Natural Grammars Research Articles

L1 grammatical attrition in late Spanish-English bilinguals in the UK: aspectual interpretations of present tense in Spanish

ABSTRACT This article sheds light on the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that determine the likelihood of L1 grammatical attrition in late sequential bilinguals. We explore whether aspectual interpretations associated with the present tense may be a vulnerable area for the native grammar of 30 late Spanish-English bilinguals who have settled in the UK for over 15 years. Attrition of this property in L1 Spanish grammars has been reported by Cuza (2010. On the L1 attrition of the Spanish present tense. Hispania 93, no. 2: 256–272. doi:10.1353/hpn.2010.a382874) for Spanish-English bilinguals in the USA and Canada. Our finding of no attrition for UK-based Spanish bilinguals suggests that in Cuza’s study, attrition may be mediated by dialectal variation in the L1 in the North American context, where Spanish is a widespread and visible community language. Further, we ascribe the absence of attrition to a specific characteristic of the grammatical distinction between the L1 and L2: where the L2 grammar provides options representing only a subset of the options available to the L1 for the corresponding grammatical property, attrition may be disfavoured.

Compositionality in Pablo Picassos Poetry

Pablo Picassos poetry expands the expressive power of language through syntactic mechanisms provided in natural grammar. His poems often consist of adjunct phrases, following a technique that recalls his cubist collages. The relation between the nuclei of those phrasal constituents as they come in contact remains open, so that readers are free to establish multidirectional semantic associations between them. His poetry is primarily word-oriented. As Picasso once stated, he wanted to compose his poems with a palette of words, leaving those words free to fight it out among themselves to attain any possible meaning. Such a combinatorial approach to language could be interpreted from the perspective of linear grammars as proposed by Culicover and Jackendoff, Jackendoff and Wittenberg and Culicover.

Colocação de clíticos em PE L2

This study investigates the acquisition of clitic placement in L2 EP, using an elicited oral production task and a speeded acceptability judgement task. Participants were 20 L1 EP speakers and 30 L1 Spanish-L2 EP adult learners at intermediate to near-native levels. Results show that enclisis stabilizes early (at least in production) and proclisis develops sequentially, following a route similar to that observed in L1 acquisition: Negation > Subjunctive complement clauses > Indicative complement clauses > Adverbial clauses, quantified subjects. The contexts that develop later are the less categorical ones in native grammars, which may give rise to greater input variability and add complexity to the acquisition task. As a result, learners need prolonged input exposure to discover the patterns of clitic placement in EP. Full convergence with the target language seems to be possible, but only at a near-native level.

Political grammars of justification and cost-benefit analysis in SEC rulemaking

We investigate how financial regulators justify rulemaking decisions on socially oriented disclosure rules through evidence-based policymaking (EBPM) mechanisms. To do so, we analyze the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) justifications within the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) it performs when promulgating the conflict minerals disclosure rule mandated by the U.S. Congress. We use a grammatical approach to analyze the SEC’s justificatory discourse wherein a grammar represents implicit rules that actors follow to be recognized as acting appropriately. We find that six key justifications comprise the SEC’s CBA discourse. These justifications reflect public, natural, and realist grammars that connect the SEC’s justifications in a way that aims to legitimize SEC decisions. Specifically, the SEC’s public grammar suggests that the Congressional mandate increases benefits to society and to market participants and increases costs to issuers. The SEC’s discretionary rulemaking, however, reflects a realist grammar that primarily justifies decreased costs to issuers. The SEC’s realist grammar is buffered by a natural grammar in which the SEC supports its justifications by mobilizing constituent comment letters regarding the rule’s costs while paying less attention to evidence consistent with the rule’s benefits. Overall, our evidence indicates regulators employ CBA, a purportedly objective, evidence-based endeavor, to justify tradeoffs between social and financial objectives when regulating social mandates, suggesting the political nature of EBPM mechanisms.

Термин различие в первых славянских грамматиках: проблемы сигнификата и денотата

The article is devoted to the analysis of the term razlichiye functioning in the first Slavic grammars. The research is based on the data contained in the works of Laurentiy Zizaniy and Meletius Smotrytsky, as well as in some later grammatical descriptions. On the basis of etymological, motivational and orienting analyzes, the ratio of denotative and significative components in the structure of the term, which in the first native grammars functioned as razlichiye, was identified. The review of theoretical research papers on the issue is introduced. The variability of the term usage resulting from the studied exponent signification and denotation ambiguity has been revealed. At the opening phase of the formation of grammatical terminology, reflected in the grammars of the Church Slavonic language in the 16 th – 17 th centuries the linguistic personality of grammarians, the cultural context of the era are proved to play an important role. The authors conclude that introducing the term razlichiye in the description of the Church Slavonic grammatical structure was the first step towards understanding the relational meaning of flexion as a morpheme. A comparative analysis of the term and its equivalents functioning in the grammars of ancient Greek, Latin, and Slavic languages has been performed. It was found that the interpretation of the medieval understanding of the term razlichiye as one of the parts of speech is recognized by the majority of modern researchers, but different assumptions are made about the significative and denotative correlation of the term (indicative-relative pronouns or articles). It is assumed that the signification of the term razlichiye in its modern interpretation can be explained as follows: it is a rudimentary inflectional category of syncretic (part-of-speech-and-affixal) nature, embodied in the forms of pronouns i, ja, e. The denotation of the term razlichiye is a transitional phenomenon between the realities corresponding to a definite article, an indicative-relative pronoun and an inflection.

Heritage Speakers as Part of the Native Language Continuum.

We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. (1) We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. (2) We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. (3) In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike.

Adult Mandarin Chinese speakers’ acquisition of locational and directional prepositional constructions in second language English

This study tests adult Chinese speakers of second language (L2) English in the domain of manner of motion verbs with locational and directional prepositional phrases. Ninety-eight Chinese speakers (a language which disallows ambiguity between locational and directional readings in sentences like Tom zai qiao dixia paobu/Tom ran under the bridge.) were asked to interpret locational and directional PPs in English (a language which, with certain prepositions, allows ambiguous locational and directional readings). The learners were divided into three proficiency levels and their performance was compared with a native speaker control group. The results from a written picture-matching test indicate that there is a discrepancy between native and non-native mental representations of the grammars concerned; whereas native grammars allow ambiguity between locational and directional readings, L2 learners overwhelmingly prefer locational readings to ambiguous readings of prepositional constructions. Results of the study lend support to the UG and Subset Principle Delinked Hypothesis, one of the predictions of the Subset Principle (Berwick, 1985; Wexler and Manzini, 1987), which argues that learning principles and UG may not be interactive in adult second language acquisition, resulting in a grammar which represents neither the L1 nor the L2 but is nevertheless a natural language permitted by UG.

Contato do português com as línguas indígenas brasileiras: Considerações sobre o desenvolvimento de L2

Nosso objetivo neste artigo é contar uma parte da história do português do Brasil a partir do contato com as línguas indígenas nacionais. Para realizar esse objetivo, buscamos trabalhos que versam sobre a presença real de características gramaticais e sonoras das línguas dos povos indígenas no português falado pelos membros desses povos. A interferência das gramáticas nativas dos povos indígenas é discutida a partir de propriedades sonoras consonantais e vocálicas do Português Ticuna (BONIFÁCIO, 2019); de propriedades consonantais do Português Kamaiurá (SILVA E SILVA, 1985); de propriedades gramaticais dos subsistemas da flexão de número no nome e da flexão de primeira e terceira pessoa do plural no verbo do Português Xinguano (EMMERICH, 1987); e de características gramaticais da expressão do gênero no português Huni Kuin (CHRISTINO, 2015). Defendemos que compreender o conhecimento linguístico responsável por produzir as características do português de contato com as línguas indígenas brasileiras possa esclarecer fenômenos envolvidos no processo de bilinguismo/multilinguismo dos povos indígenas, e ajudar a lidar com os desafios da educação escolar indígena. Para explicar o comportamento linguístico e mostrar como ele se apoia nas propriedades da Faculdade da Linguagem recorremos ao conceito de interlíngua (SELINKER, 1972). Partindo desse conceito, o início do processo de conhecimento de L2 seria marcado pela presença da gramática nativa e pelos dados da segunda língua. Todo esse processo seria restringido pelas propriedades gerais e abstratas da linguagem humana (WHITE, 2003). Assim, demonstramos como gramáticas nativas estruturam o português de contato. Pretendemos com reconhecimento dessa estruturação um resgate da participação da língua e cultura dos povos nativos na sociedade brasileira, e uma promoção do seu processo de descolonização.

Adaptation of Loanwords by Saraiki Speakers

The study presents a basic analysis of loanwords adaptation process by Saraiki speakers. Loanwords from three languages are analyzed and results reveal that native grammar used different strategies for different languages. In one language the onset/initial CC is adapted while in the other the final CC is modified by Saraiki speakers. It is observed that if the loanwords structure is absent in native grammar, it is not adapted though it follows universal principles. Native grammar allows clusters on both initial and final positions but loanwords do not. The study also discloses the strange behaviour for different languages, Saraiki speakers used fix vowel to break the cluster of English loanwords but vowel harmony and gemination in Arabic loanwords. It is noted that loanwords grammar preferred to have CV and CVC syllables rather than clusters at margins. Apart from grammatical adaptation, prosodic structure of receiver is also maintained. In many examples Saraiki follows universal principles but sometimes presents its own way to adapt loanwords

Linguistic Factors in Arabic for Miscommunication of Medication Names.

A commentary and analysis on the miscommunication of medication names between native Arabic-speaking patients and pharmacists with a native English-speaking family physician using Medical English as a Lingua Franca (MELF), in a healthcare context. An important cause of communication difficulties is the different way native English and native Arabic speakers linguistically process medication names when using MELF. This is likely to be explained by the differences in the native grammars of English and Arabic which determine differences in pronunciation and predict potential error prone groupings of letters and sounds. This in turn leads to repeating linguistic errors such as epenthesis (insertion of additional vowels between consonants) and metathesis (the swapping of adjacent consonants). The article highlights a case where both epenthesis and metathesis occur simultaneously leading to a potential serious adverse event through a medication error and suggests further avenues of research to minimise such errors.

A relevância da gramática natural nos textos produzidos por estudantes do ensino fundamental

Este artigo abordará as diferenças entre gramática normativa e natural com dois objetivos: (a)destacar a impossibilidade de a tradição gramatical ser o único parâmetro de corrção das produções de alunos da rede brasileira de ensino; (b) reforçar a importância da gramática natural na construção de textos. Linguistas tratam de limitações identificadas nas gramáticas normativas para explicar o português brasileiro. A fim de contribuir com essa discussão, apresentaremos a análise de um dos textos produzidos por alunos de uma turma de quinto ano de uma escola pública de ensino fundamental, aos quais foram ofertadas oficinas de leitura e produção textual

Accounting for the asymmetrical interpretation of thematic and non-thematic verbs in L2 English

AbstractThis study presents data from an experiment on the interpretation of thematic and non-thematic verbs in second language (L2) English by three groups of adult native Chinese speakers and a group of native English speakers. English allows non-thematic verbs to raise but requires thematic verbs to remainin-situ. In contrast, neither thematic nor non-thematic verbs are allowed to raise in Chinese. The results indicate that there is a discrepancy between native and non-native mental representations of the grammars concerned; whereas native grammars require English thematic verbs to remainin-situbut allow non-thematic verbs to raise, neither thematic nor non-thematic verbs are allowed to raise in learners L2 English grammars. Results of the study argue against theValueless Features Hypothesis(Eubank 1993/94. On the transfer of parametric values in L2 development.Language Acquisition3. 183–208, 1994. Optionality and the initial state in L2 development. In T. Hoekstra & B. Schwartz (eds),Language acquisition studies in generative grammar: Papers in Honour of Kenneth Wexler from the 1991 GLOW Workshop, 369–388. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996. Negation in early German-English interlanguage: More valueless features in the L2 initial state.Second Language Research12. 73–106.), which posits that the L1 syntactic features of INFL are initially inert and are not transferred. Instead, the results support theInterpretability Hypothesis(Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou 2007. The interpretability hypothesis: Evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition.Second Language Research23. 215–242.), which argues for the inaccessibility of uninterpretable syntactic features beyond a critical period. In particular, it is argued that uninterpretable syntactic features not selected during early stages of primary language acquisition become inaccessible in subsequent language acquisition. The results suggest that there may be cases where apparent target-like performance conceals non-target-like underlying competence.

Narcissus: correct-by-construction derivation of decoders and encoders from binary formats

It is a neat result from functional programming that libraries of parser combinators can support rapid construction of decoders for quite a range of formats. With a little more work, the same combinator program can denote both a decoder and an encoder. Unfortunately, the real world is full of gnarly formats, as with the packet formats that make up the standard Internet protocol stack. Most past parser-combinator approaches cannot handle these formats, and the few exceptions require redundancy – one part of the natural grammar needs to be hand-translated into hints in multiple parts of a parser program. We show how to recover very natural and nonredundant format specifications, covering all popular network packet formats and generating both decoders and encoders automatically. The catch is that we use the Coq proof assistant to derive both kinds of artifacts using tactics, automatically, in a way that guarantees that they form inverses of each other. We used our approach to reimplement packet processing for a full Internet protocol stack, inserting our replacement into the OCaml-based MirageOS unikernel, resulting in minimal performance degradation.

Le rôle de l’ancien français dans le développement du passif indirect en anglais

Abstract This contribution analyses the role French may have played as a model language in the development of the indirect passive (or recipient passive) in Middle English. It is based on diachronic corpus data showing that the construction appeared in Middle English predominantly with verbs borrowed from French and spread to native verbs only later. The fact that French did not have a recipient passive construction speaks against contact influence, whereas the data as well as the situation of close language contact between Old French and Middle English speak in favour of contact-induced change. The hypothesis of internal change will be contrasted with several explanations in a language contact scenario. The first one is syntactic and regards the type of dative case : English integrated the French structural dative into its native grammar, which so far only had an inherent dative. Passives with structural datives were prior to native constructions and may have triggered them. The transfer may have been facilitated by the reanalysis of certain bridge constructions (proclitics and clausal complements). The more conceptual second part discusses current psycholinguistic research in order to identify methods which help overcome the methodological deadlock that historical linguists are facing when they want to assess the validity of competing explanations.

Native and Non-Native Patterns in Conflict: Lexicon vs. Grammar in Loanword Adaptation in Brazilian Portuguese

English loanwords with /ʌ/ that are part of the Brazilian Portuguese (BP) lexicon are normally produced with [ɐ] (pub: [ˈpɐbɪ]). Although [ɐ] is the closest segment to /ʌ/ in the native inventory, it is highly constrained in BP: it is an allophone of /a/ that can only appear in nasal contexts. This paper investigates whether native speakers of BP generalize to novel loanwords the adaptation pattern of English /ʌ/ that is present in the BP lexicon. Two experiments were conducted, one with real loanwords and one with nonce loanwords. In the Real Loanword Experiment, participants consistently used [ɐ] both in oral (pub) and nasal contexts (funk), as predicted given the patterns in the lexicon. In the Nonce Loanword Experiment, participants used [ɐ] significantly more frequently in nasal contexts – in oral contexts, the most frequent adaptation was [a]. This reveals that speakers employ their native grammar to filter new loanwords: in contexts where [ɐ] is not licensed, they favor the corresponding licensed form. These results suggest that native speakers do not generalize non-native patterns that are present in the lexicon, mirroring what has been observed for the generalization of unnatural patterns in native grammars (e.g., Garcia 2017; Jarosz 2017).

Тенденция к оптимальной организации системы видовых пара- дигм в русском языке

The reorganization of the initial system of aspect paradigms in Old Russian is investigated within the framework of the theory of natural grammar. It is claimed, in accordance with this theory, that the grammatical changes in morphological systems of natural languages are determined by a limited set of typologically relevant markedness principles (naturalness principles or preference laws). These principles explain the attested diachrony of grammatical changes in the system of aspectual paradigms of the Russian verb and predict the general direction in its development. During the historical development of the system of aspectual paradigms in Russian, optimal iconic perfectivizing paradigms are ousting non-optimal countericonic imperfectivizing paradigms as well as non-optimal non-iconic aspectual syncretic paradigms. In contemporary Russian, aspectual paradigms of perfectivization are preferable in terms of competitive aspectual paradigms of imperfectivization and syncretic aspectual paradigms. The share of optimal paradigms of perfectivization is constantly increasing in modern Russian. Consequently, there is direct evidence for the development of the system of Russian aspect paradigms towards optimal organization of aspect paradigms, i.e. towards economy.

SU(2) Decomposition for the Quantum Information Dynamics in 2d-Partite Two-Level Quantum Systems.

The gate array version of quantum computation uses logical gates adopting convenient forms for computational algorithms based on the algorithms classical computation. Two-level quantum systems are the basic elements connecting the binary nature of classical computation with the settlement of quantum processing. Despite this, their design depends on specific quantum systems and the physical interactions involved, thus complicating the dynamics analysis. Predictable and controllable manipulation should be addressed in order to control the quantum states in terms of the physical control parameters. Resources are restricted to limitations imposed by the physical settlement. This work presents a formalism to decompose the quantum information dynamics in for -partite two-level systems into quantum subsystems. It generates an easier and more direct physical implementation of quantum processing developments for qubits. Easy and traditional operations proposed by quantum computation are recovered for larger and more complex systems. Alternating the parameters of local and non-local interactions, the procedure states a universal exchange semantics on the basis of generalized Bell states. Although the main procedure could still be settled on other interaction architectures by the proper selection of the basis as natural grammar, the procedure can be understood as a momentary splitting of the information channels into pairs of 2 level quantum information subsystems. Additionally, it is a settlement of the quantum information manipulation that is free of the restrictions imposed by the underlying physical system. Thus, the motivation of decomposition is to set control procedures easily in order to generate large entangled states and to design specialized dedicated quantum gates. They are potential applications that properly bypass the general induced superposition generated by physical dynamics.

Mining foreign language teaching manuals for the history of pragmatics

AbstractForeign language learning manuals can be valuable sources for the history of pragmatics and historical pragmatics. They may contain explicit guidance on pragmatics not found in native-speaker grammars. For example, accounts of German forms of address in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English–German manuals provide evidence of changing views on the appropriateness ofihrandSieearlier than does the “native” grammatical tradition. The bilingual model dialogues that are typical of such manuals may also implicitly model appropriate linguistic behaviour, demonstrated here by examining the communicative genre of bargaining in a series of three related English–Dutch language manuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Furthermore, the dialogues may provide metalinguistic comment on linguistic behaviour – for example, by criticizing the culture of excessive negative politeness. Such sources can enrich our knowledge of language use and attitudes to language use in the area of politeness, complementing the evidence to be gleaned from mainstream native grammars, civility manuals, merchants’ guides, and the like.

The role of native and non-native grammars in the comprehension of possessive pronouns

Previous studies have shown that multilingual speakers are influenced by their native (L1) and non-native (L2) grammars when learning a new language. But, so far, these studies have mostly used untimed metalinguistic tasks. Here we examine whether multilinguals’ prior grammars also affect their sensitivity to morphosyntactic constraints during processing. We use speeded judgment and self-paced reading tasks to examine the comprehension of German possessive pronouns. To investigate whether native and non-native grammars differentially affect participants’ performance, we compare two groups of non-native German speakers with inverse L1–L2 distributions: a group with L1 Spanish – L2 English, and a group with L1 English – L2 Spanish. We show that the reading profiles of both groups are modulated by their L1 grammar, with L2 proficiency selectively affecting participants’ judgment accuracy but not their reading times. We propose that reading comprehension is mainly influenced by multilinguals’ native grammar, but that knowledge of an L2 grammar can further increase sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations in an additional language.

The Development of Anaphora Resolution at the Syntax-Discourse Interface: Pronominal Subjects in Greek Learners of Spanish.

This study explores the development of anaphora resolution (AR) in late sequential bilinguals, namely, adult Greek learners of Spanish at three proficiency levels (intermediate, lower advanced, upper advanced). The use of an overt/null pronominal subject anaphor is investigated in three discourse contexts: topic-continuity (a single antecedent requiring a null pronoun), contrastive-focus (two same-gender potential antecedents requiring an overt pronoun to avoid ambiguity) and emphatic (three same-gender potential antecedents showing unclear preference for either overt or null pronoun). Crucially, AR behaves similarly in Greek and Spanish. Results from an offline contextualised acceptability judgement task show that similarity between the learner's first (L1) and second (L2) languages does not necessarily facilitate the learning task. Even very advanced learners show deficits, which are selective since not all discursive contexts are equally affected. The results are better accounted for by general pragmatic economy principles: Learners prefer being redundant (overuse of overt pronouns in topic-continuity contexts) to ambiguous (acceptance of null pronouns in contrastive-focus contexts). Such tolerance for redundancy may reflect a more general pragmatic tendency, as also reported in child L1 development, adult L2 development and also in native grammars.