This study explores which governance practices nonprofit leaders consider necessary to avoid organizational crises. Further, it explores whether these leadership mental models of crisis resistance depend on the organizational context. This helps determine whether practical learning points are organization specific or can be applied broadly. With a multilevel sample of 304 leaders from 44 Belgian nongovernmental development organizations, an exploratory path analysis reveals that nonprofit leaders consider continuous improvement, as a governance practice, particularly relevant for effective organizational crisis resistance. A multilevel analysis also shows that variations in leadership mental models cannot be explained by the organizational variables used in this study (organizational size, leadership group size, operational activities, and languages in the leadership group). This article concludes with a discussion of consequences for further research.

Although the Inuit language is generally characterized as ergative, it has been observed that the ergative case patterning is relatively weaker in certain Eastern Canadian varieties, resulting in a more accusative appearance (e.g. Johns 2001, 2006, Carrier 2017). This article presents a systematic comparison of ergativity in three Inuit varieties, as a lens into the properties of case alignment and clause structure in Inuit more broadly. Building on the previous insight that ergativity in Inuit is tied to object movement to a structurally high position (Bittner 1994, Bittner & Hale 1996a,b, Woolford 2017), I demonstrate that the relative robustness of the ergative patterning across Inuit is tightly correlated with the permissibility of object movement—and not determined by the morphosyntactic properties of ERG subjects, which are uniform across Inuit. I additionally relate this correlation to another point of variation across Inuit concerning the status of object agreement as affixes vs. pronominal clitics (Yuan 2021). These connections offer testable predictions for the status of ergativity across the entire Inuit dialect continuum and yield crosslinguistic implications for the typology of case alignment, especially in how it interacts with the syntactic position of nominals.

Indicating verbs can be directed toward locations in space associated with their arguments. The primary debate about these verbs is whether this directionality is akin to grammatical agreement or whether it represents a fusion of both morphemic and gestural elements. To move the debate forward, more empirical evidence is needed. We consider linguistic and social factors in 1,436 indicating-verb tokens from the BSL Corpus. Results reveal that modification is not obligatory and that patient modification is conditioned by several factors, such as constructed action. We argue that our results provide some support for the claim that indicating verbs represent a fusion of morphemic and gestural elements.

The lexicon divides into parts of speech (or lexical categories), and there are cross-cutting regularities (features). These two dimensions of analysis take us a long way, but several phenomena elude us. For these the term ‘split’ is used extensively (‘case split’, ‘split agreement’, and more), but in confusingly different ways. Yet there is a unifying notion here. I show that a split is an ADDITIONAL PARTITION, whether in the part-of-speech inventory or in the feature system. On this base an elegant typology can be constructed, using minimal machinery. The typology starts from four external relations (government, agreement, selection, and anti-government), and it specifies four types of split within each (sixteen possibilities in all). This typology (i) highlights less familiar splits, from diverse languages, and fits them into the larger picture; (ii) introduces a new relation, anti-government, and documents it; (iii) elucidates the complexities of multiple splits; and (iv) clarifies what exactly is split, which leads to a sharpening of our analyses and applies across different traditions.

We investigate a noncanonical agreement pattern in American English in which a fronted WH-phrase appears to control agreement on an inflected auxiliary, as in Which flowers are the gardener planting? (Kimball & Aissen 1971). We explore this phenomenon with five acceptability- judgment experiments and interpret the resulting data with the aid of a quantitative model of the judgment process. Our study suggests that fronted WH-phrases interfere with agreement primarily as a function of their linear and structural position, and that this effect is not significantly modulated by overt case or thematic cues in off-line judgments. We suggest that our findings support a model of agreement processing in which syntactic phrases compete to control agreement on the basis of their structural and linear position with respect to the inflected verb.

This research article examines the licensing of complementizer agreement with nominals (namely thematic subjects and objects) in the left periphery, focusing on data from Jordanian Arabic (JA). It demonstrates that obligatory complementizer agreement with A-bar elements is evident in JA grammar due to the effects of the Agree Identification Condition, which enforces an agreement inflection on the probe when the goal is not phonologically overt (e.g., a pro). This enforcement also applies when the probe agrees with a chain consisting of two silent links (e.g., when the complementizer agrees with a wh- or a focused element). This finding supports the proposal that the morphological realization of Agree dependencies is ruled by interface conditions, which are also proven to be responsible for the presence of an obligatorily overt complementizer when extraction of the embedded nominal takes place.

Recent research has shown that 6-month-olds relate novel words suffixed with -s, like babs, that are embedded in passages, with just the stem bab, demonstrating an early sensitivity to morphological relatedness. This study builds on these findings by investigating the role of allomorphy in early morphological acquisition. We tested whether infants relate novel words suffixed with [-z] and [-s] allomorphs of the -s suffix and their stems. We find that English-learning 6-month-olds relate novel words suffixed with the [-z], but not [-s], allomorph with stems, providing evidence for an acquisition trajectory where infants discover morphemes one allomorph at a time.

This paper focuses on two phenomena in Irish agreement – namely, complementarity between overt in-situ arguments and agreement, and the obviation of this complementarity under A-movement. An analysis of these facts is offered in terms of the defective goal ‘incorporation’ (DGI) mechanism proposed by Roberts (2010), and applied to cases of complementarity in Bantu languages by Iorio (2014), and van der Wal (2015, 2020, 2022), as well as asymmetric chains under A-movement, consisting of a full copy and a pronominal $ \phi $-feature bundle; cf. similar configurations discussed by Takahashi & Hulsey (2009), Harizanov (2014), Kramer (2014), Baker & Kramer (2018), inter alios. It is shown that this approach accounts for the facts in Irish and that the same account can be extended to explain facts concerning participial agreement in, for example, Italian. Additional cross-linguistic implications are also considered, particularly with respect to French and Welsh.

We provide a unified, theoretical basis on which measures of data reliability may be derived or evaluated, for both quantitative and qualitative data. This approach evaluates reliability as the “proportional reduction in loss” (PRL) that is attained in a sample by an optimal estimator. The resulting measure is between 0 and 1, linearly related to expected loss, and provides a direct way of contrasting the measured reliability in the sample with the least reliable and most reliable data-generating cases. The PRL measure is a generalization of many of the commonly-used reliability measures.

We show how the quantitative measures from generalizability theory can be derived as PRL measures (including Cronbach's alpha and measures proposed by Winer). For categorical data, we develop a new measure for the general case in which each of N judges assigns a subject to one of K categories and show that it is equivalent to a measure proposed by Perreault and Leigh for the case where N is 2.

We propose a coefficient of agreement to assess the degree of concordance between two independent groups of raters classifying items on a nominal scale. This coefficient, defined on a population-based model, extends the classical Cohen’s kappa coefficient for quantifying agreement between two raters. Weighted and intraclass versions of the coefficient are also given and their sampling variance is determined by the Jackknife method. The method is illustrated on medical education data which motivated the research.

Several measures of agreement, such as the Perreault–Leigh coefficient, the ${\mathrm{AC}}_1$\documentclass[12pt]{minimal}\usepackage{amsmath}\usepackage{wasysym}\usepackage{amsfonts}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage{mathrsfs}\usepackage{upgreek}\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt}\begin{document}$$\textsc {AC}_{1}$$\end{document}, and the recent coefficient of van Oest, are based on explicit models of how judges make their ratings. To handle such measures of agreement under a common umbrella, we propose a class of models called guessing models, which contains most models of how judges make their ratings. Every guessing model have an associated measure of agreement we call the knowledge coefficient. Under certain assumptions on the guessing models, the knowledge coefficient will be equal to the multi-rater Cohen’s kappa, Fleiss’ kappa, the Brennan–Prediger coefficient, or other less-established measures of agreement. We provide several sample estimators of the knowledge coefficient, valid under varying assumptions, and their asymptotic distributions. After a sensitivity analysis and a simulation study of confidence intervals, we find that the Brennan–Prediger coefficient typically outperforms the others, with much better coverage under unfavorable circumstances.

Reliability and agreement studies are of paramount importance. They do contribute to the quality of studies by providing information about the amount of error inherent to any diagnosis, score or measurement. Guidelines for reporting reliability and agreement studies were recently provided. While the use of the kappa-like family is advised for categorical and ordinal scales, no further guideline in the choice of a weighting scheme is given. In the present paper, a new simple and practical interpretation of the linear- and quadratic-weighted kappa coefficients is given. This will help researchers in motivating their choice of a weighting scheme.

Experiments are considered where each of a sample of subjects is assigned to one of C categories separately by each of a fixed or varying group of observers. Building on earlier publications, general procedures are proposed to analyze agreements and disagreements among observers. In the case of a varying group of observers, it is shown that it is not necessary to demand a constant number of observers per subject. In the case of a fixed group of observers, the problem of missing data is considered.

The procedures are illustrated within the context of two clinical diagnosis examples. In the first example it is investigated which categories are relatively hard to distinguish from one another; a new theorem is applied that shows a useful property of the statistic kappa. In the second example it is investigated if a subgroup of observers can be found with a significantly higher degree of interobserver agreement.