A study on the Spanish number agreement in first year university students

Abstract

This paper analyses the influence of some contextual variables in the establishment of the Spanish number agreement between subject and verb in written texts by first year students of Industrial Engineering at Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Argentina. In each case, the writing strategies and the way the student used to build a certain designated instance (the subject) in his/her own discourse were reviewed. This study is based on the notion of number proposed by Langacker (1991, § 2), according to which the speaker always recognizes in a noun phrase, either singular or plural, a unit. We conducted a qualitative analysis on cases of syntactic discordance that involved not only morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects, but also pragmatic ones; given that from the Prototypical-Cognitive Approach (Lakoff 1987, Langacker, 2008) we consider grammar as a system of tendencies, which reflects the worldview of a society. By way of closure, we hold that it is necessary that who are dedicated to the field of education can understand the functioning of certain processing mechanisms of linguistic information that lead students to use grammatical forms considered not correct. The aforementioned will allow reflections between teachers and students in order to attain better results in their written productions.