Pronominal Object Research Articles

Exploring Subject Markers and Object Clitics Errors in Spoken Arabic: A Case Study of Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

This study delves into the morphosyntactic challenges faced by Palestinian Arabic-speaking children, specifically focusing on conjugational subject markers and pronominal object clitics in those with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) compared to their typically developing language (TLD) peers. The sample comprised 54 children aged 4:6 to 6:6 years, including 30 DLD and 24 TLD individuals, who participated in a role-play game designed to elicit verb conjugations and object clitic usage. The analysis highlighted a pronounced discrepancy in morphological proficiency, where DLD children exhibited significant difficulties, particularly with second person and third-person forms, resulting in a 60% agreement accuracy compared to 99% in TLD counterparts. Qualitative and quantitative error analyses revealed a higher incidence and variety of morphosyntactic errors among DLD children, especially in subject-verb agreement and object clitic realization. These findings underscore the intricate nature of verb morphology in Arabic and its impact on children with DLD, pointing to the necessity for tailored educational and therapeutic interventions. The study advances our understanding of language acquisition in Arabic-speaking children with DLD, offering insights into the linguistic features that challenge this population and informing future research and clinical practice.

Object Pronouns in the Evolution of Romanian: a Biolinguistic Perspective

We examine pronominal objects in Old Romanian and show that the fluctuation in their position (pre-/post-verbal) and in their form (clitic/strong pronoun) is the result of the Directional Asymmetry Principle (DAP), a complexity-reducing principle proposed in Di Sciullo (2011), according to which language evolution is symmetry breaking. We show that DAP is sensitive to both derivational and representational complexity. Under its effects, on grounds of derivational complexity reduction, Romanian lost the discourse-driven verb movement that yielded enclisis. On grounds of representational (sensori-motor) complexity reduction, Romanian lost the use of strong pronouns in contexts that now only allow clitics. Thus, a fluctuating phase in the evolution of pronominal objects is followed by a phase where a preponderant use is attested (i.e. proclitics in Modern Romanian). We confirm previous findings on the diachronic development of the Romanian DP under the effects of DAP, showing the role of complexity reduction in language change.

Stem configurations, lexical items, and phonological words in Maltese

Maltese is the 'national' language of the people in the sister-islands of Malta and Gozo. Originally Arabic, Maltese vocabulary has been massively expanded by borrowings from Romance (Sicilian/Italian), and more recently English. Influential contributions in (post)generative phonology and Optimality Theory claim that Maltese phonology is based on the interaction of (Palestinian Arabic type) stress assignment with syncope, and cyclic application of rules/constraints. This approach fails in some cases for Arabic Maltese, and is inoperative for borrowed vocabulary. I argue for distributing morphological constituents in three domains. The stem-domain heads a radical base, to which a preformative morph may be incorporated, and inflectional circumfixes. The Lexical-item domain heads the stem-node to which (in)direct pronominal objects may be concatenated. Clitics are adjoined to the phonological-word domain. All exponents are mapped on the linearized segmental tier. Trochaic stems satisfying morpho-lexical constraints are built in a pre-lexical phase. Vocalism is underlyingly specified or assigned by default, including ‘reverse-imāla’. In a lexical phase, OCP and Licensing shape syllabic stem-profiles to satisfy morpho-prosodic constraints. In the post-lexical phase, surface forms are generated by application of phonological processes: stress assignment, vowel length and quality, voice alteration in obstruents. A model of 'Weak CV Phonology', distantly related to Strict CV Phonology, is drawn up. Segmental representations are analyzed in monovalent elements. Maltese has often been presented as a 'mixed' language with two strata of vocabulary and two morphologies: root-and-pattern, non-concatenative for template-bound vocabulary, concatenative for loan-words. I claim that Maltese consistently requires templatic, concatenative and word-based morphology.

Deverbal nominalization in Runyankore

In this paper I examine eleven different processes of deverbal nominalization in Runyankore, a Lacustrine Bantu language spoken in Uganda. After establishing both general and Runyankore-specific properties that distinguish nouns from verbs, I test each of these nominalizations against 13 phonological, morphological, and syntactic criteria. Although all eleven nominalization constructions can take the determiner-like initial vowel “augment”, and all can be derived from verb bases that include derivational suffixes (“extensions”), e.g. causative, applicative, and reciprocal, only some of the nominalizations allow a pronominal object prefix or a following noun phrase object or adverbial. The various properties are tabulated to show that the different nominalizations vary along a cline, meeting all, some, or none of the nine most discriminating criteria in defining “noun” vs. “verb”.

Argument placement in Icelandic

This paper gives an overview of the Icelandic data in the Nordic Word Order Database (NWD; Lundquist et al. 2019). The data were collected from 30 native speakers of Icelandic, and the experimental task elicited argument placement (subject shift, object shift, long object shift, particle shift). The results confirm that subject shift of definite subjects and pronouns is produced categorically in Icelandic, as is pronominal object shift. With regard to the placement of non-pronominal objects relative sentence adverbials and particles, there is, on the other hand, variability. Rather surprisingly, the results suggest that the placement of subjects (initial or postverbal) influences non-pronominal object shift. With respect to the ordering of objects and particles, the distinction between directional and metaphorical particles is relevant. The patterns are partly different from what we find in the comparable data from the other North Germanic languages (also available in NWD).

Priming of Prepositional Phrases and Direct Objects in Spanish-Speaking Children

Purpose: The phenomenon of syntactic priming involves speakers repeating sentence structures they have recently experienced. Investigating priming can contribute to understanding of how children learn and generalize linguistic structures. This study examined the priming of two structures, direct object clitic pronouns and prepositional phrases, in Spanish-speaking children. Method: Participants were 22 typically developing monolingual Spanish-speaking children ages 4;2 (years;months)–6;3 who attended an early childhood education center in Central Mexico. For each structure, direct object clitic pronouns and prepositional phrases, children were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group heard and repeated sentences that contained the target structure, and the other heard and repeated sentences without the target structure. Participants in both groups described pictures that could be appropriately described with or without the target structure after each prime sentence. Results: Results indicated that children were not more likely to produce sentences with an object after hearing and repeating a sentence with a direct object clitic. There was, however, a tendency for children to be more likely to produce sentences with prepositional phrases after hearing and repeating a sentence with a prepositional phrase. Conclusions: Results suggest that exposure to prepositional phrases can result in increased use of this structure in novel utterances. However, exposure to pronominal direct objects does not appear to increase production of direct objects, a finding that may relate to the nature of the pronominal object in Spanish. Findings inform our understanding of how typically developing Spanish-speaking children represent these grammatical structures.

Focus position below TP in Standard Arabic

PurposeAdopting the split complementizer phrase (CP) hypothesis, the paper aims at providing an account for object cliticization in Standard Arabic (SA) as an instance of object displacement. Kayne's proposal on cliticization is adopted here to account for the type of displacement in SA that objects clitics in SA, like full determiner phrases (DPs), obligatorily move from their base position as independent complements of the verb to the specifier of Foc first before attaching to the verb under the tense node.Design/methodology/approachThis research adopts a qualitative interpretive research design (Creswell, 2007, 2010). The majority of the samples chosen for the study involve dependent pronominal objects obligatorily attached to the verb. The samples were judged to be grammatical based on the author's judgment as an native speaker of Arabic. Moreover, all the examples were checked for grammaticality by two full professors of Arabic grammar who are native speakers.FindingsThe analysis proposed that, like lexical DP's, pronominal objects originate as separate maximal projection (XP) constituents and move from their base position as verbal complements to the focus position [Spec, Foc]. In other words, both are able to move out of VP, targeting the same specifier position of a functional projection. This movement is focus-driven, that is, triggered by the edge feature on Foc. Pronominal objects at a later phase crucially higher than V0 (possibly in phonetic form (PF)) get cliticized to the verb which has adjoined to T.Originality/valueUnlike displaced lexical DP objects in SA syntax, displaced pronominal objects, however, have received less critical attention especially within Rizzi's (1997, 2004) left periphery theory and, therefore, some areas of these constructions remain poorly understood.

A corpus-based investigation on the distribution of pronominal objects in Russian

This study attempts to investigate the alternating word order VO and OV in Russian from a diachronic perspective. Literature has argued that Russian, the SVO language, has the pronoun object likely to move to the preverbal position, yielding the SOV order. By controlling some factors affecting occurrences of the VO-OV alternation, the current study examined the corpus data from the 19th and the 21st centuries of Russian. The diachronic corpus study has revealed that the VO alternant was comparable to the OV alternant during the 19th century but has become less frequent in the 21st century. This study suggests that the decrease of the VO alternant can be attributed to some historical changes in the language and the VO alternant as well as the OV alternant requires a structural account.

The reflexive cycle

AbstractStarting from a morphosyntactic puzzle of the Ugric and Samoyedic languages of the Uralic family (possessive agreement suffixes functioning as accusative allomorphs on pronominal objects), this paper identifies a pronoun cycle which leads from reflexives via intensifiers and via referentially independent intensive pronouns to neutral pronouns. In Tundra Nenets, evidence of three rounds of reflexive renewal is also pointed out, with the three sets of pronouns frozen at different stages of the cycle. The analysis has implications for debated issues of language change. It is shown that elements participating in cyclic changes not only suffer feature loss but also incorporate features. Based on the recurring cycle in Tundra Nenets, it is argued that the cyclicity of linguistic changes implies a notion of unidirectionality that also leaves room for unpredictable outcomes.

Successes and shortcomings of phonological accounts of Scandinavian object shift

Object shift (OS) is a word order phenomenon in Scandinavian languages where under some circumstances the object appears before a sentential adverb. Despite the frequent assumptions that word order is determined in syntax, and despite the link of OS and syntactic phenomena like V2, there is no consensus that OS is a syntactic phenomenon. Particularly, it has been observed that OS targets specifically prosodically weak elements. This motivated recent analyses of OS as a prosodic phenomenon. We focus on two proposals that look for a synchronic motivation for OS in a correlation between its distribution and some prosodic property: (i) Erteschik-Shir et al. (2020) posit that OS is motivated and modulated by prosodic incorporation, and (ii) Hosono (2013) hypothesizes that shifted pronominal objects help facilitate downstep. We identify concrete predictions from both proposals (default prosodic incorporation, and no downstep in unshifted OS-context sentences, respectively) and test them using novel data. The results show that neither of the proposals can be maintained in its original form. In addition to the empirical shortcomings of the prosodic proposals, we explore a missed syntactic generalization regarding the role objecthood plays in OS.

Comprehension of Null and Pronominal Object Sentences in Japanese-speaking Children

ABSTRACT In successful communication, it is critical to have the ability to identify what a speaker is referring to from previously mentioned information. This ability requires the identification of the topic initially introduced by lexical forms and its continuity in discourse expressed by anaphora such as null and pronominal forms in the subsequent sentences. While Japanese-speaking children are frequently provided with pronominal and null forms, especially the null form, in reference to previously mentioned topics, it remains unclear from what age they understand the anaphoric use of such referential forms. The current study investigated the age at which Japanese-speaking children are able to identify the presence of topic chains connecting null and pronoun anaphora to the topic referred to by a lexical form in the preceding sentence. We tested children’s comprehension of null and pronominal object sentences using an intermodal preferential-looking paradigm. The results demonstrated that the Japanese-speaking children aged 2;7 and 3;2 as a group looked at the target animation reliably longer after hearing the test sentences than before or during the test sentences. This finding provides evidence that Japanese-speaking children’s ability to track topic chains and understand anaphora in the discourse develop by 2;7 years of age. However, unlike the 3;2-year-old group, the 2;7-year-old group showed weaker performance in interpreting pronominal object sentences, suggesting a possibility that young children find the interpretation of null anaphora easier than that of pronoun anaphora.

Anáforas reflexivas y doblado de clíticos en lenguas romances

AbstractIn this paper I analyze the distribution of the reflexive constructionse+a sí mismoin Romance (e.g.,‘Juan se peinó a sí mismo’). I propose that these structures are transitive. Concretely, I argue that in these cases the reflexive anaphor is the internal argument of the predicate, and that the obligatory presence of the cliticseis due to the general phenomenon of clitic doubling with pronominal objects. I show that this approach can account for some asymmetries between these constructions and simplese-reflexives regarding expletive insertion in French, proxy readings, comparative constructions, association with focus, and case distribution in causatives.

Strange nominative case in topicalized object pronominal relative clauses

Abstract In an online production experiment, we investigated the effect of sentence position on the preference for either a nominative or object form of an object pronoun restricted by a relative clause in Dutch. Results show a significant preference for the nominative form of the restricted object pronoun in sentence-initial position as it was chosen in 95% of the cases. In the original object position this percentage is only 20%. The preference for a nominative pronominal object is considered a grammatical norm violation. We account for this in terms of a combination of two factors. First, the presence of the relative clause makes the object ‘long’. Second, the sentence-initial position is a syntactic position that is relatively far removed from the original object position. We argue that when a long object is topicalized, there are too many intervening elements between the pronoun and the verb of which it is the complement. If the distance between the pronominal object and the verb has become too long, the object case fades from the working memory. This then results in the appearance of nominative case as the default case for topicalized object pronominal relative clauses in Dutch.

MATCHING Phrases in Norwegian Object Shift

One significant contribution of generative linguistics has been to our understanding of 'movement,' which occurs when a word is linearized in a position different from where it is interpreted. Even though movement often is considered a syntactic phenomenon, some cases seem best analyzed prosodically, such as pronoun post-posing in Irish (Bennett, Elfner, & McClosky 2016). We explore prosodically driven movement in Norwegian, which is known for having pronominal object shift (OS). We show that OS can be explained by Match Theory (Selkirk 2009, 2011), but only if the MATCH constraints are sensitive to lexical items and their projects instead of Elfner's (2012) definition where Match is sensitive to lexical and functional elements and their projections (see also Ito & Mester 2019).

The syntax of pronoun fronting in Late Archaic Chinese negated clauses

This paper proposes a syntactic analysis of the complex phenomenon of pronominal object fronting in negated clauses in Late Archaic Chinese (LAC). I first propose that partitive case is assigned to objects in LAC negated clauses, accounting for the fact that only pronouns in LAC undergo fronting, since they have a person feature and cannot be licensed by a defective case like partitive. I next identify the structural constraints accounting for when pronouns do and do not front in LAC negated clauses. In the context of the sentential negator 不 bu, only pronouns base generated in the verb’s complement position undergo fronting. I propose that the dislocation is head movement to the phase head v. This accounts for the large number of cases in which pronoun fronting fails to take place in the context of 不 bu. In contrast, pronouns nearly always front to the negative quantifier 莫 mo and the aspectual negator 未 wei. I show that this is because these negators occupy higher structural positions, which allows phrasal movement over a greater distance. I further show how the discrepancy between the two positions for negation is the result of diachronic change. 不 bu historically exhibited the same behavior as the other negators but came to occupy a lower position in the LAC period, which in turn resulted in the more local relationship between 不 bu and the base position of the pronominal object in LAC.

On “free” grammatical variation in a mixed lect: Clitic placement in Cypriot Greek

AbstractVariation involving a switch between pre- and post-verbal placement of pronominal object clitics in a single syntactic environment within a language is unexpected. The rationale why this would not be expected is clear: Languages pattern as either proclitic or enclitic with respect to object clitic placement, possibly allowing one or the other option across different syntactic environments. We provide an overview of our research from data collected in Cyprus, related to the development and use of pronominal object clitics for child populations and adult speakers that are bilectal in Cypriot and Standard Modern Greek. While it has been shown that the tested bilectal populations receive exposure to more than one distinct grammar, including mixed grammars with optional choices for clitic placement, an important question remains unaddressed: Is variation really “free” across all speakers or are there universally reliable predictors (such as gender, age, or level of education) that mediate a consistent use of either the standard or the dialect? Combining insights from targeted elicitation tasks administered to different groups, a corpus of spontaneous speech, and an extensive literature review, we show the weakness of such purported predictors and support a claim of free variation.

Strict and Sloppy Readings of Pronominal Objects in Polish

W literaturze dotyczącej języków południowosłowiańskich pokazano, że klityki zaimkowe w tych językach przejawiajądwuznacznośćpod względem dokładnej i niedokładnej interpretacji. W artykule poddajębadaniu z tej perspektywy polskie zaimki w funkcji dopełnienia, pokazując, że ‒ pomimo iżnie sąklitykami ‒ mogąteżmiećinterpretacjęniedokładną, jeżeli sąosadzone w odpowiednim kontekście. Dane przemawiająprzeciwko podejściu wykorzystującemu mechanizm elipsy, w zgodzie z poglądem, że interpretacja niedokładna nie jest wiarygodnym testem dla struktur eliptycznych. Proponujęzatem alternatywnąanalizę, według której interpretacje dokładna i niedokładna wynikająz różnicy strukturalnej zaimka (odpowiednio PersP vs. NumP), dostarczając przy tym dodatkowych danych wskazujących na wagęrozróżnieńpragmatycznych dla badańnad własnościami interpretacyjnymi różnych typów jednostek nominalnych. Z bardziej ogólnego punktu widzenia dyskusja sugeruje, że dane empiryczne związane z zagadnieniem interpretacji niedokładnej sąniezwykle skomplikowane, przez co konieczne jest zbadanie szerszego spektrum języków i kontekstów w celu rozwikłania wszystkich istotnych zmiennych oraz zaproponowania optymalnego podejścia teoretycznego. ABSTRACT Pronominal clitics in South Slavic languages have been shown to manifest the strict/sloppy reading ambiguity effect. In this paper I examine Polish object pronouns from this perspective, observing that even though they are not clitics, they can still be compatible with the sloppy interpretation if the right type of context is provided. The data speak against an ellipsis-based approach, aligning with the view that the sloppy reading is not a viable test for ellipsis. I thus pursue an alternative analysis on which the strict and sloppy readings are associated with a structural difference in the composition of the pronoun (PersP vs. NumP respectively), offering along the way additional evidence pointing to the importance of pragmatic distinctions in investigations of the interpretive properties of different types of nominal elements. From a more general point of view, the discussion suggests that the empirical picture related to the sloppy interpretation is highly complex, making an investigation of a broader spectrum of languages and contexts indispensable for disentangling all the relevant factors and developing an optimal theoretical approach.

Encoding definiteness on pronominal objects in Mordvinic

This article examines the morphosyntax of pronouns in object function and reveals the syntactic and morphological differences between nominal and pronominal objects in Mordvinic. The variation in case marking and declension type of nominal objects is affected by definiteness. Indefinite objects are in the basic declension nominative, whereas definite ones are in the definite or possessive declension genitive. Furthermore, definite objects may be indexed on the verb. In this paper, I analyze the morphosyntax of pronouns, in order to reveal the regularities between semantics and morphological marking and to provide a better understanding of definiteness. For this purpose, the finite forms of perception verbs were collected from the MokshEr corpus, which contains written texts in the literary languages, and native speakers were consulted on the results. Perception verbs were chosen for this study because they agree with the object in person and number more frequently than other semantic classes of verbs, thus providing good material for examining the correlation of definiteness with verbal conjugation. The paper shows how definiteness is displayed within the morphosyntax of pronouns and uncovers how verbal conjugation correlates with different pronominal objects.

Μελέτη της παραγωγής κλιτικών αντωνυμιών σε μονόγλωσσα και δίγλωσσα παιδιά με Ειδική Γλωσσική Διαταραχή

In this study, we tested the predictions of two opposing perspectives on the nature of the deficit in Specific Language Impairment (SLI): the language delay approach, and the view that the language development of SLI children is qualitatively different from typically developing children populations. Data consisted of the elicited production of pronominal object clitics from monolingual and bilingual SLI children with various language pairs (Greek always being the children’s second language); younger, typically developing, bilingual language peers, and monolingual Greek-speaking comparison groups. We analyzed the children’s accurate responses and error-types in clitic production. Both SLI groups had more difficulty with clitics in comparison to typically-developing, chronological age-matched peers, while SLI children performed similarly with their younger, unaffected monolingual and bilingual peers. We argue that these findings provide support to the language delay approach and present challenges to the role of bilingualism in SLI.

Διερευνώντας τη σχέση μεταξύ της Ειδικής Γλωσσικής Διαταραχής και της Δυσλεξίας: θεωρητικές και κλινικές προεκτάσεις

In this study, we tested the predictions of two opposing perspectives on the nature of the deficit in Specific Language Impairment (SLI): the language delay approach, and the view that the language development of SLI children is qualitatively different from typically developing children populations. Data consisted of the elicited production of pronominal object clitics from monolingual and bilingual SLI children with various language pairs (Greek always being the children’s second language); younger, typically developing, bilingual language peers, and monolingual Greek-speaking comparison groups. We analyzed the children’s accurate responses and error-types in clitic production. Both SLI groups had more difficulty with clitics in comparison to typically-developing, chronological age-matched peers, while SLI children performed similarly with their younger, unaffected monolingual and bilingual peers. We argue that these findings provide support to the language delay approach and present challenges to the role of bilingualism in SLI.