Contrast, concessive meaning, and peripheries: A diachronic register study on Hungarian pedig meaning ‘but’ and ‘(al)though’

Does first language (L1) word order affect the processing of non-canonical but grammatical syntactic structures in second language (L2) comprehension? In the present study, we test whether L1-Spanish speakers of L2-Basque process subject–verb–object (SVO) and object–verb–subject (OVS) non-canonical word order sentences of Basque in the same way as Basque native speakers. Crucially, while OVS orders are non-canonical in both Spanish and Basque, SVO is non-canonical in Basque but is the canonical word order in Spanish. Our electrophysiological results showed that the characteristics of L1 affect the processing of the L2 even at highly proficient and early-acquired bilingual populations. Specifically, in the non-native group, we observed a left anterior negativity-like component when comparing S and O at sentence initial position and a P600 when comparing those elements at sentence final position. Those results are similar of those reported by Casado et al. (2005) for native speakers of Spanish indicating that L2-Basque speakers rely in their L1-Spanish when processing SVO–OVS word order sentences. Our results favored the competition model (MacWhinney, 1997).

Transfer-of-training effects with processing instruction have recently been reported in the literature. That is, L2 learners receive processing instruction on one particular linguistic item and, as a consequence of instruction, learners' performance improves not only on the particular linguistic item but on other linguistic items as well. The present study examines processing instruction on the Spanish passive, the word order of which places the patient in the grammatical role of subject in sentence initial position and the agent as the object of a preposition in sentence final position. The purpose of the study is to determine whether learners transfer the training they receive on processing the word order of passive sentences to their processing of sentences with anaphoric reference, specifically, accusative case pronouns for which the word order is O

Because the vocal cords are not resonating reeds, any regularity or near-regularity shown in the glottal pulsing rate reflects a high degree of fineness in neuromuscular control associated with phonation. In order to compare degrees of fine control over the muscles of phonation at different positions during the production of a sentence, an experimental sentence was selected (“After you go, ask Annie”), in which periods of continuous phonation (vowels) both preceded and followed periods of silence at sentence terminal and sentence medial positions. The greatest degree of irregularity in glottal pulsing rate occurred at sentence final position: The second greatest degree of glottal irregularity occurred at sentence initial position, amounting to approximately 25% of that encountered at sentence final position: Sentence medially, a degree of glottal irregularity, was encounting to a maximum of 12% of that encountered at sentence final position. The results suggest that fine control over the muscles of phonation during speech exhibits a rapid onset, then a period marked by a relatively steady degree of fineness, followed by a longer, more protracted period of decline and decay.

In this study, trans-consonantal vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Chinese is analyzed. The target words are in the form of ‘bV 1 .ba’, which are designed to occur on the sentence initial, medial and final positions, and the subjects are eight native speakers of standard Chinese. Vowel formants are examined at the onset, middle and offset points of the target vowel. Results show that trans-segmental coarticulation exists in Chinese, especially at the onset point of the target vowel. Coarticulation is more likely to occur on F 2 , and its effect is comparatively great on the sentence initial position.

The paper revisits Duffield’s (2007) (Duffield, Nigel. 2007. Aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure: Separating tense from assertion. Linguistics 45(4). 765–814) analysis of the correlation between the position of a ‘when’-phrase and the temporal reference of a bare sentence in Vietnamese. Bare sentences in Vietnamese, based on (Smith, Carlota S. & Mary S. Erbaugh. 2005. Temporal interpretation in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics 43(4). 713–756), are argued to obtain their temporal interpretation from their aspectual composition, and the default temporal reference: bounded events are located in the past, unbounded events at present. It is shown that the correlation so observed in when-questions is superficial, and is tied to the syntax and semantics of temporal modification and the requirement that temporal adverbials denoting future time is base generated in sentence-initial position, and past time adverbials in sentence-final position. A ‘when’-phrase, being temporally underspecified, obtains its temporal value from its base position. However, the correlation between word order and temporal reference in argument wh-questions and declaratives is factual, depending on whether the predicate-argument configuration allows for a telic interpretation or not. To be specific, it is dependent on whether the application of Generic Modification (Snyder, William. 2012. Parameter theory and motion predicates. In Violeta Demonte & Louise McNally (eds.), Telicity, change, and state. Acrosscategorial view of event structure, 279–299. Oxford: Oxford University Press) or accomplishment composition is realized. Canonical declaratives, and argument wh-questions, with telicity inducing material, license GM or accomplishment composition, yielding bounded events, hence past; by contrast, their non-canonical counterparts block GM or accomplishment composition, giving rise to unbounded event descriptions, hence non-past.

Sentence-level functional categories are the functional category with specific grammatical effects by the means of the whole-sentence, which usually include negative category, interrogative category and assumption category, etc. The categories in Irish all could be realized through adjoining operation device on sentence-initial position. The pre-predicate position usually coincides with sentenceinitial position under the influence of normative word-order in Irish, and thus it makes a difference to syntactic operation device on this position. However, at least to negative category, there is only the adjoining negation operation on sentence-initial position or pre-predicate position presently, and the operation taking up sentence-final position or the corpus using movement or reduplication has not been found. Keywords—sentence-level functional categories; irish; the susceptible position

There has been much discussion, mainly by Montague grammarians, of the fact that ‘transportation’ of adverbials affects use or semantic interpretation of perfect sentences. Consider, for example, the following perfect sentences: (1) with a durational PP in sentence-final position; (2) with a durational PP in sentence-initial position; and (3) with a durationalwh-phrase in sentence-initial position:(1) John has been in Tucson for two years.(2) For two years, John has been in Tucson.(3) How long has John been in Tucson?(4) (a) John has been in Tucson for two years up to now.(b) John was in Tucson for two years in the past.

The study examined the impact of two grammatical factors on marking Hebrew adjectives in agreement with plural nouns in adults with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) compared with peers without ADHD. Participants were 36 adult speakers of Hebrew, who were administered a judgment test of 144 sentences, each containing an adjective in agreement with a plural noun in one of three different syntactic configurations—predicative adjectives, attributive adjectives in sentence–initial position, and attributive adjectives in sentence–final position. Noun suffixes were regular, semiregular (ambiguous), and irregular. Findings showed that participants with ADHD displayed lower accuracy and longer response time compared with controls. As morphological and morpho-syntactic difficulty simultaneously increased, participants with ADHD were significantly more likely to perform less well compared with controls on both accuracy and speed. These findings indicate that adults with ADHD might be suffering from a linguistic impairment exacerbated under more cognitively and linguistically demanding conditions.

Old and Classic Portuguese had two positions for contrastive focus: one at the sentence initial position, followed by the verb, a ‘V2’ sort of pattern (XPVS), and one at the sentence final position, constituting the Romance post-verbal subject (V(XP)S). This paper analyzes the role of the copula in the innovations that occurred in Modern Portuguese focus structures: (a) the expansion of cleft constructions, from wh-clefts to that-clefts, (b) from inverse clefts to canonical clefts and (c) the reduction of that-clefts, a grammaticalization that affected only Brazilian Portuguese (BP). In European Portuguese (EP), XPVS and V(XP)S survive together with modern clefts while in BP clefts and reduced clefts took over the old constructions completely.

Effects of case marking and word order on syntactic parsing in Finnish were examined by registering readers’ eye fixation patterns while they read single sentences for comprehension. Target nouns appearing towards the beginning of the sentence took one of three grammatical roles: subject, object, or adverbial. The subject phrase in the sentence-initial position is the canonical order in Finnish, but the two other word orders are less frequent. In one experimental condition, the grammatical role of the target noun was signalled by a case inflection attached to the preceding adjective modifier; in the second condition this was not the case. The results showed a facilitation effect in sentence parsing due to case marking. Similarly, there was an effect of word order, where the canonical SVO order was associated with greater processing ease than were non-canonical word orders. The two factors interacted so that there was no effect of case marking for the SVO order, but a significant case marking effect for the two marked word orders. The same pattern of results showed up as both immediate and delayed effects. The results speak against the notion of head licensing proposed by Abney (1989) and Prichett (1991).

In the case of Breton, lots of attempts were made to determine its historically grown word order. Proposals in this regard range from VSO (Timm) over V2 (Schafer) to SVO (Varin). This paper shows that traditional Breton has a preference for V2 positioning within a VSO-type framework. Lower Sorbian is a language with a rich morphology and consequently shows a relatively flexible word order. However, in unmarked declarative sentences it is normally the subject which occurs in sentence-initial position whereas the verb does not seem to prefer any specific position. Having determined the word order in the traditional varieties of Breton and Lower Sorbian, an outlook will be given on potential changes of their actual word order under language contact.

norwegian cleft-sentences and their equivalents in lithuanian Summary The aim of this article is to provide an analysis of Norwegian cleft-sentences and their equivalents in Lithuanian from the Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP). The material for this study has been collected from Lithuanian-Norwegian and Norwegian-Lithuanian translations of fiction. In Scandinavian languages the cleft-construction is an important means of FSP because it helps to arrange the components of FSP correctly for translations from Lithuanian where this construction does not exist. On the other hand the grammatically free word order in Lithuanian gives more possibilities than the fixed word order in Scandinavian languages, where syntactic means for ordering the informational elements in a sentence are limited, and therefore one needs such special constructions as cleft-sentences. The analysis partly confirmed the assumption that cleft-sentences are mostly used in Norwegian translation when the rheme is indicated by inversion or word order which is characteristic for the rheme (the rheme is in sentence final position) in the original. In dialogues the rheme is indicated by stress or emphasis. One can claim that frequently the rheme is indicated by lexical means, but in most cases various components of FSP are combined. Use of cleft-construction in translations from Lithuanian is often an additional way of emphasizing the rheme when the rheme is already expressed by other components of FSP, e. g. lexical means or word order; in questions it is the interrogative word. This article also contains a comparison of the usage of the cleft-construction in translations to Norwegian and Swedish. This led to the conclusion that there are always other ways than cleft-sentences to arrange informational elements correctly in the sentences translated from Lithuanian to Scandinavian languages.

Word and World Order: Semantic, Phonological, and Metrical Determinants of Serial Position

Scope-bearing elements for negations and questions may appear in Dutch child language as “doubling” constructions. The doublings are not part of the adult system. They arise spontaneously in early and later child language. The early doublings have a <+neg>-element or a <+Q/+wh>-element in sentence-initial position and double it by means of a sentence adverb in a sentence-final position. These doublings disappear in child Dutch after the acquisition of V-second. A later temporary doubling appears in negative constructions that contain a quantifier. The analysis below will consider the temporary doublings in child Dutch as attempts to maintain an earlier, more simplified construction. Temporary options in child language may result from a learnability hierarchy.

Introduction As is well known, negation in natural languages comes in many different forms. Crosslinguistically, we observe differences concerning the morphological character of the Neg (negation) element as well as concerning its structural position within a sentence. For instance, while many languages make use of an independent Neg particle (e.g. English and German), in others, the Neg element is affixal in nature and attaches to the verb (e.g. Turkish and French). Moreover, a Neg particle may appear in sentence-initial position, preverbally, postverbally, or in sentence-final position (for comprehensive typological surveys of negation, see Dahl 1979; 1993; Payne 1985). In this chapter I am concerned with morphosyntactic and phonological properties of sentential negation in some spoken languages as well as in German Sign Language ( Deutsche Gebardensprache or DGS) and American Sign Language (ASL). Sentential negation in DGS (as well as in other sign languages) is particularly interesting because it involves a manual and a nonmanual element, namely the manual Neg sign NICHT ‘not’ and a headshake that is associated with the predicate. Despite this peculiarity, I show that on the morphosyntactic side of the Neg construction, we do not need to refer to any modality-specific structures and principles. Rather, the same structures and principles that allow for the derivation of negated sentences in spoken languages are also capable of accounting for the sign language data. On the phonological side, however, we do of course observe modality-specific differences; those are due to the different articulators used.