On the acquisition of statives in child russian

It has been previously reported that in languages demonstrating the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage the use of RIs is characterized by two properties: these forms are overwhelmingly eventive and have, in the majority of instances, a modal interpretation. Hoekstra and Hyams (1998, 1999) have proposed a theory stating that these two properties of RIs are co-dependent in that the application of the modal reference restriction limits the use of the aspectual verbal classes to eventive predicates. Furthermore, this theory assumed that the described mutual dependency of these constraints was valid cross-linguistically. In this paper, we investigate the application of this theory to the case of RIs in Russian, one of the languages exhibiting the RI Stage. Using new longitudinal data from two monolingual Russian-speaking children, we demonstrate that the predictions of Hoekstra and Hyams’ approach are not realized for Russian child speech. While the constraint requiring that Ris have a modal reference does not seem to apply in Russian since the infinitival forms do receive past and present tense interpretation, these predicates are still overwhelmingly eventive and stative predicates appear mostly as finite verbs. Having shown that a theory connecting the application of the two restrictions on RIs does not account for the Russian data, we examine several alternative analyses of Russian RIs. We arrive at a conclusion that an explanation based on the lack of the event variable in stative predicates (Kratzer 1989) necessary for the interpretation of RIs in discourse (Avrutin 1997) succeeds in handling the Russian data presented in this article

Acquisition of Pronominal Clitics in Romanian

This paper uses new evidence from elicited production experiments to establish that Romanian children do not omit either direct or indirect object clitics at a significant rate. The results reported for the acquisition of indirect object clitics are particularly significant in that, for the first time, it is possible to demonstrate the similarity between the acquisition of direct and indirect object clitics in Romanian and, arguably, for other languages that pattern with Romanian in the relevant respects. Furthermore, our findings receive a natural explanation if it is assumed that two conditions must be met for children to produce clitics. First, children's grammars must not be constrained by any relevant grammatical constraints, such as the Unique Checking Constraint (Wexler 1998, 2003). Second, children must be able to produce utterances of the length required by the clitic constructions

Structural connection in syntax and processing : studies in Russian and Japanese

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 287-293).by Maria A. Babyonyshev.Ph.D

The EPP, Unaccusativity, and the Resultative Constructions in Japanese

In this work in progress we explore the possibility that the EPP, which has been claimed to be "strong" universally for T, may not need to emerge when the verb is unaccusative. We present a detailed analysis of the -te aru resultative constructions in Japanese. There are two -te aru constructions, "intransitivizing" and "non-intransitivizing." It is the "intransitivinzing" construction which we claim lacks the EPP on T. The nominative object of this construction must move out of its VP/ vP, but it does not go all the way to the matrix Spec of TP. The matrix T apparently does not project a specifier, which is consistent with the idea that it does not have the EPP feature. The other resultative construction, "non-intransitivizing," is a subject-to-subject raising construction and the T does have the EPP. While we do not attempt in this paper to try to explain the root of this difference between the two resultative constructions, it is possible that the difference is pointing to some fundamental property of the EPP which has yet to be discovered

An On-Line Study of Japanese Nesting Complexity

This paper reports the results of a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese in which the materials consisted of four versions of successively more nested syntactic structures. It was found that (1) people read the more nested materials slower than the less nested materials; and (2) the locus of the relative slowdown occurred early in the nested structures. There was no corresponding slowdown when processing the verbs at the end of each clause. The results are therefore not predicted by retrieval-based integration accounts of syntactic complexity. Rather, the results support expectation-based accounts of syntactic complexity for these materials

The Roles of First Language and Proficiency in L2 Processing of Spanish Clitics: Global Effects

We assessed the roles of first language (L1) and second language (L2) proficiency in the processing of preverbal clitics in L2 Spanish by considering the predictions of four processing theories—the Input Processing Theory, the Unified Competition Model, the Amalgamation Model, and the Associative-Cognitive CREED. We compared the performance of L1 English (typologically different from Spanish) to L1 Romanian (typologically similar to Spanish) speakers from various L2 Spanish proficiency levels on an auditory sentence-processing task. We found main effects of proficiency, condition, and L1 and an interaction between proficiency and condition. Although we did not find an interaction between L1 and condition, the L1 Romanians showed an overall advantage that may be attributable to structure-specific experience in the L1, raising new questions about how crosslinguistic differences influence the processing strategies learners apply to their L2

Metatheories of deductive systems

A deductive system (Hilbert-style) is an algebraic closure system over the set of formulas of given propositional language. Similarly, a Gentzen system is an algebraic closure system over the set of all sequents, i.e., finite sequences of formulas, of this language. The main feature of this work is a technique that allows us to adapt the methods, previously developed in the area of algebraic logic for work with Hilbert-style deductive systems, to the case of Gentzen systems. Using the properties of the Tarski congruence, a generalization of the Leibnitz congruence, we develop an algebraic hierarchy for Gentzen systems that closely parallels the well-known algebraic hierarchy of deductive systems. This approach allows us to unify in a single framework several previously known results about algebraizable and equivalential Gentzen systems. We also obtain a characterization of weakly algebraizable Gentzen systems. The significance of Gentzen systems and related axiomatizations by Gentzen rules is due in large part to the fact that various metatheoretical properties of deductive systems can be formulated in their terms. It was observed that a number of important non-protoalgebraic deductive system that have a natural algebraic semantics also have a so-called fully adequate Gentzen system associated with them, the conjunction-disjunction fragment of the classical propositional logic being a paradigmatic example. In this work, a general criterion for the existence of a fully adequate Gentzen system for non-protoalgebraic deductive systems is obtained, and it is shown that many of the known partial results can be explained based on this general criterion. This includes such cases as the existence of fully adequate Gentzen systems for self-extensional logics with conjunction or implication, and the criterions for the existence of a fully adequate Gentzen system for protoalgebraic and weakly algebraizable logics. In another vein, it is shown that the existence of a multiterm deduction-detachment theorem in a deductive system is equivalent to the fact that, so called, axiomatic closure relations for the deductive system form a Gentzen system.</p