Recent work on second language acquisition within the generative framework has pointed out interfaces (syntax-discourse, syntax-semantics, etc.) as a residual domain of vulnerability in L2. Rather than in core syntax, it is at the interface level that the divergence between native and non-native grammars has been shown to be more prominent. In this book the investigation of answering strategies and the focalization of new information subjects, which require access to the syntax-discourse interface, will be pursued. Data is collected through an oral elicitation task on Finnish and Italian, a rather unexplored language pair, in various stages of language development: advanced and intermediate L2 acquisition, L1 under L2 attrition, early bilingualism, child monolingual L1 development.
Clefts are intricate objects which, starting with Jespersen (1937), have motivated much work in descriptive and formal linguistics. Nonetheless, almost a century later their exact internal structure and status are still widely debated, therefore a multidisciplinary volume on this theoretically complex structure across different languages of the world is greatly needed. The articles featured in this volume follow an in-depth Introduction written by the editors, in which we offer a survey of the state-of-the-art on clefts by way of a strong contextualisation to the volume, including a number of robust empirical observations on the morphosyntactic and interpretational properties of these structures in numerous standard and non-standard Romance varieties, as well as a critical presentation of the contributions included in the volume. Among other things, the ten selected articles propose new insights into the widely-reported interpretational asymmetry between subject and object clefts, the features involved in their derivation, the ways in which the low and high peripheries are variously exploited in the derivation, the morphosyntactic and interpretational differences between clefts and their non-cleft counterparts, the role and formal properties of the copula, the notion of sub-extraction of features, a reconsideration of the very notion of focus via clefting, and much more. The volume, written by renown experts, offers an in-depth overview of the structure of it-clefts, taking into account different and complementary fields of the study of linguistics (cartography, quantitative methods, experimental investigations, nanosyntax, typology and dialectology) and robust empirical data from numerous languages including Romance varieties, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, and two Spanish- and French-lexifier creoles. Our belief is that the synchrony of clefts will only be appropriately understood once diachronic, typological, historical, experimental and dialectological aspects are all brought together. We offer through this volume a first attempt at providing such a variegated picture of the cross-linguistic morphosyntax of it-clefts.
The volume examines syntactic complexity from an acquisitional perspective, which offers a peculiarly grounded starting point when dealing with linguistic complexity, under the assumption that what is simpler is acquired earlier than what must be thought of as complex. Connecting acquisitional data inseparably to formal linguistic analyses, it not only allows a comparison between structures at various levels in terms of complexity, but also a deeper insight into the factors determining complexity in different populations of acquirers. The book is divided into two parts following an introductory chapter. The papers in Part I consider the first language acquisition of some complex structures such as different types of passives, relative clauses, questions and classes of predicates, with a look at children’s early sensitivity to seemingly complex domains, such as the Definiteness Effect and unaccusative predicates. Part II is dedicated to the acquisition of complex structures in different modes of acquisition. The papers here examine, sometimes comparatively, different conditions of language acquisition dealing with clitics, types of relative clauses or referential pronouns. The languages considered range from European Portuguese to Finnish, French, German, Italian and Romanian.
This book addresses the realization of pronominal subjects in Bulgarian and its implications for late near-native competence of German as a second/foreign language. Since Bulgarian is under-researched, typological investigations were carried out prior to the empirical study of L2 subject use. The book covers the adequate classification of Bulgarian, ascertaining its pro-drop nature, and explores the possible impact of related cross-linguistic differences on near-native interlanguage grammars of speakers with the language combination L1-Bulgarian/L2-German. Although German is not pro-drop, it allows null topics and requires some obligatory null expletives, so that null subject contexts superficially overlap for the two languages. This is a source of interlanguage deficits if no proper differentiation between subject types is made.
This book presents a comprehensive, state-of-the-art treatment of the acquisition of Indo- and Non-Indo-European languages in various contexts, such as L1, L2, L3/Ln, bi/multilingual, heritage languages, pathology as well as language impairment, and sign language acquisition. The book explores a broad mix of methodologies and issues in contemporary research. The text presents original research from several different perspectives, and provides a basis for dialogue between researchers working on diverse projects with the aim of furthering our understanding of how languages are acquired. The book proposes and refines new theoretical constructs, e.g. regarding the complexity of linguistic features as a relevant factor forming children’s, adults’ and bilingual individuals’ acquisition of morphological, syntactic, discursive, pragmatic, lexical and phonological structures. It appeals to students, researchers, and professionals in the field.
This book collects some of the most significant articles by Adriana Belletti published over the last ten years or so, offering readers a useful tool to see the mutual enrichment between linguistic theory and experimental studies on (modes of) language acquisition through her work. The volume explores domains of theoretical morphosyntax in the generative tradition and theoretically guided studies on language acquisition. An introduction specific to this volume contextualizes these contributions within ongoing developments in the field. Part I presents studies inspired by the illuminating interchange between linguistic theory and experimentation in the domain of language acquisition, leading to the formulation of explicit research questions tested experimentally and guiding in the proper interpretation of the results. Part II offers refined, detailed theoretical analyses of domains in which peripheral positions in the clause structures are crucially involved to express discourse contents, in sometimes not standard ways during development. Demonstrating how refined linguistic analyses play a crucial role in interpretating the peculiar shape of developmental data, this book will be of interest to scholars in syntax, language acquisition, and theoretical linguistics.
The book takes its lead from academic Annamaria Pagliaro’s experience straddling Australia and Italy over a thirty-year period. As both former colleagues and collaborators of Pagliaro, we editors intend to open a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the international research landscape in the fields of Italian and Anglophone studies, starting from Pagliaro’s own contribution to the creation of relations between the two cultures in the period that saw her work transnationally as Director of the Monash University Prato Centre (2005-2008).
It has long been established that bilingual speakers are rarely balanced in their languages so that one language is dominant. The contributions to the Research Topic “Bilingual Language Development: The Role of Dominance” focus on the potential effects of language dominance on the competence and processing of bilinguals, covering a large variety of language combinations and domains. Important aspects of such work are the interplay of L1-maintenance/attrition and possible L2-dominance, the direction of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) or code-mixing, as well as the effects of bilingualism on cognitive development, each addressed in several contributions. However, such research presupposes a definition of dominance, which is far from being settled. This gives rise to considerable differences in the operationalization of the concept across studies. The studies in this Research Topic present a multifaceted picture of the role of language dominance for L1-maintenance/attrition, L2-development and CLI. Though a unified story cannot emerge for such a complex subject, interesting new venues are explored including the impact of dominance shift during L1-re-exposure, comparisons of different types of bilingual groups, or operationalization of dominance through experiential measures. The variety of approaches and results is in part owed to the many language combinations studied and the fact that bilingual children, adults and atypical speakers are investigated. This diversity constitutes the interest of this Research Topic.
The articles of this collection cover a wide range of formal syntactic and semantic phenomena. The focus is on a broad array of developmental syntactic phenomena, including topics in Argument Structure and Clause-Internal Syntax, the DP Domain and Learning Theory. In total, the contents of the volume illustrate ways in which theoretically informed linguistic research can explain language behavior in terms that are motivated on independent grounds and point towards new research opportunities to test theoretical claims about the adult model of grammar. The contributions of this volume are inspired by or related to the scholarship of Nina Hyams, whose dedication to rigorous, theoretically-informed research on language is well represented here.
