Null Objects Research Articles

Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous and early sequential acquisition: Null subjects and null objects in Polish-German bilingualism

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: The topic of cross-linguistic influence regarding the overt or null expression of arguments has been frequently considered regarding bilinguals acquiring language pairs in which the null option is licensed by one and not both of the two languages. The goal of this study is to investigate whether simultaneous and sequential bilinguals differ from monolinguals in the case of the acquisition of Polish and German; that is, languages which both license null subjects and null objects, but in which the nature of the null arguments clearly differs. We focus on the acquisition of null arguments as silent but syntactically active bundles of features. Design/methodology/approach: We compare the use of null subjects and null objects by 72 bilingual and 45 monolingual children in experimental setting: acceptability judgement and sentence repetition. Data and analysis: The distribution of null arguments in production and judgement data of simultaneous and early sequential bilinguals was compared to the data of monolinguals. Findings/conclusions: The study has revealed that early sequential Polish-German bilinguals avoid null subjects in L2 German at an advanced stage of acquisition, even though null subjects are quite frequent in their L1. The slower acquisition of null subjects in early L2 German in comparison to null objects in the case of Polish-German bilinguals demonstrates that the dissimilarity between the null subjects in both languages may lead to the delay effect in the acquisition. The findings suggest that the cross-linguistic influence is due to the increased complexity inherent to the integration of syntactic and pragmatic information in case of null arguments. Originality: Unlike previous studies, we focus on the acquisition of null arguments in a language pair, Polish and German, in which the null option is licensed by both grammars, and in which the nature of the null arguments clearly differ.

CONSTRUÇÕES DE TÓPICO MARCADO NA ESCRITA CULTA BRASILEIRA

Este artigo objetiva descrever as estratégias de construção de tópico marcado presentes na escrita culta brasileira, propondo uma tipologia dessas construções, semelhante ao que fizeram Berlinck, Duarte e Oliveira (2009) para a gramática do português culto falado. Para isso, constituiu-se uma amostra de 1.456 textos, de diferentes gêneros textuais, publicados nos jornais O Globo e Folha de São Paulo, no interstício 2009-2015. Ancorados na Teoria de Princípios e Parâmetros (cf. CHOMSKY, 1981), confirmamos a hipótese de que a gramática do letrado brasileiro (KATO, 2005) é distinta da norma padrão, uma vez que o processo de letramento, desenvolvido no ambiente escolar, recupera parcialmente as regras prescritas pela tradição gramatical. Além disso, a tipologia aqui apresentada reflete a mudança paramétrica em curso no que se refere ao Parâmetro do Sujeito Nulo e ao comportamento do PB em relação ao objeto nulo (cf. DUARTE, 2019; KATO; DUARTE, 2014; CYRINO, 2019).

The effect of animacy on the elicited production of co-referential objects in brazilian portuguese

O objetivo desse estudo é verificar em que medida o traço de animacidade do antecedente é um fator que contribui na seleção de uma determinada forma para a realização do objeto direto correferencial no curso da aquisição do português brasileiro (PB). Adicionalmente, verifica-se em que medida restrições ao objeto nulo em contexto de ilha sintática, que se aplicam ao português europeu (PE), podem interferir nesse efeito, levando em conta a produção oral e escrita de adultos. Duas tarefas de produção eliciada foram utilizadas: resposta a perguntas-QU e cloze. Os resultados apontam para a relevância de animacidade, independentemente de idade, afetando não só o pronome tônico e o objeto nulo, como o DP completo. Restrições sintáticas ao objeto nulo não se impõem, no geral, no PB, embora possa haver resquícios dessas restrições em decorrência de escolarização.

Acquisition of null objects in Mandarin Chinese by heritage speakers

AbstractThe acquisition of the grammatical knowledge related to inflectional morphology and syntax-pragmatics interface have both been shown to be challenging for heritage speakers (e.g.,Montrul et al. 2008;Polinsky 2006,2008;Sorace et al. 2009;Montrul 2009;Benmamoun et al. 2013a;Laleko & Polinsky 2016). In these previous work on heritage language acquisition, the acquisition of inflectional morphology (e.g. either agreement morphology or topic marking) is also a relevant acquisition task associated with the syntax-discourse phenomena under investigation. In this paper we focus on the acquisition of discourse-conditioned structures by heritage speakers when inflectional morphology is not part of the learning task. Specifically, we report results of a picture-verification experiment focusing on English-dominant heritage Chinese speakers’ grammatical knowledge of null objects. As a topic-prominent language lacking verbal tense/agreement morphology, the licensing and identification of null arguments in Chinese has nothing to do with agreement morphology. In addition, unlike other topic-prominent pro-drop languages, Chinese has no inflectional morphology associated with grammatical subjects/objects and topic phrases. Without the interference of co-occurring inflectional morphology, we found that there is no significant difference between heritage Chinese speakers and the monolingual baseline in their acceptance of null objects in contextually appropriate contexts. The results of our study cast doubt on the thesis that heritage speakers are unable to acquire discourse-related knowledge (cf.Sorace & Serratrice 2009;Laleko 2010;Laleko & Polinsky 2016) and supportYuan’s (2010)claim that interface categories should not be considered holistically.

On null objects in Egyptian Arabic

Abstract This paper provides a descriptive account and a syntactic analysis of the grammatical distribution and properties of null objects (NOs) in Egyptian Arabic. In particular, it is shown that NOs cannot be analyzed as instances of null pro or as variables bound by a null topic operator. A Verb-Stranding VP-Ellipsis account is also shown to be empirically non-viable. Instead, I argue that NOs result from Argument Ellipsis (AE), an operation that targets arguments for deletion at PF. This AE analysis has several empirical advantages, including an account for (a) the different-entity interpretation of NOs, (b) the fact that PP and CP internal arguments can be null, (c) the availability of both strict identity and sloppy identity readings with null PPs and CPs, (d) the indefiniteness and inanimacy restrictions on the antecedents of NOs, and (e) the fact that subjects, as opposed to objects, cannot undergo AE. Following existing proposals in the generative literature on null arguments, I provide a minimalist implementation of the AE operation, whereby principles of φ-agreement, case licensing, the NP/DP distinction, and a notion of relativized phasehood, all conspire to determine when NOs occur and when they are disallowed in the language.

A variação linguística no espanhol comparada ao português brasileiro no âmbito do objeto pronominal acusativo de 3ª pessoa

Neste trabalho, apresentamos os resultados de nossa pesquisa (Simões, 2015) a respeito da realização do objeto pronominal acusativo de 3ª pessoa nas variedades de espanhol de Madri e Montevidéu e comparamos as tendências encontradas com o português brasileiro. Tendo em vista estudos sobre o espanhol (Campos, 1986; Fernández Soriano, 1999; Groppi; 1997), nossa hipótese era de que nas variedades de espanhol que investigamos a omissão do objeto se restringiria a antecedentes [-determinados; -específicos]. Contudo, verificamos a ocorrência de objetos nulos em outros contextos, contrariando parcialmente a nossa hipótese.

Acquiring the distribution of null and overt direct objects in European Portuguese

This article investigates the L1 acquisition of different types of direct objects in European Portuguese (EP). Previous research has revealed that although children have early syntactic and pragmatic knowledge of objects across languages, the adequate use of pronouns and null objects is protracted in the acquisition of EP (Costa et al. 2012). The present study shows that children acquiring the distribution of direct objects are aware of universal pragmatic hierarchies but struggle with the interpretation and feature bundles of null objects. Assuming that arguments are linked to left-peripheral C/edge linkers (Sigurðsson 2011), we argue that children need more time to discover the adult-like feature composition of null objects in EP because they involve phi-silent features. Relative accessibility (Ariel 1991) is universal and available early, whereas the absolute accessibility of null objects, i.e. their feature content, is acquired relatively late.

The role of information structure in the instantiation of objects: Evidence from Amazonian Spanish

AbstractThis study analyzes the instantiation of objects in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS) discourse in two communities with distinct linguistic contexts. We examine the impact of two social variables (gender and place) and nine linguistic variables (transitivity, animacy, definiteness, anaphora function, anaphora expression, cataphora function, cataphora expression, activation, topic persistence) on the speech of eight participants. Our findings indicate that null instantiation in PAS is pervasive, occurring with a range of verb lexemes. While neither gender nor place are significant predictors of null objects, various linguistic variables contribute to the instantiation of objects. The five significant variables as determined by a mixed model regression analysis include the following: animacy, definiteness, anaphora expression, cataphora expression, and activation status. Several findings are consistent with previous research (e. g. human and definite referents disfavor null objects), while other results differ (e. g. PAS propositions disfavor null objects). Activation status and anaphora expression are the most significant predictors of null objects in PAS. In particular, highly accessible referents in discourse and anaphoric null objects favored null objects in subsequent clauses. Thus, the results in the present study demonstrate the pivotal role of information structure in object instantiation, furthering the discussion on syntax-discourse interplay phenomena.

Null Objects in Korean: Experimental Evidence for the Argument Ellipsis Analysis

Null object (NO) constructions in Korean and Japanese have received different accounts: as (a) argument ellipsis ( Oku 1998 , S. Kim 1999 , Saito 2007 , Sakamoto 2015 ), (b) VP-ellipsis after verb raising ( Otani and Whitman 1991 , Funakoshi 2016 ), or (c) instances of base-generated pro ( Park 1997 , Hoji 1998 , 2003 ). We report results from two experiments supporting the argument ellipsis analysis for Korean. Experiment 1 builds on K.-M. Kim and Han’s (2016) finding of interspeaker variation in whether the pronoun ku can be bound by a quantifier. Results showed that a speaker’s acceptance of quantifier-bound ku positively correlates with acceptance of sloppy readings in NO sentences. We argue that an ellipsis account, in which the NO site contains internal structure hosting the pronoun, accounts for this correlation. Experiment 2, testing the recovery of adverbials in NO sentences, showed that only the object (not the adverb) can be recovered in the NO site, excluding the possibility of VP-ellipsis. Taken together, our findings suggest that NOs result from argument ellipsis in Korean.

From torsion theories to closure operators and factorization systems

Torsion theories are here extended to categories equipped with an ideal of 'null morphisms', or equivalently a full subcategory of 'null objects'. Instances of this extension include closure operators viewed as generalised torsion theories in a 'category of pairs', and factorization systems viewed as torsion theories in a category of morphisms. The first point has essentially been treated in [15].

Children do not ignore (null objects): Against deficit accounts of the null object stage in language acquisition

Children across a variety of languages omit direct objects at higher rates that adults. It has been argued that these omissions arise from children’s performance or pragmatic limitations. The null object approach holds that children start by allowing a broader set of mechanisms for the recoverability of null objects than those possible in the adult grammar, which becomes more restricted with experience. Comprehension data is considered key evidence for evaluating representational approaches, but the interpretation of previous comprehension results is obscured by methodological issues. This article presents new data contrasting the interpretation of various types of direct objects in negative sentences, including null objects (Johnny is not eating) and anaphoric and negative polarity items (not eating it/not eating anything). English-speaking children aged 4–5 (n = 75) participated in three separate comprehension studies contrasting the interpretation of null objects to overt objects. Children consistently accepted sentences with overt anaphoric objects and rejected sentences with negative polarity objects, and treated sentences with null objects as fully ambiguous.

Direct objects and language acquisition by Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux, Mihaela Pirvulescu, and Yves Roberge

Reviewed by: Direct objects and language acquisition by Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux, Mihaela Pirvulescu, and Yves Roberge João Costa Direct objects and language acquisition. By Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux, Mihaela Pirvulescu, and Yves Roberge. (Cambridge studies in linguistics 152.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 231. ISBN 9781107018006. $110 (Hb). Direct objects and language acquisition, by Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux, Mihaela Pirvulescu, and Yves Roberge, is a very important book, unavoidable if you are interested in the acquisition of transitivity, direct object pronouns, and Romance languages. At first sight, it appears to be a book on the acquisition of clitics or another piece in the long-standing discussion of clitic omission in Romance languages, but although there is a clear focus on French and Spanish, the book makes important comparisons with English, Italian, Greek, and European Portuguese, and draws on results from several other languages as well. Soon we understand that the book provides a much broader view on the acquisition of direct objects and transitivity. The book has six chapters and is structured in a way leading the authors from a formulation of the problem—the fact that children may omit objects throughout their development (Ch. 2)—through a description of what this means for the understanding of omission, learnability, and the interaction between modules of grammar (Ch. 1), combined with a thorough review of crosslinguistic differences in the acquisition of objects (Ch. 4). These descriptions and formulations provide the relevant background for a correct understanding of how null objects are interpreted and what it means to acquire a null element, in terms of proper acquisition of lexical, pragmatic, and syntactic features (Chs. 5, 6). Let me go through each chapter in greater detail. Ch. 1, 'Missing objects in child language', provides a very comprehensive overview of the acquisition of objects in their relation with the lexical properties of verbs. A discussion of the path to learning is offered, with the right balance between innate grammatical features and the role of experience. Besides laying out the research questions, this chapter opens the first major questions: How is transitivity acquired? Why are there missing objects only in some languages? Is this a right description of omission? How do children know about missing objects? The second chapter, 'From the missing to the invisible', is a key chapter, since evidence is presented against a simplistic binary approach to missing objects. A survey of adult grammars, in particular with data from French and English, reveals that null objects are more common than considered in some analyses and descriptions. In fact, the authors lead the reader to check the availability of null objects of some sort in languages with allegedly obligatory complements. This observation leads to the claim that transitivity is a default and that all apparently missing objects (or invisible, in the case of intransitive verbs) derive from a transitive basis. With this borne in mind, the child's task is no longer to learn when an object is missing, but rather the licensing conditions for the null expression of complements. The consequence of this proposal is very interesting: children are endowed with the ability to have transitive contexts and, in interaction with the inputs, have to pin down the contexts for pronunciation of complements. In Ch. 3, 'Rome leads to all roads', the actual learning path is explored for several languages. Given the common transitivity basis, it is legitimate to assume that all languages license null complements. However, the input does not confirm this, and the learning child must figure out the exact contexts in which null complements are allowed. The consequence of this is that more-variable inputs slow down the acquisition process, as the child is faced with additional conflicting evidence. This chapter ends with a very interesting point from bilingual acquisition: in a bilingual setting, the amount of input decreases and the degree of variability increases, which explains learning times specific to bilingual children. The fourth chapter, 'Interpreting the missing object', sets as a goal to refine the learnability perspective developed so far. The discussion of crosslinguistic variation takes into account the uniformity hypothesis from Chomsky (2001...

PANTERA: a parallel corpus to study translation between Portuguese and Norwegian

This paper presents an on-going project, PANTERA, which deals with the Portuguese-Norwegian language pair. The PANTERA project aims a) to identify all translations ever published between the two languages Portuguese and Norwegian, and b) to make a sample of each available and searchable for the study of translation between the two languages in the PANTERA parallel corpus. After describing the methodology and processing used to create the corpus, I discuss briefly its contents from a translation studies perspective, and proceed to give examples of its actual use in the context of linguistic and cultural studies, ending with its possibilities as a teaching aid.
 The particular subjects discussed are the concept of respect in the two languages, the semantic field of body parts, and the identification of possessive datives and null objects in Portuguese. The translations into Norwegian are used to demonstrate complex syntactic phenomena based on contrastive patterns.

Definite referential null objects in Old Hittite

Abstract The occurrence of referential Null Objects (NOs) is a recurrent syntactic feature of ancient Indo-European languages. As previous scholars have remarked, different conditions license the occurrence of NOs in individual languages. In Hittite, the occurrence of NOs has already been observed in reference works, but a systematic account of this phenomenon is still a desideratum. In this paper, we provide a thorough corpus-based study of NOs in a corpus of Old Hittite texts. By means of quantitative data, we illustrate the frequency of NOs in various contexts, and highlight their co-occurrence with sentence connectives, chiefly with ta. We also take into account other parameters that influence the occurrence of NOs. Our analysis shows that in Hittite NOs display a connection with inanimate and less individuated referents and seem to be driven by discourse rather than by syntactic motivations. In addition, textual genre also seems to play role, and we suggest that NOs constitute a feature of the technical language of festivals and ritual texts. Finally, we sketch a possible diachronic scenario that explains the observed distribution of NOs, and argue that Old Hittite attests a phase of ongoing change whereby NOs were being progressively replaced by clitic object pronouns.

Heritage Portuguese and Heritage Polish in Contact with German: More Evidence on the Production of Objects

This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.

Spatial deictics in translation

AbstractRecent research on deictic elements has made extensive use of translation corpora to demonstrate that asymmetries between translational paradigms signal subtle contrasts from a systemic and pragmatic perspective. The purpose of the present study is to identify translation correspondences of the English spatial demonstrativethisin Lithuanian and to discuss the contrastive features within the analytical framework of translational explicitation and implicitation. The results indicate that in the prototypical situational usage there is a high degree of correspondence betweenthisand its Lithuanian translation, while textual uses demonstrate low formal equivalence. A tendency to implicitate stems from the null subject construction and object ellipsis in Lithuanian and is also a result of the availability of facultative deictic words in Lithuanian. The apparent systemic difference between the deictic systems of English and Lithuanian indicates a tendency towards optional implicitation and stylistic variation in literary translation.

Null objects/full pronouns and topicality in Brazilian Portuguese

Sabe-se que o português brasileiro (PB) permite objetos nulos cujos antecedentes são inanimados. Porém, há certas sentenças que parecem desafiar essa generalização. Essas sentenças também permitem pronomes plenos na posição do objeto. Neste trabalho, defendo que a lacuna nessas sentenças não é o objeto nulo característico do PB, ou seja, não há aí uma elipse de DP. A questão, portanto, é como diferenciá-las (i) daquelas contendo o verdadeiro objeto nulo; e (ii) daquelas que só permitem o pronome pleno. Para discutir essas questões, o trabalho tem como base o arcabouço teórico gerativista e parte de recentes propostas para diferentes tipos de tópico, dentro de uma visão cartográfica (FRASCARELLI; HINTERHÖLZ, 2007). Comparando os objetos nulos do PB com o hebraico (ERTESCHIK-SHIR et al., 2013), assumo que diferentes tipos de tópico devem ser distinguidos em termos de seu papel no discurso. O PB, no entanto, não se assemelha ao hebraico em relação ao fenômeno de queda do tópico. Essa discussão embasa a proposta aqui apresentada acerca da distribuição do objeto nulo e pronome pleno no PB. Os objetos nulos animados vs. não-animados do PB são permitidos de acordo com o tipo de tópico presente na periferia à esquerda. O trabalho pretende contribuir para a discussão sobre a alternância objeto nulo/pronome pleno no PB.

Testing language acquisition models: null and overt topics in Mandarin.

Parameter setting is either precipitous (Gibson & Wexler, 1994) or it is gradual in response to input frequency (Yang, 2002, 2004). In this study, we compare these models against the empirical domain of subject and (direct) object drop in Mandarin. We conducted a corpus-based study of the speech of 47 Mandarin-speaking children aged 1;2-6;5, and their caregivers, from the CHILDES database. The results show that before age 1;8 all the children used null subjects and null objects in a target-like fashion, which reveals that the parameter that governs null topics is set from very early on, even if the presence of disambiguating evidence for [+Null Topic] patterns is low. Besides, children's ba constructions, which require an overt object, reliably included this object from the first occurrence although its frequency was scarce in the input. Our results indicate that the setting of certain parameters occurred early independently of the input.

Um tratamento unificado da omissão e da expressão de sujeitos e objetos diretos pronominais de 3ª pessoa em português brasileiro

Este trabalho apresenta um estudo sobre dois fenômenos envolvendo pronomes que vêm ocorrendo de maneira concomitante na história do português brasileiro (PB): a realização de objeto direto nulo (ON) de 3ª pessoa e o preenchimento pronominal do sujeito. Realizamos uma pesquisa diacrônica que buscou: (i) verificar se houve aumento de sujeitos pronominais expressos no intervalo de 20 anos em Porto Alegre (RS); (ii) verificar se houve aumento de objetos nulos na retomada anafórica nesse mesmo período, nessa mesma cidade; e (iii) verificar quais traços semântico-discursivos do referente (animacidade, especificidade ou gênero semântico) estão atuando como gatilho para a manifestação do pronome nas ocorrências de sujeito e de objeto direto pronominais. Analisamos dois corpora de língua falada espontânea: o corpus do projeto VARSUL, da década de 1990, e o corpus LinguaPOA, produzido e transcrito entre 2015 e 2018. Também usamos dados do NURC, com base no levantamento de Monteiro (1994). Nossos resultados mostram que houve apenas um leve aumento nas ocorrências de sujeito expresso no período de tempo analisado, o que sinaliza que essa mudança está estável em PB. Da mesma forma, também encontramos apenas um leve aumento de ONs no período, o que parece indicar, igualmente, a estabilização de uma mudança. Com relação ao objetivo (iii), mostramos que a distribuição de sujeitos nulos vs expressos e de objetos nulos vs pronomes plenos pôde (até certo ponto) ser explicada com a hipótese do gênero semântico do antecedente. Para os casos destoantes, deixamos sugestões para análises futuras.

Contraposição não oracional com mas

A proposta deste estudo é investigar a relação adversativa entre sintagmas e palavras, sob a perspectiva da Gramática Discursivo-Funcional (Hengeveld; Mackenzie, 2008). Para essa teoria, em construções como The work took longer than expected, but it was easy, ocorre concessão entre dois atos discursivos não equipolentes, sendo o ato discursivo nuclear marcado com but. Este estudo tem como objetivo verificar se expressamente e implicitamente na construção a carta está, não expressamente, mas implicitamente, dividida em pequenas quadrículas. (PT89:CartografiaPortuguesa:49), constituem atos discursivos e o tipo de processo morfossintático que esse fenômeno engendra. Para isso, utiliza como universo de investigação os materiais do corpus “Português oral”, desenvolvido pelo Projeto “Português Falado: Variedades Geográficas e Sociais”. A análise das ocorrências mostra que há dois atos discursivos não equipolentes relacionados, com núcleo lexical, morfossintaticamente mapeados por sintagmas e palavras, constituindo então casos de listagem. Esse tipo de estrutura pode indicar que (1) o falante apresenta no primeiro ato discursivo uma informação que é logo refutada e substituída pela informação contida no segundo ato discursivo; ou que (2) o falante sente a necessidade de acrescentar uma informação que supõe ser importante para a correta interpretação do ouvinte.