Sentence first, arguments after: Mechanisms of morphosyntax acquisition

Natural languages contain complex grammatical patterns. For example, in German, finite verbs occur second in main clauses while non-finite verbs occur last, as in 'dein Bruder möchte in den Zoo gehen' (“Your brother wants to go to the zoo”). Children easily acquire this type of morphosyntactic contingency (Poeppel & Wexler, 1993; Deprez & Pierce, 1994). There is extensive debate in the literature over the nature of children’s linguistic representations, but there are considerably fewer mechanistic ideas about how knowledge is actually acquired. Regarding German, one approach might be to learn the position of prosodically prominent open-class words (“verbs go 2nd or last”) and then fill in the morphological details. Alternatively, one could work in the opposite direction, learning the position of closed-class morphemes (“-te goes 2nd and -en goes last”) and fitting open-class items into the resulting structure. This second approach is counter-intuitive, but I will argue that it is the one learners take.Previous research suggests that learners focus distributional analysis on closed-class items because of their distinctive perceptual properties (Braine, 1963; Morgan, Meier, & Newport, 1987; Shi, Werker & Morgan, 1999; Valian & Coulson, 1988). The Anchoring Hypothesis (Valian & Coulson, 1988) posits that, because these items tend to occur at grammatically important points in the sentence (e.g., phrase edges), focusing on them helps learners acquire grammatical structure. Here I ask how learners use closed-class items to acquire complex morphosyntactic patterns such as the verb form/position contingency in German. Experiments 1-4 refute concerns that morphosyntactic contingencies like those in German are too complex to learn distributionally. Experiments 5-8 explore the mechanisms underlying learning, showing that adults and children analyze closed-class items as predictive of the presence and position of open-class items, but not the reverse. In these experiments, subtle mathematical distinctions in learners’ input had significant effects on learning, illuminating the biased computations underlying anchored distributional analysis. Taken together, results suggest that learners organize knowledge of language patterns relative to a small set of closed-class items—just as patterns are represented in modern syntactic theory (Rizzi & Cinque, 2016).

The Benefits and Costs of Automotive Regulations for Low-Income Americans

Benefit-cost analyses of regulations address Kaldor-Hicks efficiency but rarely investigate the distribution of benefits and costs as experienced by low-income households. In order to fill this gap, this article assembles the available evidence to determine how regulations of the automobile industry may impact the well-being of low-income Americans. The scope of the investigation includes air pollution, safety and fuel-economy regulations. We find that performing benefit-cost analyses for low-income households is more challenging than commonly understood. Given the difficulties in completing distributional analysis with available information, the authors offer practical suggestions on how to change the federal data systems and the rulemaking process to ensure that information is collected about how future automobile regulations impact the well-being of the poor.

Constraint Faced by Bt Cotton Growers for Control of Pink Bollworm

The present study on knowledge of Bt cotton growers for control of pink bollworm was conducted in Parbhani district of Marathwada region in Maharashtra State. The data were collected through personal interview with the help of interview schedule by contacting 120 respondents. The data was processed by making primary and secondary tables. The distributional analysis pertaining to age of the farmers indicated that (50.00%) of the respondents belonged to middle age category. It was found that, majority (30.00%) of the respondents belonged to primary education category, majority (54.16%) of the respondents had medium level of area under Bt cotton of respondents, 47.50 per cent of the respondents had semi-medium land holding (2.01 to 4.00 ha), 67.50 per cent of the respondents had medium annual income (Rs.98,000 to Rs 2,98,000). While majority (50.00%) of the respondents had medium level of social participation, 50.00 per cent of the respondents had medium economic motivation, larger proportion (50.00%) of the respondents belonged to medium innovativeness, 41.66 per cent of the respondents had medium risk orientation, 55.00 per cent of the respondents had medium level of farming experience, majority (58.33%) of the respondents had medium level of source of information of source of information, 66.68 per cent of the respondents had medium level source of irrigation, 58.33 per cent of the respondents had medium extension contract.

A corpus-driven description of when-adverbial in Nigerian and British Englishes

Syntactic alternation allows us to understand how structural variation, including crucial factors relevant to their meaning and interpretation, operates linguistic varieties. Empirical evidence from such syntactic alternation study can provide insights into how new varieties differ from the established ones. The present study aims at increasing contributions that show the nature of syntactic alternation from new Englishes such as Nigerian English, and how they differ from established varieties such as British English. Taking when adverbial construction in Nigerian English as a reference point (When Trump realised his reelection loss, he changed his political expectations versus Trump changed his political expectations when he realised his reelection loss), the study shows the extent to which previously tested factors influence the ordering of the construction and how they differ from findings reported in British English. Relying on corpus data, together with descriptive distributional analysis, the study shows that, unlike British English in which functional and cognitive factors strongly influence structural patterning, functional factors outweigh cognitive factors in Nigerian English.

Discourse Markers of French: Multifaceted Look at a Controversial Category

In this paper, we discuss the question of discourse markers (DM) – a category conceived differently by theoretical and applied linguistic approaches. Unlike in applied approaches, in which DMs are considered desemantized/grammaticalized lexical units devoid of their own semantics and therefore of status in the language, we consider DMs to constitute a full-fledged category of language, having its own semantics and distribution, both of which play a crucial role in the construction of discourse (Paillard 2011, 2012; Franckel 2008, 2019). This hypothesis has been developed in theoretical linguistics and has seen little evidence from a perspective of the acquisition and didactics of foreign languages. Based on cross-analysis of linguistic theories (Benveniste 1974; Ducrot 1980; Hopper & Traugott 1993; Culioli 1990,1999; Franckel & Paillard 2008) and on distributional analysis of data of the spoken corpora, we show that the absence of specific linguistic status for DMs has repercussions at the didactic and acquisition levels: DMs are generally approached in an ad hoc manner, all functions combined, which leads on the one hand to gaps in the acquisition of French and, on the other hand, to the ambiguity of criteria for evaluation. Therefore, at the level of applied linguistics, we suggest the integration of DMs in the learning path as a full category, an integration that must be carried out on several axes – semantic, syntax and prosodic – and be based on an authentic oral corpora of the spoken language. At the theoretical level, we use transversal analysis in order to give yet another argument in favor of a semantical-enunciative approach to discursive markers.

The Modal Particles in the Storybook 原我这么棒 Yuánlái Wύ Zhème Bàng By Li Huizhen Partikel Modalitas dalam Buku Cerita 原来我这么棒 Yuánlái Wǒ Zhème Bàng Karya Li Huizhen

Particles in Mandarin can be divided into three kinds, namely structural, aspectual, and modality or modal particles. The particles have their own functions, as well as having grammatical meanings. This article discusses the particles of modality in the children's storybook entitled原我这么棒(Yuánlái Wύ Zhème Bàng) 'I'm So Great' by Li Huizhen. Particles of modality are widely used in the context of the conversation in the storybook, namely 啊 a, 吧 ba, 啦la, 了le, 啰luo, 吗ma, 嘛ma, 哪na, 呢ne, 呀ya, 哟yo. Through distributional analysis methods, as well as with the technique of evaporation and transfer analysis, the modality particles can be matched with phatic particles in Indonesian, such as 'ya', 'lah', 'sih', 'lho', and 'dong' which are generally located behind sentences, and some behind clauses. However, the meaning of the particles is uncertain and unsteady because each depends on the context of the sentence or the meaning of the sentence. The presence of modality particles in a sentence can change the meaning of a sentence, its type of sentence, or its language function.