On the pragmatic and semantic functions of Estonian sentence prosody

The goal of the dissertation was to investigate intonational correlates of information structure in a free word order language, Estonian. Information-structural categories such as focus or givenness are expressed by different grammatical means (e.g. pronoun, presence of accent, word order etc.) in different languages of the world (Chafe, 1976; 1987; Prince, 1981; 1992; Lambrecht, 1994; Gundel, 1999). The main cue of focus in intonation languages (e.g. English and German) is pitch accent (Halliday, 1967a; Ladd, 2008). In free word order languages, information structure affects the position of words in a sentence (É. Kiss, 1995) and sometimes it is even implied that word order in a free word order language might function like pitch accent in an intonation language (Lambrecht 1994: 240). The study reports on perception and production experiments on the effects of focus and givenness on Estonian sentence intonation. The aim of the experiments was to establish whether information structure has tonal correlates in Estonian, and if so, whether information structure or word order interacts more strongly with sentence intonation. A perception experiment showed that L1-Estonian listeners perceive pitch prominence as focus and accent shift as a change of sentence focus. A speech production study showed congruently that L1-Estonian speakers do use accent shift, and mark sentence focus with pitch accent. Another speech production experiment demonstrated that there is no phonetic difference between new information focus (e.g. “What did Lena draw?” – “Lena drew a whale.”) and corrective focus (e.g. “Lena drew a lion.” – “No! She drew a whale”). The last experiment showed that given information is signalled with varying F0 range, if followed by focus, but without a pitch accent, if preceded by focus. All the experiments revealed that word order has a weak influence on sentence intonation. Sentence intonation interacts with focus and givenness in Estonian. As a conclusion, it is suggested that the pragmatic functions of word order, which apparently can be overridden by focus interpretation, are slightly different from the functions of pitch accent

Transfer and optionality

Diese Dissertation untersucht die Syntax in fortgeschrittener englischer Lernersprache. Der Einfluss der Verbzweitstellung (V2) des Deutschen auf die Zielsprache Englisch bei Lernern deren Erstsprache Deutsch ist, wird unter Berücksichtigung konkurrierender Theorien der Parameterfixierung und der Optionalität im Zweitspracherwerb analysiert. Die der Analyse zugrundeliegenden theoretischen Ansätze Full Transfer/Full Access, No Parameter Resetting, die Interface Hypothese und Multiple Parameter Setting werden auf Basis von kontrastiven Lernerkorpusuntersuchungen und Grammatikalitätsurteilsaufgaben getestet. Während die Ergebnisse der Korpusuntersuchung eine Resttendenz bei L1-Deutsch (und Niederländisch) Sprechern zum Transfer von V2 ins Englische zeigen, ist dies doch auf die Umstellung von Auxiliarverben und der Kopula beschränkt. Die Position des thematischen Verbs in Fragen und bei Verneinungen ist durchgehend wie in der Zielsprache. Grammatikalitätsurteile zeigen eine durchgehende Präferenz der Lernenden für englische Wortstellungsmuster gegenüber V2-Mustern, abgesehen von einem Fall: die Inversion der Argumente um Verben die in ihren lexikalisch-semantischen Eignenschaftern Kopularverben ähneln. Diese wird von den LernerInnen signifikant häufiger als von Muttersprachlern als zulässig beurteilt. Die Ergebnisse untermauern den Ansatz des No Parameter Resetting im Zweitsprachenerwerb. Die LernerInnen zeigen keine konsistente Neusetzung der Auswirkungen des Vwebzwietparameters auf die Oberflächenstruktur. Während der Mangel von Bewegung des thematischen Verbs in der Lernersprache durchgehend wie in der Zielsprache ist, zeigt die Inversion um die “equativen” Verben den Einfluß der Oberflächenstruktur des Deutschen ohne Einbeziehung eines zugrunde liegenden V2 Parameters. Dies wird in einem konstruktivistischen Ansatz ausgewertet, wonach Zweitsprachenerwerb auf der Basis von Oberflächengeneralisationen anstatt von impliziter Parametersetzung stattfindet. In Übereinstimmung mit der Interface Hypothese bereiten die Konstruktionen den Lernenden die meisten Schwierigkeiten, welche sich an der Schnittstelle von Syntax und Diskurspragmatik befinden.Against the background of the ongoing debate about access to UG and the possibility of parameter resetting in second language acquisition, the research presented here studies the transfer of verb second from L1 German into L2 English by instructed learners at advanced stages of acquisition The theoretical positions of Full Transfer/Full Access and No Access are contrasted. In addition, given the nature of word order variability in English, where inversion and surface V2 orders are constrained by lexical and discourse factors, the Interface Hypothesis is tested. The empirical study falls into two main parts: (1) A contrastive interlanguage anaylsis of the L1 German, Dutch, Bulgarian, Finnish and French sucorpora of the International Corpus of Learner English and a tailor-made L1 German learner corpus; (2) A grammaticality judgement task administered to advanced L1 (Austrian) German students of English and native English controls. For the corpus study, V2 word order diagnostics and target English word order variation patterns are identified and anaylsed between the subcorpora to arrive at a characterisation of the influence of L1 German on the acquisition of English word order. The grammaticality judgement task tests the acceptability of a range of non-target verb second word order patterns compared to target English syntax. While the results of the corpus study indicate a residual tendency on the part of the L1 German (and Dutch) speakers to transfer V2 into English, this is restricted to the movement of auxiliary verbs and inversion of copula be. Thematic verb placement in questions and relative to negation is consistently target-like. The grammaticality judgements show a consistently target-like preference for English word order patterns over V2 patterns apart from in one case. Inversion of the arguments around verbs with copula-like lexical semantics is judged significantly more acceptable the learners. The results are analysed as lending support to a No Parameter Resetting approach to L2A. The learners, as a group, do not show consistent resetting of the surface consequences of the V2 parameter. So while the lack of movement of thematic verbs to the left of the clause is consistently target-like, inversion around equative verbs shows the influence of surface German patterns without implicting an underlying V2 parameter. This is analysed in a constructionist approach, where L2A proceeds on the basis of surface generalisations rather than implicit parameter resetting. In line with the Interface Hypothesis, the constructions which pose most difficulty are those which involve the interfaces of syntax with discourse pragmatics

Discourse deixis and null anaphora in German

The main aim of this thesis is to provide insight into the interaction of the syntactic and pragmatic properties of German, particularly with respect to the issue of configurationality. This language is particularly difficult to classify as it displays both subject-object asymmetries (a feature of "configurational" languages), but also has a topic position (a feature of "discourse-configurational" languages). In order to avoid the difficulties associated with subtle acceptability judgements from informants, the study presented here is based on a frequency analysis of word order variation in spoken language corpora. In the first part, I concentrate on the initial position in German main clauses, which is traditionally referred to as the topic position, and using a task-oriented corpus provide the statistics for the following: ffl The frequency of the different grammatical functions in initial position, in order to determine the relative frequency of the canonical SVO word order. ffl ..

On the pragmatic and semantic functions of Estonian sentence prosody

The goal of the dissertation was to investigate intonational correlates of information structure in a free word order language, Estonian. Information-structural categories such as focus or givenness are expressed by different grammatical means (e.g. pronoun, presence of accent, word order etc.) in different languages of the world (Chafe, 1976; 1987; Prince, 1981; 1992; Lambrecht, 1994; Gundel, 1999). The main cue of focus in intonation languages (e.g. English and German) is pitch accent (Halliday, 1967a; Ladd, 2008). In free word order languages, information structure affects the position of words in a sentence (É. Kiss, 1995) and sometimes it is even implied that word order in a free word order language might function like pitch accent in an intonation language (Lambrecht 1994: 240). The study reports on perception and production experiments on the effects of focus and givenness on Estonian sentence intonation. The aim of the experiments was to establish whether information structure has tonal correlates in Estonian, and if so, whether information structure or word order interacts more strongly with sentence intonation. A perception experiment showed that L1-Estonian listeners perceive pitch prominence as focus and accent shift as a change of sentence focus. A speech production study showed congruently that L1-Estonian speakers do use accent shift, and mark sentence focus with pitch accent. Another speech production experiment demonstrated that there is no phonetic difference between new information focus (e.g. “What did Lena draw?” – “Lena drew a whale.”) and corrective focus (e.g. “Lena drew a lion.” – “No! She drew a whale”). The last experiment showed that given information is signalled with varying F0 range, if followed by focus, but without a pitch accent, if preceded by focus. All the experiments revealed that word order has a weak influence on sentence intonation. Sentence intonation interacts with focus and givenness in Estonian. As a conclusion, it is suggested that the pragmatic functions of word order, which apparently can be overridden by focus interpretation, are slightly different from the functions of pitch accent

L2 Influence on L1 : Chinese subject realisation in Chinese-English bilinguals

This study aims to investigate the influence of the second language (L2) on the use of the first language (L1) in late bilinguals within an L1 dominant environment. Cross-linguistic influence (Kellerman & Smith, 1986) has been usually studied in the forward direction: how bilinguals’ L1 influences the acquisition and use of their L2. The other direction (i.e., the influence of L2 on L1), on the other hand, has not been sufficiently investigated. The current study looks at Chinese-speaking learners who acquire their L2 English through instruction in an L1 dominant environment. It does so by examining ‘subject realisation’, an area where Chinese and English exhibit substantial typological contrasts since Chinese allows both overt and null arguments under certain discourse-pragmatic conditions, whereas subjects in English are, under most circumstances, obligatorily expressed (Huang, 1984).. It is then hypothesized that long-time learning and regularly using English as L2 would increase the use of overt subjects realised in the bilingual’s first language, i.e., Chinese, with the consequent use of fewer null subjects in their L1. In addition, following Grosjean (1998), the interaction between the bilingual’s two languages is expected to be stronger when bilinguals produce language in the so called ‘bilingual mode’, i.e., when both languages are highly activated, than in a ‘monolingual mode’, i.e., when only one language is predominately activated. Such ‘language mode’ factor leads naturally to a futher hypothesis: fewer null subjects are realised in speech produced by Chinese-English bilinguals within a bilingual mode compared to monolingual mode

Intonation and second language acquisition : a study of the acquisition of English intonation by speakers of other languages

In the field of second language acquisition (SLA) research, the study of intonation, and prosodic systems generally, suffers from a considerable under-representation.This has far-reaching consequences. From the large body of empirical work on various aspects of SLA over the last three decades, a great deal has been turned to pedagogical use. Indeed, the field of SLA is closely linked to that of language pedagogy, as the dual acquisition theoretical and pedagogical character of many current journals and conferences shows.However, the mutually nourishing relationship between SLA research and language teaching suffers if either component is inadequate.In the case of intonation, this is exactly the case. At a time when the processes of SLA are under analysis from a wide range of linguistic, psychological and sociolinguistic perspectives, relatively little is known, even on a simple descriptive level, about the acquisition of intonation. There is no body of studies of L2 intonational form comparable, for example, to the 'morpheme studies' or to studies of 'developmental sequences' which informed much thinking in the field in the 1970s and 1980s (see Ellis 1994, Ch.3); no substantial body of work, that is, which might form the basis of further research.The present study aims to contribute to current knowledge on the acquisition of intonational form in second languages. It seeks to provide a detailed account of how certain aspects of L2 English intonation develop, both in terms of their phonetics, and also in terms of the linguistic and discoursal ends to which they are put. The study is divided into two parts:Part One: in which the theoretical and descriptive bases of the study are established. It deals first with aspects of intonational form in English, describing in detail the prosodic systems which are employed to mark various aspects of informational structure within the spoken language, and also considers briefly the current state of language teaching in these areas (Chapter One). Then a review of research into the acquisition of sound systems in second languages is presented, looking particularly at intonational form and other aspects of prosodic production and perception (Chapter Two).Part Two: in which the experiments which have been undertaken as part of this study are presented. Firstly, the procedural and analytical aspects of these experiments will be described (Chapter Three). The findings will then be presented and discussed (Chapters Four to Seven). Finally, findings will be summarised and some general conclusions drawn (Chapter Eight)