprising since Norwegian does not have person and number marking on verbs, but uses a single present- tense form of the verb across the paradigm. Norwegian learners of English consequently have to learn not only the various person and number-marked verb forms in English and how to match them with various types of subject; they also have to grasp the very notion of person and number marking on verbs. The topic of this paper thus raises the fundamental issue of how learners acquire a feature that does not exist in their native language. To what extent do they succeed in doing this? What are the stumbling blocks or obstacles, and how can they be passed?
It is, however, not only Norwegian learners who struggle with this area of the grammar; it is a learning challenge not only in English, but cross-linguistically, and even advanced learners and native speakers struggle with it to some extent. S-V agreement is a part of functional morphology. This component of the language is most difficult to learn, representing the so-called ‘bottleneck’ of acquisition, and it should therefore be at the heart of acquisition, according to Slabakova (2016: 219, 389–403, 2019). What makes functional morphology so complicated is that it involves a whole range of grammatical meanings, which are distributed differently across the morphemes of different languages. Often several features are bundled together in one and the same morpheme, but the composition of the bundles varies from language to language (Lardiere 2009, Slabakova 2016, to appear). According to Lardiere (2009), the acquisition of functional morphology therefore involves the selection, composition, and restructuring of features, depending on the composition of the relevant bundles in the L1 and L2. Ionin & Montrul (2010: 907) suggest that “selecting features for a new category is easier than reassembling features on an existing category”. Norwegians who are trying to learn S-V agreement in English must undertake the most complicated of Lardiere’s processes: feature reassembly. While the relevant English morphemes encode tense / finitude, aspect, mood and person and number features, the Norwegian morphemes that are functionally closest to the English ones do not encode person and number. There is a bundle of features to unpack, and these also have to be matched against a set of forms which is in some cases rather irregular as they involve a change of vowel (e.g. do – does), a change of consonant (have – has) or highly irregular suppletive inflection (with be). The forms must then be matched against a range of different subject and clause types, which necessitates semantic and syntactic knowledge of various sorts (Fisher 1985: 9-12; Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik 1985: 755–766; Hasselgård, Lysvåg & Johansson, 2012: 265-274).
Given that S-V agreement is such a complex area, it probably matters a great deal what we do in the language classroom:
The good news is that the bottleneck is not solid, not rigid: it expands with practice. We have all heard that practice makes perfect. The legendary American football coach Vince Lombardi said, “Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” We should not be maximalist in arguing that we can come up with advice on the perfect learning practice. The perfect practice for language learning probably differs from person to person. But at a minimum, practice should be smart. Teachers should know what is difficult to learn and therefore will take practice, and what is universal, hence so easy that it should come for free. Smart practice can make perfect sense in language classrooms. (Slabakova 2016: 403)
The question, then, is what is easy to learn and what requires more practice? By answering this question, we can hopefully make the teaching of S-V agreement more efficient so that this part of the grammar is acquired both earlier and more successfully.
2.2 Corpus and Methodology
The data are taken from the Corpus of young learner language (CORYL), which was compiled by the Research Group for Language Testing and Assessment at the University of Bergen. CORYL contains texts from the National Tests in English (writing) in the years 2004 and 2005. Its current size is 129,421 tokens. The texts are drawn randomly from pupils in 7th, 10th and 11th grade across Norway and contains samples from 272 learners, 136 from each of the two age groups 12–13 years (7th grade) and 15–16 years (10th and 11th th grade). The corpus is coded for error type, gender, age group, and proficiency level in relation to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages/CEFR. (See Hasselgren & Sundet, 2017 for more detailed information.)
Killie (under ) analyses the agreement errors in the CORYL corpus, discussing possible generalization strategies. However, the aim of the present study is not only to analyse errors but also to determine what learners do not struggle with. To do this, I needed a corpus that included also the correct verb choices of the learners. Given that CORYL is not syntactically tagged, the only way of retrieving all relevant verb forms is to carry out word searches for each verb form. As this is hardly feasible, the focus is on the so-called primary verbs (i.e. verbs that are used both as main verbs and auxiliaries; Biber et al. 1999: 358), viz. be, have and do. These verbs are also the most frequent verbs in English, with be at the top (Biber et al. 1999: 359, Kress & Fry 2016; Wikipedia 2018), guaranteeing a reasonably large corpus and more reliable data. As shown by Ringbom (1998: 193–194), the frequencies of these very basic verbs are even higher among learners than among native speakers. The reason for this phenomenon is probably that learners’ vocabulary is less ‘advanced’.
Word searches were carried out for all forms of be, have and do which are marked for person and number, viz. am, are, is, was, were, have, has, do, and does, including negative forms. Thankfully, the corpus compilers have provided corrected forms of incorrect forms and these are searchable. Hence, one does not have to search for every imaginable and unimaginable misspelling of one and the same word but can search for e.g. was and every incorrect spelling of was. Such searches were carried out twice for all the forms listed above – for the 12-13-year-olds and for the 15-16-year-olds. Table 1 below shows the number of tokens for each verb lemma for the two age groups in what will henceforth be referred to as the ‘Primary Verb Corpus’. The Primary Verb Corpus, then, is a subset of the CORYL corpus; it contains all instances of be, have and do in CORYL which require agreement marking:
be
|
have
|
do
|
Total
| |
12–13-year-olds
|
2,378
|
467
|
57
|
2,902
|
15–16-year-olds
|
2,071
|
397
|
244
|
2,712
|
Total
|
4,449
|
864
|
301
|
5,614
|
Table 1: Size of the Corpus
The corpus sentences were categorized according to subject type, viz. the nature of the head and the complexity of the subject NPs, in order to test the hypotheses described in the previous section.
In order to test the hypotheses described in the previous section, the corpus examples have been categorized according to the subject type, viz. the nature of the head and the complexity of the subject NP. All corpus examples have also been marked as ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’. However, there are cases in which speakers disagree whether a singular or plural verb is required. The next section discusses some such cases and the reasons why disagreements arise in this domain. We will also look at some cases which have been classified as agreement errors by the CORYL corpus annotators, but which are not considered agreement errors in this study.
2.3 Principles of Subject-Verb Agreement and the Classification of Some Potentially Controversial Examples
As mentioned above, S-V agreement in English is an extremely complex area that requires linguistic knowledge of various kinds. There are further cases where usage is divided, and these may give corpus taggers and corpus researchers problems as well. There are also other cases where corpus taggers and corpus researchers may disagree. In what follows, my approach to these cases is clarified.
The main agreement rule in English is clear: The finite verb must agree with the head of the subject NP, as in (1). This is referred to as grammatical agreement / concord (e.g. Quirk et al. 1985: 757). In this paper, the term ‘agreement’ is used (though the term ‘concord’ occurs in quotes from other scholars):
1a) The pupil is here. (1b) The pupils are here.
While grammatical agreement is the rule, agreement may also be affected by word order in the sense that the verb is made to agree with a closer noun rather than with the head noun of the subject NP, as in (2) below. This phenomenon will be referred to as ‘Agreement Attraction’ (Strang 1966):
(2) *All kinds of love is good.
Most cases of Agreement Attraction result in ungrammaticality, as in (2), and below it will be argued that Agreement Attraction is a common source of errors among Norwegian learners of English. However, there are cases where a large proportion of native speakers accept the results of Agreement Attraction as grammatical, even if prescriptive grammarians insist on grammatical agreement. One such case is when the subject consists of structures such as none of them or neither of them. According to Biber et al. (1999: 184), usage is “fairly evenly divided between singular and plural concord with none of”. A similar case is shown in (3), where the verb seems to agree with the head of the postmodifying NP his own supporters rather than with the head of the subject NP. As indicated by the question mark, Quirk et al. are not certain whether a plural verb is legitimate here or not:
(3) ?No one except his own supporters agree with him. (Quirk et al. 1985: 757)
In Fisher’s (1985) study of agreement among university students (native speakers and Swedish learners of English), she offers experimental data that aim to tap native-speaker intuitions about S-V agreement in various contexts. Fisher, among other things, discusses relative clauses such as the one in (4) below (her example 71):
(4) She was one of those people who tried to be popular with everybody. (Fisher 1985: 166)
Fisher asked her native speaker informants to turn the past-tense verb in (4) into present tense. As many as 34 out of 85 subjects (i.e. 40.3%) chose a plural verb (1985: 166). When specifically asked to weigh the two possible present-tense variants in (4) – tries and try – against each other, the result was as follows:
tries preferred
|
try preferred
|
no preference
| |||||||
n
|
%
|
rating
|
n
|
%
|
rating
|
n
|
%
|
total
| |
(71) She is one of those people who tries / try to be popular with everybody
|
43
|
55.1
|
Md 4.86
Q 0.32
|
21
|
26.9
|
Md 4.50
Q 0.86
|
14
|
17.9
|
78
|
Table 2: -Speaker Attitudes to Verb Agreement in a Relative Clause
Postmodifying the String one of + Plural Noun (Fisher 1985: 166)
Fisher provides the following comment on the relevant data:
Also in the preference test, weighing the two variants against each other, a majority of the NSs [native speakers’, K.K.] remain faithful to singular verb concord: 55.1% mark the singular verb as their first choice, and, at 4.86, it is rated higher than the plural verb; 26.9% prefer plural verb concord, which, at 4.50, is also a highly acceptable alternative. The impression that verb concord is in divided usage here is reinforced by the unusually high percentage of intrapersonal variation, ie the number of informants who claim to have no preference one way or the other (17.9%). (Fisher 1985: 167)
The strategy of the present study has been to mark as grammatical both a singular and a plural verb in the case of complex NPs such as those discussed above, where native-speaker intuitions differ to such an extent. There are only a handful of such cases in the Primary Verb Corpus. However, there is another ‘legitimate’ context for Agreement Attraction which is more frequent in the primary verb corpus, viz. existential there clauses where the real subject is realized by two or more conjoined NPs. In such cases, the verb tends to agree with the closest conjoint (Biber et al. 1999: 186). Thus, as noted by Hasselgård, Lysvåg & Johansson (2012: 267), the verbs in (5) and (6) differ in number even though the subjects contain the same elements and refer to the same referents. In such cases, both a singular and a plural verb have been classified as correct:
(5) There is a book and two articles that I still haven’t read. (Hasselgård et al. 2012: 267)
(6) There are two articles and a book that I still haven’t read. (Hasselgård et al. 2012: 267)
Clauses involving existential there or existential contexts also involve other classification problems. The corpus examples in (7) to (9) below for instance, are classified as agreement errors by the CORYL annotators, while apparently, only (8) is an example of this:
(7) It is many animals here ay like and it is a wonderful town. (Primary Verb Corpus, 12–13-year-old learner)
(8) One day when I came home from school, I found the front door wide open. There are hot in here. (Primary Verb Corpus, 12–13-year-old learner)
(9) They don’t! That’s just ridiculous to say, there’s care less- people among adults to, not just among the young people. (Primary Verb Corpus, 15–16-year-old learner)
In (7), the learner has used it is instead of there are. As shown in Killie (in prep a), this is common among Norwegian learners before the existential there construction has been acquired.Therefore, these uses are not analysed as errors here as they most probably exemplify insufficient knowledge of the existential there construction rather than of S-V agreement; the finite verb after all agrees with the subject pronoun it. There are as many as 167 examples like this.
In (8), the learner has used there in place of it. Such examples have been classified as incorrect. To be sure, also the use of there in this type of context may be argued to demonstrate insufficient learning of the existential there construction: there is, after all, chosen instead of it in a non-existential context. However, while is in (7) agrees with it, are in (8) has no plural subject to agree with. The Primary Verb Corpus contains 18 examples like the one in (8).
The corpus contains nine examples of there’s followed by a plural subject NP, as in (9). In such cases, there’s is probably treated as a ‘fixed pragmatic formula’ rather than as there followed by a singular verb (Breivik & Martinez-Insua 2008: 361, also Crawford 2005: 58).5 Given that the learner does not have to choose between a singular and a plural verb, such uses have been excluded from the data. The same goes for the following ‘creative’ solutions, which allow the learner to avoid making a choice between verb forms. These are tagged as agreement errors in CORYL:
(10) My teacher was/were very mad and asked me “so, young lady what is your excuse (Primary Verb Corpus, 15–16-year-old learner)
(11) When I finally was / were home, I went up to my rom, ... (Primary Verb Corpus, 15–16-year-old learner)
The examples in (12)–(14) below contain optional contexts for the subjunctive. Here the error coding in CORYL is inconsistent. Presumably the sentence in (12) has been coded as an error on the rationale that the learner should have used the subjunctive, while the uses in (13) and (14) are considered errors on the assumption that the relevant learners probably do not know about the subjunctive and hence should not have used it. However, in my view, coding should not involve labelling any grammatically correct uses as ungrammatical and it should not be based on speculations about what a learner knows or does not know. Uses such as those in (12) to (14) have therefore all been coded as correct in the primary verb corpus:
(12) Firstly, if I was you, I would’nt come to Norway at all. (Primary Verb Corpus, 15–16-year-old learner)
(13) ... I thought for my self, “ maybe this day weren’t so bad anaway. (Primary Verb Corpus, 15–16-year-old learner)
(14) I really don’t know what I would do, what the world would do, if it weren’t for Tor Vidar. (Primary Verb Corpus, 15–16-year-old learner)
The examples in (15) and (16), which are coded as agreement errors in CORYL, have also been classified as correct in the primary verb corpus.
((15) The house was huge and it was invided 150 people. (Primary Verb Corpus, 15–16-year-old learner)
(16) So I think that the one who shud drive is thous who is over 18 and younger then 65 (Primary Verb Corpus, 15–16-year-old learner)
In (15), the verb correctly agrees with the pronoun it, so there is no lack of agreement here. Instead, the problem seems to be incorrect use of the passive (presumably by analogy with Norwegian, which allows a much wider range of verbs in the passive than does English). In (16), the sentence is awkward in that the subject is singular and the subject complement plural; however, the verb agrees with the head of the subject NP, one, in accordance with the principle of grammatical agreement, so this is consequently no agreement error (in contrast to the verb following the second relative pronoun).
3 Presentation and Discussion of the Data
In this section, the two hypotheses listed above will be discussed in the light of the corpus data. However, the section begins with a general overview of performance with the various subject types represented in the Primary Verb Corpus, as defined by the category of the head.
3.1 Overview: the distribution of errors across subject types
Table 3 below shows the proportion of errors in the Primary Verb Corpus for the verbs be, have and do across the various subject types represented. The relevant types are: demonstrative pronouns (demon pron), indefinite pronouns (indef pron), interrogative pronouns (interrog pron), personal pronouns (pers pron), possessive pronouns (poss pron), relative pronouns (rel pron), nouns, mixed subjects (mixed) and clauses. Mixed subjects are subjects consisting of two or more coordinated NP subjects, where at least one conjoint is a noun and at least one a pronoun, as in John and I. The percentages in parentheses represent the proportion of errors for each category. Percentages are given for all categories, even though some error rates may not be representative due to low token frequencies. This is done consistently throughout the present paper.
12–13-
Year-Olds
|
15–16-
Year-Olds
| |||||||
Type of subject
|
BE
Tokens/
Errors
|
HAVE
Tokens/
Errors
|
DO
Tokens/
Errors
|
Totals
|
BE
Tokens/
Errors
|
HAVE
Tokens/
Errors
|
DO
Tokens/
Errors
|
Total
|
demon
pron
|
60/1
(1.7%)
|
2/2
(100%)
|
1/1
(100%)
|
63/4
(6.3%)
|
124/1
(0.8%)
|
---
|
1/1
(100%)
|
125/2
(1.6%)
|
Indef
pron
|
75/6
(8%)
|
6/1
(16.7%)
|
---
|
81/7
(8.6%)
|
93/13
(14%)
|
9/5
(62.5%)
|
10/---
|
112/18
(16.1%)
|
Interrog
pron
|
8/2
(25%)
|
---
|
---
|
8/2
(25%)
|
13/1
(7.7%)
|
1/---
|
---
|
14/1
(7.1%)
|
Pers
pron
|
1285/133
(10.4%)
|
371/25 (6.7%)
|
50/5
(10 %)
|
1706/163
(9.6%)
|
1028/47
(4.6%)
|
268/11 (4.1%)
|
157/8
(5.1%)
|
1453/66
(4.5%)
|
Poss pron
|
---
|
---
|
--
|
---
|
---
|
1/---
|
---
|
1/---
|
Rel
pron
|
102/22
(21.6%)
|
12/6 (50%)
|
1/---
|
115/28
(24.3%)
|
73/5
(6.8%)
|
29/4 (13.8%)
|
19/3
(15.8%)
|
121/12
(9.9%)
|
Noun
|
814/163
(20%)
|
66/28
(42.4%)
|
5/3
(60 %)
|
885/194
(21.9%)
|
709/86
(12.1%)
|
86/27 (31.4%)
|
55/8
(14.5%)
|
850/121
(14.2%)
|
Mixed
|
32/15
(46.9%)
|
10/2
(20%)
|
---
|
42/17
(40.5%)
|
10/3
(25%)
|
2/---
|
---
|
12/3
(25%)
|
Clause
|
2/---
|
---
|
---
|
2/---
|
21/1
(4.8%)
|
1/---
|
2/---
|
24/1
(4.2%)
|
Total
|
2378/342
(14.4%)
|
467/64 (13.7%)
|
57/9
(15.8%)
|
2902/415
(14.3%)
|
2071/157
(7.6%)
|
397/47
(11.8%)
|
244/20
(8.2%)
|
2712/224
(8.3%)
|
Table 3: Token Rates and Agreement Errors across Subject Types in the Primary-verb Corpus
Before we look at the figures, it should be noted that the CORYL corpus does not provide data which allow significance testing. The corpus is not balanced in terms of the number of tokens for the various verbs and contexts, and no information is given about the number of words produced by each learner and each age group. However, some subject types are used frequently by both age groups, at least with be (and, to some extent, with have), and the relative frequencies here (given as percentages) strongly suggest that there are some clear and consistent differences between subject types and age groups.
As shown in the above table, the overall error rate for 12–13-year-olds is 14.3 %, while for 15–16-year-olds, it is 8.3%. The latter rate is almost identical to the mean error rate of 8.25% found by Garshol (2019 a, 2019 b) in her corpus of written English texts produced by Norwegian 15–16-year-olds. The error rates are lower among the 15–16-year olds than among the 12–13-year-olds for most subject types. The data thus suggest that Norwegian pupils make substantial progress between the ages of 12–13 and 15–16 years old and support the claim that it is indeed possible to acquire features that do not exist in the pupils’ L1 (Lardiere 2009; also Ionin & Montrul 2010, Sprouse 2006, Slabakova 2019). For nouns, the error rate is 35% lower for the older pupils, while for personal pronouns and relative pronouns, it is 50% and 60% lower. For mixed, clausal, interrogative and possessive pronoun subjects, the database is too small to enable us to draw any conclusions about progress. Indefinite pronouns are the only subject type where the error rate is, in fact, twice as high among the older pupils than among the younger ones.
When it comes to the proportion of errors with the various subject categories, there are large differences. The category with the lowest error rate is demonstrative pronoun subjects, exemplified in (17) and (18) below, where not even the 12–13-year-olds make mistakes:
(17) “That is cool”, said the friend. (Primary Verb Corpus, 12–13-year-old learner)
(18) So, perhaps this is where we need to start? (Primary Verb Corpus, 15–16-year-old learner)
The fact that Norwegian learners hardly make mistakes at all with demonstrative pronoun subjects may be due to a combination of frequency – the relevant pronouns are highly frequent in English, especially that (Biber et al. 1999: 349 Kress & Fry 2016, Wikipedia 2018) – and simplicity – there is a limited number of forms, which are morphologically and also syntactically simplex since they do not have postmodifiers.
The highest error rate – 40.5% – was found in the case of mixed subjects among the younger learners, which suggests that such subjects may cause considerable problems for learners. Examples with this type of subject are given in (19) and (20) below:
(19) The robbers and I was blinded, and then we were through to the gound [thrown to the ground, KK] by the police... (Primary Verb Corpus, 15–16-year-old learner)
(20) I and my Frind Kari is in England thes soummer (Primary Verb Corpus, 12–13-year-old learner)
To be sure, the token rate is not high enough to draw any definite conclusions, but in Section 3.3 below, mixed subjects are discussed together with other conjoined subject NPs, and there it is shown that it is not the mixedness but the coordination aspect of these subjects which is the problem, most probably because such coordinated subjects are susceptible to Agreement Attraction.
An interesting question that may be addressed on the basis of the corpus data is whether there are any differences regarding the acquisition of agreement with be, have and do. It has been claimed that accuracy is highest with be. This claim has been linked to early acquisition, to the suppletive nature of the be forms, to frequency, and to verb raising (Fraser, Bellugi & Brown 1963, Ionin & Wexler 2002, Keeney & Wolfe 1972, White 1992, 2003). Thus, according to Keeney & Wolfe (1972: 699), the higher accuracy with be is due to the high frequencies of this verb, along with the fact that it is not “subject to direct interference from the noun inflections”. This hypothesis predicts that there will be a difference in accuracy between be on the one hand, and have and do on the other.
To White (1992) and Ionin & White (2002), by contrast, the main distinction is not between individual verbal lexemes but between auxiliaries and lexical verbs. Agreement is said to be easier, and therefore to be acquired earlier, with auxiliaries than with lexical verbs. As is common in the generative tradition, this fact is explained in terms of different (overt or covert) movement patterns: while finite auxiliaries raise to the I position to check tense, finite lexical verbs do not. The hypothesis is that L2 learners initially associate morphological agreement with movement to the I position. This hypothesis predicts that learners will make more mistakes with lexical verbs than with auxiliaries, but that there should be no large differences in the accuracy of be, have and do, given that have and do are also used as auxiliaries and consequently raise to I.
Interestingly, there may be some truth in both these hypotheses. On the one hand, there are no notable differences in the general error rates of the three verbs, suggesting that White (1992) is right. On the other, there are large differences between the verbs with some types of subject. Perhaps most notable is the fact that while there are small differences with personal pronoun subjects, the differences are much larger with noun subjects. This suggests that drilling and frequency with respect to input and output are crucial when L2 learners learn these verbs (Section 3.2). There is, however, no direct support for Keeney & Wolfe’s (1972) hypothesis that affixal agreement may be disturbed due to interference from noun inflections. If this were the case, one would expect the -s form of the verb to be overused with plural subjects, but most of the errors occurring with noun subjects involve a singular subject used with the base form of the verb (referred to as ‘omission’). Similarly, Killie (under review), which is a study of all affixal agreement errors in CORYL, found no tendency for the -s form of the verb to be used only with nouns in the CORYL error corpus. However, the fact that plural nouns carry the same suffix as singular verbs leads to general confusion and a certain degree of randomness among learners in selecting verb forms. In conclusion, the figures suggest that the early acquisition of be is not due to type of inflection (suppletive) but rather to properties that be shares with have and do, such as high frequencies, drilling and / or verb raising.
In what follows, some of the data in Table 3 will be discussed against the hypotheses outlined in Section 1.
3.2 Hypothesis 1: A Considerably Lower Proportion of Agreement Errors with Personal Pronoun Subjects than with Noun Subjects
In their experimental study of S-V agreement (with sein) among L2 learners (i.e. university students) of German, Slabakova & Gajdos (2018) found that the error rate was much lower when the head was a personal pronoun than when it was a noun. The same was the case with the 15–16-year-old Norwegian learners of English in the study conducted by Garshol (2019a, 2019b). The difference between nouns and pronouns was also tested in the present study. The relevant data are marked in bold in Table 3 above.
As can be seen, the error rate with personal pronoun subjects is 9.6% among the younger pupils and 4.5% among the older pupils, while the corresponding figures for nouns are 21.9% and 14.2%. Hypothesis 1 – according to which the proportion of agreement errors is considerably lower with personal pronoun subjects than with noun subjects – can thus be considered as confirmed.
It is natural to relate the relatively low error rates with personal pronouns to the rote learning – or drilling – of verbal paradigms, which commonly takes place in Norwegian schools (and in English classes in many other countries). According to Tan (2005), drill exercises considerably reduce the number of agreement errors. Other possible contributing factors are input and output. In the years following the publication of Krashen (1985), the idea prevailed that input is more or less the only success factor in language learning. However, researchers have gradually come to realize that (pushed) output and verbal interaction may be important contributors as well (de Bot 1996; Ellis 2012; Long 1996; Swain, 1985, 1993, 2000). Output also functions to promote automaticity (Gass & Mackey 2014: 184–185). It is likely that output plays a key role in the acquisition and automatization of subject-verb agreement with personal pronouns. As shown in Table 4 below, personal pronouns represent by far the largest category of subjects in the Primary Verb Corpus, making up well over half of the subjects in both age groups. The next most frequent subject type is nouns, which constitute slightly less than a third of the subjects:
12–13-
Year-Olds
|
15–16-
Year-Olds
| |||||||
Type of
Subject
|
BE
|
HAVE
|
DO
|
Total
|
BE
|
HAVE
|
DO
|
Total
|
Demon
pron
|
60
(2.5%)
|
2
(0.4 %)
|
1
(1.8 %)
|
63
(2.2%)
|
124
(6%)
|
---
|
1
(0.4 %)
|
125
(4.6%)
|
Indef
pron
|
75
(3.2%)
|
6
(1.3 %)
|
---
|
81
(2.8%)
|
93
(4.5%)
|
9
(2.3 %)
|
10
(4.1 %)
|
112
(4.1%)
|
Interrog
pron
|
8
(0.3%)
|
---
|
---
|
8
(0.3%)
|
13
(0.6%)
|
1
(0.3 %)
|
---
|
14
(0.5%)
|
Pers
pron
|
1285
(54.3%)
|
371
(79.4 %)
|
50
(87.7 %)
|
1706
(58.8%)
|
1028
(49.6%)
|
268
(67.5 %)
|
157
(64.3 %)
|
1453
(53.6%)
|
Poss
pron
|
---
|
---
|
---
|
---
|
---
|
1
(0.3 %)
|
---
|
1
(0.0%)
|
Rel
pron
|
102
(4.3%)
|
12
(2.6 %)
|
1
(1.8 %)
|
115
(4%)
|
73
(3.5%)
|
29
(7.3 %)
|
19
(7.8 %)
|
121
(4.5%)
|
Noun
|
814
(34.4%)
|
66
(14.1 %)
|
5
(8.8 %)
|
885
(30.5%)
|
709
(34.3%)
|
86
(21.7 %)
|
55
(22.5 %)
|
850
(31.3%)
|
Mixed
|
32
(1.4%)
|
10
(2.1 %)
|
---
|
42
(1.4%)
|
10
(0.5%)
|
2
(0.5 %)
|
---
|
12
(0.4%)
|
Clause
|
2
(0.1%)
|
---
|
---
|
2
(0.1%)
|
21
(1%)
|
1
(0.3 %)
|
2
(0.8 %)
|
24
(0.9%)
|
Total
|
2378
|
467
|
57
|
2902
|
2071
|
397
|
244
|
2712
|
Table 4: Distribution of Subject Types in the Primary Verb Corpus
Apparently, Norwegian pupils use personal pronouns very frequently. There may be at least two main reasons for this. One reason is that they are often instructed to describe their own personal opinions and experiences, which, of course, encourages the use of the 1st person singular. This was also the case in most of the tasks in the National Tests of 2005,, from which the CORYL corpus (and hence also the Primary Verb Corpus) is drawn (Lie, Hopfenbeck, Ibsen & Turmo 2005: 84–87; Section 2.2). Another plausible reason is that the texts and conversations pupils produce are often rather informal, and informal registers cross-linguistically contain a larger proportion of personal pronouns than do formal ones, especially in subject position (e.g. Anderssen & Westergaard 2010: 7; Biber et al. 1999: 65–66, 92, 235-236, 333-335, Westergaard 2011).
If personal pronouns are generally frequent in pupils’ output, then, logically, they must also be frequent in the classroom input. Presumably, out-of-school (‘extra-mural’) input in the form of video games, YouTube videos or films, which Norwegian pupils are heavily exposed to these days, also contains a large number of personal pronoun subjects. Based on this discussion, we may hypothesize that rote learning, input and output are all factors that contribute to the acquisition and automatization, and hence the high accuracy rates, of S-V agreement with personal pronouns.
In sum, the data and discussion in this section show that Norwegian adolescents make comparatively few agreement mistakes when the subject is a personal pronoun. Hypothesis 1 is therefore confirmed.
3.3 Hypothesis 2: A Considerably Higher Proportion of Agreement Errors with Complex Subjects than with Simplex Subjects
We have just seen that Norwegian learners make fewer mistakes with personal pronoun subjects than with noun subjects, and we have explained this in terms of frequency and drilling. We should, however, consider the possibility that syntactic complexity and Agreement Attraction may play a role (Section 2.3), given that noun subjects, but not personal pronoun subjects, are frequently post-modified.
Agreement Attraction with postmodified subject NPs is not only relevant for learners; in fact, most studies on this phenomenon focus on adult native speakers. Thus, Quirk et al. argue that
“[c]onflict between grammatical concord and attraction through proximity tends to increase with the distance between the noun phrase head of the subject and the verb, for example when the postmodifier is lengthy”. (Quirk et al. 1985: 757)
This claim is supported by Strang’s (1966) study of English university students’ examination papers. Levin (2001) draws the same conclusion based on a study of newspaper language, and experimental data also point in the same direction (Eberhard, Cutting & Bock 2005). Fisher discusses the agreement errors made by native speakers in published academic articles. These had all “passed through several hands and various stages of manuscript, revision, proof-reading, publishing house editing, etc.” (Fisher 1985: 22); yet, they contained 127 agreement errors. Of these, 120 (94.5%) were found in noncontiguous contexts (Fisher 1985: 23). Fisher explains such errors in terms of processing problems:
In contiguous as well as noncontiguous S-V constructions, the subject must be stored in short-term memory; retrieval is obviously facilitated when the verb occurs immediately after the head of the subject noun phrase, since disturbing factors such as the limited capacity of short-term memory and attraction from intrusive elements do not obtain. (Fisher 1985: 11)
Given that native speakers make agreement mistakes with postmodified subjects even in written contexts in which they have time for proofreading and revision, it should not come as a surprise if learners have problems with postmodified subjects.
There is also a stronger version of Agreement Attraction which holds that attraction errors do not have a symmetric distribution, but that there is a “preponderance of agreement errors with a plural intervening noun” (Eberhard 1997: 149, also Bock & Miller 1991). According to this hypothesis, errors are more likely to occur in examples such as (21) than in examples like (22). The explanation is that plural is marked, while singular is unmarked. This distinction has both a morphological aspect – plural nouns are morphologically marked, while singular ones are not – and a semantic aspect – singular nouns are used not only in contexts where they signal a contrast with plural nouns, but also in those contexts where the contrast between singular and plural is neutralized (Eberhard 1997: 148). Thus, singular is the default number. It is argued that by virtue of their markedness, plural nouns obstruct correct number assignment, while this does not happen when the intervening noun is singular. Eberhard (1997) refers to this as the ‘Plural Markedness Effect’:
(21) Grammatical findings indicate that the grammatical number of English verbs are determined by agreement with the noun. (Eberhardt 1997: 149)
(22) The Ordination services of the English Church states this to be a truth. (Eberhardt 1997: 149)
Some work has been done to determine whether a Plural Markedness Effect also exists in second-language acquisition. Ocampo (2013) argues in favour of a weak effect for her (adult) Spanish L2 learners of English, but her results are inconclusive and she also suggests that learner variability is likely to be caused by general processing limitations, given that native speakers have similar problems (Ocampo 2013: 14, 20, 47). Jensen (2016) finds no Plural Markedness Effect among her 11–19-year-old Norwegian pupils (also Jensen et al. 2017). The data in Table 5 below show the proportion of agreement errors with postmodified noun heads in the present corpus and to what extent these errors may be due to Agreement Attraction or the Plural Markedness Effect:
12–13-year-olds
|
15–16-year-olds
|
24 tokens
4 errors (16.7 %)
possible Agreement Attraction: 3 cases (75 %)
possible Plural Markedness Effect: 0 cases
|
88 tokens
10 errors (11.4 %)
possible Agreement Attraction: 5 cases (50 %)
possible Plural Markedness Effect: 0 cases
|
Table 5: Subject-Verb Agreement with Postmodified Noun Subjects
As can be seen, there are not that many postmodified noun subjects in the data. Only 24 out of the 885 noun subjects produced by the younger group are of this type (viz. 2.7%), while the corresponding number for the older group is 88 of 850 tokens (10.4%). Of these, four and ten uses involve an incorrect verb form, viz. 16.7% and 11.4%, which is not much higher than the overall error rates for all subject types (viz. 14.3% and 8.3%; Table 3). Not one of the relevant errors may have been caused by the Plural Markedness Effect. To what extent the relevant context (a noun head in the singular followed by a plural modifier) represents a problem could not be tested, though, as there are no examples of this context in the Primary Verb Corpus. There are, however, examples of errors with plural heads ((23) and (24)) that could be due to Agreement Attraction:
(23) ... I was going in a trance and all the people in the world was going to hate for a long time (Primary Verb Corpus, 12–13-year-old learner)
(24) Two big feet under a gray body was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor. (Primary Verb Corpus, 15–16-year-old learner)
The above data suggest that agreement with postmodified NPs does not represent a big problem for Norwegian learners of English. The same was found to be the case with the Norwegian 15–16-year-olds in Garshol’s study (Garshol, 2019a, 2019b). However, a possible explanation is that the complexity of the NPs produced by these learners is limited (also Killie, under review). Experimental data provided by Jensen (2016; also Jensen et al., 2017) show that when confronted with complex, postmodified NPs, Norwegian learners aged 12–19 had huge problems determining whether a singular or plural verb form was required.
The data on postmodified subjects in Table 5 above do not allow us to conclude that Agreement Attraction is a source of agreement errors among Norwegian learners. However, there is another type of subject which is not normally discussed in connection with Agreement Attraction, but which may be subjected to such attraction, namely conjoined subject NPs like the beauty and the beast. Such NP subjects normally take a plural verb, but it seems likely that if the noun closest to the verb is in the singular, the verb may end up in the singular as well, by Agreement Attraction. Table 6 below shows the number of conjoined subject NPs in the corpus, along with the error rates and the number and proportion of errors which may be caused by Agreement Attraction. The table includes not only coordinated noun subjects, but also mixed subject NPs (Section 3.1), as there is no reason to suspect that these two behave any differently in relation to Agreement Attraction.
12–13-year-olds
|
15–16-year-olds
|
Mixed heads
| |
42 tokens
17 errors (40.5%)
Possible Agreement Attraction: 15 (93.8%)
|
12 tokens
3 errors (25.0%)
Possible Agreement Attraction: 1 (33.3%)
|
Noun heads only
| |
73 tokens
39 errors (53.4%)
Possible Agreement Attraction: 36 (92.3%)
|
21 tokens
9 errors (42.9%)
Possible Agreement Attraction: 8 (88.9%)
|
Total
| |
115 tokens
56 errors (48.7%)
Possible Agreement Attraction: 51 (91.1%)
|
33 tokens
12 errors (36.4%)
Possible Agreement Attraction: 9 (90.0%)
|
Table 6: Subject-Verb Agreement with Conjoined Subjects
As shown in the above table, conjoined subject NPs are not extremely frequent in the data, but they seem to represent a highly problematic context. The error rate with such subjects is high in both age groups – viz. 48.7% among the younger and 36.4% among the older pupils, and approximately 90% of the errors are explicable in terms of Agreement Attraction. Some examples are given in (25)–(27) below:
(25) John, Jack and Adam is building a house in a tree in Jacks garden. (Primary Verb Corpus, 12–13-year-old learner)
(26) But my littlebrother and his friend doesn’t see it. (Primary Verb Corpus, 12–13-year-old learner)
(27) The robbers and I was blinded, and then we were through to the gound [thrown to the ground, KK] by the police. (Primary Verb Corpus, 15–16-year-old learner)
On the basis of the data presented here, It is hypothesized that Agreement Attraction exerts a strong influence on verbs co-occurring with conjoined subjects, though larger data sets are needed to draw any firm conclusions.
If Agreement Attraction influences the choice of verbs among Norwegian learners of English, this may or may not be explicable in terms of the so-called Shallow Structure Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser 2006, 2018, Clahsen, Felser, Neubauer, Sato & Silva, 2010). According to this hypothesis, the syntactic representations of adult L2 learners are “shallower and less detailed” than those of native speakers (Clahsen & Felser, 2006: 32). For this reason:
... the L2 grammar does not provide the kind of information required to process complex syntax in native-like ways, forcing L2 learners to fall back on “shallow” parsing strategies. These provide a less detailed representation of the structure of a sentence or a morphologically complex word and are largely based on lexical-semantic and other non-syntactic cues to interpretation. (Clahsen et al. 2010: 23)
Ocampo (2013) argues that “deficits in the representation of L2 grammar prevents learners from using inflectional morphology accurately” so that “agreement can only be established locally for L2 learners” (Ocampo 2013: 2). In other words, learners are unable to (consciously) establish long-distance agreement, which is necessary in order to mark the verb for the correct number with complex subject NPs. Clahsen & Felser (2018) argue that the Shallow Structure Hypothesis has been misinterpreted by a number of scholars in that it is not about any ‘deficit’ in the grammar of L2 learners, but rather about a tendency among L2 learners to be “guided more strongly than native speakers by semantic, pragmatic, probabilistic, or surface-level information” (Clahsen & Felser 2018: 2), i.e. non-grammatical information. According to Clahsen & Felser (2018), the factors that cause these differences are not clear, but a number of hypotheses have been offered to explain this phenomenon. One of these hypotheses is that L1 and L2 learners attach different weightings to different types of cues in memory retrieval (Cunnings 2017). Another hypothesis is that L2 processing is more demanding in terms of cognitive resources and that this fact results in less automatic processing (McDonald 2006). A third hypothesis is that lexical processing is particularly demanding in L2 comprehension so that the resources left for syntactic processing are insufficient (Hopp 2014). A fourth hypothesis is that L1 and L2 processing are different in terms of the brain structures and neural pathways involved (e.g. Ullman 2005). The question of whether one of these hypotheses is correct, whether the Shallow Structure Hypothesis is correct, and whether the Shallow Structure Hypothesis can explain errors such as those discussed in this section, cannot be answered here.
We have seen that Agreement Attraction may give rise to ungrammatical verb forms with conjoined subject NPs. However, the number of such subject NPs in the writings of these learners is not very high. The question therefore is to what extent the high error rates with conjoined subject NPs affect the error rates for noun subjects as a whole. To throw light on this question, the proportion of agreement errors with simplex noun subjects is indicated in Table 7 below. These are NP subjects whose head is a single noun with no post-modification:
12–13-year-olds
|
15–16-year-olds
|
788 tokens
151 errors (19.2%)
|
741 tokens
102 errors (13.8%)
|
Table 7: Subject-Verb Agreement with Simplex Noun Subjects
As can be seen, learners made quite a large proportion of errors (19.2% and 13.8 %) even when the noun subject is simplex. The error rates here are not much lower than the 21.9% and 14.2% of errors for all noun heads (Table 3). Thus, while the error rates with conjoined subject NPs are high, these figures do not substantially affect the overall figures for noun subjects. It therefore appears that Norwegian learners, like the German learners in Slabakova & Gajdos’ (2008) study, indeed have a general problem with agreement with noun subjects, which gets bigger when the subject consists of more than one NP. In the same vein, Garshol (2019a) concludes that “neither the increased distance between the subject and the verb, nor an intervening noun of a different number is the main problem for these learners”.
The reason why Norwegian, and other learners, encounter agreement problems with noun subjects, may be that, unlike personal pronoun subjects, sequences of noun subject + finite verb are not drilled, neither are they reinforced through repeated use in input and output. Instead, noun subjects come in a variety of forms – simplex, with various types of modification, conjoined, with or without the plural s suffix, or with other plural suffixes, including a zero plural suffix. This heterogeneity presumably makes reinforcement and automatization difficult. It may also be hypothesized that some learners have learnt the paradigms of the primary verbs by heart, but have not really grasped the concept of person and number marking on verbs and consequently do not realize that an NP like the boy has the same number and person values as the NP he. This may be a fact that needs to be pointed out specifically and repeatedly in the classroom to enable learners to move from word knowledge to system knowledge.
To conclude, Hypothesis 2 – according to which the proportion of agreement errors is considerably higher with more complex subjects than with simplex subjects – is confirmed by our data. The fact that Hypothesis 2 is confirmed does, however, not contradict Hypothesis 1 as there is indeed a general problem with noun subjects, which increases when the subject NP consists of more than one NP – presumably as a result of Agreement Attraction. These facts suggest that when teaching S-V agreement, language instructors should put more emphasis on noun subjects, and that they should point out explicitly that conjoined subjects should normally have a plural verb even when the noun that is closest to the verb is singular.
4 Conclusion
In this paper we have been concerned with the question of whether Norwegian learners of English make more agreement errors with some types of subjects than with others.
Hypothesis 1 (The proportion of agreement errors will be considerably lower with personal pronoun subjects than with noun subjects) is clearly confirmed by our data. The low error rates with personal pronoun subjects were hypothesized to be the result of the drilling of verb paradigms in combination with high input and output frequencies. The absence of these factors with noun subjects, most probably in combination with a limited understanding of the concept of person and number marking on verbs and the fact that noun subjects come in so many different forms, explain the high error rates with this type of subject.
Hypothesis 2 (The proportion of agreement errors will be considerably higher with more complex subjects than with simplex subjects) also seems to be confirmed, though the data are less robust here. It was found that the most problematic issue in learners’ own production is not post-modified NPs but conjoined NP subjects. In the case of such subjects, Agreement Attraction frequently interferes with grammatical agreement.
On the basis of our data, we may suggest that the teaching of S-V agreement in English should focus more on noun subjects, and that it may be worth pointing out explicitly that conjoined subjects are normally in the plural form and should have a plural verb even when the noun placed closest to the verb is in the singular form. An emphasis on noun subjects in the classroom may help learners to understand the very concept of S-V agreement, i.e. to move from the knowledge of fixed collocations (I am, you are...) to an understanding of the systematic aspects of S-V agreement.
References
Anderssen, M. & M. Westergaard (2010). Frequency and economy in the acquisition of variable word order. Lingua 120(11), 2569-2588.
Berko, J. (1958). The child’s learning of English morphoplogy. In: Word 14, 150-177.
Biber, D. et al. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.
Bloom, L. (1970). Language Development. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Bock, K. & K. M. Eberhard (1993). The meaning, sound, and syntax of English number agreement. In: Language and Cognitive Processes 8, 57-99.
Bock, K. & C. A. Miller (1991). Broken agreement. In: Cognitive Psychology 23, 45-93.
Breivik, L. E. & A. E. Martinez-Insua (2008). Grammaticalization, subjectification and non-concord in English existential sentences. In: English Studies 89(3), 351-362.
Breiteneder, A. (2005). The naturalness of English as a European lingua franca: The case of the ‘third person -s’. In: Vienna English Working Papers 14(2), 3-26.
Brown, R. (1973). A First Language: The Early Stages. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Clahsen, H., C. Felser, K. Neubauer, M. Stato & R. Silva (2010). Morphological structure in native and nonnative language processing. In: Language Learning 60, 21-43.
Clahsen, H. & C. Felser (2018). Some notes on the Shallow Structure Hypothesis. In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition 40(3), 693-706.
Clahsen, H. & C. Felser (2006). Grammatical processing in language learners. In: Applied Psycholinguistics 27(1), 3-42.
Crawford, W. J. (2005). Verb agreement and disagreement: A corpus investigation of agreement variation in existential there + be constructions. In: Journal of English Linguistics 33(1), 35-61.
de Bot, K. (1996). The Psycholinguistics of the Output Hypothesis. In: Language Learning 46, 529–555.
Dröschel, Y. (2011). Lingua Franca English: The Role of Simplification and Transfer. Bern: Peter Lang.
Dulay, H. C. & M. K. Burt (1974). Natural sequences in child second language acquisition. In: Language Learning 24, 37-53.
Eberhard, K. M., J. C. Cutting & K. Bock (2005). Making sense of syntax: Number agreement in sentence production. In: Psychological Review 112, 531-559.
Eberhard, K. (1997). The marked effect of number on subject-verb agreement. In: Journal of Memory and Language 36, 147-164.Ellis, R. (2012). Language Teaching Research and Language Pedagogy. Chapter 8: Interaction and L2 learning in the classroom., 237–270. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ellis, R. (2012). Language Teaching Research and Language Pedagogy. Chapter 8: Interaction and L2 learning in the classroom, 237–270. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Fayol, M., Hupet, M. & Largy, P. (1999). The acquisition of subject-verb agreement in written French: From novices to experts’ errors. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 11, 153–174.
Fisher, U. T. (1985). The Sweet Sound of Concord: A Study of Swedish Learners’ Concord Problems in English (Doctoral dissertation). Lund University, Lund.
Fraser, C., Bellugi, V. & Brown, R. (1963). Control of grammar in imitation, comprehension, and production. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 2, 121–135.
Garshol, L. (2019 a). We agreed to disagree: Agreement in L2 English written by young Norwegian learners. In A. Abel, A. Glaznieks, V. Lyding & L. Nicholas (Eds.), Widening the Scope of Learner Corpus Research: Selected Papers from the Fourth Learner Corpus Research Conference. Section 3. Analysis of learner data of young learners (pp. 237–252). Leuven: Presses universitaires de Louvain.
Garshol, L. (2019 b). I just doesn’t know: Agreement errors in English texts by L2 Norwegian learners: Causes and remedies. (PhD thesis). University of Agder, Kristiansand.
Gass, S. M. & A. Mackey, (2014). 10 Input, interaction and output in second language acquisition. In B. Vanpatten & J. Williams (Eds). Theories in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction (180–206). New York: Routledge.
Hasselgren, A. & K. T. Sundet (2017). Introducing the CORYL Corpus: What it Is and How We Can Use it to Shed Light on Learner Language. In: Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies 7. (https://doi.org/10.15845/bells.v7i0.1107).
Hasselgård, H., P. Lysvåg & S. Johansson (2012). English Grammar: Theory and Use. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Haznedar, B. (2001). The Acquisition of the IP system in child L2 English. In: Studies in Second Language Acquisition 23, 1-39.
Hill, A. C. (1983). A Computational Model of Language Acquisition in the Two Year Old. Indiana: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Hopp, H. (2014). Working memory effects in the L2 processing of ambiguous relative clauses. In: Language Acquisition 21, 250-278.
Housen, A. (2002). A corpus-based study of the L2-acquisition of the English verb system. In: Granger, S., J. Hung & S. Petch-Tyson (Eds.). Computer learner corpora, second language acquisition, and foreign language teaching. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 77-116.
Ionin, T. & K. Wexler (2002). Why is ‘is’ easier than ‘-s’?: Acquisition of tense / agreement morphology by child second language learners of English. In: Second Language Research 18(2), 95-136.
Ionin, T. & S. Montrul (2010). The role of L1-transfer in the interpretation of articles with definite plurals in L2-English. In: Language Learning 60(4), 877-925.
Jensen, I. N. (2016). The Bottleneck Hypothesis in L2 acquisition: Norwegian L1 speakers’ knowledge of syntax and morphology in English L2 (Master’s thesis). Tromsø: UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
Jensen, I. N., R. Slabakova & M. Westergaard (2017). The Bottleneck Hypothesis in L2 acquisition: Norwegian L1 learners’ knowledge of syntax and morphology in English L2. In: LaMendola, M. & J. Scott (Eds.). Proceedings of the 41st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 333-346.
Keeney, T. J. & J. Wolfe (1972). The acquisition of agreement in English. In: Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11, 698-705.
Killie, K. (under review). Omission or overgeneralization? Subject-verb agreement errors among Norwegian (teenage) learners of English.
Killie, K. (in prep a). The acquisition of existential ‘there’ among Norwegian learners of English (working title).
Killie, K. (in prep b). The competence, problems and strategies of Norwegian adolescents acquiring subject-verb agreement in English (working title).
Krashen, S. (1985). The input hypothesis: Issues and implications. London: Longman.
Kress, J. E. & E. B. Fry (2016). The Reading Teachers Book of Lists. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bas.
Lardiere, D. (2009). Some thoughts on a contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. In: Second Language Research 25(2), 173-227.
Leech, G. & J. Svartvik (2002). A communicative grammar of English. Routledge.
Levin, M. (2001). Agreement with Collective Nouns in English. Lund: Lund University Press.
Lie, S., T. N. Hopfenbeck, E. Ibsen & A. Turmo (2005). Nasjonale prøver på ny prøve: Rapport fra en utvalgsundersøkelse for å analysere og vurdere kvaliteten på oppgaver og resultater til nasjonale prøver våren 2005. Universitetet i Oslo / Institutt for lærerutdanning og skoleutvikling.
Long, M. (1996). The role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition. In: W. Ritchie & T. Bhatia (Eds.). Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 413–468). San Diego: Academic Press.
McDonald, J. (2006). Beyond the critical period: Processing-based explanations for poor grammaticality judgment performance by late second language learners. In: Journal of Memory and Language 55, 381-401.
Neff, J., F. Ballesteros, E. Dafouz, F. Martínez, J.-P. Rica, M. Díez & R. Prieto (2007). A contrastive functional analysis of errors in Spanish EFL university writers’ argumentative texts: Corpus-based study. In: E. Fitzpatrick (Ed.). Corpus linguistics beyond the word: Corpus research from phrase to discourse. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 203-225.
Negro, I. & L. Chanquoy (2000). Subject-verb agreement with present and imperfect tenses: A developmental study from 2nd to 7th grade. In: European Journal of Psychology of Education 15(2), 113-133.
Ocampo, S. (2013). Morphological variability in long-distance subject-verb agreement: A study of native and nonnative processing (Doctoral dissertation). Kansas: University of Kansas.
Ponmani, M. & S. Mekala (2016). An analysis of concord errors in ESL learners’ writing. In: The Global Journal of English Studies II(I). (http://thegaes.org/files/documents/Kongu-23-M-Ponmani-and-Dr-S-Mekala.pdf).
Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech & J. Svartvik (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Radford, A. (1990). Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax: The Nature of Early Child Grammars of English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Reifegerste, J., F. Hauer & C. Felser (2017). Agreement processing and attraction errors in aging: evidence from subject-verb agreement in German. In: Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition 24(6), 672-702.
Ringbom, H. (1998). High-frequency verbs in the ICLE Corpus. In A. Renouf (Ed.), Explorations in Corpus Linguistics (191–200). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Slabakova, R. (2016). Second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Slabakova, R. (under review). The Bottleneck Hypothesis Updated. In: Rispoli, M. & T. Ionin (Eds.). Selected Proceedings from the 7th Selected Proceedings from the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America conference. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Author’s pre-publication copy.
Slabakova, R. & J. Gajdos (2008). The Combinatorial Variability Hypothesis in the Second Language. In: Bowles, M., R. Foote, S. Perpinján & R. Bhatt (Eds.). Selected Proceedings of the 2007 Second Language Research Forum. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 35-43.
Sprouse, R. A. (2006). Full transfer and relexification: Second language acquisition and creole genesis. In: Lefebvre, C., L. White & C. Jourdan (Eds.). L2 Acquisition and Creole Genesis: Dialogues. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Benjamins, 169-181.
Strang, B. M. H. (1966). Some features of S-V agreement in present-day English. In: Cellini, I. & G. Melchiori (Eds.). English studies today: Fourth series. Rome, Italy: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 73-87.
Swain, M. (1985). Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In: Input in Second Language Acquisition 15, 165-179.
Swain, M. (1993). The Output Hypothesis: Just speaking and writing aren´t enough. In: The Canadian Modern Language Review, 50, 158-64.
Swain, M. (2000). The output hypothesis and beyond: Mediating acquisition through collaborative dialogue. In: J.P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 97–114). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tan, A. B. (2005). The use of drill exercises in helping students reduce subject-verb agreement errors in academic writing: A case study in IPBA. In: Jurnal IPBA, 3(2).
Taylor, B. P. (1975). The use of overgeneralization and transfer strategies by elementary and intermediate students of ESL. In: Language Learning, 25(1), 73–107.
Ullman, M. (2005). A cognitive neuroscience perspective on second language acquisition: The declarative/procedural model. In C. Sanz (Ed.). Mind and context in adult second language acquisition (pp. 141–178). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Wee, Roselind, Jacqueline Sim & Kamaruzaman Jusoff. 2009. Enhancing the Quality of EAP Writing through Overt Teaching. In: English Language Teaching, 2 (3), 58–68.
Westergaard, M. (2011). Subject positions and information structure: the effect of frequency on acquisition and change. In: Studia Linguistica, 65(3), 299–332.
Westergaard, M. (2003). Unlearning V2. Transfer, markedness, and the importance of input cues in the acquisition of word order in English by Norwegian children. In: EUROSLA Yearbook, 3, 77–101.
White, L. (1992). Long and short verb movement in second language acquisition. In: Canadian Journal of Linguistics / Revue canadienne de linguistique, 37(2), 273–286.
White, L. (2003). Second language acquisition and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wikipedia (2018, 21 January). Most common words in English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English; 15-12-2019.
Author:
Professor Kristin Killie
Department of Education
UiT The Arctic University of Norway
N-9037 Tromsø
Norway