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The Processing of Lexicon and Morphosyntax
This volume showcases a selection of empirical research reports presented at the Experimental Psycholinguistics Conference 2012 held at the National University of Distance Learning in Madrid. It deals with original experimental studies on the processing of language, with special emphasis on word access, word recognition, acquisition of vocabulary, and syntax development in numerous languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, English, German, Polish, Russian, and Spanish, among others.
The Acquisition of Syntax in Romance Languages
This volume includes a selection of papers that address a wide range of acquisition phenomena from different Romance languages and all share a common theoretical approach based on the Principles and Parameters theory. They favour, discuss and sometimes challenge traditional explanations of first and second language acquisition in terms of maturation of general principles universal to all languages. They all depart from the view that language acquisition can be explained in terms of learning language specific rules, constraints or structures. The different parts into which this volume is organized reflect different approaches that current research has offered, which deal with issues of development of reflexive pronouns, determiners, clitics, verbs, auxiliaries, Inflection, wh-movement, rssumptive pronouns, topic and focus, mood, the syntax/discourse interface, topic and focus, and null arguments.
The L2 Acquisition of Spanish Subjects
There is a long overdue need to address the sharp philosophical and methodological divide between formal/generative and functional/discourse perspectives in contemporary theoretical linguistics and L2 acquisition. Language structure in general, and the use of subjects in particular, is dependent upon multiple syntactic, lexico-semantic, and discourse-pragmatic factors. Therefore, the study of L2 acquisition must be equally multi-faceted. This volume examines data from over twenty years of research in the L2 acquisition of Spanish subjects from several theoretical perspectives, including generative approaches, processing theory, discourse-pragmatics and sociolinguistic-variationist models. By...
Multimodality across Communicative Settings, Discourse Domains and Genres
This volume focuses on multimodality in various communicative settings, with special attention to how non-verbal elements reinforce and add meaning to verbal expressions. The first part of the book explores issues related to the use of multimodal resources in educational interactions and English language classroom teaching, also involving learners with disabilities. The second part, on the other hand, investigates multimodality as a key component of communication that takes place in different specialized domains and genres. The book reflects a variety of methodological approaches that are grounded in both quantitative and qualitative techniques. These include multimodal discourse analysis, m...
Partitive Determiners, Partitive Pronouns and Partitive Case
Although the interest in the concept of partitivity has continuously increased in the last decades and has given rise to considerable advances in research, the fine-grained morpho-syntactic and semantic variation displayed by partitive elements across European languages is far from being well-described, let alone well-understood. There are two main obstacles to this: on the one hand, theoretical linguistics and typological linguistics are fragmented in different methodological approaches that hinder the full sharing of cross-theoretic advances; on the other hand, partitive elements have been analyzed in restricted linguistic environments, which would benefit from a broader perspective. The a...
Overt and Null Subjects in Bulgarian and in L1 Bulgarian-L2 German Interlanguage
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.
Frequency Effects in Language Acquisition
The book addresses a controversial current topic in language acquisition studies: the impact of frequency on linguistic structure in child language. A major strength of the book is that the role of input frequency in the acquisition process is evaluated in a large variety of languages, topics and the two major theoretical frameworks: UG-based and usage-based accounts. While most papers report a clear frequency effect, different factors that may be interacting with pure statistical effects are critically assessed. An introductory statement is made by Thomas Roeper who calls for caution as he identifies frequency as a non-coherent concept and argues for a precise definition of what can and cannot be explained by statistical effects.
Referring to discourse participants in Ibero-Romance languages
This volume brings together contributions by researchers focusing on personal pronouns in Ibero-Romance languages, going beyond the well-established variable of expressed vs. non-expressed subjects. While factors such as agreement morphology, topic shift and contrast or emphasis have been argued to account for variable subject expression, several corpus studies on Ibero-Romance languages have shown that the expression of subject pronouns goes beyond these traditionally established factors and is also subject to considerable dialectal variation. One of the factors affecting choice and expression of personal pronouns or other referential devices is whether the construction is used personally o...
Asymmetries between Language Production and Comprehension
This book asserts that language is a signaling system rather than a code, based in part on such research as the finding that 5-year-old English and Dutch children use pronouns correctly in their own utterances, but often fail to interpret these forms correctly when used by someone else. Emphasizing the unique and sometimes competing demands of listener and speaker, the author examines resulting asymmetries between production and comprehension. The text offers examples of the interpretation of word order and pronouns by listeners, and word order freezing and referential choice by speakers. It is explored why the usual symmetry breaks down in children but also sometimes in adults. Gathering co...
Wh-exclamatives, Imperatives and Wh-questions
Research on left periphery phenomena has increased in the last 20 years, resulting in consistent studies from a wide range of languages and a fruitful debate on the functional projections within the CP system. Throughout these years, important contributions have been made on Brazilian Portuguese, especially on wh-interrogative sentences, focalization, topicalization and relative clauses. As for exclamative and imperative sentences, however, there is a considerable research gap in all grammatical levels. Regarding interrogatives, semantic and prosodic studies are still lacking (as well as research on the acquisition and processing of these constructions). This collected volume fills some of those gaps, gathering studies on wh-exclamatives, imperatives and wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese which approach syntactical, semantical and prosodic aspects of these constructions through a rich and unregistered set of data. They also deliver novel acquisition and diachronic data that will further both the comprehension of Brazilian Portuguese grammar and the ongoing discussions on left periphery phenomena.
