Language acquisition and universal grammar : a survey of recent research

openDipartimento di discipline linguistiche, comunicative e dello spettacoloCONSULTABILE PRESSO IL DIPARTIMENT

Phonological phrases--their relation to syntax, focus, and prominance

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-259).by Hubert Truckenbrodt.Ph.D

The size of things I

This book focuses on the role size plays in grammar. Under the umbrella term size fall the size of syntactic projections, the size of feature content, and the size of reference sets. The contributions in this first volume discuss size and structure building. The most productive research program in syntax where size plays a central role revolves around clausal complements. Part 1 of Volume I contributes to this program with papers that argue for particular structures of clausal complements, as well as papers that employ sizes of clausal complements to account for other phenomena. The papers in Part 2 of this volume explore the interaction between size and structure building beyond clausal complements, including phenomena in CP, vP, and NP domains. The contributions cover a variety of languages, many of which are understudied. The book is complemented by Volume II which discusses size effects in movement, agreement, and interpretation

Predictions on markedness and feature resilience in loanword adaptation

Normalement, un emprunt est adapté afin que ses éléments étrangers s’intègrent au système phonologique de la langue emprunteuse. Certains auteurs (cf. Miao 2005; Steriade 2001b, 2009) ont soutenu que, lors de l’adaptation d’une consonne, les traits de manière d’articulation sont plus résistants au changement que les traits laryngaux (ex. : le voisement) ou que ceux de place. Mes résultats montrent cependant que les traits de manière (ex. : [±continu]) sont impliqués dans les adaptations consonantiques aussi fréquemment que les autres traits (ex. [±voisé] et [±antérieur]). Par exemple, le /Z/ français est illicite à l’initiale en anglais. Les options d’adaptation incluent /Z/ → [z] (changement de place), /Z/ → [S] (changement de voisement) et /Z/ → [dZ] (changement de manière). Contrairement aux prédictions des auteurs précités, l’adaptation primaire en anglais est /Z/ → [dZ], avec changement de manière (ex. français [Zelatin] gélatine → anglais [dZElœtIn]). Plutôt qu’une résistance des traits de manière, les adaptations étudiées dans ma thèse font ressortir une nette tendance à la simplification. Mon hypothèse est que les langues adaptent les consonnes étrangères en en éliminant les complexités. Donc un changement impliquant l’élimination plutôt que l’insertion d’un trait marqué sera préféré. Ma thèse innove aussi en montrant qu’une consonne est le plus souvent importée lorsque sa stratégie d’adaptation primaire implique l’insertion d’un trait marqué. Les taux d’importation sont systématiquement élevés pour les consonnes dont l’adaptation impliquerait l’insertion d’un tel trait (ici [+continu] ou [+voisé]). Par exemple, /dZ/ en anglais, lorsque adapté, devient /Z/ en français après l’insertion de [+continu]; cependant, l’importation de /dZ/ est de loin préférée à son adaptation (89%). En comparaison, /dZ/ est rarement importé (10%) en germano-pennsylvanien (GP) parce que l’adaptation de /dZ/ à [tS] (élision du trait marqué [+voisé]) est disponible, contrairement au cas du français. Cependant, le /t/ anglais à l’initiale, lui, est majoritairement importé (74%) en GP parce que son adaptation en /d/ impliquerait l’insertion du trait marqué [+voisé]. Ma thèse permet non seulement de mieux cerner la direction des adaptations, mais repère aussi ce qui favorise fortement les importations sur la base d’une notion déjà établie en phonologie : la marque.A loanword is normally adapted to fit its foreign elements to the phonological system of the borrowing language (L1). Recently, some authors (e.g. Miao 2005; Steriade 2001b, 2009) have proposed that during the adaptation process of a second language (L2) consonant, manner features are more resistant to change than are non-manner features. A careful study of my data indicate that manner features (e.g. [±continuant]) are as likely to be involved in the adaptation process as are non-manner [±voice] and [±anterior]. For example, French /Z/ is usually not tolerated word-initially in English. Adaptation options include /Z/ → [z] (change of place), /Z/ → [S] (change of voicing) and /Z/ → [dZ] (change of manner). The primary adaptation in English is /Z/ → [dZ] (e.g. French [Zelatin] gélatine → English [dZElœtIn]) where manner is in fact the less resistant. Instead, during loanword adaptation there is a clear tendency towards unmarkedness. My hypothesis is that languages overwhelmingly adapt with the goal of eliminating the complexities of the L2; a change that involves deletion instead of insertion of a marked feature is preferred. Furthermore, my thesis shows for the first time that a consonant is statistically most likely to be imported if its preferred adaptation strategy involves insertion of a marked feature (e.g. [+continuant] or [+voice]). For example, the adaptation of English /dZ/ is /Z/ in French after insertion of marked [+continuant], but /dZ/ is overwhelmingly imported (89%), instead of adapted in French. I argue that this is to avoid the insertion of marked [+continuant]. This contrasts with Pennsylvania German (PG) where English /dZ/ is rarely imported (10%). This is because unlike in French, there is an option to adapt /dZ/ to /tS/ (deletion of marked [+voice]) in PG. However, English word-initial /t/ is heavily imported (74%), not adapted, in PG because adaptation to /d/ involves insertion of marked [+voice]. Not only does my thesis better determine the direction of adaptations but it also establishes the circumstances where L2 consonants are most likely to be imported instead of being adapted, on the basis of a well-known notion in phonology: markedness

Person-based Prominence in Ojibwe

This dissertation develops a formal and psycholinguistic theory of person-based prominence effects, the finding that certain categories of person such as first and second (the local persons) are privileged by the grammar. The thesis takes on three questions: (i) What are the possible categories related to person? (ii) What are the possible prominence relationships between these categories? And (iii) how is prominence information used to parse and interpret linguistic input in real time? The empirical through-line is understanding obviation — a “spotlighting” system, found most prominently in the Algonquian family of languages, that splits the (ani- mate) third persons into two categories: proximate, the person who is in the spotlight, and obviative, the persons who are introduced into the discourse, but are not in the spotlight. I provide a semantics for the feature [proximate], and detail a lattice-based theory of feature composition to derive the categories related to obviation in Border Lakes Ojibwe and beyond. This leads to insights about the syntactic and semantic relationships between person, animacy-based noun classification, number, and obviation. The novel contribution to the theory of person-based prominence effects is to de- compose person features into sets of primitives. This proposal allows the stipulated entailment relationships between categories and features, as encoded in prominence hierarchies and feature geometries, to be derived from the first principles of set theory. I further motivate the account by showing that it has increased empirical coverage, and apply it to capture patterns of agreement and word order in Border Lakes Ojibwe. Finally, I present a psycholinguistic study on how obviation is used to process filler- gap dependencies in Border Lakes Ojibwe. I show that obviation, and by extension, prominence information more generally, is used immediately to predictively encode movement chains, prior to bottom-up information from voice marking about the argument structure of the clause. I argue for a modular and syntax-first model of parsing, revising the Active Filler Strategy to be guided by pressures to minimize syntactic distance and maximize the expected well-formedness of each link in the chain. These pressures compete, accounting for effects of prediction, integration, and reanalysis in long-distance dependency formation

The size of things I

This book focuses on the role size plays in grammar. Under the umbrella term size fall the size of syntactic projections, the size of feature content, and the size of reference sets. The contributions in this first volume discuss size and structure building. The most productive research program in syntax where size plays a central role revolves around clausal complements. Part 1 of Volume I contributes to this program with papers that argue for particular structures of clausal complements, as well as papers that employ sizes of clausal complements to account for other phenomena. The papers in Part 2 of this volume explore the interaction between size and structure building beyond clausal complements, including phenomena in CP, vP, and NP domains. The contributions cover a variety of languages, many of which are understudied. The book is complemented by Volume II which discusses size effects in movement, agreement, and interpretation

Non-linear analyses in English historical phonology

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D66398/86 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches

An Inheritance-Based Theory of the Lexicon in Combinatory Categorial Grammar

Institute for Communicating and Collaborative SystemsThis thesis proposes an extended version of the Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) formalism, with the following features: 1. grammars incorporate inheritance hierarchies of lexical types, defined over a simple, feature-based constraint language 2. CCG lexicons are, or at least can be, functions from forms to these lexical types This formalism, which I refer to as ‘inheritance-driven’ CCG (I-CCG), is conceptualised as a partially model-theoretic system, involving a distinction between category descriptions and their underlying category models, with these two notions being related by logical satisfaction. I argue that the I-CCG formalism retains all the advantages of both the core CCG framework and proposed generalisations involving such things as multiset categories, unary modalities or typed feature structures. In addition, I-CCG: 1. provides non-redundant lexicons for human languages 2. captures a range of well-known implicational word order universals in terms of an acquisition-based preference for shorter grammars This thesis proceeds as follows: Chapter 2 introduces the ‘baseline’ CCG formalism, which incorporates just the essential elements of category notation, without any of the proposed extensions. Chapter 3 reviews parts of the CCG literature dealing with linguistic competence in its most general sense, showing how the formalism predicts a number of language universals in terms of either its restricted generative capacity or the prioritisation of simpler lexicons. Chapter 4 analyses the first motivation for generalising the baseline category notation, demonstrating how certain fairly simple implicational word order universals are not formally predicted by baseline CCG, although they intuitively do involve considerations of grammatical economy. Chapter 5 examines the second motivation underlying many of the customised CCG category notations — to reduce lexical redundancy, thus allowing for the construction of lexicons which assign (each sense of) open class words and morphemes to no more than one lexical category, itself denoted by a non-composite lexical type. Chapter 6 defines the I-CCG formalism, incorporating into the notion of a CCG grammar both a type hierarchy of saturated category symbols and an inheritance hierarchy of constrained lexical types. The constraint language is a simple, feature-based, highly underspecified notation, interpreted against an underlying notion of category models — this latter point is crucial, since it allows us to abstract away from any particular inference procedure and focus on the category notation itself. I argue that the partially model-theoretic I-CCG formalism solves the lexical redundancy problem fairly definitively, thereby subsuming all the other proposed variant category notations. Chapter 7 demonstrates that the I-CCG formalism also provides the beginnings of a theory of the CCG lexicon in a stronger sense — with just a small number of substantive assumptions about types, it can be shown to formally predict many implicational word order universals in terms of an acquisition-based preference for simpler lexical inheritance hierarchies, i.e. those with fewer types and fewer constraints. Chapter 8 concludes the thesis