Theticity

The subject matter of this chapter is the semantic, syntactic and discoursepragmatic background as well as the cross-linguistic behavior of types of utterance exemplified by the following English sentences […]: (1) My NECK hurts. […] (2) The PHONE's ringing. [...] Sentences such as […] are usually held to stand in opposition to sentences with a topical subject. The difference is said to be formally marked, for example, by VS order vs. topical SV order (as in Albanian po bie telefoni 'the PHONE is ringing' vs. telefoni po bie 'the PHONE is RINGING'), or by accent on the subject only vs. accent on both the subject and the verb (as in the English translations). The term theticity will be used in the following to label the specific phenomenological domain to which the sentences in (1) and (2) belong. It has long been commonplace that these and similar expressions occur at particular points in the discourse where "a new situation is presented as a whole". We will try to depict and classify the various discourse situations in which these expressions have been found in the different languages, and we will try to trace out areas of cross-linguistic comparability. Finally, we will raise the question whether or not there is a common denominator which would justify a unified treatment of all these expressions in functional/semantic terms

Children’s acquisition of new/given markers in English, Hindi, Mandinka and Spanish: Exploring the effect of optionality during grammaticalization

We investigated the effect of optionality on the acquisition of new/given markers, with a special focus on grammaticalization as a stage of optional use of the emerging form. To this end, we conducted a narrative-elicitation task with 5-year-old children and adults across four typologically-distinct languages with different new/given markers: English, Hindi, Mandinka and Spanish. Our starting assumption was that the Hindi numeral ‘ek’ (one) is developing into an indefinite article, which should delay children’s acquisition because of its optional use to introduce discourse referents. Supporting the Optionality Hypothesis, Experiment 1 revealed that obligatory markers are acquired earlier than optional markers. Experiment 2 focused on Hindi and showed that 10-year-old children’s use of ‘ek’ to introduce discourse characters was higher than 5-year-olds’ and comparable to adults’, replicating this pattern of results in two different cities in Northern India. Lastly, a follow-up study showed that Mandinka-speaking children and adults made use of all available discourse markers when tested on a familiar story, rather than with pictorial prompts, highlighting the importance of using culturally-appropriate methods of narrative elicitation in cross-linguistic research. We conclude by discussing the implications of article grammaticalization for common ground management in a speech community

Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2018 (Volume 4)

Advances in Formal Slavic Linguistics 2018 offers a selection of articles that were prepared on the basis of talks presented at the conference Formal Description of Slavic Languages (FDSL 13) or at the parallel Workshop on the Semantics of Noun Phrases, which were held on December 5–7, 2018, at the University of Göttingen. The volume covers a wide array of topics, such as situation relativization with adverbial clauses (causation, concession, counterfactuality, condition, and purpose), clause-embedding by means of a correlate, agreeing vs. transitive ‘need’ constructions, clitic doubling, affixation and aspect, evidentiality and mirativity, pragmatics coming with the particle li, uniqueness, definiteness, maximal interpretation (exhaustivity), kinds and subkinds, bare nominals, multiple determination, quantification, demonstratives, possessives, complex measure nouns, and the NP/DP parameter. The set of object languages comprises Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, and Torlak Serbian. The numerous topics addressed demonstrate the importance of Slavic linguistics. The original analyses prove that substantial progress has been made in major fields of research

Formal approaches to number in Slavic and beyond (Volume 5)

The goal of this collective monograph is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of number and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language with a special focus on Slavic. The book aims at investigating different morphosyntactic and semantic categories including plurality and number-marking, individuation and countability, cumulativity, distributivity and collectivity, numerals, numeral modifiers and classifiers, as well as other quantifiers. It gathers 19 contributions tackling the main themes from different theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to contribute to our understanding of cross-linguistic patterns both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages

Acquisition of the English Article System by Speakers of Polish in ESL and EFL Settings

This paper examines the second language (L2) developmental sequence of article acquisition by adult language learners in two different environments: English as a Second Language (ESL), and English as a Foreign Language (EFL). On the basis of an existing classification of English articles (a, the, zero), data on article usage were obtained from adult learners who were native speakers of Polish, a language that has no articles or article-like morphemes. Data analyses led to some limited conclusions about the order of acquisition of the English article system, and may contribute to a more detailed understanding of the nature of interlanguage representations

Structural competition in second language production : towards a constraint-satisfaction model

Second language (L2) learners often show inconsistent production of some aspects of L2 grammar. One view, primarily based on data from L2 article production, suggests that grammatical patterns licensed by learners’ native language (L1) and those licensed by their L2 compete for selection, leading to variability in the production of L2 functional morphology. In this study, we show that the idea of structural competition has broader applicability, in correctly predicting certain asymmetries in the production of both the definite article the and plural marking –s by Thai learners of English. At the same time, we recognize that learners’ growing sensitivity to structural regularities in the L2 might be an additional contributing factor, and therefore make a novel proposal for how the L1–L2 structural competition model and the sensitivity-to-L2-structural regularities account could be integrated and their respective contributions studied under the constraint-satisfaction model of language processing. We argue that this approach is particularly suited to studying bilingual processing as it provides a natural framework for explaining how highly disparate factors, including partially activated options from both languages, interact during processing

Possessive expressions in Danish and Swedish in a diachronic and synchronic perspective

Wydział NeofilologiiPrzedmiotem rozprawy są nominalne wyrażenia dzierżawcze w językach duńskim i szwedzkim analizowane w ujęciu diachronicznym i synchronicznym. Do analizowanych konstrukcji dzierżawczych należą: dopełniacz -s, konstrukcja dzierżawcza z przyimkami, zaimki dzierżawcze zwykłe oraz zwrotne. Głównym celem naukowym projektu jest zbadanie dystrybucji oraz cech charakterystycznych wymienionych konstrukcji dzierżawczych ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem czynników, które mogą wpływać na wybór między dopełniaczem -s a konstrukcją przyimkową w językach duńskim i szwedzkim. Do badanych czynników należą między innymi żywotność, określoność, topikalność, długość grupy nominalnej oraz typ relacji dzierżawczej. Tło teoretyczne dysertacji opiera się na założeniach Gramatyki Funkcjonalnej, w szczególności zastosowane zostały pojęcia hierarchii żywotności, ikoniczności i ekonomii w języku oraz topikalności. Badania oparte zostały na korpusach duńskich i szwedzkich tekstów historycznych spisanych w latach 1250–1700 oraz tekstów współczesnych. Korpus tekstów liczy ok. 315 000 słów. Wyniki jednoznacznie wskazują na to, że konstrukcja z dopełniaczem -s i konstrukcja przyimkowa występują w znacznej mierze w dystrybucji komplementarnej. Referent ludzki, określony i znany występuje częściej z dopełniaczem, natomiast referent nieżywotny, nieokreślony i nieznany występuje częściej w konstrukcji przyimkowej. Taki układ czynników odzwierciedla motywację ekonomiczną w języku.The aim of this dissertation is to examine the distribution and characteristics of adnominal possessive constructions in Danish and Swedish from both a diachronic and synchronic perspective. The constructions in question are the following: the s-genitive, the prepositional construction, and pronominal constructions with both regular and reflexive possessive pronouns. The main research objective is to examine the factors that may influence the selection of the s-genitive vs. the prepositional construction. Among the factors taken into consideration are animacy, definiteness, topicality, length of an NP and type of possessive relation. The theoretical approach taken in this dissertation is based on various tenets of Functional Grammar; in particular the concepts of animacy hierarchy, iconicity and economy in language and topicality are invoked. The research is based on a corpus of Danish and Swedish historical texts written between 1250 and 1700 and a corpus of contemporary texts. The length of the corpora is ca. 315,000 words. Results indicate that the s-genitive and the prepositional construction are largely in a complementary distribution in Danish and Swedish. While a human, definite and familiar referent will frequently occur in an s genitive construction, an inanimate, indefinite and new referent will frequently occur in a prepositional construction. Such an array of factors reflects the economic motivation in language

The Integration of Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Information in Second Language Sentence Processing.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Definitely saw it coming? The dual nature of the pre-nominal prediction effect

Acknowledgements We thank Birgit Knudsen for help with EEG data collection and Elise van Wonderen for help with norming data collection. JR was partially supported by NWO Veni grant 275-89-032. We thank Tamara Swaab and two anonymous reviewers for providing helpful feedback on a previous draft of this manuscript. All materials associated with the current article are available on OSF at https://osf.io/6drcy/. For the analyses and plots, we used the following packages for R (R Core Team, 2018): “brms” (Bürkner, 2017), “lme4” (Bates et al., 2014), “simr” (Green & MacLeod, 2016), “ggplot2” (Wickham, 2016), “dplyr” (Wickham, François, Henry & Müller, 2019), “patchwork” (Pederson, 2020), “emmeans” (Lenth, 2019).Peer reviewedPostprin

Definitely saw it coming? The dual nature of the pre-nominal prediction effect

In well-known demonstrations of lexical prediction during language comprehension, pre-nominal articles that mismatch a likely upcoming noun's gender elicit different neural activity than matching articles. However, theories differ on what this pre-nominal prediction effect means and on what is being predicted. Does it reflect mismatch with a predicted article, or ‘merely’ revision of the noun prediction? We contrasted the ‘article prediction mismatch’ hypothesis and the ‘noun prediction revision’ hypothesis in two ERP experiments on Dutch mini-story comprehension, with pre-registered data collection and analyses. We capitalized on the Dutch gender system, which marks gender on definite articles (‘de/het’) but not on indefinite articles (‘een’). If articles themselves are predicted, mismatching gender should have little effect when readers expected an indefinite article without gender marking. Participants read contexts that strongly suggested either a definite or indefinite noun phrase as its best continuation, followed by a definite noun phrase with the expected noun or an unexpected, different gender noun phrase (‘het boek/de roman’, the book/the novel). Experiment 1 (N = 48) showed a pre-nominal prediction effect, but evidence for the article prediction mismatch hypothesis was inconclusive. Informed by exploratory analyses and power analyses, direct replication Experiment 2 (N = 80) yielded evidence for article prediction mismatch at a newly pre-registered occipital region-of-interest. However, at frontal and posterior channels, unexpectedly definite articles also elicited a gender-mismatch effect, and this support for the noun prediction revision hypothesis was further strengthened by exploratory analyses: ERPs elicited by gender-mismatching articles correlated with incurred constraint towards a new noun (next-word entropy), and N400s for initially unpredictable nouns decreased when articles made them more predictable. By demonstrating its dual nature, our results reconcile two prevalent explanations of the pre-nominal prediction effect