ARTICLE REVIEW 1

KEYWORDS: classifier, one-insertion, Noun Phrase Ellipsis, Partitivity.

This first paper named “Classifiers as morphosyntactic licensors of NP Ellipsis:

English vs. Romance “was written by Artemis Alexiadou & Kirsten Gengel in the year
2011. These authors are both professors in the University of Stuttgart. The first one,
Artemis, is the head of the Department of English Studies in the mentioned university.
She is recognised as an excellent linguist and she has been awarded with several prizes
due to her brilliant career as researcher. The second one, Kirsten, is another professor
of the University of Stuttgart. She is also a researcher and she has written many papers
about ellipsis such as “Focus and Ellipsis” (2008). Moving to the topic of the paper, it
should be noticed that the work is about the difference between classifiers licensing
the Noun Phrase Ellipsis in English and in Romance languages. Besides the topic, it is
necessary to deal with the aim of this paper. Alexiadou and Gengel want to
demonstrate that focus is not a crucial part licensing noun phrase ellipsis (opposite
idea to Ntelitheos’ one (2004) for Greek among others). Furthermore, they try to prove
that classifiers are somehow related to the concept of partitivity (an idea which agrees
with Sleeman (1996) and others).

This work might be considered as a debate between the defenders of the

classifiers (a word or affix that expresses the classification of a noun) and the defender
of the focus as licensors of noun phrase ellipsis. Despite this, it is just their opinion
(although proved with examples) and they are only hypotheses.

Moving to the organisation of the paper, their thoughts are endorsed by a data,
therefore they claim that their hypothesis is the right one. Moreover, it should be
noticed that Alexiadou and Gengel establish two main sections: NPE in Spanish/Italian
and NPE in English; a third section which is the partitivity and finally the examples and
references. Since the authors’ purpose is, as mentioned previously, to prove that
classifiers license NPE morphosyntactically, they begin doing that with Romance
languages. Along this part, authors claim that the final –o/-a on Spanish and Italian
indefinite determiners are classifiers (following Bernstein (1993) and Picallo (2006)).
Indeed, they use a brilliant example: << Un/*Uno libro grande è sulla tavola>>. (Italian).
Authors consider these vowels the head of the classifier in the NP. The reason why the –o is
missing is because it does not attach to the noun, but to the adjective. However, when the
adjective is near, the –o appears : <<Uno grande è sulla tavola>>. After this, authors deal with
English, in which classifiers attach to the nouns. Furthermore, in this language is quite different
because adjectives do not have gender or number. They emphasize on the use of one-
insertion, particularly in the plural: << I’ll have these vs. I’ll have this *(one)>> cf. Lobeck 1995).
In order to finish this section, they make an elaborate correspondence between one-insertions
and the licensing of NPE by classifiers: << a big book is on the table>> and << a big (one) is on
the table>>.

In reference to the last section, partitivity, Alexiadou and Gengel believe that in Classifier

Sentences, a division and new individuals are created. Thus, a new structure quite
similar to partitive is created: << uno de tus problemas – one of your problems>>.
Therefore, the –o vowel in Spanish and Italian as well as the “one” might be
considered a crucial part in the licensing of NPE .

To conclude this review, it is worth mentioning that in my opinion this work is

really persuading due to the expertness of the writers. I have no doubt that if someone
does not have background knowledge off this subject, Artemis Alexiadou & Kirsten
Gengel will convince them that what they are stating is the right hypotesis. Referring
to the strengths, this paper has been very useful for me, and I am quite sure that it
would be the same for my fellows, because authors make some distinctions and
similarities between our language and English. However, in my opinion in this work
there is a lack of examples and tables, for example comparing the classifiers among the
different languages. For me, the paper follows a coherent structure, because authors
have divided the work into aims, differences in the languages and examples. Honestly I
consider that they have used numerous references and that they complete all the aims
they promised at the beginning of the work.
References

1. Alexiadou, A., & Gengel, K. 2011. Classifiers as morphosyntactic licensors of NP

ellipsis: English vs. Romance. In Proceedings of NELS (Vol. 39, pp. 15-28).

2. Gengel, K. 2008. Focus and Ellipsis.

3. University of Sttugart. (2013). Retrieved from https://www.uni-

stuttgart.de/en/university/news/press-
release/Leibniz_Prize_for_Prof._Artemis_Alexiadou/

4.Bernstein, J. 1993. Topics in the syntax of nominal structure across Romance.

Ph.D. Thesis, CUNY.

5. Lobeck, A. 1995. Ellipsis. Oxford University Press.

6. Ntelitheos, D. 2004. Syntax of Elliptical and Discontinuous Nominals. MA Thesis,

UCLA. Picallo, C. 2006. On Gender and Number. Stuttgart. Sleeman, P. 1996. Licensing
Empty Nouns in French. Ph.D. Thesis, Amsterdam.
 ARTICLE REVIEW 2
KEYWORDS: experiment, mistake, Nigeria, students, concord.

This work named “Assessing Problem Areas in Senior Secondary Students’’ Use
of the English Concord” was written by three scholars in the year 2018: Isaiah I. Agbo,
a Nigerian professor and researcher in the University of Nsukka (Nigeria). He also
writes articles in a journal. He is really interested in Applied Linguistics and teaching
evaluation; Goodluck C. Kadiri, a Nigerian lecturer from the University of Nsukka. She is
the head of the Department of English and Literary Studies. She defines herself as an
interested person in English as second language; Blessing U. Ijem, another Nigerian
lecturer in the Federal University of Wukari (Nigeria). Her area of interest is Applied
Linguistics and Discourse analysis. Moving to the topic of the paper, it should be
noticed that this work is based on an experiment made in Nigeria, where the English
language is the language for education. Scholars wanted to know the level of
knowledge in English concord of the students who are being prepared for university.
Therefore, the aims of this paper is just to illustrate how the students violate these
rules of concord, describe that errors with examples, analyse these mistakes of
selected verbs in written expressions and provide the correct form. In order to achieve
these aims, the authors evaluate this experiment with an objective-test instrument,
which will be explained deeper in this article. Throughout the paper, I have noticed
that authors insist in the idea that there is a lack of knowledege about concord in
English in the Nsukka Educational Zone. Certainly, once I have read the examples and
the results, it is clear evidence that this idea is true.

Moving to the content and organisation of the paper, it should be noticed that
authors have included excellent definitions of concord (“agreement of a word with
other words in a sentence; that is, a relationship between two grammatical units such
that if one of them selects a given features, the other has to have the same features,
especially with regard to their number-singular and plural.”). Definitely, it is really
necessary for people who do not have background knowledge about this topic. After
that, scholars explain clearly the concepts of grammatical, notional and proximity
concord. Consequently, they claim that students from Nsukka do not follow these rules
on concord. In reference to the organisation, the paper is very well-organised with
sections perfect and clearly divided: At the beginning, they put their names and
profession, after that they write an introduction in which the main theory is explained
as well as the objectives of this experiment. It is a fact that this is the most common
structure for introductions in articles.

After this, there is a section called “REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE”, the

largest, in which the authors illustrate with examples the types of mistakes in concord
in English. These examples are a really brilliant choice in my opinion, because they use
some nouns which may entail several confusions in number. For instance: news
(singular), measles (singular), police (plural). In addition, they provide examples with
compounds subjects joined by and, where two singular subjects agree with a plural
verb and two plural subjects with a plural verb too. Furthermore, they aware us of
exceptions such as by with, as well as, … when they replace and, the verb agree in
singular. Ex: << The boy as well as his sister is here.>>. Furthermore, they keep
illustrating with examples in order to help readers to understand the theory. For
example, they discuss the proximity concord using correlatives, where the nearest
noun establish the number of the verb: << Neither the teacher nor his student is
here.>>. After that, they deal with collective nouns, which they claim that the number
depends on the notion of the word, if it is seen as a whole (singular) or whether it is
seen as a group of something (plural). Consequently, the authors illustrate the most
typical errors in concord: using a wrong possessive which does not agree with the verb.
Ex:<< The choir is singing their song >>. They state this rule: if the verb is singular, then
the possessive is too. If the verb is plural, the possessive is too. One of my favourite of
this paper is the examples, because they provide wrong sentences and their
corrections. This makes the explanation clearer. Later, the authors deal with the use
“one of”, where the verb must agree in singular. It is the same as the use of nobody,
each, every, ...They also must agree in singular in Standard English, but it is a fact that
it is often used with plural. Subsequently, they introduce the Eko’s hypothesis (1999)
which assumes that here and there can agree either singular or plural. In my opinion,
this paper creates a debate between defenders of the idea that the most important
concord is the subject -verb one (Eko 1999 and Oluikpe 1985) and others who think
that the agreement of words according to their syntactic functions (notional concord)
is more important (Nzenem 2008). I strongly believe that the most important one is
subject-verb, because in my opinion notional concord is very ambiguous.

As mentioned before, this section is the largest, and at the end of it, the results
of the experiment are shown. It demonstrates the theory of the scholars Agbo, Kadiri
and Ijem who claimed that the level of concord of these senior students is under
average. A total of 1100 errors were observed among 100 students. The most common
errors were notional concord, proximity concord, some problem with grammar and
the inability to identify the head noun of a sentence. It is really fascinating reading
other student’s mistakes in concord, because it may help readers to not do the same.
Indeed, they use a huge corpus of errors made by students, which might enrich
readers’ knowledge about agreement. After that, they clearly summarize the type of
mistake students make. In order to this summary, they use numbers which refer o the
total of times students make that error. What really surprised me is what Ogidefa
(2010) noticed: some funny grammatical concord errors in learners. For instance:
<<John and Kemi does not know what to do.>>. These errors make me laugh because I
sometimes do it. Finally, the results prove that students in Nigeria need more
competence in this linguistic area.

1. Plural Nouns + singular verbs – 443

2. Singular Nouns _ plural verbs - 372

3. Plural Nouns + singular pronouns - 69

4. Singular Noun + plural pronouns - 34

5. Plural pronouns + singular verbs – 29

(Results taken from the paper)

Continuing the organisation of the paper, the next section is the methodology.
The research is evaluated using the prescriptivism rules. It is a true experiment on a
random group of students from Nigeria. The mistakes made by these students helped
scholars to elaborate a data. The reason of the choice of the level is simple: these
students are supposed to have an average level of English acquisition. As mentioned
before, the experiment was executed by 100 random students and the evaluation used
was the objective test instrument, which has only one correct answer among 4
options. The test contains 40 questions. Really this type of evaluation is quite useful,
because it cannot entail mistakes like subjective ones. Due to this method, the scholars
could create a correct data of mistakes.

Finally, the last two sections of the paper are the data analysis itself and the
references. Certainly, the data analysis section is really well presented, because
although readers are not master in statistics, the results are easy to understand.
Therefore, this a positive point for the clarity of the results. They use tables in order to
present the type of error (grammatical or proximity concord) and the number of
mistakes. Honestly, the author’s purpose of proving the mistakes of the students is
really well exemplified and shown.

To sum up this paper, it is important to mention that the authors totally

achieve their aims and that they are right when they say that Nigerian senior students
are under the average level. To pass the test, students should have obtained 40 points
and they only got 16’5. The conclusion of the work is an excellent example of a good
conclusion: it summarizes the main arguments of the whole paper, it reviews the
theory explained and it also contains a summary of the methodology used. In my
opinion, the work is superb because authors provide really wonderful examples and it
is really well-structured. Furthermore, the use of tables and examples with arrows
make easier the understanding of the results and theory. As previously mentioned, it is
an almost-mandatory article for English learners, because it will help you to not make
the same mistakes as these students make. Finally, the references they have used are
necessary and sufficient. Furthermore, the paper contains information about the
authors, which makes the review easier to write.
 References

1. Agbo, I. I., Kadiri, G. C., & Ijem, B. U. (2018). Assessing Problem Areas in Senior
Secondary Students’ Use of the English Concord. Theory and practice in
Language studies, 8(8), 973-981.

2. Eko, E. (1999). Effective Writing. Heineman Education Books (Nigeria) PLC.

3. Nzerem, J. K. (2008). ‘Rules of concord in English Language’. Journal of Nigerian
Languages and Culture, vol.10, pp. 257 – 266
4. Ogidefa, I. (2010). ‘The Grammatical Errors Typical of Advanced Users and Learners of
English as a Second Language’.http://socyberty.com/language-user-and-learner-of-
English-as-a-second-language/#ix2216iHvcYSA. Accessed 12 November, 2011.
5. Oluikpe, B. O. (1985). ‘Agreement. In: The Use of English for Higher Education,
(Second Reprint). Oluikpe, B.O. (eds). Awka: Africana –Fep Publishers Ltd. Pp. 84-102