Showing papers in "Lingua in 2010"

TL;DR: The authors reported four experiments that test whether persistent problems of second-language learners with L2 inflection, such as case or subject-verb agreement, are the consequence of age-related grammatical impairment of L2 morphosyntax or differences in processing efficiency between natives and non-natives.

TL;DR: The authors investigated the role of language proficiency and working memory on adult L2 acquisition and found that adults with higher working memory were more accurate on some comprehension questions than those with lower working memory.

TL;DR: This paper showed that not all English adverbial clauses are compatible with argument fronting, and that Romance adverbs can resist French Stylistic Inversion and clitic left dislocation.

TL;DR: Studies showing a relationship between the relative frequency of forms in the input and children's errors, including morphological errors, optional infinitive errors and accusative-for-nominative errors in English are discussed.

TL;DR: This work investigated comprehension of center-embedded headed object RCs with Italian children, where Number and Gender feature values on subject and object DPs are manipulated, and found that, Number conditions are always more accurate than Gender ones, showing that intervention is sensitive to DP-internal structure.

TL;DR: Investigating 20 languages using treebanks with different sizes from 16 K to 1 million dependencies demonstrates that the proposed method based on dependency treebanks as a typological means is valid for positioning a language in the typological continuum and the resources from computational linguistics can also be used in language typology.

TL;DR: This article found that there are considerable differences in native language attainment and that these are at least partially attributable to individual speakers' experience, and that the order of difficulty of the four sentence types mirrored their frequency.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use agent-based computer simulations to investigate the dynamic properties of these network roles in a large social influence network, in which diffusion is modeled as the probabilistic uptake of one of several competing variants by agents of unequal social standing.

TL;DR: The authors investigated English-speaking 5-year-old children's and adults' production and evaluation of referring expressions and found that children do not over-inform as speakers but unlike adults, child comprehenders do not reject overinformative utterances when given a binary judgment choice.

TL;DR: A unified model of the grammatical representations that underlie language variation of both types is offered, confirming and extending Borer’s suggestion that language variation is ultimately a matter of the properties of the lexicon of functional categories.

TL;DR: A Strong Modularity Hypothesis for Discourse Features is proposed, according to which no discourse notion can be encoded by formal features, and movements corresponding to non-truth-conditional notions must thus be interface phenomena, rather than driven by a feature-checking mechanism.

TL;DR: This article argued that contrast cannot be satisfactorily defined from a semantic-pragmatic point of view for all the environments where contrast has been argued to occur, and argued that exhaustivity often accompanies contrast and vice versa but the two meaning components do not necessarily occur together.

TL;DR: The authors argue that the language sciences are on the brink of major changes in primary data, methods and theory, and propose a coevolutionary model of the interaction between mind and cultural linguistic traditions which puts variation central at all levels.

TL;DR: The authors showed that a single morpheme can lexicalize a "span" of heads rather than a single head in Nguni (Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele and Swati).

TL;DR: In this article, a linguistic investigation of four preschool-aged Italian children with SLI (4:5-5:9) using more than one linguistic modality, with the aim of analyzing their performance with relative clauses (subject and object relatives).

TL;DR: The utility of general learning mechanisms in the acquisition of the core grammatical system through frequency effects in parameter setting is demonstrated, and an optimization-based model of productivity with applications to morphology and syntax in the periphery is developed.

TL;DR: A corpus study of the order between subject and object in German main and embedded clauses found that object-subject (OS) sentences are rare in comparison to subject-object (SO) sentences, and two corpora were assembled.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present evidence for either the presence or absence of a production/comprehension asymmetry in child language acquisition, focusing on various areas of linguistics, ranging from phonology and syntax to semantics and pragmatics.

TL;DR: In the case of argument disambiguation, both Warlpiri and Gurindji use a case marking system, whereas Kriol relies on word order as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: The authors re-examine Merchant's arguments and show that some of them are orthogonal to the issue at hand, and that the remaining ones are compatible with the Last-Resort scenario adopted by the sluicing-as-cleft literature.

TL;DR: The authors reported results from psycholinguistic experiments (visual lexical decision, masked priming) examining the processing of derived German nouns with the nominalizing suffix -ung in adult native speakers of German and adult second language learners of German with Polish as L1.

TL;DR: The concept of optional case marking (OCM) as mentioned in this paper is defined as the situation in which, in specifiable grammatical environments, a case marking morpheme may be either present or absent from an NP without affecting the grammatical role borne by that NP.

TL;DR: This article showed that verb placement in German is determined by information-structural (IS-) conditions: the verb serves to separate the aboutness topic from the rest of the clause (the comment).

TL;DR: This article investigated the second language acquisition (L2A) of scalar implicatures (Grice, 1989 and Horn, 1972), which are based on a range of quantifiers ordered in terms of informational strength: some … most … all.

TL;DR: This article investigated whether German 3-to 4-year-olds take advantage of the information provided by the verb inflection in sentence comprehension and found that children did not perform above chance level.

TL;DR: This paper proposed a condition on saturating Chinese gradable adjectives through which the bifurcated use of the unmarked form of Chinese gradably adjectives can be well captured.

TL;DR: The authors argued that the notion of emphasis has to be part of the grammar of German and demonstrated that in German, Ā-movement to the left periphery of a declarative clause is associated with a conventional implicature which encodes the emphatic interpretation of the moved item.

TL;DR: It is shown that BNs in object position are not singular, and do not denote individual entities, either object-level individuals or kinds, which conveys a number-neutral (NN) interpretation that is compatible with atomicity as well as non-atomicity entailments.

TL;DR: It is argued that VOS order is not base-generated, as is commonly proposed within Mayan linguistics, but instead is the result of phrasal fronting of the predicate to the specifier of TP, and this analysis receives empirical support from the placement of certain adverbs and PPs.

TL;DR: This paper argued that Spanish main clause reports must be analyzed as instances of quotative constructions, and that the latter must be represented as involving an underlying predication between a clausal constituent and a quotative predicate.