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22. Experimental syntax and Slavic languagesArthur Stepanov, 2021, independent scientific component part or a chapter in a monograph Abstract: The chapter reviews a number of empirical domains that recently came into the focus of research in Slavic experimental syntax, including island phenomena, syntactic Superiority effects, various types of agreement, word order, and scope interaction, among others. This research mostly relies on sentence acceptability experiments applied across larger pools of participants, but the chapter also reviews selected studies using related experimental methods (e.g. elicited production and sentence–picture verification). The chapter concludes by identifying a number of conceptual issues in syntactic theory, for which we believe Slavic experimental syntax has a potential to make a particularly strong contribution.
Keywords: experimental syntax, Slavic language, syntactic island, unaccusativity, information structure, superiority effect, case matching, agreement, numeral phrase
Published in RUNG: 20.12.2021; Views: 3705; Downloads: 17
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23. A corpus investigation of the ordering of selected attributive adjectives in SlovenianVesna Plesničar, 2021, published scientific conference contribution abstract Abstract: The paper investigates the question of attributive adjective ordering in Slovenian against the background of the cartographic model of natural language syntax, outlined already in Rizzi (1997). According to this model, the order of adjectives within a complex noun phrase results from a hierarchy of functional projections (e.g., Cinque 1994, 2010, Scott 2002, Shlonsky 2004, Laenzlinger 2005); a proposal for how the hierarchy should be structured is given below:
DETERMINER > ORDINAL NUMBER > CARDINAL NUMBER > SUBJECTIVE COMMENT > ?EVIDENTIAL > SIZE > LENGTH > HEIGHT > SPEED > ?DEPTH > WIDTH > WEIGHT > TEMPERTURE > ?WETNESS > AGE > SHAPE > COLOR > NATIONALITY/ORIGIN > MATERIAL > COMPOUND ELEMENT > NP
(Scott 2002: 114)
The model has been very influential, but has also attracted various types of criticism, ranging from the problem of innateness, origin and plentitude to the problem of rigidity (i.a., Truswell 2009, Larson 2017, Scontras et al. 2017, 2019, Leivada and Westergaard 2019). Given the conclusions based on large databases, the concerns of corpus studies focusing on the rigidity problem seem particularly relevant (i.a., Wulff 2003, Truswell 2009, Kotowski and Hartl 2019, Trotzke and Wittenberg 2019).
Using nearly 1,2-billion-word Gigafida corpus, we conducted a study in which we check the frequency of attested orders of selected attributive adjectives of thirteen semantic categories and determine whether we can adequately predict language use if we adopt a cartographic model as a working theoretical framework, specifically the adjective hierarchy proposed in Scott (2002).
The results show that the probability of encountering an order that violates the hierarchy, compared to the probability of encountering an order that respects the hierarchy, is in general extremely small, and indicates that the order of adjectives attested in our Slovenian corpus is by-and-large compatible with the proposal that the order is governed by a hierarchy of adjective projections.
Keywords: generative grammar, cartography, attributive adjective string, language use, corpus
Published in RUNG: 08.12.2021; Views: 2712; Downloads: 0
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24. Prosodia e Foreign Accent - Prosody and Foreign Accent : Prominenza accentuale e deaccentazione in Italiano e Tedesco come lingue secondeAlessandra Zappoli, 2012, master's thesis Abstract: This thesis investigates the production and acquisition of prosodic contours in Italian learners of German, and German learners of Italian as second languages (L2). The thesis compares speech production in L2 with speech production in the native language (L1). The goal is to verify whether the speech production in L2 is affected by Transfer phenomena that are linked to the phonological properties of the L1. The thesis also tests, in light of the Markedness Differential Hypothesis, whether the direction of acquisition - the acquisition of German as L2, being an L1 speaker of Italian vs. the acquisition of Italian as L2, being an L1 speaker of German – can predict a production in L2 connotated by Foreign Accent (FA). The thesis describes: i) the current state of the art of acquisitional theories of an L2 in adulthood; ii) the theoretical description of the patterns of prosodic prominence in Italian and German within the Autosegmental Theory of Intonation framework; iii) the interaction of the phonological structure with the Information Packaging of the Discourse Structure that differently affects the realization of prosodic patterns in Germanic and Romance languages. Finally, the thesis reports the preliminary results of a production experiment that adopts the paradigm of Swerts et. al (2002) in which participants utter a sequence of Noun-Phrases composed by a Noun and Adjective in which the Information Status rotates between the conditions of New, Given, and Contrastive information. The data highlight the presence of H+L* as the most frequently used Pitch Accent in the production of Italian speakers, that emerges also in the production of the German L2 speakers of Italian; in contrast, the data show the presence of Deaccentuation in the production of L1 speakers of German in correlation with the Given information status of a referent that is not successfully acquired by Italian L1 speakers of German as L2. The data indicate that it appears to be easier to successfully acquire the Italian prosodic system, being a native speaker of German, than vice-versa, supporting the MDH. The facilitatory effect is explainable by the less relevant role of the Discourse Structure in guiding the prominence patterns in Italian, which more heavily relies on the phonological structure, resulting in a less marked prosodic system compared to the prosodic system of German.
Keywords: pitch accents, prosody, foreign accent, prominence, second language acquisition, german, Italian, markedness, speech production
Published in RUNG: 06.12.2021; Views: 3253; Downloads: 0
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30. Addressing the debate on pronoun reversal, caused by Theory of Mind or by Echolalia?Greta Mazzaggio, invited lecture at foreign university Abstract: Pronoun reversal is among the most interesting errors of early child language. It mainly consists in the substitution of I for you, and you for I; during these years, such reversal has often been associated mainly with Autistic Spectrum Disorder but recent studies have shown that the phenomena also occur in typically developing children with almost the same frequency (Evans, K.E., Demuth, K., 2012). Many theories on the cause of pronoun reversals have been proposed but the problem remains puzzling because a lot of children who reverse pronouns occasionally produce also correct forms. Moreover, it is a phenomenon which is not present in all the children (Dale, P.S., Crain- Thoreson, C., 1993). Of the two of the main hyphoteses related to pronoun reversal, one links it to a lack of a Theory of Mind (ToM), another relates it to echolalia. Based on two different surveys I conducted, I would like to address the debate. With the first study I wanted to verify whether pronoun reversals is related to a lack or to a non- mature development of ToM (Wechsler, S., 2010) testing a group of typically developing children with a series of ToM tasks ordered by a degree of complexity, from less to more complex. Then I created four tasks to verify their competence in using pronouns: focus position, pronoun with verb agreement, null form and pronouns other than first and second singular forms. We administered this experiment to a group of 17 Italian children - 38 to 70 months of age - because such tasks have never been performed before for Italian language. In this respect, Italian is more complex than English, mainly for two aspects: it’s a pro-drop language, that is a language in which some pronouns can be omitted if they are pragmatically inferable, and there is agreement between the subject pronoun and the verb, which is another factor that we must take into account. With the second study I analysed spontaneous speech uttered by a 15-years-old boy officially diagnosed with Kleefstra Syndrome and known to be a reverser, focusing on cases of pronoun reversal. At the end of the two studies I have data in favor of both ToM hypothesis and echolalia hypothesis. Further researches should verify if echolalia can be related with a lack of ToM and the differences in pronoun reversal between typically developing children and children with disorders.
Keywords: echolalia, language development, theory of mind, pronouns, pronoun reversal, autism developmental disorders
Published in RUNG: 22.09.2021; Views: 3379; Downloads: 0
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