False cognates: The effect of mismatch in morphological complexity on a backward lexical translation task

In this article we focus on ‘false cognates’, lexical items that have overlapping orthographic/phonological properties but little or no semantic overlap. False-cognate pairs were created from French (second language or L2) and English (first language or L1) items by manipulating the levels of morphological correspondence between them. Our aim was to test whether mismatches in morphological structure affected success on a low-frequency backward lexical translation task. Fifty-eight participants, divided into four groups (A-level; degree level; adult learners; bilinguals) were tested on monomorphemic items (simplex), polymorphemic items (complex), items whose morphological structure in French exceeded that of their English counterpart (mismatch), and control items. Translation success rate followed a uniform pattern: control > mismatch > simplex > complex. With respect to the false-friend effect, participant responses were also uniform: complex > simplex > mismatch. It is argued that an independent level of morphology explains these results

The False-Friend Effect in Three Profoundly Deaf Learners of French: Disentangling Morphology, Phonology and Orthography

Three profoundly deaf individuals undertook a low-frequency backward lexical translation task (French/English), where morphological structure was manipulated and orthographic distance between test items was measured. Conditions included monomorphemic items (simplex), polymorphemic items (complex), items whose French morphological structure exceeded their English counterpart (mismatch), and a control. Order of translation success was uniform: control > mismatch > simplex > complex, as was order for false-cognate errors: complex > simplex > mismatch, patterning precisely with hearing participants (Janke and Kolokonte, 2014). We discuss how these results highlight a route for future studies to disentangle phonology and orthography further from morphology in first-language interference

Bare Argument Ellipsis and information Structure

This dissertation presents a cross-linguistic study of three elliptical predicate constructions: (a) stripping, (b) negative-contrast, and (c) yes/no ellipsis, which are all argued to fall under the scope of a more general type of ellipsis, Bare Argument Ellipsis. From an interpretive point of view, in all three constructions, the constituent that is present in the second conjunct ('the remnant') has a characteristic information role. In yes/no ellipsis, the remnant functions as a contrastive topic whereas in stripping and negative-contrast the remnant is a focused constituent. The latter two constructions are further differentiated with regard to the semantic characteristics of us. Based on the assumption that Focus is not uniform, it is shown that stripping involves narrow information focus whereas negative-contrast involves contrastive focus.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo