Parameter Resetting In Metrical Phonology: The Case of Setswana and English

2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (sup38) ◽  
pp. 55-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigit van der Pas ◽  
Daan Wissing ◽  
Wim Zonneveld
1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 1444-1460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelley L. Velleman ◽  
Lawrence D. Shriberg

Previous studies have shown that metrical analysis accounts for syllable omissions in young normally developing children better than prior perspectives. This approach has not yet been applied to children with disorders. Inappropriate sentential stress has been proposed as a diagnostic marker for a subgroup of children with suspected developmental apraxia of speech (SD-DAS), suggesting that the application of metrical perspectives to this population may be appropriate. This report extends the goal of identifying diagnostic markers for SD-DAS using analytic procedures from metrical phonology. The lexical metrical patterns of children with SD-DAS were compared to those of a group of children with speech delay (SD) to verify the applicability of metrical constructs to children with disorders while at the same time seeking lexical stress characteristics that might be useful for differential diagnosis. The lexical stress errors of children in both the SD and SD-DAS disorder groups were found to conform to patterns identified in metrical studies of younger normally developing children, confirming the applicability of this approach to children with disorders. Lexical metrical patterns did not differentiate the groups from each other. However, syllable omissions persisted to much later ages in the SD-DAS subjects, especially those children previously identified as having inappropriate phrasal stress. Further metrical studies of the speech of children with suspected SD-DAS are needed, both at the lexical and the sentential level, using both perceptual and acoustic measures.


1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E Cooper ◽  
Stephen J Eady

1995 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 313-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Hammond
Keyword(s):  

1999 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalila Ayoun

This study investigates the acquisition of verb movement phenomena in the interlanguage of English native speakers learning French as a second language. Participants (n=83), who were enrolled in three different classes, were given a grammaticality judgment task and a production task. The French native speakers' results (n=85) go against certain theoretical predictions for negation and adverb placement in nonfinite contexts, as well as for quantification at a distance. The production task results, but not the grammaticality judgment results, support the hypothesis that the effects of parameter resetting successfully appear in the interlanguage of adult L2 learners.


1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harald Clahsen ◽  
Upyong Hong

In L1 acquisition research, developmental correlations between superfi cially unrelated linguistic phenomena are analysed in terms of clustering effects, resulting from the setting of a particular parameter of Universal Grammar (UG). In German L1 acquisition, there is evidence for a cluster ing of the acquisition of subject-verb agreement and the decrease of (incor rect) null subjects. The developmental connection between these two phenomena in L1 acquisition has been interpreted in terms of parameter setting. Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994) have claimed that the acqui sition of subject-verb agreement and non-pro-drop in adult L2 learners developmentally coincides in the same way as it does in child L1 learners. This is taken to indicate that UG parameters are fully accessible to adult L2 learners. In this article we will report on reaction-time (RT) experi ments investigating subject-verb agreement and null subjects in 33 Korean learners of German and a control group of 20 German native speakers. Our main finding is that the two phenomena do not covary in the Korean learners indicating that (contra Vainikka and Young-Scholten) properties of agreement and null subjects are acquired separately from one another, rather than through parameter resetting.


2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Longobardi

Current theories place very mild constraints on possible diachronic changes, something at odds with the trivial observation that actual, “language change” represents a tiny fraction of the variation made a priori available by Universal Grammar. Much recent work in diachronic syntax has actually been guided by the aim of describing changes (e.g., parameter resetting), rather than by concerns of genuine explanation. Here I suggest a radically different viewpoint (the Inertial, Theory of diachronic syntax), namely, that syntactic change not provably due to interference should not occur at all as a primitive-that is, unless forced by changes in the phonology, the semantics, or the lexicon, perhaps ultimately by interface or grammar-external pressures, in line with the minimalist enterprise in synchronic linguistics. I concentrate on a single case, the etymology of Modern French chez, showing howthe proposed approach attains a high degree of explanatory adequacy.


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