Clitic Pronouns Research Articles

‘Real’ and apparent optionality in second language grammars: finiteness and pronouns in null operator structures

The existence of optionality in acquisitional data presents a problem to the view that developing grammars do not include more than one grammatical system at any stage. In this article data from Greek and Spanish, on the one hand, and English, on the other, constitute the background for the discussion of the existence of ‘true’ optionality in second language (L2) grammars and its potential persistence at advanced proficiency levels. We also discuss the relation between optionality and finiteness features in L2 grammars as well as how morphology interacts with the development of null operator structures (NOS). Specifically the article deals with the use of pronouns or empty categories in NOS and their relation to finiteness. We discuss the role of clitics in adult second language acquisition when the first language (L1) and the L2 differ in the choices of the pronominal system and in their choice for a gap or clitic pronoun in NOS. The subjects studied are speakers of Greek and of Spanish, languages with clitics, learning English, a language without clitics, as well as speakers of English learning Greek or Spanish. The data collected support the claim that optionality is found in developing grammars but not randomly. First, there is a difference in the degree and nature of optionality found developmentally in advanced as opposed to intermediate learners; secondly, the degree of optionality depends on the morphological richness characterizing L1 and L2 in relation to the phenomena studied. Thus, English learners of Spanish or Greek show more optionality in the use of clitic pronouns and less evidence for a correlation between finiteness and clitics in NOS. On the other hand, Spanish/Greek learners of English show constrained optionality in the use of empty categories or pronouns in NOS.

The Change in Clitic Placement from Classical to Modern European Portuguese: Results from the Tycho Brahe Corpus

In this paper we study the syntax of clitic-placement in Portuguese authors born from 1542 to 1836, as regards their patterns of clitic pronouns placement. The motivation for the research was to enquire: what is the pattern of enclisis (V-cl) and proclisis (cl-V) variation in those texts; is it indicative of linguistic change; if so, when in the timeline can the change be located?Drawing from the emprical results, we analyse the syntax of clitic placement in those texts as representative of a grammatical change which should be located in the first half of the 18th century. Our empirical arguments and structural analysis sustain that in texts up to the 18th century, enclisis is strictly a Verb-First phenomenon (even so, we will argue, in constructions that are supperficially non-verb initial). We sustain that the effects of this syntax in clitic placement ceases to be noticed for texts written by authors born after 1700.

Clitic Phenomena in European Languages (review)

Reviewed by: Clitic phenomena in European languages ed. by Frits Beukema, Marcel den Dikken Ana R. Luís Clitic phenomena in European languages. Ed. by Frits Beukema and Marcel den Dikken. (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics today 30.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000. Pp. viii, 320. ISBN 1556199147. $100 (Hb). The essays in this volume are mostly about cliticization in South Slavic (i.e. Macedonian, Slovenian, [End Page 281] Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian). The introduction, by Steven Franks (1–46), discusses interface phenomena in South Slavic and examine show to best analyze the interaction between different components of grammar. Franks argues that an analysis of cliticization should combine insights from derivational syntax with representational work in optimality theory (OT). Theoretically, the position is taken that the proper place for OT in the grammar is at the interface between different components. Within the group of papers on South Slavic, ŽEljko Bošković (71–119) examines the mechanisms triggering clitic placement in Serbo-Croatian. After discussing the purely syntactic analysis and the purely prosodic reordering mechanism, he reaches the conclusion that placement mechanisms are phonological in nature. In ‘Where do clitics cluster?’, Ljiljana Progovac (249–58) writes a short reply to Bošković’s claim that second position clitic placement in Serbo-Croatian is phonological. She argues instead that both syntactic positions and intonation boundaries play an important role in determining where Serbo-Croatian clitics appear. Mila Dimitrova-Vulchanova (121–46) compares possessive clitics in English and Bulgarian, and argues that the difference between them is due to the nature of the clitic head: while English genitive ’s is nonreferential (realizing functional categories), the Bulgarian clitic is referential (i.e. pronominal). Marija Golden and Milena M. Sheppard (191–207) show that Slovenian pronominal clitics depart from prototypical second-position clitics as found in Serbo-Croatian, providing distributional evidence from the clitic systems of both languages to support this claim. Clitic doubling is addressed in Ivana P. Schick’s essay on Bulgarian (259–92). Comparing Bulgarian and Macedonian, she claims that clitic pronouns act consistently as topic markers and participate in the interpretation of information stucture. In the last essay on Slavic, ‘On clitic sites’ (293–316), Olga M. Tomić argues that Macedonian has both verbal and Wackernagel clitics, unlike other European languages with only verbal clitics. Tomić is mostly concerned with deriving the positions of both types of clitics within a derivational view of syntax. There are also essays on cliticization in Spanish, Greek, and Albanian. Artemis Alexiadou and Elena Anagnostopoulou (47–70) examine Greek restrictive relatives introduced by the complementizer pu. The crucial question addressed here is why only direct objects are sensitive to the indefiniteness of the head. Jon Franco (147–89), who looks at clitic doubling with respect to Spanish, takes the position that object clitics should be analyzed as agreement morphemes on the verb (on a par with subject agreement markers), rather than as phonologically dependent pronominal arguments. Dalina Kallulli’s (210–48) paper on clitic doubling focuses on Albanian and Greek. In contrast to Jon Franco’s position, Kallulli argues that clitic doubling and object agreement, despite the similarities, constitute distinct phenomena, particularly because doubled DPs behave like topics. She also discusses the information structure of clitic doubling and specificity. Other topics addressed in this volume include the difference in status between clitic pronouns and auxiliary clitics, and the nature of the functional features instantiated by clitics. Most of the contributions in this volume were originally presented at the fourth conference of the European Society for the Study of English, held at the Lajos Lossuth University in Debrecen, Hungary, in 1997. Ana R. Luís University of Coimbra, Portugal Copyright © 2005 Linguistic Society of America

On the Morphological Nature of Spanish Adverbs Ending in -mente

The morphological status of adverbs ending in -mente in Spanish (-ly in English) has been the object of many studies and continues to be the subject of debate. The two main proposals regarding the morphology of these adverbs treat them as either compounds or derivatives as the result of suffixation, but both hypotheses present problems. In this study an analysis will be defended which treats -mente as a phrasal affix (cf. Zwicky 1987, Nevis 1985 and Miller 1992). The notion of phrasal affix has been used to describe clitics which, from a morphological standpoint, are similar to affixes but which, simultaneously manifest characteristics of independent words. The argument for analyzing -mente as a phrasal affix is based on both synchronic and diachronic data, including some similarities with object clitic pronouns.

Topics in Bulgarian morphology and syntax: a minimalist perspective

This paper offers a minimalist view of a variety of topics that in Bulgarian are at the crossroads of lexicon, syntax, morphology, and phonology. It discusses syntactic characteristics in periphrastic tenses with biclausal structures and the formal properties of Balkan control/raising constructions. It sketches accounts for clitic templates, person restrictions, and reflexive haplology that combine syntax and morphology, and assign an important role to person in postsyntactic morphology. It reviews some minimalist-oriented displacement analyses of the distribution of interrogative li . It examines the construction with an obligatory clitic Trese me “I am shivering,” proposing that lexical structure and syntactic conditions on clitic pronouns and doubling account for its characteristics. It compares two prominent GB/minimalist views on reflexive marking and applies them to inherent reflexive verbs. It ends by discussing word order in auxiliary complexes, and touches on left branch phenomena, and on the relation between displacement and information structure.

Degrees of Explicitness: Information Structure and the Packaging of Bulgarian Subjects and Objects (review)

Reviewed by: Degrees of explicitness: Information structure and the packaging of Bulgarian subjects and objects by John Leafgren Donald L. Dyer Degrees of explicitness: Information structure and the packaging of Bulgarian subjects and objects. By John Leafgren. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. viii, 247. ISBN 1588112209. $90 (Hb). John Leafgren has been working in the fields of Bulgarian morphology and syntax for many years. In Degrees of explicitness, his first book-length publication, L gives Bulgarian, South Slavic, and Slavic linguistics, as well as general sentence-level pragmatics, a well-crafted description of the relationship that exists in Bulgarian syntagmata among semantics, pragmatics, and morphology. This book is a comprehensive examination of the link between functional and formal explicitness in the Bulgarian noun phrase, particularly as reflected in subject, direct object, or indirect object (Chs. 2–3). L’s monograph builds significantly on his earlier work in this area as well as on that of a number of Bulgarian and American linguists. L effectively ties together in one treatise several different approaches to the analysis of word order in Bulgarian, including the Prague School’s functional sentence perspective (FSP) of the 1940s and 1950s; structuralist approaches from the 1960s and 1970s; generative treatments of the 1980s and 1990s; and formalism, prevalent in the past two decades. L calls his own analytical approach ‘clausal aboutness perspective’ (207). L successfully navigates the complex collection of characterizations of how Bulgarian speakers and writers portray substantives as informationally significant and the terminology associated with them, for example, focus, topicality, and discourse themehood (DT) (23–37). Throughout the book we see that two primary kinds of factors affect formal explicitness in Bulgarian—semantics and pragmatics. In the broadest of terms the book’s goal is to lay out the varieties of and reasons for the use of a set of nominal sentence forms—full NPs (including the doubled type), full pronouns, clitic pronouns, and Ø. L gives lists of 14–15 factors that promote degrees of explicitness (L’s functional ‘aboutness’) in the Bulgarian subject and object in the conclusion (186–87, 198–99). The degree to which an NP contrasts with another proximate NP is critical to an understanding of the degree of explicitness that it will command and the shape of the NP that will be realized (57ff.). This also may involve temporal shifts in the narrative (69–70). L points to Grice’s ‘cooperative principle’ (be brief and only as informative as necessary) as a justification for many explicitness choices (45, 84). In the two main analytical chapters of the book (Chs. 2 and 3), L surveys quite adequately the relevant results of major works that have examined this material before providing his own findings. Arguably the most important novel observations are L’s remarks in Ch. 3 (97–139; also 206–7) on the finer degrees of explicitness—or nonexplicitness—that may be expressed in Bulgarian objects, owing to the greater variety of available forms. Also of note is L’s mention of the different measures of explicitness in the use of first-, second-, and third-person pronominal forms (44). L’s corpus for analysis consists of a large database provided by Krasimira Aleksova and seven literary [End Page 350] texts, as well as his own fieldwork. The volume’s bibliographic sources are a strength, and while most monographs of significance for this topic are cited, the articles listed could be more inclusive. The volume’s index is rather good, and there are virtually no grammatical miscues or spelling mistakes in the entire volume. ‘Rå Hauge, Kjetil’ should be given as ‘Hauge, Kjetil Rå’ throughout, a mistake many of us have made. Donald L. Dyer University of Mississippi Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

The Distribution of a Subject Clitic Pronoun in a Franco-Provençal Dialect and the Licensing of Pro

We study the distribution of null subjects in one Franco-Provençal variety. These are possible in root declaratives, obligatory in embedded subject position, and impossible in root wh-questions as well as in the company of weather predicates. We approach null subjects indirectly, by investigating the distribution of one subject clitic, arguing that its optionality in some contexts is due to the possibility of moving pro to a peripheral topic position, where formal licensing is not required. We also discuss the circumstances in which an overt complementizer and a robustly inflected verb license pro, rendering the clitic redundant. The comparative interest of this dialect is that it reveals synchronically the three mechanisms of pro licensing available in Romance diachronically. These are (a) association with rich verbal inflection, (b) government by a complementizer, and (c) doubling by a clitic. We contend that the syntax is sensitive to the formal relationship between an XP and a head that these three mechanisms instantiate.

Clitics in Child Spanish

This paper investigates the knowledge young children have about clitic pronouns. In particular, it examines whether children ever make mistakes that suggest discontinuity between child and adult Spanish. An elicited imitation task and spontaneous data are used to study children's responses to a number of constructions involving clitics. Results indicate that, from the earliest testable age, children have the grammatical competence for clitic placement and never make certain logical, but unattested, errors.

A New View of the Proto-Oceanic Pronominal System

Proto-Oceanic had two distinct sets of clitic pronouns, with members of one set expressing the S ("subject" of intransitive sentences), while the members of the other set expressed the A ("agent" of transitive sentences). Clitic pronouns expressing O ("object") observed in some Oceanic languages today are later innovations, rather than reflexes of Proto-Oceanic "object" clitic forms. The main evidence comes from a comparison of what is reconstructible for Proto-Extra Formosan, a parent language of Proto-Oceanic, and Proto-Polynesian, one of the daughter protolanguages of Proto-Oceanic.

A Sociolinguistic Study of the Origins of ne Deletion in European and Quebec French

A Sociolinguistic Study of the Origins of ne Deletion in European and Quebec French France Martineau and Raymond Mougeon We present and discuss the results of a sociolinguistic historical study of variable deletion of the preverbal negative particle ne ‘not’, a phenomenon observable in many contemporary varieties of spoken French, but which has not yet made its way into standard written French. Our study’s two main goals are (i) to contribute to the resolution of a debate over the point in time when ne deletion became a prevalent feature of nonstandard spoken French, and (ii) to assess the role of the affixal status of subject clitic pronouns in the rise of ne deletion. Our study is based on the analysis of an extensive database comprising a wide range of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century sources providing information on the typical features of nonstandard spoken European and Quebec French. It reveals that ne deletion became widespread in nonstandard spoken French only in the nineteenth century and leads us to hypothesize that the affixal status of subject clitic pronouns contributed to the rise of ne deletion.* Introduction In this article we present and discuss the results of a historical study of nonstandard spoken French. Our study is focused on variable deletion of the preverbal negative particle ne, a phenomenon observable in many contemporary varieties of spoken French but which has not yet made its way into standard written French. Our study has two main goals: (i) to contribute to the resolution of a debate as to when deletion of the particle ne became prevalent in nonstandard spoken French, and (ii) to assess the role played by the affixal status of subject pronouns in the rise of ne deletion. As shown below, there is a considerable range of more or less divergent opinions among linguists as to when ne deletion became widespread in nonstandard spoken French, some contending that this phenomenon was already prevalent as early as the seventeenth century, others of the opinion that its rise is a much more recent development. This lack of agreement demonstrates that there has not been enough systematic corpus-based research on the evolution of ne deletion and hence that those who have debated this issue have often not based their opinion on solid diachronic data. What is needed now is a study that focuses on this phenomenon and attempts to chart its diachronic sociolinguistic trajectory over several hundred years. The internal factors that may have favored the rise of ne deletion have been the object of a number of recent studies. One factor that has received special attention is the transformation of French subject clitics into preverbal affixes. We examine the role of this factor in the light of the findings of our historical study of ne deletion and of previous historical studies that have documented phenomena indicating that subject clitics have become preverbal affixes. 1. Overview of the rise of postverbal negation It should be pointed out at the outset that the primary condition behind variable deletion of particle ne lies in the fact that French developed a two-pronged negative construction, whereby the notion of [End Page 118] negation is expressed redundantly via two elements: a preverbal particle ne and postverbal negators (words such as pas or point ‘not’ or jamais ‘never’ and rien ‘nothing’), as in examples 1 and 2. (1) (2) Before we review the studies that focused on deletion of particle ne, we provide the reader with a brief overview of the chief stages that led to the development of this two-pronged negative construction. Our diachronic presentation focuses on literary French. According to Foulet 1977 and Price 1984, as early as the thirteenth century, negation was expressed mostly via preverbal negative particle ne rather than non, a morpheme of Latin origin that is still used in Romance languages such as Spanish or Italian. Negative particle ne expressed the generic notion of negation and it could be used either on its own (il ne vout estre ses amis ‘he does not want to be their friend’) or it could be reinforced with postverbal words such as pas, point, mie which added emphasis to that notion...

Sull'omissione del pronome clitico oggetto in italiano antico

In conjoined structures in Modern Italian, clitic pronouns are to be repeated, even if exceptions from this rule are to some extent acceptable, as in lo leggo e rileggo. The Old Italian grammar appears to have been considerably more liberal on this point. In a 13th century text such as Il Libro de' Vizî e delle Virtundi, the omission of clitic pronouns in the second conjuct of a conjoined structure is highly frequent. This pronominal system, however, is not generally valid for the entire Old Italian period. Arguably, some 13th and 14th century authors cancel clitics in context where null objects cannot be recovered in Modern Italian. This indicates that some alternative recovery strategy was indeed available at an earlier stage of Italian.

A Peircean analysis of the American-Spanish clitic pronoun system

La plupart des etudes abordent les pronoms clitiques dans une perspective fonctionnelle, sans les considerer a l'interieur d'un systeme. L'A. propose alors une analyse des clitiques de l'espagnol americain qui prenne en compte leurs fonctions et leurs proprietes a partir d'une approche semiotique. Se basant sur le systeme des categories universelles d'existence de Peirce, l'A. applique ainsi le modele peircien aux problemes traditionnels souleves par les categories syntaxiques des clitiques, tels que la polysemie de se ou la polyfonctionalite de le.

Sentence processing strategies in French-speaking children with SLI: a study of morphosyntactic cues

The sentence comprehension strategies used by children with specific language impairments (SLI) were examined within the framework of the Competition Model (Bates and MacWhinney, 1989). The experiment was a replication of Kail and Charvillat'experiment (1988) designed to investigate the use of different morphosyntactic cues (i.e. word order, clitic pronoun, verbal agreement) in sentence comprehension by children (4;6 – 6;6) with normal language development. They found that French speaking children used mainly information on word order with a lesser reliance on the other cues (word order > clitic pronoun > verbal agreement). In the present study, the same experiment was replicated with 25 French speaking children with SLI. The results suggested that children with SLI had specific difficulties in processing clitic pronouns, while verbal agreement could be processed (word order > verbal agreement > clitic pronoun). This pattern seems to be a specific strategy and not simply a delayed profile. In addition, our results were compatible with a theoretical account in terms of limitation in processing capacities.

Overt vs. Null Direct Objects in Spoken Brazilian Portuguese: A Semantic/Pragmatic Account

Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is unique among Romance languages in that it allows null direct objects where other Romance varieties would require at least a clitic pronoun. Although the correct syntactic analysis of null objects in BP has been debated extensively, there has been virtually no discussion of their semantic/pragmatic characteristics. This paper examines the semantic/pragmatic constraints on null objects in spoken BP in detail, and situates BP null objects in the broader cross-linguistic perspective of differential object marking. We demonstrate that the semantic/ pragmatic dimensions of animacy and specificity, and in particular their interaction, must be taken into consideration to fully account for the form of direct objects in BP. We also argue that, despite clear formal differences in how BP treats direct objects on the surface and their treatment in other languages (including other Romance varieties), the underlying semantic/pragmatic motivations for these differential surface patterns across languages are extremely similar.

The Effects of Processing Instruction on the Acquisition of Ser and Estar

Extending previous research on the acquisition of Spanish clitic pronouns (elements with high communicative value), this study compares the relative effects of two types of instruction, processing instruction and traditional instruction, on the acquisition of the verbs ser and estar with adjectives and past participles. The dual roles of these verbs as semantic and aspectual indicators in combination with their low communicative value for comprehension make the subtle distinction complicated for English-speaking learners in the early stages of acquiring a second language. However, when only the estar (marked copula) data is analyzed, the results of this classroom-based research with second-year college students of Spanish partially corroborate earlier findings by VanPatten and his fellow researchers: The performance of students who received traditional instruction improved only on sentence production and guided composition tests, while that of the processing-instruction group improved on both interpretation and production tests.

Against Optional and null clitics. Right dislocation vs. marginalization

This paper contains a discussion of (Italian) Right Dislocation, which seems to instantiate an optional anticipatory clitic pronoun. It will be shown that the distribution of the anticipatory pronoun is not free. When the clitic is absent, we do not have an instance of Right Dislocation, but of Marginalization. The structural analysis of Right Dislocation suggested here is similar to Kayne's (1994) analysis of English Right Dislocation, the structure of Marginalization contains an in situ; destressed constituent. Depending on how optionality is interpreted, it is possible to conclude that clitic pronouns are neither optional nor null.

Morphology in incipient bilingual Spanish-speaking preschool children with specific language impairment

This study examined the use of clitic pronouns by incipient bilingual Spanish-speaking 4- and 5-year-old children with and without language impairments. Incipient bilingualism refers to the initial stages of contact between two languages, when an individual still has only passive knowledge of a second language. The participants included 10 children with typical language development and 10 children with specific language impairment (SLI). The experimental task elicited clitic pronouns serving as direct objects with finite verbs (lo, la, los, and las). The children who had SLI used clitic pronouns less frequently than their age-matched peers and were less accurate in their use of gender agreement for clitics. No group differences were found for third person singular and plural verb inflections in the preterite tense. These results were compared to previous studies of Spanish- and Italian-speaking children with SLI.

Rotuman and Fijian Case-Marking Strategies and Their Historical Development

Rotuman and Fijian Case-Marking Strategies and Their Historical Development1 Ritsuko Kikusawa Abstract Although the Fijian languages and Rotuman are thought to be closely related genetically, and are all accusative languages, considerable differences are observed in their case-marking strategies. This paper describes the various strategies to be found in these languages, and discusses how they could have developed from a single protosystem. It is argued that in Rotuman, where it is word order alone that marks nouns as Nominative or Accusative, the preverbal position of clitic pronouns was generalized to become also the position of full noun phrases. On the other hand, in Fijian languages, different strategies resulted in the original clitic pronouns either remaining as clitics, or becoming grammaticalized as agreement features on the verb. 1. Introduction 1.1 An Overview. The Fijian languages and Rotuman are considered to belong to the Central Pacific language family and to be closely related to one another.2 Although each of these languages shows an accusative case-marking system, considerable differences are found in their case-marking strategies, that is, how nouns are formally marked (or unmarked) as Accusative and Nominative. The Rotuman case-marking system is relatively simple. As described in section 2, it is the word order that nominatively and accusatively marks nouns. There is no [End Page 85] morphological marking on the core nouns of a sentence.3 On the other hand, a variety of case-marking strategies are found in the Fijian languages. In some, nouns are never casemarked either morphologically or by their position. The "doer" and the "recipient of the action" are understood through agreement on the verb, or other nonformal aspects, such as the meaning of the verb, and/or the context. In other Fijian languages, whether a noun is casemarked or not depends on the nature of the noun, namely, whether it is pronominal or nonpronominal, and when nonpronominal, whether it is proper or nonproper. The different case-marking strategies observed in the Fijian languages are described in section 3. How Rotuman and the Fijian languages have developed these different systems from a single protolanguage is of interest from both theoretical and historical points of view, and is discussed in section 4. It is proposed that Rotuman has developed its Nominative position from what originally was the clitic pronoun position, while the Fijian languages have developed the original clitic pronoun position into the verb agreement system. Conditions and motivations that enabled the various changes to take place are also discussed. Section 5 is a summary. 1.2 Terms and Definitions. The definitions of the basic notions and the terms that appear in this paper are described in this subsection. The original analysis was conducted applying a version of the Word and Paradigm model, or "whole-word morphology,"4 and Lexicase Dependency Grammar,5 and some of the terms used in this paper follow those of Lexicase. 1.2.1 Transitivity. The judgment of the transitivity of a verb in this study is based solely on the number of core noun phrases a verb may take. The core noun phrases in Rotuman and Fijian sentences appear as "bare noun phrases," that is, without being preceded by determiners or prepositions that could assign case.6 When a verb may take two of these, it is considered to be transitive, while when a verb can take only one, it is considered to be intransitive. An intransitive verb may take a complement noun phrase preceded by a case-assigning preposition in addition to the single bare noun phrase.7 The traditional transitive and intransitive classifications of Rotuman and Fijian verbs are often based on verb morphology, and do not always match the judgment of syntactic transitivity used in this study.8 The differences between the traditional analyses and the one in this study are mentioned in each section when it is relevant. 1.2.2 Case forms. Case forms are labels that describe the morphological and/or position marking on nouns and prepositions. Nouns or prepositions with the same [End Page 86] marking are always labeled in the same way. The total number of case forms in each language differs, depending on the language. Those that...

Persian Complex DPs: How Mysterious Are They?

AbstractPersian complex DPs exhibit structural peculiarities with respect to the placement of the object marker for specific DPs and the position of embedded CPs. This article discusses these peculiarities as well as the internal structure of Persian complex DPs and the distribution of clitic pronouns in this language. It is argued that a base generation approach accounts more adequately for Persian and other languages that exhibit the following properties: lack of a wh-relative pronoun, presence of an invariant relative complementizer, and alternation between a gap and a pronoun representing the relativized head. Regarding the postverbal position of the embedded CP, it is argued that extraposition and VP-remnant face theoretical and empirical problems, while V-raising and XP movement, as instances of scrambling triggered by focus in this language, provide an adequate explanation for Persian data.

The Differential Role of Comprehension and Production Practice

In the last 10 years, the ideas that second language learning requires a certain amount of focus on form, and that form should to some extent be learned explicitly, have been steadily gaining ground (see, e.g., Doughty & Williams, 1998; Norris & Ortega, 2000). What exact instructional activities this implies, however, remains the subject of considerable controversy.In the early 199Os, VanPatten and his collaborators published several studies suggesting that a type of form‐focused input activities called processing instruction were all that was necessary, and that form‐focused output activities were not useful, given that students who had had either input or output practice performed similarly on subsequent production tasks, whereas students used to input practice performed better on comprehension tasks than the output practice group. In a study published around the same time as the present one, VanPatten and Oikkenon (1996) even argued that not only output practice but even grammar explanation is not necessary provided students receive processing instruction.The vast majority of studies carried out by VanPatten and his collaborators, however, including the (1996) study just mentioned, dealt with the problem of learning the morphology and word order of Spanish clitic pronouns by English speakers. In our (1996) article we argued‐and we still do‐that the results of studies by VanPatten and collaborators are to some extent due t o this choice of structure and therefore not generalizable.Our results with 82 first‐year students of Spanish as a second language indicated that the relative effectiveness of production versus comprehension practice depended on the morphosyntactic complexity of the structure in question as well as on the delay between practice and testing. The findings basically reflected the predictions of skill acquisition theory that input practice is better for comprehension skills, and output practice for production skills, but these patterns were obscured when both testing time and the morphosyntactic nature of the structure in question favored one skill or the other.Not much research has been published since 1996 that addresses these specific issues empirically. Allen (2000), however, in a study on the learning of causative structures in French, reached the same conclusion we had in 1996. In that study, traditional instruction was found as effective as processing instruction in enabling learners to comprehend and more effective than processing instruction in enabling learners to produce the French causative. It appears again, then, that which kind of instructional activity is most effective at bringing about comprehension or production skill depends on the morphosyntactic nature of the structure at issue, and that the advantage of (specific forms of) input practice over output practice for learning Spanish clitic pronouns cannot be generalized to other structures.