First verbs : On the way to mini-paradigms

This 18th issue of ZAS-Papers in Linguistics consists of papers on the development of verb acquisition in 9 languages from the very early stages up to the onset of paradigm construction. Each of the 10 papers deals with first-Ianguage developmental processes in one or two children studied via longitudinal data. The languages involved are French, Spanish, Russian, Croatian, Lithuanien, Finnish, English and German. For German two different varieties are examined, one from Berlin and one from Vienna. All papers are based on presentations at the workshop 'Early verbs: On the way to mini-paradigms' held at the ZAS (Berlin) on the 30./31. of September 2000. This workshop brought to a close the first phase of cooperation between two projects on language acquisition which has started in October 1999: a) the project on "Syntaktische Konsequenzen des Morphologieerwerbs" at the ZAS (Berlin) headed by Juergen Weissenborn and Ewald Lang, and financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and b) the international "Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition" coordinated by Wolfgang U. Dressler in behalf of the Austrian Academy of Sciences

Early verb development in one croatian-speaking child

This paper shows the early development of the first approximately 50 verbs found in the recorded speech production of one Croatian girl. The aim is to analyse and interpret the child's verb development in terms of the distinction of a pre- and a protomorphological phase before modularised morphology in language acquisition (Dressler & Karpf 1995). Furthermore, focus will be laid on the emergence of first verb paradigms

Investigating the cross-lingual translatability of VerbNet-style classification.

VerbNet-the most extensive online verb lexicon currently available for English-has proved useful in supporting a variety of NLP tasks. However, its exploitation in multilingual NLP has been limited by the fact that such classifications are available for few languages only. Since manual development of VerbNet is a major undertaking, researchers have recently translated VerbNet classes from English to other languages. However, no systematic investigation has been conducted into the applicability and accuracy of such a translation approach across different, typologically diverse languages. Our study is aimed at filling this gap. We develop a systematic method for translation of VerbNet classes from English to other languages which we first apply to Polish and subsequently to Croatian, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian, and Finnish. Our results on Polish demonstrate high translatability with all the classes (96% of English member verbs successfully translated into Polish) and strong inter-annotator agreement, revealing a promising degree of overlap in the resultant classifications. The results on other languages are equally promising. This demonstrates that VerbNet classes have strong cross-lingual potential and the proposed method could be applied to obtain gold standards for automatic verb classification in different languages. We make our annotation guidelines and the six language-specific verb classifications available with this paper

Processing and production of unique and non-unique-to-L2 syntactic structures: The case of English articles and tense-aspect

The L2 acquisition of English articles and tense-aspect (TA) have been popular research areas over the last two decades. Compared with the numerous applications of metalinguistic knowledge and oral production tasks, the use of online (real time) processing methods to investigate these morphosyntactic structures has been far less common. In perhaps the only eye-tracking study on L2 English article processing, Trenkic et al. (2014) showed that L1 Mandarin/L2 English learners are able to use articles in real time to resolve referent ambiguity in a similar manner to L1 English speakers. In one of the rare self-paced reading (SPR) studies on L2 English TA processing, Roberts and Liszka (2013) found that while L1 English and L1 French/L2 English speakers were sensitive to English present perfect violations, L1 German/L2 English speakers, whose first language grammaticalises tense but not aspect, were not. However, beyond these important findings, our understanding of the L2 online processing of these morphosyntactic structures remains limited. To address these gaps, the present thesis tested 24 L1 Mandarin/L2 English, 22 L1 Croatian/L2 English and 24 L1 English participants on an SPR task and in oral production. The SPR task used novel article stimuli and TA items adapted from Roberts and Liszka (2013) to test (implicit) sensitivity to violations, while a grammaticality judgement task (GJT) on the same stimuli was used to ascertain participants’ explicit knowledge. The comprehension data were triangulated with oral productions of English articles and tense elicited via an animated film retelling task. A linear mixed-effects model analysis revealed that the participants’ performance on both the SPR and oral production tasks was highly influenced by their L1. The findings lend support to the morphological congruency hypothesis (Jiang, Novokshanova, Masuda, & Wang, 2011) which posits that late L2 learners cannot fully acquire morphosyntactic features that are incongruent (realised differently or absent in the L1 and L2), which suggest several implications for further research

Cultural specificity in the translation of popular fiction from english into croatian during the socialist and transition periods (1960-2010)

El objetivo del presente estudio es el de identificar las tendencias en la traducción de elementos culturales específicos en traducciones de inglés a croata y, posteriormente, correlacionarlas con los desarrollos que ocurrieron en el contexto general en el que se produjeron las traducciones. El estudio se propuso probar hipótesis que predicen una tendencia creciente por emplear tipos de soluciones de asimilación al traducir elementos culturales específicos y también relacionar esta tendencia con los mayores flujos de traducción. Las hipótesis se evalúan usando un corpus de novelas de detectives traducidas en tres períodos: principios de los 60, finales de los 70 y la década del 2000. Los datos cuantitativos obtenidos por medio de análisis textuales se unen con datos cualitativos obtenidos en entrevistas son los agentes de las traducciones. En la conclusión se discuten estos resultados con el objetivo de establecer posibles correlaciones entre los datos del análisis textual, los datos de las entrevistas y los datos extratextuales con las variables contextuales

Ethnohistorical Processes, Demographic Structure and Linguistic Determinants of the Island of Vis

The present paper aims at describing the most relevant background data on geomorphological, economic, ethnohistoric, demographic and linguistic features of the island of Vis. As an introduction to future holistic anthropological research on the island, it seeks to identify both internal and external impulses of change and/or continuity of the island population structure within a wider socio-cultural and historical context. The ethnohistorical and demographic data indicate a higher degree of isolation throughout history as compared to other islands in the region and a continuous depopulation trend during the last century. The analysis of the existing linguistic data on two main settlements shows a certain amount of intradialectal micro-differentiation, which is mainly due to various social and non-linguistic reasons

Reactions to second language speech: Influences of discrete speech characteristics, rater experience, and speaker first language background

This study investigates how Mandarin and Slavic language speakers’ comprehensibility, accentedness, and fluency ratings, as assigned by experienced teacher-raters and novice raters, align with discrete linguistic measures, and raters’ accounts of influences on their scoring. In addition to examining mean ratings in relation to rater experience and speaker first language background, we correlated ratings with segmental, prosodic, and temporal measures. Introspective reports were segmented, coded, enumerated, and submitted to loglinear analysis to elucidate influences on ratings. Results showed that ratings were strongly correlated with prosodic goodness and moderately correlated with segmental errors, implying the importance of both segmentals and prosody in L2 speech ratings. Experienced teacher-raters provided lengthier reports than novice raters, producing more comments for all coded categories where an error was identified except for pausing (a dysfluency marker). This may be because novice raters observed little else about the speech or struggled to pinpoint or articulate other features