Identical topics in Mandarin Chinese and Shanghainese

Identical topic (IT henceforth) was previously known as copying topic (Xu & Liu (1998:141-157). It is fully or partially identical to a corresponding element (CE henceforth) occurring in the following part of the clause. Broadly speaking, IT is semantically empty. Being an unusual type of adding, it properly falls into the central concern of this volume. It seems IT can be attested in all Chinese dialects, though the phenomena in question have been poorly documented and have scarcely been studied under a unified category. IT seems to be a better candidate to characterise topic prominent languages than many other topic types including the non-gap topic, which has long been called "Chinese style topic" since Chafe (1976) and has been viewed as a major characteristic of topic prominent languages (e.g., Li & Thompson, 1976, Xu & Langendoen 1985, Gasde 1999). I believe the study of IT structure is necessary to obtain a clearer and more complete picture of topic structure in general. As far as I know, Wu dialects of Chinese, including Shanghainese, are the ones which have the richest IT types and the greatest text frequency of IT. Therefore, this study will be based on both Mandarin and Shanghainese data

Issues on topics

The present volume contains papers that bear mainly on issues concerning the topic concept. This concept is of course very broad and diverse. Also, different views are expressed in this volume. Some authors concentrate on the status of topics and non-topics in so-called topic prominent languages (i.e. Chinese), others focus on the syntactic behavior of topical constituents in specific European languages (German, Greek, Romance languages). The last contribution tries to bring together the concept of discourse topic (a non-syntactic notion) and the concept of sentence topic, i.e. that type of topic that all the preceding papers are concerned with

Do infants have abstract grammatical knowledge of word order at 17 months? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months) participated and the same experiment was conducted with eighteen adults. The results show that hearing well-formed NP-V-NP sentences triggered infants to fixate more on a transitive scene than on a reflexive scene. In contrast, when they heard deviant NP-NP-V sequences, no such preference pattern was found, a performance pattern that is adult-like. This is at variance with some of the results from Candan et al. (2012), who only found evidence for canonical word order comprehension at almost age 3 when considering fixation time. Furthermore, within the age range tested, performance showed no effect of age or vocabulary size

Null Subjects in Northeast English

This paper presents data and analysis relating to null subjects in spoken colloquial English. While English is not a „pro-drop? language (i.e. subjects must usually be overt), a corpus of speech collected on Tyneside and Wearside in 2007 shows that null subjects are permitted in finite clauses in certain contexts. This paper analyses these examples and follow-up questionnaires, and compares the data with the other types of null subject described in the literature (pro-drop, topic-drop, early null subjects, aphasics? null subjects and „diary-drop?), ultimately concluding that the colloquial English phenomenon is most closely related to diary- drop

The acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in european portuguese by native chinese speakers

The access of adult learners of a second language (L2) to Universal Grammar (UG) has been widely studied in generative L2 acquisition research. Following the Representational Deficit Hypothesis (RDH), certain features not available in the native language (L1) are not accessible in adult L2 acquisition (Hawkins, 2005; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007, among others). On the contrary, according to the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH), adults can access UG to acquire configurations that are not present in their L1 nor in the explicit input (e.g. Lardiere, 2008; Slabakova, 2016). This dissertation aims at contributing to this debate through the study of the L2 acquisition of prepositional relative clauses (RCs) in European Portuguese (EP) by Mandarin Chinese (MC) native speakers. EP displays wh-movement in prepositional RCs formed with standard Pied-Piping (PiP) and non-standard P-Chopping (P-Chop). Non-standard resumptive RCs do not involve movement (Alexandre, 2000). In MC, prepositional RCs involve a mandatory resumptive pronoun (RP), without movement. P-Chop is also attested in the L2 acquisition of prepositional RCs and wh-questions (Klein, 1993; Jourdain, 1996; Perpiñán, 2010), being analyzed as a developmental stage (Perpiñán, 2010, 2020) or evidence of a wild grammar (Klein, 1993). In MC, prepositional RCs display a mandatory resumptive pronoun (Pan, 2016a, 2016b, a.o.), not involving movement (Wen, 2020). The main goals of this dissertation are to understand if MC learners of EP L2: 1) transfer resumption from the L1 into the L2; 2) can acquire new functional features or reorganize (reassemble) L1 features to configure wh-movement in the L2, producing and accepting PiP and P-Chop RCs; 3) show a developmental path in the acquisition of prepositional RCs. To achieve these goals, an oral production task and two self-paced reading acceptability judgement tasks (SPR-AJTs) were used. One SPR-AJT targets relativization strategies and the other focuses on the learner’s implicit knowledge of wh-movement, both contrasting argument and adjunct prepositional RCs. Intermediate (n=36) and advanced (n=36) native MC learners of EP L2, and native EP speakers (N=30) participated in this study. Results show that: 1) learners do not transfer resumption from their L1; 2) both groups of learners produce and accept preferentially PiP RCs; 3) intermediate learners have larger percentages of production of P-Chop with adjuncts than advanced learners; 4) in island configurations, argument RCs are rated worse than adjunct RCs; and 5) RPs do not rescue islands for any group. Overall, these results support the FRH, indicating that L2ers are able to acquire the features that trigger wh-movement, producing PiP and P-Chop. The results also corroborate that P-Chop exists as a developmental stage (Perpiñán, 2010, 2020), with distinct properties from P-Chop in native EP, arguing against previous research that treats P-Chop as evidence of a wild grammar (e.g., Klein, 1993). Finally, the results with syntactic islands challenge the idea that RPs improve these structures in both native and non-native grammars. The convergence between EP natives and Chinese speakers rejecting argument RCs more assertively than adjunct RC also indicates that adult Chinese learners are sensitive to the same grammatical constraints and processing principles of native speakers, and that L2 learners are able to reassemble the wh-features accordingly.O acesso de aprendentes adultos de uma segunda língua (L2) à Gramática Universal (GU) tem sido muito estudado no âmbito da gramática generativa. De acordo com a Hipótese de Défice Representacional (RDH, em inglês) (Hawkins, 2005; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007, e.o.), determinados elementos não adquiridos na língua nativa (L1) não estão acessíveis na aquisição de uma L2 na idade adulta. Pelo contrário, a Hipótese de Reconfiguração de Traços (FRH, em inglês) (Lardiere, 2005, 2008, 2009) defende que os falantes adultos de uma L2 podem aceder à GU para adquirir elementos novos, não disponibilizados na sua L1. A presente dissertação pretende contribuir para este debate através do estudo da aquisição de orações relativas preposicionadas em português europeu (PE) L2 por falantes nativos de chinês mandarim (CM). Em PE, as frases relativas preposicionadas envolvem movimento-wh quando são formadas através das estratégias de arrastamento da preposição (PiP) (standard) e cortadora (não standard). Podem ainda ser formadas, não convencionalmente, com um pronome resumptivo (PR), não implicando movimento (Alexandre, 2000). A estratégia cortadora é igualmente descrita na aquisição de L2 de relativas e interrogativas preposicionadas (Klein, 1993; Jourdain, 1996; Perpiñán, 2010), sendo analisada como uma fase de desenvolvimento (Perpiñán, 2010, 2020) ou uma gramática selvagem (Klein, 1993). Em CM, as frases relativas preposicionadas são formadas com um elemento resumptivo obrigatório (Pan, 2016a, 2016b), não envolvendo movimento (Wen, 2020). Nesta dissertação, pretende-se compreender se os falantes nativos de CM, aprendentes de PE L2: 1) transferem a estratégia resumptiva da sua L1 para a L2; 2) adquirem novos traços ou reconfiguram traços existentes na L1 para adquirir o movimento-wh na L2, produzindo e aceitando frases relativas com PiP e cortadoras; 3) mostram um percurso de desenvolvimento na aquisição de frases relativas preposicionadas. Para responder a estas questões, foram aplicadas uma tarefa de produção oral e duas tarefas de julgamento de aceitabilidade com leitura automonitorizada (SPR-AJT, em inglês). Uma das tarefas SPR-AJT visa as estratégias de relativização e a outra testa o conhecimento implícito de movimento-wh. Ambas as experiências SPR-AJT contrastam relativas preposicionadas argumentais e adjuntas. Quanto aos participantes neste estudo, eles distribuem-se por falantes nativos de CM, aprendentes intermédios (n= 36) e avançados (n= 36) de PE e falantes nativos de PE (n= 30), o grupo de controlo. Os resultados mostram que: 1) os aprendentes não transferem a estratégia resumptiva da sua L1 para a L2; 2) os dois grupos de aprendentes produzem e aceitam preferencialmente PiP; 3) os falantes intermédios apresentam percentagens mais altas de produção da estratégia cortadora com adjuntos do que com argumentos; 4) as frases relativas argumentais formadas com extrações de ilhas são pior classificadas por todos os grupos do que as adjuntas; 5) os PRs não melhoram as extrações de ilhas para nenhum grupo. Estes resultados corroboram a FRH, indicando que os aprendentes de uma L2 podem adquirir os traços que desencadeiam o movimento-wh. Os resultados também indicam que a estratégia cortadora (P-Chop) surge como uma fase de desenvolvimento na L2 (Perpiñán, 2010, 2020), tendo propriedades distintas da estratégia cortadora no PE L1, contra a proposta de gramática selvagem (Klein, 1993). Os resultados com as ilhas sintáticas desafiam os estudos que indicam que os PRs melhoram a aceitabilidade destas construções, na gramática nativa e não nativa. Finalmente, a convergência dos falantes nativos e não nativos na rejeição mais expressiva de frases relativas argumentais do que adjuntas, nas ilhas sintáticas, indica que os aprendentes são sensíveis a restrições gramaticais e princípios de processamento idênticos aos dos falantes nativos, e que os aprendentes acedem à UG para reconfigurar adequadamente os traços que definem o movimento-wh na L2

Papers on predicative constructions : Proceedings of the workshop on secundary predication, October 16-17, 2000, Berlin

This volume presents a collection of papers touching on various issues concerning the syntax and semantics of predicative constructions. A hot topic in the study of predicative copula constructions, with direct implications for the treatment of he (how many he's do we need?), and wider implications for the theories of predication, event-based semantics and aspect, is the nature and source of the situation argument. Closer examination of copula-less predications is becoming increasingly relevant to all these issues, as is clearly illustrated by the present collection

Possessor Extraction in Mandarin Chinese

In this paper, I argue that genitive possessors should be distinguished from possessive modifiers and that possessor extraction is allowed in Chinese. Unlike previous analyses that treat sentences with possessors at the sentence-initial position as involving base-generation, I show that the construction at issue is island sensitive. My point of departure is Boškovic’s (2005) generalization that adjunct extraction is not allowed in DP languages and I show that Chinese behaves in the same way. Along this line of analysis, I adopt his suggest that a language which has DP yet allows possessor extraction, like Hungarian, does so because the whole possessor phrase is located in SpecDP in such a language. I argue that the seeming discrepancy between extraction from within subject and object arguments is only apparent: subject possessors can be extracted by either A- or A\u27- movement, whereas object possessors can only be extracted via A\u27-movement. I show that the unstable acceptability of object extraction is not due to syntactic reasons, but because of the availability of proper information structure. The result of this study suggests that Boškovic’s (2005) observation about English and Hungarian is correct and Chinese behaves on a par with the latter type of language