Information structure in linguistic theory and in speech production : validation of a cross-linguistic data set

The aim of this paper is to validate a dataset collected by means of production experiments which are part of the Questionnaire on Information Structure. The experiments generate a range of information structure contexts that have been observed in the literature to induce specific constructions. This paper compares the speech production results from a subset of these experiments with specific claims about the reflexes of information structure in four different languages. The results allow us to evaluate and in most cases validate the efficacy of our elicitation paradigms, to identify potentially fruitful avenues of future research, and to highlight issues involved in interpreting speech production data of this kind

The acquisition of the English dative alternation by Russian foreign language learners

Ditransitive verbs include a “recipient” and a “theme” argument (in addition to the subject). The choice of putting one argument before the other (i.e., either recipient-theme, or theme-recipient) is associated with multiple discourse-pragmatic factors. Language have different options to code the ditransitive construction. In English, a ditransitive verb can take two alternating patterns (“the dative alternation”): the Double Object Construction (DOC) (John gives Mary a book) and the to-dative construction (to-dative) (John gives a book to Mary). In Russian, theme and recipient are marked by accusative and dative, respectively. In addition, word order is flexible and either the accusative-marked theme (Pjotr dal knigu Marii), or the dative-marked recipient (Pjotr dal Marii knigu) can come first. This article reports on two sentence rating experiments (acceptability judgments) to test whether Russian learners of English transfer their preferences about the theme-recipient order in Russian to the ditransitive construction in English. A total of 284 Russian students were tested. Results for both tests showed a great variability in the ratings. A comparison of the ratings seems to suggest a small positive correlation, but no statistically significant relation was found between the order preferences in both languages. However, we found a small preference for the use of the to-dative, which we relate to the language acquisition process as proposed by Processability Theory

Stative sentences in Japanese and the role of the nominative marker "ga" : a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Japanese at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

The Japanese nominative particle ga is normally associated with the marking of subjects. However, there are several constructions involving stative predicates, where it has been claimed, notably by those working within a generative framework, that a ga-marked NP can be an object and that such sentences are transitive. Such an analysis has particularly arisen in the case of sentences with more than one ga-marked NP, exhibiting so-called double ga marking. The following study makes two claims. Firstly, that one of the functions of ga in such sentences is to provide a discourse frame akin to the topic marking function of the postpositional particle wa. Secondly it argues that stative sentences associated with double ga-marking are in fact intransitive and that the ga-marked NP's that have been claimed to be objects are in fact subjects

Thematic orders and the comprehension of subject-extracted relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese

This study investigates the comprehension of three kinds of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRs) in Mandarin Chinese: standard SRs, relative clauses involving the disposal ba construction (‘disposal SRs’), and relative clauses involving the long passive bei constructions (‘passive SRs’). In a self-paced reading experiment, the regions before the relativizer (where the sentential fragments are temporarily ambiguous) showed reading patterns consistent with expectation-based incremental processing: standard SRs (with the highest constructional frequency and the least complex syntactic structure) were processed faster than the other two variants. However, in the regions after the relativizer and the head noun (where the existence of a relative clause is unambiguously indicated), a top-down global effect of thematic ordering was observed: passive SRs (whose thematic role order conforms to the canonical thematic order of Chinese) were read faster than both the standard SRs and the disposal SRs. Taken together, these results suggest that two expectation-based processing factors are involved in the comprehension of Chinese relative clauses, including both the structural probabilities of pre-relativizer constituents and the overall surface thematic orders in the relative clauses

Particles, word order, and intonation

Synopsis: This study explores information structure (IS) within the framework of corpus linguistics and functional linguistics. As a case study, it investigates IS phenomena in spoken Japanese: particles including so-called topic particles, case particles, and zero particles; word order; and intonation. The study discusses how these phenomena are related to cognitive and communicative mechanisms of humans

Syntactic Frequency and Sentence Processing in Standard Indonesian:Data from agrammatic aphasia and ERP

Aphasia is a language impairment caused by focal brain damage affecting multiple channels of language. Studies have shown that one third of stroke patients show some form of aphasia. One of the key characteristics of aphasia is that in most types, patients show deficits in sentence processing. This is so much so that many aphasia assessment tools utilize sentence comprehension or production tasks to determine aphasia type or severity, or perhaps to provide a more detailed profile on the symptoms. Individuals with aphasia have been known to face difficulties in processing sentences with a derived or non-canonical structure, like the passive. While numerous studies have discussed the morphosyntactic basis of this deficit, other aspects of sentence processing such as frequency of the sentence structures are often neglected. There is considerable possibility of syntactic frequency affecting sentence processing, as a large body of research has shown the impact of word-level frequency towards language processing. Could the impairment of processing non-canonical sentences be related to the low frequency of these sentences?This thesis examines sentence processing in Standard Indonesian, a language where the passive occurs at a rate that is comparable to active sentences. Individuals with aphasia and controls were tested with sentence comprehension and production tasks, and an event-related potential study of sentence processing for healthy adults were conducted. We found the passive to be unimpaired for aphasic individuals, and we also did not find any observable processing differences between the active and the passive in the neuroimaging experiment

Bilingual and monolingual children's acquisition of Spanish dative alternation structures: order of acquisition and adult input effects

Producción CientíficaThis work investigates the acquisition of Spanish dative alternation (DA) in the production of English-Spanish bilingual and Spanish monolingual children. We explore whether a/para-datives and dative clitic doubled (DCLD) structures are syntactically derived from one another or, whether they are different structures. We also examine whether bilinguals follow similar developmental paths to monolinguals in the acquisition of Spanish DA or whether they differ from their peers given the influence from the syntactic status of English DA in their other language. We conduct an analysis of the spontaneous data from nine English-Spanish bilingual and nine Spanish monolingual children, along with the adults that interact with them, as available in CHILDES database (MacWhinney, B. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. 3rd ed. Hillsdale: Erlbaum. Accessed December 10, 2018. http://childes.talkbank.org). Our results reveal that bilinguals begin to produce DCLDs and a/para-datives at an approximately similar age. This suggests a syntactic underived relationship between the two DA structures, akin to that in monolinguals’ data. Nevertheless significant, the bilinguals and the monolinguals show a delay in the onset and a lower incidence in the production of a/para-datives when compared to DCLDs, which seems to be in line with adult input factors. The monolingual-like patterns in the bilinguals’ data point to a lack of crosslinguistic influence from English DA