The influence of first and second language on the acquisition of pragmatic markers in Spanish : Evidence from an experimental study

This paper reports on an experimental study of the use of two Spanish markers of epistemic modality and evidentiality, creo que 'I believe that' and pienso que 'I think that', by native speakers, and by Dutch and German learners of Spanish. We found a clear preference for creo que among the native speakers of Spanish, but with differences between the main varieties of the language. For Dutch and German learners the preference for creo que was significantly weaker, and for beginning learners of Spanish it was significantly weaker than for advanced learners. While for the Dutch learners of Spanish this pattern reflects the preference for I think over I believe in their L1, the preference that the German-speaking learners have for creo que can be seen as evidence for a general tendency noticed in the literature, namely the interference of an L2 (in this case English) instead of the L1 (in this case German) in L3 performance (in this case Spanish)

Structure-(in)dependent Interpretation of Phrases in Humans and LSTMs

In this study, we compared the performance of a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to the behavior of human participants on a language task that requires hierarchically structured knowledge. We show that humans interpret ambiguous noun phrases, such as second blue ball, in line with their hierarchical constituent structure. LSTMs, instead, only do so after unambiguous training, and they do not systematically generalize to novel items. Overall, the results of our simulations indicate that a model can behave hierarchically without relying on hierarchical constituent structure

Secondary predication and the distribution of raising to object

In Den Dikken (2017b) arguments are presented for a predicational approach to hyperraising and copy raising constructions in which the ‘raised’ DP serves as the subject of the matrix clause. In this sequel, I show that hyperraising and copy raising also occur in secondary predication constructions embedded under propositional attitude verbs such as consider. An examination of the properties of these hyperraising and copy raising to object constructions leads to the conclusion that overt subject-toobject raising (‘object shift’) definitely exists in English but is obligatory only for subjects of small-clause complements of verbs. Apart from yielding a clearer perspective on the distribution of overt object shift in English, the study also delivers a unified account of a variety of restrictions on the subject of the non-finite complement of propositional attitude verbs

Opvallende naamvallen

Contains fulltext : 45152_opvana.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)With bibliogr., inaugural address Radboud University Nijmegen20 p

Introduction: Current issues in optimality theoretic syntax

Contains fulltext : 42609.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access