Efeitos do ensino explícito da gramática no desenvolvimento de diferentes tipos de propriedades em L2

The present study investigates the effects of explicit grammar teaching on the acquisition of a core syntactic property (the ungrammaticality of free inversion) and a syntax-discourse property (the unacceptability of locative inversion with informationally heavy verbs) by advanced and upper intermediate Portuguese learners of English. The study followed a pre-test/post-test design. Its results reveal that, at an upper intermediate level, explicit teaching did not have any effects on learners’ performance, regardless of the type of property. At an advanced level, in contrast, the teaching intervention resulted in gains in all cases. However, these gains were only maintained beyond the immediate teaching period when the target property was strictly syntactic. These findings indicate that the effectiveness of instruction depends on the stage of development at which learners are and on the type of target property. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed in detail.

Verb Phrase in Tamil

The verb phrase is built up of a verb, which is the head of the construction. Verb occurs as predicate in the rightmost position of a clause. As a predicate it selects arguments (Ex. Subject, Direct object, Indirect object and Locative NPs) and assigns case to its arguments and adverbial adjuncts. Another syntactic property of verbs in Tamil is that they can govern subordinate verb forms. Verb occurring as finite verbs in clause final position can be complemented by non-finite verbs proceeding them. The latter with respect to the interpretation of tense or subject governs these non-finite forms, being subordinate to the finite verb form. If we follow the traditional idea of having a VP node for Tamil, then all the elements, except the subject NP, will have to be grouped under VP.

The structure of Num+CL in the Zhōutún dialect

The structure of Num+CL in the Zhōutún dialect can be divided into two kinds: VCP and NCP. The VCP in VCP+V is the adverbial, while the NCP can either precede or follow the N it modifies. In NCP+N, the NCP is the attribute; however, in N+NCP, the NCP can be the post-attribute and the adverbial, according to the syntactic property of N. The language contact of the Zhōutún dialect with Amdo Tibetan (AT) plays a role in leading to the peculiarities of Num+CL in the Zhōutún dialect.

Sujeitos nulos em inglês L2

The present article investigates the acquisition of a core syntactic property – the ungrammaticality of null subjects in English – by advanced and near-native learners whose first languages are European Portuguese (EP), a null subject language, and French, a non-null subject language. Two experimental tasks were used: an untimed drag-and-drop task and a speeded acceptability judgement task. Results show that French speakers behave target-like across all tasks and conditions, but EP speakers do not. At an advanced level, they fail to reject expletive and [-animate] null subjects in the speeded task. Crucially, at a near native level, EP speakers behave fully target-like across all conditions and tasks. These findings indicate that the syntax of subjects may exhibit significant developmental delays depending on first-second language combinations, but is completely acquirable. Developmental problems are argued to result from the misanalysis of (some of) the overt expletive subjects in the L2 input. This proposal is supported by an exploratory follow-up experiment, whose results are presented and discussed in the article.

A note on the emotive origins of syntax

In this note, I ask what (if any) linguistic means above the word level might have already been in place before our full-blown syntactic capacity involving recursive Merge has evolved. I argue that the ‘pre-Merge era’ might have been characterized by paratactic emotive utterances comparable to root small clauses in modern languages. At the end of this contribution, this new emotive perspective on so-called ‘living linguistic fossils’ is extended to the core syntactic property of displacement, which features an augmentation strategy in the form of multiple copies that is reminiscent of doubling and reduplication processes involved in conveying expressive meaning components.

Lexical Inferencing in Newspaper Columns: An Introspective Study

The significance of vocabulary in second or foreign language cannot be denied. The study explores the knowledge sources used by ESL learners in generating the meanings of the unknown words found in the columns of a daily Dawn. The study also investigates the effect of text length and syntactic property of unknown words in the inferential behaviors of learners. The participants of the study were chosen randomly from BS English, Govt. Emerson College, Multan. The amended taxonomy of knowledge sources and clues given by Bengleil and Paribakht (2004) was used in the study. The inferences verbalized their thoughts while guessing the meanings of the unknown words. The higher group was more successful in their guessing than the lower group. The study also found out that text length and the syntactic property of an unknown word his impact on the process of lexical inferencing. The study recommends the strategy of lexical inferencing as it facilitates reading comprehension and enhances lexical knowledge of learners.

Comparing heritage speakers and late L2-learners of European Portuguese

This study compares the performance of Portuguese-German heritage children and adult L2 speakers of European Portuguese whose L1 is German with respect to two aspects of grammar, adverb placement and VP-ellipsis, which depend on a core syntactic property of the language, verb movement. The results show that both groups have acquired V-to-I and adverb placement, showing no influence of a V2 grammar. Performance in the VP-ellipsis task is more complex: heritage children produce VP-ellipsis at the level of controls, as opposed to L2 speakers; however, both L2 and heritage speakers show that cross-linguistic influence may produce a preference for pronoun substitution over VP-ellipsis in a task asking for redundancy resolution. Nevertheless, given that overall results show that heritage children perform at the level of L1 children, we take our results to support approaches to heritage bilingualism which suggest the development of an intact grammar in childhood.

Morphosyntactic property sets at the interface of inflectional morphology, syntax and semantics

The morphosyntactic property set associated with the syntactic node occupied by a word form is not invariably identical to the property set determining that word form’s inflection, as evidence from Bhojpuri, Turkish, Sanskrit and Hua shows. The difference between syntactic property sets and their corresponding morphological property sets may be represented as a property mapping relating two different kinds of paradigm: a lexeme L’s content paradigm specifies the range of property sets with which L may be associated in syntax ; its form paradigm specifies the (sometimes distinct) property sets that determine L’s inflectional realization. Thus, a language’s inflectional morphology doesn’t merely specify the realization of paradigm cells: it also specifies the sometimes nontrivial linkage of content with form at the interface of syntax and semantics with morphology.