L2 effects on L1 in foreign language learners: An exploratory study on object pronouns and verb placement in wh-questions in Polish

This study investigates L2 effects on L1 grammar in foreign language learners. As partof a cross-sectional study, 25 Polish native speakers learning English and German, and16 Polish monolingual speakers participated in an acceptability judgment test in Polish The test involved two grammatical phenomena: anaphoric object pronouns which lie at thesyntax-pragmatics interface, and verb placement in wh-questions, which is a propertyof narrow syntax. The analysis shows that multilingual learners accepted overt anaphoricobject pronouns in a sentence-internal position significantly more frequently than monolingual speakers from the control group. Object pronouns in the native language seem to bean element open to the influence of a foreign language, in contrast to linguistic propertieswhich are solely syntactic. This study thus confirms that interface phenomena are moreprone to cross-linguistic influence than purely syntactic features, but it also extends thisthesis to include L2 effect on L1

Negation and Pronoun Position as a way of investigating verb movement and the emergence of do support during Early Modern English

This paper presents an analysis of the rise of do support and the gradual loss of verb movement during the period of Early Modern English. The analysis focuses on studying the structures in which do support was first used as an alternative to verb raising to I. It takes into consideration the analysis of the relationship between the position of the negation marker not in negative interrogative structures and the position of the subject and the object pronouns in these structures. The analysed structures are negative interrogatives taken from Shakespeare’s works in the period of Early Modern English. The results of the data analysis show that in most cases, there is do support when the subject pronouns are above negation, while there is no do support when object pronouns appear above negation. This suggests that do was first inserted here to avoid object raising with the verb to I or to C to avoid putting object and subject pronouns in subsequent positions.

Children’s Pronoun Interpretation Problems Are Related to Theory of Mind and Inhibition, But Not Working Memory

In several languages, including English and Dutch, children’s acquisition of the interpretation of object pronouns (e.g., him) is delayed compared to that of reflexives (e.g., himself). Various syntactic and pragmatic explanations have been proposed to account for this delay in children’s acquisition of pronoun interpretation. This study aims to provide more insight into this delay by investigating potential cognitive mechanisms underlying this delay. Dutch-speaking children between 6 and 12 years old with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 47), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; n = 36) or typical development (TD; n = 38) were tested on their interpretation and production of object pronouns and reflexives and on theory of mind, working memory, and response inhibition. It was found that all three groups of children had difficulty with pronoun interpretation and that their performance on pronoun interpretation was associated with theory of mind and inhibition. These findings support an explanation of object pronoun interpretation in terms of perspective taking, according to which listeners need to consider the speaker’s perspective in order to block coreference between the object pronoun and the subject of the same sentence. Unlike what is predicted by alternative theoretical accounts, performance on pronoun interpretation was not associated with working memory, and the children made virtually no errors in their production of object pronouns. As the difficulties with pronoun interpretation were similar for children with ASD, children with ADHD and typically developing children, this suggests that certain types of perspective taking are unaffected in children with ASD and ADHD.

Acquisition of Object Pronouns in EFL in Germany by Heritage Speakers of Turkish

Summary L3 acquisition has begun to attract the attention of many scholars in recent years. Heritage contexts are especially fruitful areas to understand how linguistic and nonlinguistic mechanisms interact with one another. The current study focuses on L3 English acquisition of object pronouns with L1 Turkish, L2 German speakers. We seek to find out whether the speakers could produce object pronouns accurately, whether L3 English proficiency has any effects on their acquisition, and finally, whether all object pronouns are acquired in the same way. Data for this study come from a corpus consisting of written and oral productions of 167 participants, who were students in four distinct grades, namely 5th, 7th, 10th and 12th graders at different schools in Berlin, Germany. The results reveal that participants were highly meticulous in their object pronoun use. Also, no clear L1 effect was observed, while L2 impact is implied. Lastly, proficiency and linguistic features are noted as significant factors that have an impact on L3 acquisition.

Personal pronouns in Bua languages

Bua languages in general are poorly documented and many aspects of their morphosyntax are still undescribed. The purpose of this paper is to outline a state of the art concerning the structure and operation of the personal pronoun systems. Largely based on unpublished or restricted documentation, it systematically reviews the systems of eight languages, commenting on both the identity of persons and the types of functional paradigms. Despite numerous shortcomings and uncertainties, interesting observations can be made concerning the 1st person plural ‘exclusive’/‘inclusive’ contrast, the logophoric pronouns, the tonal polarity of Subject and Object pronouns, and different types of personal possessive constructions.

The position of object pronouns in the German middlefield

This paper presents a corpus study of the position of object pronouns relative to a non-pronominal subject in embedded clauses of German. A total of 4322 embedded clauses from the deWaC corpus (Baroni, Marco, Silvia Bernardini, Adriano Ferraresi & Eros Zanchetta. 2009. The WaCky Wide Web: A collection of very large linguistically processed web-crawled corpora. Language Resources and Evaluation Journal 23(3). 209–226), a corpus of written German Internet texts, were analyzed. In 67.0% of all clauses, the object pronoun occurred in front of the subject. Several factors that have been proposed in the literature on word order alternations were found to govern the choice between subject–object and object–subject order in the corpus under investigation. The most important findings are: (i) The Extended Animacy Hierarchy and the Semantic Role Hierarchy independently contribute to the choice of word order. (ii) The Definiteness Hierarchy has a strong effect on the position of the object pronoun. (iii) Word order effects of constituent weight, measured as length in number of words, cannot be reduced to effects of grammatical factors, nor can effects of grammatical factors be reduced to effects of weight.

The effect of animacy on object pronoun distinctions in L2 Spanish

When acquiring Spanish object pronouns (OP), English-speaking second language (L2) learners must learn the variety of forms available, word order, and case distinctions. The acquisition of case distinctions in particular is an aspect that has not been thoroughly investigated. Zyzik (2006) showed, through production tasks, that English-speaking L2 Spanish learners overgeneralize the dative form to accusative contexts when the referent is animate. This study investigates how L2 learners use animacy (human, animal, and inanimate object) instead of case marking as cues to interpret and produce L2 Spanish object pronouns. Data from an interpretation task and a fill-in-the-blank production task were collected from 121 intermediate to advanced levels of Spanish learners. Results from linear mixed effects models reveal that learners show effects of the influence of animacy on object pronoun distinction in comprehension as well as production. A key new finding is that learners use the dative form with human referents, reserving accusative forms for animals and inanimate referents. These results provide evidence that animacy cues strongly influence L2 Spanish learners in the formation of their OP paradigm, especially at lower-proficiency levels. As proficiency increases, L2 learners begin to rely on case cues to distinguish Spanish OPs.