Multiple final embedding of clauses

2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Karlsson
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Successive Level ◽  
Complex Varieties ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Processing Mechanisms

There are no grammatical limits on multiple final embedding of clauses. But converging corpus data from English, Finnish, German and Swedish show that multiple final embedding is avoided at levels deeper than three levels from the main clause in syntactically simple varieties, and at levels deeper than five levels in complex varieties. The frequency of every successive level of final embedding decreases by a factor of seven down to levels 4–5. Only relative clauses allow free self-embedding, within the limits just mentioned. These restrictions are regularities of language use, stylistic preferences related to the properties of various types of discourse. Ultimately they are explained by cognitive and other properties of the language processing mechanisms. The frequencies of final embedding depths in modern languages such as English and Finnish is not accidental. Ancient Greek had reached this profile by 300 BC, suggesting cross-linguistic generality of the preferences.

Deutsch als schwächere Sprache bei deutsch-polnisch bilingualen Kindern: Studie zur Negation- und Verbstellung

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-297
Author(s):  
Aldona Sopata ◽  
Kamil Długosz
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Language Use ◽  
The Other ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Striking Difference ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Development Characteristic ◽  
Processing Mechanisms ◽  
Constrained Input

AbstractThis article examines the acquisition of German as the weaker language in the cases of German-Polish bilingual children. Focusing on negation and verb position, phenomena that have frequently been taken as diagnostic when distinguishing between the course of language development characteristic for first (L1) and second language acquisition (L2), we analyse experimental and productive data from six simultaneously bilingual children. Due to the constrained input, German is their weaker language. The results in Forced Choice and Grammaticality Judgements tasks are compared with the results of monolingual children. We show that in the area of negation the acquisition of German as the weaker language resembles L1, and in the area of inversion and verb final position the development of the weaker language is delayed. The striking difference between bilinguals’ results in the experimental vs. productive tasks points to specific processing mechanisms in bilingual language use. In narrative contexts of the production tasks the language of the performance is activated, while the other is inhibited, which leads to a target-like performance. Structural properties of the stronger language tend to be activated, however, in the experimental tasks involving the weaker language, resulting in non-target-like responses.

scholarly journals Can Frequency Account for the Grammatical Choices of Children and Adults in Nominal Modification Contexts? Evidence from Elicited Production and Child-Directed Speech

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Emanuela Sanfelici ◽  
Petra Schulz
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Production Rate ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
High Production Rate ◽  
High Production ◽  
Acquisition Order

There is consensus that languages possess several grammatical variants satisfying the same conversational function. Nevertheless, it is a matter of debate which principles guide the adult speaker’s choice and the child’s acquisition order of these variants. Various proposals have suggested that frequency shapes adult language use and language acquisition. Taking the domain of nominal modification as its testing ground, this paper explores in two studies the role that frequency of structures plays for adults’ and children’s structural choices in German. In Study 1, 133 three- to six-year-old children and 21 adults were tested with an elicited production task prompting participants to identify an agent or a patient referent among a set of alternatives. Study 2 analyzed a corpus of child-directed speech to examine the frequency of passive relative clauses, which children, similar to adults, produced very often in Study 1. Importantly, passive relatives were found to be infrequent in the child input. These two results show that the high production rate of rare structures, such as passive relatives, is difficult to account for with frequency. We claim that the relation between frequency in natural speech and use of a given variant in a specific context is indirect: speakers may opt for the less grammatically complex computation rather than for the variant most frequently used in spontaneous speech.

scholarly journals Finding What Is Inaccessible: Antimicrobial Resistance Language Use among the One Health Domains

Antibiotics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 385
Author(s):  
Lauren L. Wind ◽  
Jonathan S. Briganti ◽  
Anne M. Brown ◽  
Timothy P. Neher ◽  
Meghan F. Davis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Antibiotic Resistance ◽  
Open Access ◽  
Antimicrobial Resistance ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
One Health ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Usage ◽  
Health Domains ◽  
Accessibility Issues ◽  
The One

The success of a One Health approach to combating antimicrobial resistance (AMR) requires effective data sharing across the three One Health domains (human, animal, and environment). To investigate if there are differences in language use across the One Health domains, we examined the peer-reviewed literature using a combination of text data mining and natural language processing techniques on 20,000 open-access articles related to AMR and One Health. Evaluating AMR key term frequency from the European PubMed Collection published between 1990 and 2019 showed distinct AMR language usage within each domain and incongruent language usage across domains, with significant differences in key term usage frequencies when articles were grouped by the One Health sub-specialties (2-way ANOVA; p < 0.001). Over the 29-year period, “antibiotic resistance” and “AR” were used 18 times more than “antimicrobial resistance” and “AMR”. The discord of language use across One Health potentially weakens the effectiveness of interdisciplinary research by creating accessibility issues for researchers using search engines. This research was the first to quantify this disparate language use within One Health, which inhibits collaboration and crosstalk between domains. We suggest the following for authors publishing AMR-related research within the One Health context: (1) increase title/abstract searchability by including both antimicrobial and antibiotic resistance related search terms; (2) include “One Health” in the title/abstract; and (3) prioritize open-access publication.

scholarly journals What is special about L3 processing?

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
KEES DE BOT ◽  
CAROL JAENSCH
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Third Language ◽  
The Core ◽  
Dynamic Perspective ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Over Time

While research on third language (L3) and multilingualism has recently shown remarkable growth, the fundamental question of what makes trilingualism special compared to bilingualism, and indeed monolingualism, continues to be evaded. In this contribution we consider whether there is such a thing as a true monolingual, and if there is a difference between dialects, styles, registers and languages. While linguistic and psycholinguistic studies suggest differences in the processing of a third, compared to the first or second language, neurolinguistic research has shown that generally the same areas of the brain are activated during language use in proficient multilinguals. It is concluded that while from traditional linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives there are grounds to differentiate monolingual, bilingual and multilingual processing, a more dynamic perspective on language processing in which development over time is the core issue, leads to a questioning of the notion of languages as separate entities in the brain.

scholarly journals Similarity-based interference and relative clauses in second language processing

2021 ◽  
pp. 026765832110635
Author(s):  
Ian Cunnings ◽  
Hiroki Fujita
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Interference Effects ◽  
Second Language Processing ◽  
L2 Processing ◽  
Relative Disadvantage ◽  
L1 And L2 ◽  
Object Relative

Relative clauses have long been examined in research on first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition and processing, and a large body of research has shown that object relative clauses (e.g. ‘The boy that the girl saw’) are more difficult to process than subject relative clauses (e.g. ‘The boy that saw the girl’). Although there are different accounts of this finding, memory-based factors have been argued to play a role in explaining the object relative disadvantage. Evidence of memory-based factors in relative clause processing comes from studies indicating that representational similarity influences the difficulty associated with object relatives as a result of a phenomenon known as similarity-based interference. Although similarity-based interference has been well studied in L1 processing, less is known about how it influences L2 processing. We report two studies – an eye-tracking experiment and a comprehension task – investigating interference in the comprehension of relative clauses in L1 and L2 readers. Our results indicated similarity-based interference in the processing of object relative clauses in both L1 and L2 readers, with no significant differences in the size of interference effects between the two groups. These results highlight the importance of considering memory-based factors when examining L2 processing.

scholarly journals On the correlative nature of Hungarian left-peripheral relatives

2004 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-313
Author(s):  
Anikó Lipták
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Distributional Properties ◽  
The Right

This paper takes a close look at the properties of Hungarian relative clauses that occur in the left periphery of the main clause, preceding a (pro)nominal associate. It will be shown that these left-peripheral relative clauses differ in many ways from relative clauses dislocated on the right periphery, as well as from relative clauses embedded under a (pro)nominal head. To capture the precise syntax of these left-peripheral clauses, these will be compared to ordinary left-dislocated items, with which they have some properties in common. Despite the surface similarities between the two, however, there are a few decisive aspects of behaviour, most notably, distributional properties and connectivity effects, which argue against taking left-peripheral relatives as cases of clausal left-dislocates in Hungarian. Instead, one is led to consider these as correlative clauses, on the basis of the properties they share with well-established correlatives in languages like Hindi.  

Subordinate clauses

2019 ◽  
pp. 237-288
Author(s):  
Jan Terje Faarlund
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Matrix Clause ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Infinitival Clauses ◽  
Finite Verb ◽  
Nominal Clauses

In subordinate clauses, the C position is occupied by a complementizer word, which may be null. The finite verb stays in V. SpecCP is either empty or occupied by a wh-word, or by some other element indicating its semantic function. Nominal clauses are finite or non-finite. Finite nominal clauses are declarative or interrogative. Declarative nominal clauses may under specific circumstances have main clause word order (‘embedded V2’). Infinitival clauses are marked by an infinitive marker, which is either in C (Swedish), or immediately above V (Danish). Norwegian has both options. Relative clauses comprise several different types; clauses with a relativized nominal argument are mostly introduced by a complementizer; adverbial relative clauses relativize a locative or temporal phrase, with or without a complementizer; comparative clauses relativize a degree or identity. Under hard-to-define circumstances depending on language and region, subordinate clauses allow extraction of phrases up into the matrix clause.

Changing the Topic

Mnemosyne ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rutger J. Allan
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
The Other ◽  
Coherent System ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Flexible System ◽  
Pragmatic Function ◽  
The One ◽  
Topic Constructions

AbstractIn Ancient Greek, topics can be expressed as intra-clausal constituents but they can also precede or follow the main clause as extra-clausal constituents. Together, these various topic expressions constitute a coherent system of complementary pragmatic functions. For a comprehensive account of topic organization, therefore, a limited focus on the clause proper is insufficient. In this paper, I will argue that it is possible to distinguish five different structural positions in which topic constituents may appear in Ancient Greek. These are: (i)Theme, (ii)clause-initial, (iii)postverbal in Setting, (iv)postverbal in main clauseand (v)Tail.Each of these positions in the sentence is associated with a specific pragmatic function: Resumed Topic, Contrastive/New Topic, Given Topic or clarification of Given Topic. In linguistic theory, topic and focus are often seen as independent aspects of information structure instead of complementary functions. It is, therefore, attractive to posit two separate sets of constructional templates: on the one hand, a topic set comprising the aforementioned topic constructions and, on the other hand, a focus set containing two (narrow and broad) focus-constructions. This results in a flexible system in which the word order of each sentence is determined by a combination of a focus construction plus one or more topic constructions.

Input Enhancement in Instructed SLA

1993 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sharwood Smith
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Learner ◽  
Modular Systems ◽  
Input Enhancement ◽  
Instructed Sla ◽  
Processing Mechanisms

The concept of input to the language learner is examined with reference to some current theorizing about language processing and the idea of modular systems of knowledge. The question of what this can tell us about the actions taken by teachers and textbook writers is addressed specifically with regard to manipulating, or “enhancing,” the input ideally so that it will affect learner knowledge and thereby learner behavior. The logic of the argumentation is that, in exposing the learner to the second language, we are engaging a whole battery of different processing mechanisms. Input enhancement research and the conclusions drawn from it have to be set within the context of a modular view of language and language learning.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document