relative clauses
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Author(s):  
Chisato Kitagawa ◽  
Shigeru Miyagawa

Grosu & Hoshi (2019:20), in their rejoinder to Kitagawa (2019), propose that apparent violations of island constraints in the so-called internally-headed relative clauses are accounted for by considering them as reduced doubly-headed relative clauses. This paper shows that this claim by Grosu and Hoshi is not empirically sustainable, and further that it misses the discourse function of doubly-headed relative clauses. A discussion of gapless light-headed externally-headed relative clauses is also presented so as to identify how this construction type interrelates with internally-headed relative clauses and doubly-headed relative clauses.


2022 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanne Paradis ◽  
Tamara Sorenson Duncan ◽  
Stephanie Thomlinson ◽  
Brian Rusk

Over-identification of language disorder among bilingual children with typical development (TD) is a risk factor in assessment. One strategy for improving assessment accuracy with bilingual children is to determine which linguistic sub-domains differentiate bilingual children with TD from bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD). To date, little research on sequential bilinguals with TD and DLD has focussed on complex (multi-clausal) sentences in naturalistic production, even though this is a noted domain of weakness for school-age monolinguals with DLD. Accordingly, we sought to determine if there were differences in the use of complex sentences in conversational and narrative tasks between school-age sequential bilinguals with TD and with DLD at the early stages of L2 acquisition. We administered a conversation and a narrative task to 63 English L2 children with TD and DLD, aged 5–7 years with 2 years of exposure to the L2. Children had diverse first language backgrounds. The L2-TD and L2-DLD groups were matched for age, length of L2 exposure and general L2 proficiency (receptive vocabulary size). Language samples from both tasks were coded and analyzed for the use of complex versus simple sentences, for the distribution of complex sentence types, for clausal density and mean length of utterance (MLU). Complex sentences included coordinated clauses, sentential complement clauses, adverbial clauses and relative clauses. Using regression modelling and PERMANOVA, we found that the L2-TD group produced more complex sentences than the L2-DLD group, with coordinated clauses, adverbial clauses and relative clauses differing the most between the groups. Furthermore, the two groups differed for mean clausal density, but not for MLU, indicating that clausal density and MLU did not estimate identical morphosyntactic abilities. Individual variation in complex sentence production for L2-TD was predicted by longer L2 exposure and task; by contrast, for L2-DLD, it was predicted by older age. This study indicates that complex sentence production is an area of weakness for bilingual children with DLD, as it is for monolinguals with DLD. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed.


2022 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-214
Author(s):  
Arti Prihatini ◽  
Fauzan Fauzan ◽  
Fida Pangesti

This study was intended to describe (1) the characteristics of the argument bar movement in relative clauses, (2) the characteristics of the relative clause structure, and (3) the suitability of the relative clause structure produced by BIPA students. This research was a qualitative descriptive case study. This research data were relative clauses sourced from BIPA students' speeches at the beginner and intermediate levels at the University of Muhammadiyah Malang. The data collection method used was the listening method with tapping, recording, note-taking, and hidden fishing techniques. Data analysis was carried out by identifying the predication-argument relationship with theta theory, identifying the deep structure and surface structure, analyzing movement objectives, movement traces, and movement consequences by utilizing the subjacency condition theory. The results showed that the characteristics of the argument bar movement in the relative clauses generated by 92% of BIPA students were in the form of short movements and did not exceed one bounding node. Based on the Indonesian language rules, most of the relative clauses produced by BIPA students were appropriate (75%). It shows that BIPA students have fully understood the relative clause structure.


2022 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 221
Author(s):  
Ido Benbaji

Szabó (2010, 2011) argues that DPs in intensional contexts have specific-opaque readings, in which their determiner scopes above some intensional operator while their restrictor is nevertheless interpreted in the scope of the operator. This poses a potential problem to prominent theories of intensionality (e.g. Percus 2000, Keshet 2008) in which wide quantificational scope (specificity) implies transparency. We attempt to restrict the scope of the problem by demonstrating that an important sub-class of Szabó's examples is syntactically restricted to relativization environments, and can be generated by invoking independently motivated mechanisms for NP reconstruction into relative clauses without calling into question commonly made assumptions about intensional constructions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
Mirjam Premrl Podobnik

The article focuses on the relationship between postmodifiers in the form of noun phrases, relative and content clauses, and the use of articles or pro-adjectives in the nominal heads. The results of a qualitative analysis of Slovene and Italian texts and their translations into Italian and Slovene are presented, the main purpose of which was to identify markers of definiteness in Slovene and to predict the use of articles in Italian, thus showing the possibilities for Slovenes to express themselves appropriately in Italian. Assuming that definiteness is a universal category and therefore recognisable also in languages without articles (Slovene), and considering the author and the translator ideal speakers of Slovene and/or Italian, the Slovene texts served as the starting point of each analysis, while the Italian texts played the role of control. An article use is defined as cataphoric if the content of the postmodifier contributes to the definite interpretation of its head. Subordinate noun phrases can be divided into conceptual and argumentative. In Italian, the former, expressing a non-entity, are marked by a zero article and form a semantic unit with their heads, whereas the latter, expressing an entity, are marked by an article (included the zero one) and do not form a semantic unit with their heads. Related to definiteness is the restrictiveness of the clause, which consists in the article or pro-adjective determining the head including its postmodifier. Such heads can be both definite or indefinite. The analyses have shown instances of relative clauses that are placed between restrictive and non-restrictive ones. Conveying descriptive information, they occur after the heads preceded by an indefinite article. The definiteness of nominal heads preceded by a pro-adjective or without a determiner in Slovene texts is also discussed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angel Chan ◽  
Stephen Matthews ◽  
Nicole Tse ◽  
Annie Lam ◽  
Franklin Chang ◽  
...  

Emergentist approaches to language acquisition identify a core role for language-specific experience and give primacy to other factors like function and domain-general learning mechanisms in syntactic development. This directly contrasts with a nativist structurally oriented approach, which predicts that grammatical development is guided by Universal Grammar and that structural factors constrain acquisition. Cantonese relative clauses (RCs) offer a good opportunity to test these perspectives because its typologically rare properties decouple the roles of frequency and complexity in subject- and object-RCs in a way not possible in European languages. Specifically, Cantonese object RCs of the classifier type are frequently attested in children’s linguistic experience and are isomorphic to frequent and early-acquired simple SVO transitive clauses, but according to formal grammatical analyses Cantonese subject RCs are computationally less demanding to process. Thus, the two opposing theories make different predictions: the emergentist approach predicts a specific preference for object RCs of the classifier type, whereas the structurally oriented approach predicts a subject advantage. In the current study we revisited this issue. Eighty-seven monolingual Cantonese children aged between 3;2 and 3;11 (Mage: 3;6) participated in an elicited production task designed to elicit production of subject- and object- RCs. The children were very young and most of them produced only noun phrases when RCs were elicited. Those (nine children) who did produce RCs produced overwhelmingly more object RCs than subject RCs, even when animacy cues were controlled. The majority of object RCs produced were the frequent classifier-type RCs. The findings concur with our hypothesis from the emergentist perspectives that input frequency and formal and functional similarity to known structures guide acquisition.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naama Friedmann ◽  
Julia Reznick

This study explored the order of acquisition of various types of syntactic-movement and embedding structures in Hebrew, using a sentence-repetition task, in which 60 children aged 2;2-3;10 repeated 80 sentences (with a total of 4800 sentences), and an analysis of the spontaneous speech of 61 children aged 1;6-6;1 (27,696 clauses). The sentence repetition task revealed a set order of acquisition of the various types of syntactic movement: A-movement is acquired first, then A-bar-movement, and finally movement of the verb to C. The analysis of spontaneous speech revealed the same order: A-movement of the object of unaccusative verbs to subject position appears first, together with simple SV sentences; then, wh-questions appear, then relative clauses and topicalization, which appear together with embedding of finite clauses, and lastly, V-to-C movement. Previous studies have shown that Hebrew speakers under age six have difficulty comprehending and producing sentences with A-bar-movement in which a lexically-restricted object crosses over a lexically-restricted subject. And indeed, whereas children produced A-bar structures very early (wh-questions from age 1;6, relative-clauses and topicalization from age 2;6), until age 5;8 these structures never included a lexical DP crossing over another lexical DP. Both tasks indicated that the order of structure acquisition is fixed, creating Guttman scales between structures, but different children acquire the same structure at very different ages. It seems that whereas the syntactic path and the stages of structure acquisition along it are constant between children, each child walks this path in their own pace.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
METIN BAGRIACIK ◽  
LIEVEN DANCKAERT

This paper studies the structure and origin of prenominal and postnominal restrictive relative clauses in Pharasiot Greek. Though both patterns are finite and introduced by the invariant complementizer tu, they differ in two important respects. First, corpus data reveal that prenominal relatives are older than their postnominal counterparts. Second, in the present-day language only prenominal relatives involve a matching derivation, whereas postnominal ones behave like Head-raising structures. Turning to diachrony, we suggest that prenominal relatives came into being through morphological fusion of a determiner t- with an invariant complementizer u. This process entailed a reduction of functional structure in the left periphery of the relative clause, to the effect that the landing site for a raising Head was suppressed, leaving a matching derivation as the only option. Postnominal relatives are analyzed as borrowed from Standard Modern Greek. Our analysis corroborates the idea that both raising and matching derivations for relatives must be acknowledged, sometimes even within a single language.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026765832110635
Author(s):  
Ian Cunnings ◽  
Hiroki Fujita

Relative clauses have long been examined in research on first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition and processing, and a large body of research has shown that object relative clauses (e.g. ‘The boy that the girl saw’) are more difficult to process than subject relative clauses (e.g. ‘The boy that saw the girl’). Although there are different accounts of this finding, memory-based factors have been argued to play a role in explaining the object relative disadvantage. Evidence of memory-based factors in relative clause processing comes from studies indicating that representational similarity influences the difficulty associated with object relatives as a result of a phenomenon known as similarity-based interference. Although similarity-based interference has been well studied in L1 processing, less is known about how it influences L2 processing. We report two studies – an eye-tracking experiment and a comprehension task – investigating interference in the comprehension of relative clauses in L1 and L2 readers. Our results indicated similarity-based interference in the processing of object relative clauses in both L1 and L2 readers, with no significant differences in the size of interference effects between the two groups. These results highlight the importance of considering memory-based factors when examining L2 processing.


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