Analyzing Subject - Verb Agreement Errors of Persian Learners in the Framework of Distributed Morphology

Ahmadi, Mahya; Abbasi, Azita

doi:10.22059/jolr.2023.361098.666846

Analyzing Subject - Verb Agreement Errors of Persian Learners in the Framework of Distributed Morphology

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Mahya Ahmadi ¹

Azita Abbasi ²

¹ Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Literature and Human Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

² Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Literature, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran.

10.22059/jolr.2023.361098.666846

Abstract

Researchers have paid a lot of attention to collecting and analyzing the language errors. Language learners commit various mistakes during the stages of language learning, and Subject Verb Agreement (SVA) is one of these mistakes. In this type of errors, the features of the person and the number of the verb and the subject do not match with each other. Based on the theory of Distributed Morphology (DM), in this type of errors, the morphologic features that should be specified on the final nodes are received from a wrong source. In this article, we analyze and examine the internal structure of the SVA errors produced by Persian learners in the framework of the DM in order to explain how copying a wrong feature from the wrong source can lead to the production of wrong sentences. The examined samples are related to the final writing test of Persian learners of Saadi Foundation, which were extracted from the corpus of this institution. The discussed errors are divided into two groups: local agreement and long distance agreement. In the first type, the source of error is linearly closer to the verb than the real subject, while in the second type, the source of error is located at a further distance from the subject. By examining examples of local agreement errors of Persian learners, we will show that the source of the error can be the goal, and instead of agreeing with its local subject, the verb agrees with the goal and takes its features. Also, by analyzing the internal structure of long distance agreement errors, we will introduce two new sources which verb can agree with them and takes their features. First, in a coordination structures the verb of the second conjunct mistakenly agrees with the subject of the first conjunct. Second, the verb of the relative clause can agree with the subject of the main clause.

Keywords

Linguistic errors

Distributed Morphology

Subject verb agreement

Local agreement

Long distance agreement

Subjects

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