Incomplete conditionals and the syntax-pragmatics interface

This paper is concerned with conditional thoughts that are expressed via ‘incomplete conditionals’ in which an if-clause is uttered with no corresponding main clause, and yet still succeeds at communicating a fully-fledged conditional proposition. Incomplete conditionals pose a puzzle for the semantics and pragmatics of conditionals as in one respect, a condition is expressed explicitly using the canonical form ‘if p’, yet in another, the target of the condition is left unexpressed, requiring recourse to other linguistic or extra-linguistic information for its recovery. Taking observations from attested corpora, we explore the various ways in which the consequent of an incomplete conditional can be recovered, demonstrating that cases of incompleteness range from simple cases of ellipsis which are susceptible to a syntactic solution at one end of the continuum, to pragmatically recoverable cases at the other. This involves considering aspects of meaning arising out of the co-text, including cross-sentential anaphoric dependencies and considerations of coherence, as well as extra-linguistic context such as shared sociocultural information and world knowledge

Resolving Multiple Wh-Fragments: A Syntax-Pragmatics Approach

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200

What is the source of L1 attrition? The effect of recent L1 re-exposure on Spanish speakers under L1 attrition

The recent hypothesis that L1 attrition affects the ability to process interface structures but not knowledge representations (Sorace, 2011) is tested by investigating the effects of recent L1 re-exposure on antecedent preferences for Spanish pronominal subjects, using offline judgements and online eye-tracking measures. Participants included a group of native Spanish speakers experiencing L1 attrition (‘attriters’), a second group of attriters exposed exclusively to Spanish before they were tested (‘re-exposed’), and a control group of Spanish monolinguals. The judgement data shows no significant differences between the groups. Moreover, the monolingual and re-exposed groups are not significantly different from each other in the eye-tracking data. The results of this novel manipulation indicate that attrition effects decrease due to L1 re-exposure, and that bilinguals are sensitive to input changes. Taken together, the findings suggest that attrition affects online sensitivity with interface structures rather than causing a permanent change in speakers’ L1 knowledge representations

Language as a complex system: the case of phonetic variability

International audienceModern linguistic theories try to give an exhaustive explanation of how language works. In this perspective, each linguistic domain, such as phonetics, phonology, syntax, pragmatics, etc., is described by means of a set of rules or properties (in other words, a grammar). However, it is a long time linguists have observed that it is not possible to give a precise description of a real life utterance within a unique domain. We illustrate this problem with the case of phonetic variability and show how different domains interact. We propose then a two-level architecture in which domain interaction is implemented by means of constraints

Subject inversion in non-native Spanish

This study presents new empirical evidence on the L2 acquisition of Spanish SV–VS contrasts, a syntax-pragmatics interface phenomenon. Results from a context-dependant preference task involving unergative and unaccusative verbs in different focus situations (broad and narrow focus) reveal that beginner and intermediate English speakers prefer SV in all contexts. In contrast, advanced learners, who clearly know that VS is possible in Spanish, show a pattern of optionality with unergative verbs (in both broad and narrow focus contexts), whereas VS is correctly preferred with unaccusative verbs in both broad and narrowly-focused contexts. We argue that these results can be explained by a representational deficit according to which the VS order is overgeneralised to unergative verbs regardless of the discursive situation. We argue that learners’ overuse of VS structures is exacerbated by the lack of clear evidence for the use of SV and VS forms in the native input

A Rank Order of Accurate Use at the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface: Evidence from French and Spanish L2 Acquisition

In an attempt to investigate the vulnerability of the syntax-pragmatics interface and to shed light on the acquisition of subjects and objects in two different languages, namely the [+null subject] language Spanish and the [-null subject] language French, this article presents evi-dence from a crossectional and crosslinguistic university classroom study. The experiment in-vestigated various linguistic structures whose use is determined by information structure: pre-verbal subjects, null subjects, postverbal subjects and in situ objects with preverbal subjects, in situ objects with null subjects, Clitic Left Dislocations (CLLD) with null and with postverbal subjects in Spanish; subject clitics, subject dislocations, c'est clefts and in situ objects with subject clitics, in situ objects with subject dislocations, CLLDs with subject clefts and with subject dislocations in French. 76 English learners of French, 67 English learners of Spanish as well as 5 native French controls and 8 native Spanish controls participated in the study. Re-sults of the rating task evaluating learners' pragmatic intuitions indicate a crosslinguistic rank order of acquisition