Going Native? Yes, If Allowed by Cross-Linguistic Similarity

Can native competence be achieved in a second language? Here, we focus on the Language Distance Hypothesis that claims that early and proficient bilinguals can achieve native competence for grammatical properties shared by their two languages, whereas unshared grammatical properties pose a challenge for native-like syntactic processing. We present a novel behavioral and Event-Related Potential (ERP) study where early and proficient bilinguals behave native-like in their second language when processing (a) argument structure alternations in intransitive sentences involving agent vs. patient subjects and (b) subject verb agreement, both of which are grammatical properties shared by their two languages of these bilinguals. Compared to native Basque bilinguals (L2Spanish) on the same tasks, non-natives elicited similar sentence processing measures: (a) in the acceptability task they reacted faster and more accurately to unaccusative sentences than to unergatives and to person than number violations: (b) they generated a larger P600 for agreement violations in unaccusative sentences than unergatives; (c) they generated larger negativity and positivity effects for person than for number violations. Previous studies on Basque-Spanish bilinguals find that early and proficient non-natives display effects distinct from natives in both languages when processing grammatical properties where Basque and Spanish diverge, such as argument alignment (ergative/nominative) or word order type (OV/VO), but they perform native-like for shared properties such as subject agreement and word meaning. We contend that language distance, that is, the degree of similarity of the languages of the bilingual is a crucial factor that deserves further and detailed attention to advance our understanding of when and how bilinguals can go native in a second language.

Infinitival Clauses in the Romance Languages

“Infinitival clauses” are constructions with a clausal status whose predicate is an infinitive. Romance infinitive clauses are mostly dependent clauses and can be divided into the following types: argumental infinitival clauses (such as subject and object clauses, the latter also including indirect interrogatives), predicative infinitival clauses, infinitival adjunct clauses, infinitival relative clauses, and nominalized infinitive clauses (with a determiner). More rarely, they appear as independent (main) clauses (root infinitival clauses) of different types, which usually have a marked character. Whereas infinitival adjunct clauses are generally preceded by prepositions, which can be argued to be outside the infinitival clause proper (i.e., the clause is part of a prepositional phrase), Romance argumental infinitive clauses are often introduced by complementizers that are diachronically derived from prepositions, mostly de/di and a/à. In most Romance languages, the infinitive itself is morphologically marked by an ending containing the morpheme {r} but lacks tense and agreement morphemes. However, some Romance languages have developed an infinitive that can be inflected for subject agreement (which is found in Portuguese, Galician, and Sardinian and also attested in Old Neapolitan). Romance languages share the property of English and other languages to leave the subject of infinitive clauses unexpressed (subject/object control, arbitrary control, and optional control) and also have raising and accusative-and-infinitive constructions. A special property of many Romance languages is the possibility of overtly expressing a nominative subject in infinitival clauses, mostly in postverbal position. The tense of the infinitive clause is usually interpreted as simultaneous or anterior to that of the matrix clause, but some matrix predicates and infinitive constructions trigger a posteriority/future reading. In addition, some Romance infinitive clauses are susceptible to constraints concerning aspect and modality.

Ergativity in Indo-Aryan

Case and agreement patterns that are present in Old, Middle, and New Indo-Aryan languages have been argued to require the following perspective: since ergative case marking and ergative (object) agreement in these languages are historically tied to having originated from the past perfective morphological marker ta, they can only be fully understood from a perspective that factors in this development. Particular attention is given to the waxing and waning of ergative properties in Late Middle Indo-Aryan and New Indo-Aryan, which give rise to recurring dissociation of case and agreement; specifically, object agreement in the absence of ergative case marking is attested in Kutchi Gujarati and Marwari, whereas ergative case marking without object agreement is present in Nepali. With regard to case, recent insights show that “ergative/accusative” may be regularly semantically/pragmatically conditioned in Indo-Aryan (so-called differential case marking). Pertaining to agreement, a central theoretical question is whether “ergative” object agreement should be analyzed uniformly with subject agreement or, alternatively, as a type of participle agreement—drawing on synchronic parallels between Indo-Aryan and Romance.

Resilient Subject Agreement Morpho-Syntax in the Germanic Romance Contact Area

In this work, we intend to investigate one fundamental aspect of language contact by comparing the distribution of subjects in German, Northern Italian dialects and Cimbrian. Here, we show that purely syntactic order phenomena are more prone to convergence, i.e., less resilient, while phenomena that have a clearly identifiable morphological counterpart are more resilient. The empirical domain of investigation for our analysis is the morphosyntax of both nominal and pronominal subjects, the agreement pattern and their position in Cimbrian grammar. While agreement patterns display a highly conservative paradigm, the syntax of nominal (vP-peripheral and topicalized) subjects is innovative and mimics the Italian linear word order.

The Bantu relative agreement cycle

This article presents the Bantu relative agreement (BRA) cycle, a scenario of recurrent morphosyntactic change that involves the emergence of relativizers, which are subsequently integrated into the relative verb form, where they can ultimately replace the original subject agreement prefix. All logical outcomes at every stage of the cycle are amply attested in the languages of the Bantu family. The BRA cycle makes sense of many of the puzzling characteristics of relative clause constructions in the Bantu languages, especially in the domain of agreement.

Reflexive constructions in German, Spanish, and French as a product of cyclic interaction

German sich and Spanish se can have reflexive or anticausative interpretations but only Spanish se can have a passive interpretation. We argue that Spanish Passse is the result of interaction between the subject agreement cycle and the reflexive object cycle. We make two claims: i) pro merges in Spec-Voice in Passse, due to the subject agreement cycle; and ii) se heads Voice due to the reflexive cycle. The types of reflexive constructions a language has depends on the presence/absence of pro and the categorial status of the reflexive pronoun (head or DP). French appears problematic since it has Passse but lacks subject pro. However, Passse existed in Old French (Cennamo 1993), which was a null subject language (Vance 1997). Thus, French is consistent with this claim; i.e., it developed Passse when it had subject pro and se as a head. Passse survived into Modern French as a historical remnant.

Loci of agreement and deviations from the Mirror Principle in Hungarian verbs

In this revised account of Hungarian verbal agreement, I propose that the language’s locus of subject agreement is not T, unlike in current Minimalist analyses, but Pred (or Asp), just above direct object agreement in v. Furthermore, the surface linear order of affixes (stem – tense/mood – object agreement – subject agreement) does not conform to the hierarchical order of syntactic heads (V < v < Pred < T/M), thus violating the Mirror Principle, because local dislocation in postsyntactic morphology adjusts the initial linearization of the heads.

Lexical and Structural Ambiguity in Machine Translation: An Analytical Study

The aim of this study is to investigate the difficulties facing Machine Translation (Google) particularly those related to lexis and structure. The researcher has chosen randomly two English and two Arabic texts about various sorts of translation: Media, Scientific, General and Economic. They were taken from several sources (websites, magazine.) to be translated automatically (Google) and humanly from Arabic to English and vice versa. Then they were analyzed to see the challenges that face Machine Translation (Google). The results of the study indicate that MT is problematic and has many challenges concerning lexis such as (Deletions, non-vocalizations, multiple meanings, collocations, additions and acronyms) and syntax like: word order, verb-subject agreement, passive voice etc. On the basis of the results of the study, the researcher recommended that further work needs to be done to create a system that comprises syntax, morphology and semantics of all languages.

Aurelia Mallya: Locative-subject alternation constructions in Kiwoso

Locative subject alternation constructions show variation within and across languages in terms of subject agreement pattern and the type of predicates involved. In Kiwoso, the preverbal locative DPs with and without locative morphology are best analysed as canonical subjects, as evidenced by the subject diagnostics, such as subject-verb agreement and its occurrence as a subject of passive verb and relative verb clauses. The examined examples demonstrate that the postverbal subject neither behaves like canonical subject nor shows features of canonical object in that it cannot passivize in alternation constructions or appear on the verb as an object marker (i.e., cannot be object marked). However, there is strong evidence to suggest that the preverbal locative (subject) DP in Kiwoso locative-subject alternation constructions is a grammatical subject. As in most languages, locative-subject constructions in Kiwoso serve a pragmatic-discourse function of presentational focus. The locative subject argument of the locative-subject alternation constructions is interpreted as a topic, whereas the postverbal thematic subject of these sentences is understood as focus. The postverbal subject provides information which is usually discourse new in relation to preverbal locative DPs. The data examined from Kiwoso challenges the view that formal and semantic locative inversions cannot co-exist in a single language.