Clausal Restructuring in the complex nominal

Restructuring of infinitival complements within complex VPs, or Verbal Restructuring, is a well-known cross-linguistic phenomenon. In contrast, there is a dearth of empirical evidence for restructured complements within complex NP/DPs, even though the theory posits equivalence between nominal and verbal domains. Here, we provide novel evidence for the presence of restructuring within complex NP/DP complements in Kannada light verb constructions, and claim on this basis that clausal restructuring within the nominal domain is a possibility in natural languages

L’acquisition de l’accord sujet-verbe par les jeunes francophones natifs entre 14 et 30 mois : préférence, compréhension et environnement linguistique (The acquisition of subject-verb agreement by young native French speakers between 14 and 30 months: preference, understanding, and linguistic environment)

The aim of this study is to contribute to the current debate on the nature of morphosyntactic representations in young children which opposes two hypotheses. On the one hand, the so-called lexicalist or constructivist approaches suggest that the young child is sensitive to the structures he frequently hears and that the first constructions he represents are based on combinations of specific linguistic elements. understood combinations of inflected words and marks. On the other hand, generative theories give a lesser role to the linguistic environment and stresses the importance of the capacities of young children to form abstract morphosyntactic representations which do not systematically reflect the frequency of combinations in the linguistic environment and which apply to lexical categories (eg Noun, verb etc) and are not limited to colloquial words. The analysis of the spontaneous production of young children is the traditional method that has been most often used to test these hypotheses. The study presented below tests the two hypotheses at the heart of the current debate by using two other complementary experimental approaches - the Head Turn Paradigm and the Intermodal Paradigm of the Preferential Gaze - which make it possible to study the preference and the understanding of the chord. subject-verb in native French speakers between 14 and 30 months. The data obtained on 88 children between 14 and 30 months were analyzed. The verbs and constructions used in the experiments are also the subject of detailed quantitative analyzes of the language to which young children are exposed. These analyzes covered a total number of 54,000 statements. These three sources of data on the preference and understanding of agreement in young children and the properties of the linguistic environment allow us to contribute to the current debate on the nature of early morphosyntactic representations. The results of the three studies reveal a) that 18-month-old French speakers prefer grammatical constructions that involve a Nominal Syntagma and an irregular verb in the third person singular and plural, b) that at 30 months children understand constructions that contain a third-person clitic subject and a verb that begins with a vowel, in the singular and in the plural and c) that these two results do not directly reflect the statements to which the children are exposed in which the forms and constructions tested are not frequent and which reveal a significant asymmetry between the singular and the plural. These results do not seem compatible with the so-called “lexicalist” or “constructivist” hypotheses according to which the performance of children of these ages should reflect the combinations and forms frequent in the linguistic environment. This study allowed us to better understand the morposyntactic capacities of the young child. The preference data are compatible with those published on English and German, but our study makes an additional contribution because the forms used in our experience are not regular

Converging evidence of underlying competence: Comprehension and production in the acquisition of Spanish subject-verb agreement

A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring Mexican Spanish gain competence with 3rd-person SV agreement, testing production as well as comprehension in the same children aged between 3;6 and 5;7 years, and whether comprehension of SV agreement is modulated by the sentential position of the verb (i.e., medial vs. final position). Accuracy and sensitivity analyses show that comprehension performance correlates with SV agreement production abilities, and that comprehension of singular and plural third-person forms is not influenced by the sentential position of the agreement morpheme. Issues of the appropriate outcome measure and the role of structural familiarity in the development of abstract representations are discussed

Mapping Lexical Semantics onto Syntactic Structure: The Problem of Unaccusative Mismatches in Romance Languages

The problem of mapping lexical semantics onto syntactic structure became particularly acute with the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978) and its claim that intransitive verbs divide into two subsets with distinct syntactic properties. The single argument of unaccusative verbs is an underlying or deep direct object, and thus displays many syntactic properties of direct objects of transitive verbs; in contrast, the single argument of unergative verbs is a subject at all levels of representation, and thus displays the same syntactic behavior as the subject of transitive verbs. This syntactic difference is typically represented configurationally as in(1)(1) Intransitive structures (Burzio 1986) Unergative: NP [yp V] Unaccusative: [vpV NP