The Northern Subject Rule: Constraints Without Input? Studying native speakers of Standard English
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2019-07-08
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en
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Abstract
The current study was designed to see whether or not native speakers of Standard English show
sensitivities towards the Type of Subject-constraint and the Subject Adjacency-constraint of the
Northern Subject Rule (NSR). The NSR is a grammatical feature which allows for an -s on the
verb in a plural context. If speakers of Standard English show such sensitivities, this cannot be
due to the input that they received, but are rather caused by underlying innate principles which
go beyond the input. A pre-test was needed to make sure that the experimental tests only tested
the Northern Subject Rule, and that the results could not be due to anything else. The unbiased
pre-test was used for the real tests. Two experimental tests consisted of test items which all had
two possible answers for the participants to choose from: one sentence which shows either the
Type of Subject or the Subject Adjacency-effect, and one sentence which does not. Results
suggest that native speakers of Standard English are sensitive towards the Type of Subject
constraint, but not towards the Subject Adjacency-constraint.
Keywords: Northern Subject Rule, Type of Subject constraint, Subject Adjacency constraint,
constraints without input, Standard English
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