bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The get-passive at the intersection of get and the passive
Authors: Wanner Anja
Published: March 2014

On the surface, the English get-passive looks just like a be-passive, with a form of get replacing the auxiliary be, resulting in a more informal passive construction. However, the meaning of the get-passive has been described as different from the meaning of the be-passive in a manner that goes beyond just stylistics. This paper examines claims that have been made about the differences between the English get-passive and the canonical be-passive on the basis of corpus-based data, specifically the secondary agent or responsibility reading of the subject, the adversity reading ascribed to the construction, and the presence or absence of an implicit argument. Corpus-based data show that the get-passive is not as uniformly different from the be-passive as is often claimed, which either means that flexibility must be built into the construction or that there are two structurally different get-passives.
Variations in non-canonical passives
Authors: Huang C.-T. James
Published: March 2014

This paper shows that non-canonical passives (like English get- and Chinese bei-passives) exhibit a chameleonic character that makes them amenable to a control and/or a raising analysis – depending on context and lexical choice. Such passives are formed by superimposing on the main predicate a higher semi-lexical verb whose meaning may include one or more points in the causative-unaccusative spectrum. Such semi-lexical verbs may differ in their ‘bandwidths’ along the spectrum, exhibiting lexical, contextual and idiolectal micro-variation – accounting for the controversies that have often arisen in the literature. The paper demonstrates the need for fine-grained decomposition in argument structure theory by providing several concrete cases, and ends with a case study of so-called ‘give-passives’ in Mandarin, arguing that they are raising constructions involving an existential use of gei ‘give’ and an implicit affectee which gives rise to their passive-like meanings.
How much bekommen is there in the German bekommen passive?
Authors: Bader Markus , Häussler Jana
Published: March 2014

We present an experiment and a corpus study jointly examining possible semantic constraints on the formation of the bekommen passive in German. In particular, we address the question of whether the recipient role that the lexical verb bekommen (‘get’) assigns to its external argument still constrains the formation of the bekommen passive. We capture this potential restriction in the Recipient Constraint. Our data show a split between verbs whose dative object is not a recipient – many of them are perfectly acceptable in the bekommen passive, but some are not. We conclude that the Recipient Constraint does not hold, but the formation of the bekommen passive is still sensitive to semantic properties of the main verb use of bekommen.
Haben-statives in German
Authors: Businger Martin
Published: March 2014

This paper addresses stative sentences like Er hat den Arm verbunden (‘He has his arm bandaged’), which are going to be referred to as haben-statives. A ‘passive analysis’ of haben-statives is rejected. Instead, I put forward a syntactic analysis of haben-statives where haben ‘have’ embeds a small clause in which the participle functions as an adjectival predicate. In my approach, Kratzer’s (1993) stipulative distinction between ‘lexical’ and ‘phrasal’ adjectivization (cf. Rothstein 2007) can be abandoned. The proposed analysis allows for a uniform analysis of an array of different haben-structures in German, since they can all be ascribed the same underlying structure.
Another passive that isn’t one
Authors: Gese Helga
Published: March 2014

This article adresses the semantics of the so-called haben-passive, i.e. the stative reading of sentences like Er hat den Arm verbunden (‘He has his arm bandaged’). In line with recent research on haben-passives (Rothstein 2007; Businger this volume), I assume that these involve adjectivization of the participle. I will argue that participles in haben-passives share two main semantic properties with participles in German adjectival passives (sein-passives): (i) the semantic underspecification of the property denoted by the participle (ii) the generic interpretation of the event introduced by the verbal baseI propose an adjectival zero-affix that accounts for these semantic properties. The conclusion will be that adjectivization of the participle, in adjectival sein-passives as well as in haben-passives, has a specific semantic impact: it serves to create a property – the property of belonging to a contextually mediated ad hoc category based on the verbal event kind.
Passives and near-passives in Balto-Slavic
Authors: Lavine James E.
Published: March 2014

This paper claims that variation regarding the appearance of accusative case on the Theme argument of passive and passive-like predicates in Ukrainian, Polish, and Lithuanian is a function of the arrangement of a predicate’s voice property and transitivity property in the functional domain of vP. Accusative survives passivization (and related constructions) only when v-voice, which is concerned with the projection of an external argument, and v-cause, which identifies a causative sub-event and serves as an accusative probe, appear “unbundled” in the sense of Pylkkänen’s (2008) Voice Bundling Parameter, thereby linking structural accusative to the structure of the event. In such “split-vP” languages, accusative appears regardless of the specification of voice as active or passive.
How do things get done
Authors: Heinat Fredrik , Manninen Satu
Published: March 2014

In this paper, we argue that, in addition to non-agreeing passives, Finnish has even an agreeing passive. The agreeing passive shows similar behaviour to non-canonical passives in other languages, such as get-passives in English. The agreeing passive differs from ordinary copular constructions in various ways, most importantly in the availability of an event-interpretation. Agreeing and non-agreeing passives have similar structure in the tense and vP domains; the differences between them can be attributed to differences in the selecting heads. Agreeing passives differ from copular constructions in that the latter lack a vP. The selecting heads are, however, the same in the two constructions.
Få and its passive complement
Authors: Klingvall Eva
Published: March 2014

This paper argues that Swedish få-constructions (get-constructions) with a Beneficiary and Causer subject are structurally different. It is argued that få is a different verb on the two interpretations and that the subjects are merged in different positions.
The Danish reportive passive as a non-canonical passive
Authors: Ørsnes Bjarne
Published: March 2014

Danish passive utterance and cognitive verbs allow a construction where the subject of an infinitival complement is raised: Peter siges at være bortrejst (‘Peter is said to be out of town’). Contrary to English, these verbs are not ECM-verbs or subject-to-object raising verbs in the active. The subject of the passive can never be construed as an object. These raising passives are termed Reportive Passives since they attribute a proposition to an (unknown) information source. Some analyses treat these passives as special constructions with an idiosyncratic semantics or even as grammaticalized evidentiality markers. I argue that they are fully compositional passives in Danish, but that they are non-canonical inasmuch as they raise an argument of an embedded predicate. I provide an account within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and I suggest that such passives are motivated in (Germanic) SVO-languages by a strong subject condition.
(Non-)canonical passives and reflexives
Authors: Kallulli Dalina
Published: March 2014

This paper highlights similarities between two classes of arguably non-canonical passives, namely ‘deponent’ verbs familiar from Latin, and ‘inherent reflexive’ verbs in Germanic and Romance, arguing that the latter are the counterparts of the former – notably, both classes of verbs are denominal/deadjectival. Building on the idea that overt morphological voice markings reflect feature distinctions associated with v0 in the syntax, I argue that the special ‘unaccusative’ morphology (i.e. reflexive or non-active) doesn’t just bear on the absence of an external argument in the syntax, but on the presence of an actor-initiation feature of v0 in syntactic configurations lacking an external argument, which accounts for facts such as the ubiquity of reflexive marking across inherent and non-inherent reflexive predicates, and others.
Why challenging clitics?
Authors: Meklenborg Salvesen Christine , Helland Hans Petter
Published: March 2014

Linguists have been drawn to the intriguing nature of clitics ever since the golden age of philology in the 19th century. In this paper we aim to provide a brief history of different approaches to clitics, from Wackernagel’s law to modern theories that link clitics to phases. We also present the papers that follow in this volume and show how they fit into the overall picture of research done on clitics in the 21st century.
Enclisis at the syntax-PF interface
Authors: Mavrogiorgos Marios
Published: March 2014

This paper discusses the proclisis-enclisis alternation of object clitics in finiteness sensitive and Tobler-Mussafia languages. I argue that proclisis/enclisis can be derived via the interaction of syntactic and PF operations, at least in a number of environments, although purely syntactic or PF derivations are also possible but rare. I present an outline of how certain proclitic and enclitic structures are derived, using a grammatical model in which syntax feeds PF, and I try to show how much of the alternation is syntactic and how much is PF. The implications for head movement are also discussed.
Handling Wolof clitics in LFG
Authors: Bamba Dione Cheikh
Published: March 2014

Clitics often involve intricate interaction between different grammar components, including morphophonology, syntax and information structure. This phenomenon is challenging from a general theoretical perspective. In Wolof, clitization has been investigated using a transformational approach. In contrast, this paper proposes a formal analysis of Wolof clitics using a non-transformational model based on the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) theory. This approach needs no special rule for verb movements at all and preserves the lexical integrity of words. For sake of concreteness, the theoretical purpose is combined with an implementation that illustrates how the LFG formalism is well suited to a precise treatment of clitics.
Clitic placement and grammaticalization in Portuguese
Authors: Sandalo Filomena , Galves Charlotte
Published: March 2014

In this paper, we argue that the architecture of grammar proposed in Distributed Morphology can shed light on the diachronic shift that has occurred in Portuguese enclisis. Employing such a view of the architecture of grammar allows us to interpret this shift as a case of grammaticalization, thus broadening the treatment of this concept in the framework of generative grammar. In Modern European Portuguese, enclitic pronouns are more affix-like than proclitic pronouns, both syntactically and phonologically. We argue that enclisis in Modern Portuguese is due to Lowering, a post-syntactic incorporation process, whereas clitics in Classical Portuguese must be displaced from the beginning of an Intonational Phrase, and as such, enclisis in this language period is a result of Prosodic Inversion.
Diachronic source of two cliticization patterns in Slavic
Authors: Migdalski Krzysztof
Published: March 2014

This paper presents an analysis of a diachronic modification in the position of pronominal clitics in Slavic. The modification involved a switch from verb-adjacent clitics to second position clitics, but it occurred only in those languages that also lost tense morphology. The paper interprets the change as a loss of the TP projection, as a result of which clitics may not adjoin to a suitable syntactic head. The change has repercussions for the syntactic process of cliticization: second position clitics no longer have a designated position in the clause structure, but instead they land in specifiers of different functional heads above VP.
The Freezing Principle in Hungarian polarity, non-polarity and multiple wh-questions
Authors: Dalmi Gréte
Published: March 2014

This paper explores how weak erotetic vajon ‘whether, if…at all’ interacts with the interrogative clitic -e ‘QCL’ in polarity questions and with wh-words in non-polarity and multiple wh-questions in Hungarian. Vajon ‘if…at all’, sitting in ForceP, forms an expletive–associate chain with FINP, which hosts the polarity interrogative clitic -e ‘QCL’. Whenever the INT operator forms an OP-variable chain with the interrogative clitic -e ‘QCL’, this chain blocks Long wh-movement out of subordinate clauses. Weak erotetic vajon ‘if…at all’ signals such OP-variable chains. The same holds for subordinate multiple wh-questions, where the INT….wh-word chain blocks the extraction of another wh-word.
The morphosyntax of -nde and post-verbal clitics in Cypriot Greek
Authors: Pavlou Natalia , Panagiotidis E. Phoevos
Published: March 2014

This paper explores pronominal clitic placement in a mixed clitic placement variety, Cypriot Greek, and the restrictions on it in the presence of the dialectal element -nde. -Nde appears as a verb suffix, but imposes syntactic and morphological restrictions in the clause. We argue that -nde is a borrowed element from Turkish and it behaves as a validational marker (Weber 1986) in Cypriot Greek, expressing the truth validity of the speaker’s judgment. Challenging the true nature of clitics and affixes, the discussion focuses on the possibility of clitic-like elements appearing as suffixes. The ungrammaticality yielded with both -nde and post-verbal object clitics leads to the observation that the two need to appear adjacent to the verb.
Acquisition of Italian object clitics by a trilingual child
Authors: Khachaturyan Elizaveta
Published: March 2014

This paper describes the acquisition of Italian object pronouns by a trilingual girl who simultaneously acquires Italian, Russian, and Norwegian. Different processes were distinguished according to the subject’s age at the time of acquisition. Italian first- and second-person singular clitics were produced correctly during the first stage (at age 2;2) but were replaced by tonic forms after the age of three, while third-person singular clitics were used in a target-consistent manner. On the basis of these data I shall discuss different approaches to Italian clitics.
Clitic clusters in early Italo-Romance and the syntax/phonology interface
Authors: Pescarini Diego
Published: March 2014

This paper deals with the morpho-phonology of Italo-Romance clitic clusters. It argues that morpho-phonological processes (i.e. apocope, prosthesis, etc.) are sensitive to both the syntactic make-up of clitic clusters and their prosodic structure. The first part of the paper aims to support the hypothesis that a clitic cluster is a Foot, daughter to a recursive Prosodic Word (Peperkamp 1995, 1996, 1997). The second part of the paper accounts for the distribution of the apocopated clitic l (< lo ‘it/him’/‘the.m.sg’) in early Italo-Romance. I show that the distribution of l follows from syllabic and alignment constraints compatible with the foot-based analysis. The last section addresses a puzzling vowel alternation which targets the leftmost clitic of certain clusters in Old and Modern Italian.
Predication and specification in the syntax of cleft sentences
Authors: den Dikken Marcel
Published: March 2014

This paper reviews the differences between predicational and specificational copular sentences in the realm of (pseudo-)cleft constructions, and proposes an analysis which treats the it of specificational it-clefts as a pro-predicate that inverts with its subject in the course of the syntactic derivation. In contrastive-focus it-clefts, the sentence-final relative clause is a right-dislocated headless relative dependent on a formal licensing relationship with the operator inside the relative clause and a content-licensing relationship with the focus. This dual licensing dependency explains the restrictions on the distribution of which as the relative clause operator in contrastive-focus it-clefts. Continuous-topic it-clefts are structurally assimilated to pseudorelative constructions, which accounts for the restrictions on the realisation of the left periphery of their relative clause. Keywords: it-cleft; predication; specification; headless relative; asyndetic specification
Wh-clefts and verb-initial word order in Austronesian languages
Authors: Aldridge Edith
Published: March 2014

Wh-questions are formed on clefts in many Austronesian languages, a fact which is generally assumed to be related to their verb-initial basic word order. What is less clear is the precise relationship between verb-initial word order and the cleft strategy for questions. This paper proposes that the derivation of clefts is parallel to the derivation of basic word order in VOS languages. The absolutive DP is analyzed as a topic and moves to the left periphery of the clause. Following this, the remnant clause is fronted to a higher focus position. I further show how this parallelism accounts for certain distinguishing characteristics of clefts in Austronesian languages. Keywords: Cleft; wh-question; verb-initial word order; predicate-fronting; Austronesian
The cleft pronoun and cleft clause in English
Authors: Reeve Matthew
Published: March 2014

In this paper I argue against both ‘specificational’ and ‘expletive’ analyses of English clefts. I provide new evidence that the cleft pronoun it is non-expletive, and that the cleft clause is interpreted as a discontinuous definite description with it, as under specificational analyses. On the other hand, I argue that specificational analyses are mistaken in positing a syntactic modification relationship between the cleft clause and it. Rather, the evidence shows that the cleft clause behaves in all relevant ways as if it is a syntactic modifier of the clefted XP. Keywords: cleft constructions; relative clauses; copular sentences; definite descriptions.
The morphosyntax of wolof clefts
Authors: Torrence Harold
Published: March 2014

This paper examines the structure and derivation of cleft clauses in the Atlantic language Wolof, which possesses distinct clefts for subjects and nonsubjects. I argue that the clefts are based on two syntactically distinct copular constructions. In the subject cleft, the copula occurs with a TPstructure. In the nonsubject cleft, the copula occurs with a CPlike structure. In terms of derivation, I argue that Wolof clefts involve overt movement of the clefted constituent, not base generation. I show that Wolof clefts are islandsensitive using general and Wolofspecific tests. I then present evidence from a number of reconstruction tests that converge on the conclusion that clefted items in Wolof undergo A’movement. Keywords: A’- movement; wh-movement; reconstruction; copula; cleft; focus; left periphery; Niger-Congo; Atlantic
Multiple focus and cleft sentences
Authors: Hedberg Nancy
Published: March 2014

The information structure of English cleft sentences is discussed. A cleft sentence divides a proposition into two parts, which are interpreted as an exhaustive focus and a pragmatic presupposition. These two semantic components can be flexibly mapped onto the information structure categories of topic and comment to arrive at comment-topic (‘stressed focus’) clefts and topic-comment (‘informative presupposition’) clefts. Clefts thus introduce a cleft focus or even a pair of foci constructionally. They also exhibit an assertive (comment) focus, which may or may not correspond to the cleft focus. While only exclusive focus particles can associate with the cleft focus, additive and scalar focus particles can associate with the assertive focus in the cleft clause, thus giving rise to additional cleft sentences containing multiple instances of focus. Keywords: cleft; focus; presupposition; topic
Recursion of FocP in Malayalam
Authors: Mathew Rosmin
Published: March 2014

This paper attempts to look into Malayalam where both Identificational Focus and Information Focus are overtly represented. With the help of diagnostic tests for exhaustivity the paper argues that clefts in the language encode Exhaustive Identificational Focus. It has been shown by Jayaseelan (2001) that there is a Focus position above vP and below IP. It is argued here that while the language encodes Information Focus in this preverbal lower Focus position, Exhaustive Focus involves a higher C- level Focus position, thus manifesting different types of Focus in different domains. Keywords: Focus; recursion; exhaustivity; new information
Multiple Wh-questions and the cleft construction in Malayalam
Authors: Madhavan Punnapurath
Published: March 2014

Wh-questions in Malayalam are usually clefts, with the wh-phrase occupying the cleft focus. An alternative to clefting the wh-element is to cleft the whole clause containing the wh. When there are multiple wh-phrases in the embedded clause, however, the only option is to cleft the embedded clause wholesale. Another interesting observation is that when there is potential scope ambiguity involving, say, a time adverbial like eppooL ‘when’, clefting of the whole clause versus clefting of the time adverbial is being resorted to as a means to disambiguate. The paper shows that a two-way distinction of languages, namely those which are wh-in-situ and those which are not, will not do justice to the array of facts, and that a more nuanced typological account is called for. Keywords: Clefts; wh-in-situ; scope ambiguity; question interpretation
Italian clefts and the licensing of infinitival subject relatives
Authors: Sleeman Petra
Published: March 2014

This paper investigates the licensing of infinitival subject relative clauses by clefted constituents. It is claimed that in Italian clefted constituents license infinitival subject relatives because in this language clefts function as contrastive foci. This claim is supported by the syntactic analysis of the position of clefted constituents that license infinitival subject relatives in Italian. It is argued that they occupy a left-peripheral Focus position in the clause. On the basis of extraction data, it is argued that the infinitival subject relative itself is a complement. Keywords: cleft; infinitival relative clause; contrastive focus; Italian; left-periphery
Chapter 2. Dynamic systems methods in the study of language acquisition
Authors: van Geert Paul
Published: March 2014

Language acquisition is viewed as an example of a dynamic system. It consists of many components that interact with each other. The components show trajectories over time, the properties of which result from the dynamics of the interaction. A large variety of components can be taken as potential indicators of underlying mechanisms of change and acquisition. Examples of such indicators are the number of one-, two-, three- and more word sentences, the number of spatial prepositions, and many others. These and other observable aspects may be used as stochastic indicators of underlying processes such as transitions between qualitatively distinct generative mechanisms, discontinuities, and so forth. Insights into the dynamics of language acquisition may be obtained, first, by modeling the dynamic interactions between the components at issue and by comparing qualitative properties of data simulated by those models with properties of empirical data. A second approach to obtaining more insight into the dynamics of language acquisition is by applying flexible smoothing techniques to time-serial language data and to determine the eventual changes in the amount of fluctuation in the data. Both the smoothed curves and fluctuation data can provide indirect evidence of underlying processes, such as continuities or discontinuities and regressions. The modeling, smoothing, and fluctuation techniques are primarily quantitative and should be seen as an addition to qualitative analyses.
Chapter 3. Early bootstrapping of syntactic acquisition
Authors: Christophe Anne , Millotte Séverine , Brusini Perrine , Cauvet Elodie
Published: March 2014

Infants acquiring language have to learn about the lexicon, the phonology, and the syntax of their native language, among others. For each of these domains, being able to rely on knowledge from the other domains would simplify the learner’s task. For instance, having access to words and their meaning should help infants to learn about syntax, but learning about the meaning of words would be greatly facilitated if infants had access to some aspects of syntactic structure (Gleitman 1990). This chapter focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. In addition, by two years of age they can exploit function words to infer the syntactic category of unknown content words (nouns vs verbs) and guess their plausible meaning (object vs action). We speculate on how infants may build a partial syntactic structure, the ‘syntactic skeleton’, by relying on both phonological phrase boundaries and function words, and present adult results strengthening the plausibility of this hypothesis.
Chapter 4. Language acquisition in developmental disorders
Authors: Thomas Michael S.C.
Published: March 2014

In this chapter, I review recent research into language acquisition in developmental disorders, and the light that these findings shed on the nature of language acquisition in typically developing children. Disorders considered include Specific Language Impairment, autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome. I argue that disorders of language should be construed in terms of differences in the constraints that shape the learning process, rather than in terms of the normal system with components missing or malfunctioning. I outline the integrative nature of this learning process and how properties such as redundancy and compensation may be key characteristics of learning systems with atypical constraints. These ideas, as well as the new methodologies now being used to study variations in pathways of language acquisition, are illustrated with case studies from Williams syndrome and Specific Language Impairment.
Chapter 5. Language development in a cross-linguistic context
Authors: Lieven Elena
Published: March 2014

Children’s language development has only been studied fro a very small fraction of the world’s languages. This chapter provides a brief introduction to existing cross-linguistic research on morphological and syntactic development in young children learning oral languages. The final section addresses the important issue of differences in the communicative environments of children learning to talk and the possible implications of these differences.
Chapter 6. A typological approach to first language acquisition
Authors: Dressler Wolfgang U.
Published: March 2014

This paper will not simply be cross-linguistic, but typological, insofar as it refers to language types as constellations of typologically relevant linguistic properties. The general hypothesis is that children are sensitive to typological properties of the language they acquire, i.e. they are sensitive to the relative communicative importance and structure of linguistic patterns in their verbal interactions. This paper will focus on morphology as the backbone of holisic language typology. The data discussed will come especially from the collaborative results of the international “Cross-linguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition”. The paper will concentrate on early phases of language acquisition and on inflectional morphology. The relevant properties are degree of morphological richness of a language, of transparency, uniformity and productivity. It is assumed that children will develop morphology faster, the richer the morphology is they are acquiring. They will also acquire transparent, uniform and productive patterns faster than opaque, non-uniform and unproductive ones. Among the three epistemological levels of typology, i.e. classificatory, ordering and quantitative typology, the paper will focus on the second level, where languages, and more precisely language subsystems, are ordered according to how closely they approach the ideal morphological types of, in our case, the agglutinating, the inflecting(-fusional) and the isolating type.
Chapter 8. On the importance of goals in child language
Authors: Pléh Csaba
Published: March 2014

Modern psycholinguistic studies started to use experimental and child language observational data concerning the language of space to obtain evidence for the primacy issue: who leads in the articulation of spatial language: language or spatial cognition? Following the model of Landau and Jackendoff, strong claims can be made about the universal distinctions languages make about space and their relationship to the organization of spatial cognition in the brain. However, there are important differences in this regard between languages. Hungarian data will be used to illustrate how a universal cognitive tendency – the primacy of goals – exist very early on in a language that requires distinctions along the path (e.g. in, into, from inside). These tendencies are shown both in normal and in developmentally impaired populations. Our studies on Williams syndrome (in coll. with Á. Lukács) provide some clarifications regarding the language-cognition interface. This condition is characterized by severe limitations of spatial cognition, related to the underdevelopment of posterior parietal areas. In line with these neurocognitive limitations, spatial language in these subjects seems to be very limited as compared to their general level of grammatical morphology. However, detailed comparisons show no differences in the qualitative pattern of performance and errors in using spatial language. It seems that the limitations of computational space limit spatial language in this group, but at the same time the types of computations performed by this limited system are identical. A similar observation also indicates that, in using spatial suffixes to code interpersonal meanings such as to be angry at, spatial use is easier and earlier both in normal subjects and in impaired populations. All of these data support a rather universal and cognition-based view of the unfolding and organization of spatial language.
Chapter 9. Promoting patients in narrative discourse
Authors: Jisa Harriet , Chenu Florence , Fekete Gabriella , Omar Hayat
Published: March 2014

Languages provide speakers with a number of structural options for manipulating the expression of events in narrative discourse. Underlying narrative competence is the capacity to view events as dynamic actions composed of a bundle of elements such as, agent, patient, affectedness, etc. (Hopper & Thompson 1980). This study examines the grammatical constructions used by children (5–6, 7–8 and 10–11-year-olds) and adult speakers of Amharic, English, French and Hungarian to manipulate the expression of agent and patient participants in the linguistic formulation of events. The narrative task used to elicit the data is composed of a series of pictures which recount the adventures of two principal characters (a boy and a dog) in search of their runaway frog (Frog, Where are you? Mayer 1969). Over the course of the story the boy and the dog encounter a host of secondary characters (a gopher, an owl, a swarm of bees and a deer) and change participant status, going from controlling agent to affected patient of a secondary character’s action. Our interest lies in the structures available in the languages studied and their use by children and adults in narrative discourse. We detail how children and adult native speakers of the four languages use topicalising constructions to promote the patient participant in an event to the “starting point” (Langacker 1998) of the recounting of that event.
Chapter 10. On-line grammaticality judgments
Authors: Kail Michèle , Costa Armanda , Faria Isabel Hub
Published: March 2014

Online sentence processing in children is still an emerging field. This crosslinguistic study examined the on-line sentence processing in a grammaticality judgment experiment. In each language (French, Portuguese) three age groups of children (6–7 year-olds, 8–9 year-olds and 10–11 year-olds) and a group of adults were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors were studied: the violation position (early vs. late in the sentence), the violation span (intraphrasal vs. interphrasal), and the violation type (agreement vs. word-order). The main developmental results were as follows. Not surprisingly, children of both languages were always slower than adults at detecting grammatical violations. No matter how old they were or which language they spoke, subjects were faster at judging sentences with violations that occurred later and the effect was especially strong in the younger groups. As predicted, intraphrasal violations were more rapidly detected than interphrasal ones in French, but Portuguese subjects presented the opposite pattern. This paradoxical result seems linked to the low perceptibility of phonological violations in oral sentence processing. Finally, agreement violations were more rapidly detected than word-order ones at every age in French, whereas, such differences did not reach significance in Portuguese. Crosslinguistic comparisons between these two romance languages are discussed in the light of cue validity and cue cost interactions during online sentence processing.
Chapter 11. The expression of finiteness by L1 and
L2 learners of Dutch, French, and German
Authors: Perdue Clive
Published: March 2014

Finiteness is traditionally associated with the morpho-syntactic categories of person and tense. The notion of finiteness has however much wider, semantic and pragmatic ramifications, a fact which has led several researchers to make a distinction between M(orphological) and S(emantic) finiteness. We follow this distinction here. Over the last decade language acquisition researchers have analyzed the expression of finiteness from different theoretical standpoints, mainly analyzing learners’ verbal production in comparable tasks, ranging from spontaneous conversation to more guided complex verbal tasks. With the same methodology, we will examine the acquisition of finiteness by adult learners of French L2 in cross-linguistic comparison with learners of Germanic L2s. The adult acquisition process will also be compared to the child’s acquisition of finiteness in the L1 for the same target languages. All languages in the sample mark finiteness by means of verbal morphology. We will describe the acquisitional paths towards the TL system and the various stages learners pass through on the way. Finally, we ask whether the difference in mastery of the target system by these two types of learner – children achieve mastery of the relevant verbal morphology whereas adults often do not – can throw light on the organisation and functioning of finiteness in language in general.
Chapter 12. Age of onset in successive acquisition
of bilingualism
Authors: Meisel Jürgen M.
Published: March 2014

In first language acquisition, monolingual as well as bilingual, every child develops a full gram­matical competence in the language s/he is exposed to. This is arguably not the case in second language acquisition (L2). My assumption here is that this is due to the fact that the Language Making Capacity which guides L1 development is not fully accessible any more to L2 learn­ers. My claim is that it becomes inaccessible as a consequence of neural maturation, supporting thus the Critical Period Hypothesis. The latter should, however, be understood as a cluster of sensi­t­ive periods, each defined in terms of an optimal period for the development of specific features of grammar. Age of onset of acquisition is consequently argued to be the single most important factor distinguishing acquisition types. As for the age periods at which crucial changes happen, my claim is that they occur significantly earlier than is commonly assumed. More spec­ifically, I will show that linguistic as well as neuropsychological evidence suggests that at least some as­pects of grammar, relating to inflectional morphology and to syntax, are indeed affected as early as at age of onset between age 3 and 4. Further significant changes seem to happen at around age 6 to 7.
Chapter 13. The development of person-number verbal morphology
in different types of learners
Authors: Schlyter Suzanne
Published: March 2014

In this chapter, the acquisition of French subject-verb agreement (in form of verbal inflections) in different types of learners is discussed. Different studies, essentially case studies on corpora of spontaneous spoken vs written adult L2 French (L1 Swedish), and on simultaneous bilingual Swedish-French children, are presented and compared. The results suggest that the 3rd person plural (3p pl) marking in written adult L2 French is acquired relatively earlier than the corresponding marking in spoken adult L2 French. It is argued that this is related to the frequency and regularity of the written 3p pl inflection (always -nt) in contrast to the irregular and different markings in spoken French (zero marking or different consonants). It is further argued that the same markings in the bilingual children (2L1) are not quite as early and easily acquired as in French monolinguals (L1) of corresponding age and linguistic development. This may also be related (differently from agreement in form of subject clitics) to the frequency of the 3p pl inflection in the spoken input of these children, since their French input is reduced and 3p pl is not marked in Swedish.
Chapter 14. Re-thinking the bilingual interactive-activation model
from a developmental perspective (BIA-d)
Authors: Grainger Jonathan , Midgley Katherine , Holcomb Phillip J.
Published: March 2014

A large body of empirical research, accumulated over the last twenty years, has set the foundations for a generic model of word comprehension in relatively fluent bilinguals (the bilingual interactive-activation (BIA) model). This approach combines an initial language non-selective access process with inhibitory control mechanisms in order to limit cross-language interference. However, it is still not clear how such an architecture could emerge during the learning of a second language. The present chapter briefly summarizes the key results in favor of the original BIA-model and describes the research agenda that hopefully will help fill in the “missing link” – that is, a developmental investigation of second language vocabulary acquisition. We present a theoretical framework (the developmental BIA-model, BIA-d) designed to guide future research in this area.
Chapter 15. Foreign language vocabulary learning
Authors: de Groot Annette M.B. , Brink Rosanne C.L. van den
Published: March 2014

This chapter reviews the results of a set of experiments that examined foreign-language (FL) vocabulary learning by late learners, exploiting the paired-associate-learning (PAL) paradigm. The effects on acquisition and retention of the concreteness and frequency of the native-language (L1) words, the (phonotactical) typicality of the FL words, and the cognate relation between the L1 words and their FL translations were studied. To determine long-term retention a retest took place one week after learning. The results showed substantial effects of concreteness, typicality and cognate status: More concrete, typical, and cognate words were learned than abstract, atypical, and non-cognate words, respectively. Learning was also better for frequent than for infrequent words, but this effect was relatively small. Furthermore, the retest indicated that the words acquired best during the learning phase were also those retained best: The forgetting functions were steeper for abstract, atypical, and non-cognate words than for concrete, typical, and cognate words. We explain these effects in terms of differential pre-experimental long-term memory knowledge (concreteness and frequency), phonological short- and long-term memory (typicality), and a retrieval cue that exists for cognates but not for non-cognates (cognate status).
Chapter 16. Cerebral imaging and individual differences in language learning
Authors: Pallier Christophe
Published: March 2014

The majority of the brain imaging studies on bilingualism have focused on the question of the separation or overlap of the neural regions involved when a bilingual brain is working with one language or the other. Researchers have been especially interested in the roles of factors such as age of acquisition of the second language and level of proficiency. In recent studies, however, new questions about the bilingual brain have started to be explored. For example, are there anatomical and/or functional differences between the brains of bilinguals and monolinguals? Do the interindividual differences in the ability to learn a second language correlate with brain differences? We will present recently published and ongoing work about these questions.
Chapter 17. The cognitive neuroscience of second language acquisition
and bilingualism
Authors: Reiterer Susanne
Published: March 2014

In this chapter I aim to systematically discuss the various factors that play a role in the second language acquisition processes that finally lead to what is known as ultimate attainment – from a neuro-imaging point of view. Therefore a basic threefold classification into “biological”, “psychological” and “socio-linguistic” factors is tentatively offered. The main focus lies in reviewing recent brain-imaging literature from the relatively young field of “bilingual brain imaging” with the attempt to integrate definitions used in the field of SLA research with the terminology of brain imaging experiments on bilinguals or second language learners. The aim is to put that into a wider framework of second language acquisition by proposing a systematic classification according to which individual differences in L2 learning could better be described. Important factors like, for example, age of onset of learning, proficiency level, experience/exposure, or language aptitude are highlighted and critically discussed.
Relative clause attachment preferences of Turkish L2 speakers of English
Authors: Dinçtopal-Deniz Nazik
Published: March 2014

Monolingual Turkish speakers, highly proficient Turkish speakers of English as a second language (L2), and native English speakers participated in online self-paced reading tasks and offline pen-and-paper questionnaires testing the processing of relative clause (RC) attachment ambiguities. Experimental stimuli in the online task consisted of temporarily and globally ambiguous sentences. Temporarily ambiguous sentences were disambiguated using animacy information carried by the NPs in the complex genitive NP. The offline task consisted of globally ambiguous sentences. The results of the online and offline tasks showed that both first language (L1) groups preferred to attach the RC to the low noun phrase (NP), both with animate and inanimate antecedents. Results for the L2 group, however, differed in the online and offline tasks. In the online task, they preferred to attach the RC high with animate antecedents, but showed a tendency to attach it low with inanimate antecedents. In the offline task, on the other hand, they showed a high attachment preference throughout. Results are discussed in relation to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis of Clahsen and Felser (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c).
Evidence of syntactic constraints in the processing of wh-movement
Authors: Aldwayan Saad , Fiorentino Robert , Gabriele Alison
Published: March 2014

Recent proposals have suggested that second language learners, unlike native speakers, are ‘shallow processors’ in that they do not make use of abstract syntactic knowledge in parsing, relying instead on lexical semantic knowledge and pragmatic notions such as plausibility (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a,b). The present study tested whether Najdi Arabic learners of English process whdependencies incrementally and whether they use knowledge of syntactic constraints in the processing of wh-movement. A group of advanced L2 learners (n = 40) as well as a control group of English native speakers (n = 40) participated in a self-paced reading study, which was based on Stowe (1986). The results of two experiments suggest that non-native processing is, like native processing, incremental and guided by syntactic constraints.
Constraints on L2 learners’ processing of wh-dependencies
Authors: Cunnings Ian , Batterham Claire , Felser Claudia , Clahsen Harald
Published: March 2014

Using the eye-movement monitoring technique, the present study examined whether wh-dependency formation is sensitive to island constraints in second language (L2) sentence comprehension, and whether the presence of an intervening relative clause island has any effects on learners’ ability to ultimately resolve long wh-dependencies. Participants included proficient learners of L2 English from typologically different language backgrounds (German, Chinese), as well as a group of native English-speaking controls. Our results indicate that both the learners and the native speakers were sensitive to relative clause islands during processing, irrespective of typological differences between the learners’ L1s, but that the learners had more difficulty than native speakers linking distant wh-fillers to their lexical subcategorizers during processing. We provide a unified processing-based account for our findings.
The effects of linear distance and working memory on the processing of gender agreement in Spanish
Authors: Keating Gregory D.
Published: March 2014

This study investigates the effects of linear distance and working memory on native and advanced L2 Spanish speakers’ on-line sensitivity to violations of grammatical gender. Using eye-tracking, participants were tested on agreement violations on predicative adjectives located one, four, and seven words away from a controller noun. The results revealed that linear distance influenced both groups’ sensitivity to gender anomalies, albeit at different points on the linear distance continuum. Furthermore, each group’s sensitivity to gender violations emerged at different points in the eye-movement record. The reading span analysis revealed that the advanced learners’ sensitivity to gender errors during first-pass reading was moderated by individual differences in working memory. The results are discussed in light of the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006b).
Feature assembly in early stages of L2 acquisition
Authors: Renaud Claire
Published: March 2014

Based on the feature assembly hypothesis (e.g. Lardiere, 2009), and assuming a universal parser, early stages of second language (L2) acquisition are investigated in this paper. Using a methodology that combines reading time and acceptability judgment data, it is argued that L2 learners’ processing relies on a universal parser that allows the selection of uninterpretable features (even those that are not selected in the learners’ first language, such as uGender) based on a universal store. The data also suggest that these features are (re-)assembled, as shown by the asymmetries in the reading time data, which are taken to reflect different computational costs associated with different computations (i.e. feature checking and feature underspecification).