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ka tama-ŋɔ river-prox. in- ka this ka tama- ā -ŋɔ river-pl-prox. in- ka - ā these ka tama-ŋɔ in- ka / ka tama- ā -ŋɔ in- ka - ā river-prox. this / river-pl-prox. these In this example, what is copied is not a prefix, but rather the initial syllable of the head "river". By language Languages can have no conventional agreement whatsoever, as in Japanese or Malay ; barely any, as in ...
In the English language, there are grammatical constructions that many native speakers use unquestioningly yet certain writers call incorrect. Differences of usage or opinion may stem from differences between formal and informal speech and other matters of register, differences among dialects (whether regional, class-based, generational, or other), difference between the social norms of spoken ...
The stereotypical subject immediately precedes the finite verb in declarative sentences and represents an agent or a theme. The subject is often a multi-word constituent and should be distinguished from parts of speech, which, roughly, classify words within constituents. In the example sentences below, the subjects are indicated in boldface.
In such languages, the subject of a verb is marked for nominative case, but the object is unmarked, as are citation forms and objects of prepositions. Such alignments are clearly documented only in northeastern Africa , particularly in the Cushitic languages , and the southwestern United States and adjacent parts of Mexico, in the Yuman languages .
Compound subjects cause many difficulties in compliance with grammatical agreement between the subject and other entities (verbs, pronouns, etc.). These issues also occur with compound noun phrases of all sorts, but the problems are most acute with compound subjects because of the large number of types of agreement occurring with such subjects.
The syntactic arguments of a given verb can also vary across languages. For example, the verb put in English requires three syntactic arguments: subject, object, locative (e. g. He put the book into the box). These syntactic arguments correspond to the three semantic arguments agent, theme, and goal.
The head of the subject noun phrase, "efforts", is plural, but the verb appears in a singular form because the local noun "language" in the interceding phrase is singular, and therefore attracts the production of the singular feature in "is". While Bock pointed to this example, it doesn't follow the more common pattern where the local nouns are ...
In some other languages, in which subjects are not syntactically obligatory, there would be no subject at all: The Spanish translation of It's raining, for example, is a single verb form, Llueve.) An intransitive verb takes one argument, e.g. He 1 sleeps. A transitive verb takes two, e.g. He 1 kicked the ball 2. A ditransitive verb takes three ...