Cross-linguistic Generalizations Research Articles

Effects of cognate status and language of therapy during intensive semantic naming treatment in a case of severe nonfluent bilingual aphasia

As bilingualism becomes less exceptional in the world, and with the growing incidence of stroke and aphasia, a better understanding of how bilingualism affects aphasia recovery is increasingly important. The present study examined the effect of intensive semantic naming therapy in three phases (Spanish, English and mixed) on within- and across-language generalization for cognates and non-cognates, in a bilingual individual with chronic, severe expressive aphasia. We hypothesized that cognates would positively influence cross-linguistic generalization, which might be more likely to occur from L2 to L1. Results indicate relative increases in confrontation naming ability in the following conditions: trained versus untrained, L1 versus L2 or mixed and non-cognates versus cognates. This participant demonstrated a pattern of results consistent with a differential recovery pattern in which presentation of treatment in both languages and training of cognates may have promoted interference, thus increasing the activation threshold, and lowering performance under these conditions.

The Morphopragmatics of the Diminutive Morpheme (-ba/-wa

The present paper is concerned with the diminutive morpheme -wa/-ba in Akan. It examines the form, the origin and the various meanings associated with diminutive forms in the language. We attribute the origin of the diminutive to the lexical word for ‘child/offspring’ ɔba, basing our argument on language internal evidence as well as cross-linguistic generalizations. The identified meanings of the Akan diminutive are as follows: small, young/offspring, feminine, member, insignificant/nonserious, affection/admiration and contempt/disdain. Having identified the basic meaning of the diminutive as ‘small’, Jurafsky’s [1996] Radial Category theory provides us with a basis to adequately account for the various meanings; drawing a link, through metaphors and inferences, between the diachronic and the synchronic meanings.

Case assignment, case concord, and the quantificational case construction

Abstract This paper examines a controversial and particularly complex case phenomenon called quantificational case attested in a number of historically unrelated Slavonic and Finno-Ugric languages, and attempts to establish certain novel cross-linguistic generalizations and conclusions. In particular, it will be argued that (i) instead of standard one-to-one case assignment, in which one case assigner is case-related to one case assignee, a many-to-many case flow is attested; (ii) nominal case is not a privilege of full DPs, arguments or thematic roles; (iii) case reflects either local or nonlocal functional structure, whether in the verbal or nominal domain; and that (iv) there is no distinction between case assignment and case concord. An analysis is provided using the probe–goal system of recent minimalist theory, although some modifications to this system are required. In particular, the system is generalized to cover the reported instances of many-to-many case assignment in which one probe can affect several goals and several probes can affect the case features of the one and the same goal.

Unity and diversity in human language.

Human language is both highly diverse-different languages have different ways of achieving the same functional goals-and easily learnable. Any language allows its users to express virtually any thought they can conceptualize. These traits render human language unique in the biological world. Understanding the biological basis of language is thus both extremely challenging and fundamentally interesting. I review the literature on linguistic diversity and language universals, suggesting that an adequate notion of 'formal universals' provides a promising way to understand the facts of language acquisition, offering order in the face of the diversity of human languages. Formal universals are cross-linguistic generalizations, often of an abstract or implicational nature. They derive from cognitive capacities to perceive and process particular types of structures and biological constraints upon integration of the multiple systems involved in language. Such formal universals can be understood on the model of a general solution to a set of differential equations; each language is one particular solution. An explicit formal conception of human language that embraces both considerable diversity and underlying biological unity is possible, and fully compatible with modern evolutionary theory.

Discourse particles, clause structure, and question types

Discourse particles provide important clues to our understanding of the syntax-to-discourse relation. They are sensitive to sentence types and utterance contexts. As such they seem to contribute to the determination of illocutionary force. After providing some general background information on discourse particles, the present article focuses on the role of discourse particles in German constituent questions. Syntactic evidence is provided which suggests that they are pre-VP functional heads which can to some extent be stacked. It is shown how the particles under consideration can access the force system, and how this access can proceed even in cases in which they occur in embedded clauses. After providing the basic architecture, we investigate the role of these particles in “special questions”, questions which are not interpreted as simple requests for information. The syntactic discussion is then extended to cases in which the discourse particle forms a constituent with a wh-phrase – [wh+Prt] –, as well as to cases in which this constituent interacts with particles in pre-VP position. The [wh+Prt] construction offers important evidence both in favor of the head status of the particles under investigation and in favor of the existence of distinctive syntactic properties of special questions, especially so-called “surprise-disapproval questions”. Finally, data on surprise-disapproval questions in a Northern Italian dialect as well as in an Indo-Aryan language suggest that the findings about special questions in German are likely to fall under cross-linguistic generalizations.

Reconstructing last week's weather: Syntactic reconstruction and Brythonic free relatives

Lightfoot (2002) argues that syntactic reconstruction is rendered impossible by the lack of any analogue in syntax to the traditional notion of the phonological ‘correspondence set’ of the Comparative Method and by the radical discontinuity caused by reanalysis between successive grammars. Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell, in various works, have defended the notion of ‘syntactic pattern’ as the analogue of the correspondence set, arguing that patterns can be compared across languages, with innovations being stripped away to reveal aspects of the protolanguage. In this article, I argue that syntactic reconstruction can be carried out while maintaining and indeed utilizing core notions in generative approaches to syntactic change such as the central role of reanalysis and child language acquisition and the distinction between the abstract grammatical system and the surface output of that system. Reanalysis itself is constrained by the fact that both pre- and post-reanalysis grammars must be acquirable on the basis of the same primary linguistic data. This imposes limits on the possible hypotheses that can be entertained (‘local directionality’) even in the absence of any crosslinguistic generalizations about patterns of change (‘universal directionality’). This approach is then applied to aspects of the syntax of free relative clauses and negation in the early Brythonic Celtic languages (Welsh, Breton and Cornish), showing that non-trivial reconstructions can be achieved even where the daughter languages manifest significant differences.

Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies

In this discussion note, I argue that we need to distinguish carefully between descriptive categories, that is, categories of particular languages, and comparative concepts, which are used for crosslinguistic comparison and are specifically created by typologists for the purposes of comparison. Descriptive formal categories cannot be equated across languages because the criteria for category assignment are different from language to language. This old structuralist insight (called categorial particularism ) has recently been emphasized again by several linguists, but the idea that linguists need to identify ‘crosslinguistic categories’ before they can compare languages is still widespread, especially (but not only) in generative linguistics. Instead, what we have to do (and normally do in practice) is to create comparative concepts that allow us to identify comparable phenomena across languages and to formulate crosslinguistic generalizations. Comparative concepts have to be universally applicable, so they can only be based on other universally applicable concepts: conceptual-semantic concepts, general formal concepts, and other comparative concepts. Comparative concepts are not always purely semantically based concepts, but outside of phonology they usually contain a semantic component. The fact that typologists compare languages in terms of a separate set of concepts that is not taxonomically superordinate to descriptive linguistic categories means that typology and language-particular analysis are more independent of each other than is often thought.

Multiple final embedding of clauses

There are no grammatical limits on multiple final embedding of clauses. But converging corpus data from English, Finnish, German and Swedish show that multiple final embedding is avoided at levels deeper than three levels from the main clause in syntactically simple varieties, and at levels deeper than five levels in complex varieties. The frequency of every successive level of final embedding decreases by a factor of seven down to levels 4–5. Only relative clauses allow free self-embedding, within the limits just mentioned. These restrictions are regularities of language use, stylistic preferences related to the properties of various types of discourse. Ultimately they are explained by cognitive and other properties of the language processing mechanisms. The frequencies of final embedding depths in modern languages such as English and Finnish is not accidental. Ancient Greek had reached this profile by 300 BC, suggesting cross-linguistic generality of the preferences.

Deficits on irregular verbal morphology in Italian-speaking Alzheimer's disease patients

Studies of English have shown that temporal-lobe patients, including those with Alzheimer's disease, are spared at processing real and novel regular inflected forms (e.g., walk → walked; blick → blicked), but impaired at real and novel irregular forms (e.g., dig → dug; spling → splang). Here we extend the investigation cross-linguistically to the more complex system of Italian verbal morphology, allowing us to probe the generality of the previous findings in English, as well as to test different explanatory accounts of inflectional morphology. We examined the production of real and novel regular and irregular past-participle and present-tense forms by native Italian-speaking healthy control subjects and patients with probable Alzheimer's disease. Compared to the controls, the patients were impaired at inflecting real irregular verbs but not real regular verbs both for past-participle and present-tense forms, but were not impaired at real regular verbs either for past-participle or present-tense forms. For novel past participles, the patients exhibited this same pattern of impaired production of class II (irregular) forms but spared class I (regular) production. In the present-tense, patients were impaired at the production of class II forms (which are regular in the present-tense), but spared at production of class I (regular) forms. Contrary to the pattern observed in English, the errors made by the patients on irregulars did not reveal a predominance of regularization errors (e.g., dig → digged). The findings thus partly replicate prior findings from English, but also reveal new patterns from a language with a more complex morphological system that includes verb classes (which are not possible to test in English). The demonstration of an irregular deficit following temporal-lobe damage in a language other than English reveals the cross-linguistic generality of the basic effect, while also elucidating important language-specific differences in the neurocognitive basis of regular and irregular morphological forms.

The nature of generalization in language

This paper provides a concise overview of Constructions at Work (Goldberg 2006). The book aims to investigate the relevant levels of generalization in adult language, how and why generalizations are learned by children, and how to account for cross-linguistic generalizations.

Palatalization in Romanian: Acoustics, perception, and the role of place of articulation.

Departing from the crosslinguistic generalization whereby the contrast between the plain and palatalized consonants is favored at the coronal, as compared to the labial, place of articulation, recent perceptual studies show native speakers of Romanian displaying higher sensitivity to this contrast in labials. To investigate this unexpected behavior, a production study was conducted with 31 subjects. Five plain and palatalized fricatives (/f, v, z, S, h/) were analyzed in terms of average duration and spectral properties (coefficients of the Bark Cepstrum). A linear discriminant analysis was run using duration and the Cepstral coefficients to predict segment type (plain/palatalized). 78.2% of 3674 tokens were classified correctly; however, the contribution of the duration and spectral properties of each segment showed interesting asymmetries. To summarize, /h/ was most successfully distinguished, /S/ was least successfully distinguished, and /f/ and /v/ were distinguished better than /z/. Our acoustic anal...

An Experimental Syntactic Study of Binding of Multiple Anaphors in Korean

In this paper we investigated the binding behavior of three Korean reflexives-caki, casin, and caki-casin-through a Truth Value Judgment Task with pictures and found that while caki and caki-casin pattern as claimed in the theoretical literature, as a long-distance and a local anaphor respectively, native Korean speakers differ in how they treat casin. While the speakers as a group treat casin as an LDA, individual results revealed a bimodal distribution, with one group of speakers consistently treating casin as an LDA and another, smaller, group consistently treating it as a local anaphor. This distribution is puzzling in that the grammar of speakers who treat casin as a strictly local anaphor appears to violate the cross-linguistic generalization that morphologically simple reflexives are long-distance anaphors. We show that this problem is only apparent, since the bare form casin lends itself to two different structural analyses. In addition, we show that the greater percentage of speakers who treat casin as an LDA reflects an ongoing change in the grammar of Korean, where casin is both increasing in frequency and taking on more long distance antecedents. This assessment is supported by the sociolinguistic profiles of speakers we tested as well as the frequency and distribution of casin in Bible translations.

A frequentist explanation of some universals of reflexive marking

This paper identifies a number of empirically observable universals of reflexive marking that concern the existence of a special reflexive pronoun and the length of the marker that is used in reflexive constructions, in various different positions of the nonreflexive or reflexive pronoun. Most of the proposed universals have been mentioned earlier in the literature, but they have not been very prominent because the literature on binding has focused on language-specific generalizations rather than identifying readily testable cross-linguistic generalizations. I argue that all of these universals have their basis in a frequency asymmetry: Under different circumstances, the likelihood of an anaphoric pronoun being coreferential with the subject can be quite different, and this is argued to be the motivation for the universal patterns of form.

Glides, vowels, and features

Generative phonologists usually take high vowels like [i,u] and glides like [j,w] to be identical (respectively) in terms of distinctive features. The main argument for this assumption comes from theoretical economy: since syllable theory independently provides us with a means of distinguishing between vowels and glides – as syllable nuclei and margins respectively – there is no need for a featural distinction. This paper shows that in fact vowels must be featurally distinct from glides. Evidence for this comes from phonological processes that distinguish between the segment types, in a way that specifically diagnoses a difference of constriction degree. I further show that the vowel vs. glide distinction is part of a larger hierarchy of segmental distinctions based on constriction degree, as indicated by cross-linguistic generalizations. The implications of these conclusions for cases of high vowel vs. glide contrast are explored.

Construction Grammar in the twenty-first century

Adele Goldberg, Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. vii + 280.Goldberg's new work ‘investigates the nature of our knowledge of language, how that knowledge is acquired by children, and how crosslinguistic and language-internal generalizations can be explained’. It builds on earlier research on Construction Grammar (CxG) by Fillmore (1986), Lakoff (1987), Fillmore, Kay & O'Connor (1988), and Goldberg (1995), among others. Since the mid-1990s constructions have become more and more popular as an alternative to Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist Program, but it was not until the new millennium that CxG reached a new level of interest that resulted in an ever-growing body of research (for an overview, see Fried & Östman 2004). Besides numerous articles and monographs, the increased interest in CxG is evidenced by a book series and an e-journal devoted to constructional research, as well as the bi-annual International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG). The publication of Goldberg (1995) inspired much constructional research over the past decade, most notably Croft's (2001) typologically oriented approach to CxG and Tomasello's (2003) constructional account of language acquisition.

Restricted pro drop in Early Modern Dutch

In this paper, we argue that Early Modern Dutch allowed pro drop, despite the fact that the language has only poor agreement. This provides a direct counterexample to the standard view that Italian-style pro drop is subject to a condition of grammatical recoverability (in that the features of pro must be indexed on the verb). However, pro drop in Early Modern Dutch is subject to very strict pragmatic conditions, and this, we argue, does follow from the lack of rich agreement. Basing ourselves on Mira Ariel’s Accessibility Theory, we argue that if fewer features of an omitted subject are grammatically recoverable, its antecedent must be more salient in discourse. Consequently, there is an indirect relation between rich agreement and pro drop: rich agreement facilitates pro drop in more contexts. Since a very limited distribution of pro drop implies that the rule is vulnerable in diachronic development, the familiar cross-linguistic generalization can be derived.

A Construction-Based Analysis of the Acquisition of East Asian Relative Clauses

Why are crosslinguistic generalizations like the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) relevant to our understanding of language acquisition? The answer to this question relies on our view of language universals. In generative linguistics, it is commonly assumed that language universals are based on innate linguistic knowledge. In this approach, languages share some of their basic grammatical properties because the core of human grammar is innate (Crain & Pietroski, 2001). However, this view of linguistic nativism is incompatible with what we know about the neurological foundations of the human mind: Although language has genetic prerequisites, it is biologically implausible that these prerequisites consist of prespecified categories and constraints (Quartz & Sejnowski, 1997).

Effect of Semantic Naming Treatment on Crosslinguistic Generalization in Bilingual Aphasia

The effect of semantic naming treatment on crosslinguistic generalization was investigated in 3 participants with English-Spanish bilingual aphasia. A single-subject experimental designed was used. Participants received semantic treatment to improve naming of English or Spanish items, while generalization was tested to untrained semantically related items in the trained language and translations of the trained and untrained items in the untrained language. Results demonstrated a within- and across-languages effect on generalization related to premorbid language proficiencies. Participant 1 (P1; equal premorbid proficiency across languages) showed within-language generalization in the trained language (Spanish) as well as crosslinguistic generalization to the untrained language (English). Participant 2 (P2) and Participant (P3) were more proficient premorbidly in English. With treatment in English, P2 showed within-language generalization to semantically related items, but no crosslinguistic generalization. With treatment in Spanish, both P2 and P3 exhibited no within-language generalization, but crosslinguistic generalization to English (dominant language) occurred. Error analyses indicated an evolution of errors as a consequence of treatment. These results are preliminary because all participants were not treated in both languages. However, the results suggest that training the less dominant language may be more beneficial in facilitating crosslinguistic generalization than training the more proficient language in an unbalanced bilingual individual.

Toward universals in the gestural organization of syllables: A cross-linguistic study of liquids

Asymmetries in the relative timing of gestures in English liquids and nasals have provided the basis for the beginnings of an articulatory definition of the syllable, and both perceptually and biomechanically based hypotheses have been proposed to explain these patterns. However, previous studies have not generally considered intergestural timing in languages other than English, making it impossible to distinguish between these hypotheses, or to substantiate claims of universality of these patterns. This paper presents an ultrasound study measuring intergestural timing of liquids in three syllable positions in six languages. Cross-linguistic generalizations in timing patterns among liquids are identified, and specific questions are tested. While much work remains to be done, results at this stage support the view that both perception (recoverability) and biomechanics (jaw movement cycles) are likely playing a role in determining intergestural timing patterns, with possible tendencies for perceptual recoverability to dominate in onsets and jaw movement cycles to dominate in codas.

The Many Faces of Agreement

Agreement features correlate closely with semantics as well as with noun morphology. This book presents a precise formal theory of those correlations, illustrated with Serbo-Croatian and other languages. In explaining regular agreement as a network of constraints, the theory also predicts a restricted set of exceptional situations where normal agreement can give way to agreement mismatches. With this framework in place, the authors explore a number of factors that affect agreement processes. The theory even explains the striking cross-linguistic generalizations expressed in Corbett's Agreement Hierarchy. Agreement is shown to be a distributed phenomenon, manifesting its many faces among the various components of grammar.