A parametric approach to the acquisition of syntax

Three case-studies, using longitudinal records of children's spontaneous speech, illustrate what happens when a child's syntax changes. The first, examining acquisition of English verb-particle constructions, shows a near-total absence of commission errors. The second, examining acquisition of prepositional questions in English or Spanish, shows that children (i) may go as long as 9 months producing both direct-object questions and declaratives with prepositional phrases, before first attempting a prepositional question; and (ii) at some point, abrubtly begin producing prepositional questions that are correctly formed for the target language. The third case study shows that in children acquiring English, the onset of verb-particle constructions occurs almost exactly when that child begins using novel noun-noun compounds. After a discussion of the implications for the nature of syntactic knowledge, and for the mechanisms by which it is acquired, two examples are presented of as-yet untested acquisitional predictions of parametric proposals in the syntax literature.

A Corpus-Based Research on Ditransitive Constructions with Tell and Say

Learners’ errors give insights to teachers, textbook writers, curriculum designers and many applied linguists about the learning difficulty in the acquisition of a target language. Studying systematically these errors is therefore considered indispensable in learning teaching process. Basing on the corpus-based model, this paper investigates the constructions of two ditransitive verbs: TELL and SAY which cause much trouble to second language learners. After analysing the exam copies of 200 second-year students in the English department of Cheikh Anta DIOP University of Dakar, the study comes up with two general observations. First, the analysis of the overall data shows that learners of the corpus largely prefer using TELL (62, 5%) to SAY (14, 5%). The second observation is, these students use more correctly the ditransitive form involving TELL than SAY. For instance, 79, 2% of them employ TELL in the double object construction corresponding to the basic structure TELL + someone + something, while only 5,1% correctly use the dative construction of SAY which is SAY + something + to + someone. These findings conform to several studies which claim that the dative form is the most complicated construction, and is consequently the rarely used one. All of this indicates, that even if these students are English majors, they are still in their basic level in the acquisition of ditransitive constructions. This suggests that special strategies and mechanisms are required in teaching and learning ditransitive verbs. More efforts are also needed in teaching and learning constructions in grammar (e.g. alternating pairs like Passive /Active, Will /Be going to, Verb-particle constructions etc.). This will help students become more accurate in using English, the target language.

roles of efficiency and complexity in the processing of verb particle constructions

Recent theories have proposed that processing difficulty affects both individuals’ choice of grammatical structures and the distribution of these structures across languages of the world (Hawkins, 2004). Researchers have proposed that performance constraints, such as efficiency, integration, and storage costs, drive languages to choose word orders that minimize processing demands for individual speakers (Hawkins, 1994; Gibson, 2000). This study investigates how three performance factors, adjacency, dependency, and complexity, affect reading times for sentences with verb-particle constructions. Results from a self-paced reading task indicate that reading times increase with each performance factor, such that shifted sentences, more dependent verb-particle constructions, and more complex noun phrases are more difficult. More importantly, I explore the relative weightings and interactions of the performance factors. The results support the notion that processing ease affects grammaticalization, such that those structures which are more easily processed by individuals (subject relatives and adjacent dependent constituents) are also more common crosslinguistically (Keenan & Hawkins, 1987).

Esistono verbi sintagmatici in arabo standard?

This study aims to show that verb-particle constructions exist in standard Arabic. The first part deals with verb-particle constructions in Italian, that are verbal constructions formed by a verbal base and a locative particle (e.g. venire giù’, lit. “come down”, “to come down, to descend”; “portare via” lit. “take away”, “to take away”; “mettere sotto” lit. “put under”, “to put (something) under, to run over”). In the second part, we have analyzed the semantic properties of Arabic post-verbal particles. We conducted the study in the newspaper al-Ahrām between 2006 and 2012. We collected fortyseven verb-particle constructions in which the incidence of the particle on the lexical semantics of the verb was found to confirm the existence of verb-particle constructions in standard Arabic.

Underuse of English verb–particle constructions in an L2 learner corpus: Focus on structural patterns and one-word preference

This study analyzes English verb–particle constructions (VPC) in a learner and a native corpus of argumentative essays, focusing on two important factors: structural patterns of VPCs and preference for one-word verbs (e. g.,delayvs.put off). The results showed that while every structural type of VPC was significantly underused by L2 learners, greater underuse was observed with discontinuous transitive VPCs (e. g.,bring it back). In addition, the frequency of the most underused VPCs in the learner corpus was significantly lower than that of their one-word synonyms, indicating the learners’ strong preference for one-word verbs. Identifying these specific areas of difficulty when learning VPCs, the author explores how contrastive linguistic analyses and corpus-based quantitative approaches can collaboratively contribute to the investigation of complex interlanguage systems.

Verb-particle constructions in Cognitive Linguistics perspective: Compositionality behind selected English phrasal verbs

The developments in Cognitive Linguistics have made it possible to uncover multiple meanings of composite structures to the effect that more and more scholars have become interested in the issue of semantic relations in verb-particle constructions. With only a handful of those focusing on both elements of such constructions, many of them have directed their research towards the study of particles exclusively. The current paper aims to advance the study on phrasal verbs by offering a new outlook on their compositional nature. In order to achieve a desired aim, the principle of partial compositionality is adopted here. Hence, apart from focusing on both the verb and the particle, the senses that go beyond those comprising the composite parts receive considerable attention in this study. The phrasal verbs singled out for the purpose of the analysis include: get and take with selected spatial-orientational particles.