Verbal Clitics Research Articles

Early grammar-building in French-speaking deaf children with cochlear implants: A follow-up corpus study.

One of the most consistent findings reported in the paediatric cochlear implant (CI) literature is the heterogeneity of language performance observed more in grammatical morphology than in lexicon or pragmatics. As most of the corpus studies addressing these issues have been conducted in English, it is unclear whether their results can be generalized to other languages. In particular, little is known about languages known for their grammatical complexity, such as French. The aim of this corpus study was to compare the productive use of function words (FWs) and some agreement features (AGRs) in children with CIs and children with typical development (TD) matched for mean length of utterance in words (MLUwords ), a general index of grammatical complexity, and auditory experience, as measured by hearing age (HA) and chronological age (CA), respectively. Natural speech samples from 116 monolingual French-speaking children, including 40 children with CIs followed longitudinally and 76 TD children, were collected. FWs and AGRs were analysed using a Part of Speech Tagger (POS-T) from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). The two groups differed by 3 years for HA and CA. No effect of family socio-economic status (SES) was found in the CI group. Stepwise regression analyses showed that the two groups did not share the same predictors of MLUwords : plurals and determiners predicted MLUwords in children with CIs, at 2 and 3 years of HA, whereas feminine markers and subject-pronouns were found to best predict MLUwords in TD children at 2 and 3 years of CA. Structural equation models (SEMs), a combination of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and path analysis, yielded a different hierarchical structure of grammatical relations (GRs). Selective difficulties affecting verbal clitics and other pronominal forms were found specifically in the CI group (object-pronouns, reflexive, relative and past participles). Dependency grammar analysis confirmed these contrasting developmental profiles in multiword utterances, such as preposition/nouns, subject/verbs, and verb/determiner/nouns. Atypical grammatical patterns in children with CIs reflect a specific architecture of syntactic dependencies of FWs underpinning morphological complexity and syntactic connectivity. Clinical implications are discussed for assessment and intervention planning. What is already known on this subject The productive use of FWs has been identified as a particular area of weakness in children with CIs compared with TD children. In addition, heterogenous grammatical performance has often been found after 1-3 years of CI use, regardless of demographic factors such as age at implantation, duration of deafness or SES. What this paper adds to existing knowledge Assessing the early building of FWs and AGRs in children with CIs helps to understand the syntactic complexity and hierarchical structure of their language. Since most corpus studies on grammatical morphology have been conducted in English, it is not clear whether their difficulties can be generalized to other languages. The French language has a system of FWs and inflections that determine the morphophonological properties of nominal and verbal forms. Early grammar learning in children with CIs born with profound deafness were compared with the two groups of TD children matched both for duration of auditory experience (i.e., HA of CI children, CA of TD children) and for MLUwords . We found a similar profile between groups at 2 years but not at 3 years for HA and CA. The two groups do not share the same predictors of MLUwords : namely, plurals and determiners for CI children versus feminine markers and subject pronouns for TD children. They show a different syntactic organization of GRs. Children with CIs struggle with selective difficulties affecting verbal clitics and pronominal forms (object-pronouns, reflexive, relative and past participles). Consistent with theories of morphophonological richness and syntactic connectivity, our results support the distributional learning hypothesis of language acquisition that infants and toddlers are sensitive to FWs and AGRs at an early age. Specific components of syntactic organization are disrupted in children with CIs. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? This work has potential clinical implications because it unravels the limitations of morphophonological processing in children with CIs. Its results highlight a specific difficulty in learning FWs and AGRs in a verbal inflectional morphology context.

Clitics in the Wild: Empirical Studies on the Microvariation of the Pronominal, Reflexive and Verbal Clitics in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian by Zrinka Kolaković et al. (review)

Clitics in the Wild: Empirical Studies on the Microvariation of the Pronominal, Reflexive and Verbal Clitics in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian by Zrinka Kolaković et al. (review)

VERBAL CLITICS IN ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR

Purpose of the study: The present study analyses the interplay of semantics, syntax and pragmatics in Pashto clauses containing verbal clitics (VC) in the light of the Role and Reference framework. It particularly focuses on the relational aspect of the clause. The lexical representation of the predicating elements is presented.
 Methodology: The four projections of a Pashto clause i.e., constituent projection, operator projection, logical structure projection and focus structure projection are analyzed in the Role and Reference Grammar theoretical framework.
 Main Findings: The findings of the study show that VCs are different from both agreement markers and pronouns with some shared properties. A linking algorithm is proposed for Pashto from semantics to syntax and syntax-to-semantics based on the activation level of the referents.
 Applications of this study: The study analyses the discourse pragmatic conditions responsible for the occurrence of VCs in Pashto clause terms of role and reference grammar.
 The novelty of this study: The study has novelty in the sense that it describes the structure of the Pashto clause from a discourse pragmatic perspective which has never been investigated in previous studies. The study shows the movement is triggered by both actor (in present) and undergoer (in past) along with syntactic neutralization. The VCs are different from both agreement markers and pronouns with some shared properties identifying dative arguments like arguments and causing doubling like agreement markers and so, are linked to an ‘agreement index’ node.

Phonological Reduction in Pashto

The study is concerned with the phonological reduction in Pashto. The study particularly focuses on the reduction in the structure of complex predicates, verbal clitics and postpositional phrases in Pashto. The study finds out that the phonological reduction has syntactic/semantic or phonological factors allowing or constraining it. These more or less reduced and expanded forms are closely related to a number of linguistics abstractions. In structures with verbal clitics and postpositions, the reduction is optional, while in structure with complex predicates, the phonological reduction is obligatory if the compound verb denotes imperfective aspect. The obligatory reduction makes a single phonological unit from two syntactic units by omitting consonants or vowels in the structure of the phrase. The reduction is avoided if it creates an ambiguity of some kind or if the meaning of the lexical items is changed, and so, its allowance in one structure is constrained in another.

In support of an OT-DM model

This paper provides support for a modified DM model which I call Optimality-Theoretic Distributed Morphology (OT-DM). The strongest form of this model is that all morphological operations take place in parallel, which I call the Morphology in Parallel Hypothesis (MPH). Although combining OT and DM is unorthodox in practice, I show that a growing body of data warrants this modification (Trommer 2001a, 2001b, 2002; Dawson 2017; Foley 2017; a.o.). I provide support for OT-DM from the distribution of verbal clitics in Degema, a language of southern Nigeria. Within, I argue that agreement clitics are inserted post-syntactically via the DM operation Dissociated Node Insertion (DNI), and further that verb complexes are formed post-syntactically via the operation Local Dislocation (LD), operating in tandem with a well-formedness markedness constraint which requires verbs to appear in properly inflected words. These DM operations are decomposed into a series of constraints which are crucially ranked. Candidates are freely generated from gen and are subject to all DM operations, and are evaluated via eval against the ranked constraint set. I illustrate that under the standard serial DM model in which DNI proceeds VI, this would result in the wrong output form, and that even after parameterizing DM operation order in response, this model does not adequately capture the motivations behind the morphological patterns.

Maintained and acquired heritage Spanish in the Netherlands: The case of dative constructions

Abstract The present study examines five types of dative constructions in heritage Spanish in the Netherlands. Elicited production data from first generation bilinguals and heritage speakers were analyzed and compared to those of monolingual controls. The results indicate that the first generation is not different from the monolingual baseline in their use of datives. The heritage group showed a remarkable subdivision: those with a history of relatively high exposure to Spanish in childhood, move away significantly from the use of dative experiencers and datives of interest, while they are native-like regarding the other constructions. Those who grew up with only one Spanish speaking parent and/or did not productively use Spanish in childhood, however, appear to avoid or restructure all dative constructions. Moreover, the observed innovations correlate with speech rate. It is hypothesized that, whereas influence of Dutch may be one of the factors at play, particularly in the case of dative experiencers and datives of interest, a principal underlying factor to all observed innovations is a Spanish-internal optimization mechanism of omitting dative verbal clitics, which serves to free up processing resources in the less-automatized systems of those who had low childhood exposure to Spanish.

Relative clauses in Asheninka Perene (Arawak)

We argue that existing syntactic typologies of relative clauses which distinguish between two categories of relatives, i.e. headed and headless relative clauses, based on the presence or absence of head NP in the main clause, do not include externally headed relative clauses with reduced and light heads such as demonstratives, pronominal person clitics, classifiers, plural number markers, etc. The Ashéninka Perené data show that the third syntactic category of intermediate heads such as demonstratives, indefinite terms, numerals, pronominal verbal clitics and classifiers should be included in syntactic typology of relatives to more accurately represent variability of headed relatives in individual languages.

Las bases cognitivas del estilo lingüístico

Studies on variation in linguistic structure have rarely tried to move beyond description and find an explanation for the correlations observed between formal variants and internal, social and/or situational factors. In our view, the usual insistence on the need for synonymy between alternating forms has obscured the fact that it is precisely differences in meaning –however subtle they be– that may account for the existence and maintenance of alternations within a linguistic system. The main aim of this paper is to propose a theoretical concept of linguistic style, this being understood as the possibility of making meaningful choices on all internal and external levels of linguistic usage, from the formal to the pragmatic-discursive and social-situational ones, and which could be ultimately explainable by general principles of human cognition. Starting from an empirical investigation on Spanish verbal clitics, it will be shown how the discursive and cognitive meanings of grammatical variants may constitute the basis not only for their internal covariations, but also for their potential as interactional stylistic resources, which in turn might explain their social distribution.

L2 effects on L1 event conceptualization

The finding that speakers of aspect languages encode event endpoints to a lesser extent than do speakers of non-aspect languages has led to the hypothesis that there is a relationship between grammatical aspect and event conceptualization (e.g., von Stutterheim and Nüse, 2003). The present study concerns L1 event conceptualization in 40 L1 Spanish – L2 Swedish bilinguals (all near-native speakers of Swedish). Spanish and Swedish differ as regards grammatical aspect: whereas Swedish lacks this grammatical category, Spanish conveys aspect through verbal morphology and periphrasis. The principal aim of the study was to explore the relationship between productive event conceptualization patterns and receptive decoding proficiency related to aspectual contrasts. The participants were asked to provide oral L1 Spanish descriptions of video clips projecting motion events with different degrees of endpoint orientation (see von Stutterheim, 2003). In addition, they took a grammaticality judgment test concerning verb and gender agreement, verbal clitics and aspectual contrasts. Compared with baseline data from monolingual Spanish speakers, the results on endpoint encoding show that the bilinguals mention the endpoints of motion events to a higher degree than the Spanish control group does. Moreover, it was shown that the weaker the bilinguals' discrimination of aspectual errors on the grammaticality judgment test, the more prone they were to encoding endpoints. This result consequently furthers the hypothesis about the interconnectedness between grammatical aspect and event conceptualization. The results were further interpreted as indicating that the bilinguals are influenced by the Swedish-like tendency to attend to the boundedness rather than the ongoingness of events.

Syntactic and morphosyntactic phenomena in Modern Greek dialects: The state of the art

AbstractIn this paper I give an overview of several syntactic and morpho-syntactic phenomena applying to a range of Modern Greek dialects. I present a descriptive account of these phenomena, and refer to some possible theoretical analyses put forward by a number of well-known linguists. In certain cases, I offer evidence for the cross-dialectal occurrence of a phenomenon as a contribution to the establishment of syntactic isoglosses, and report some hints of its diachronic development when the available sources permit. <br /> My data are drawn not only from written sources, but also from the oral material that has been collected in the last six years from several Greek areas, and stored in the Modern Greek Dialects Laboratory (MGDL) of the University of Patras. <br /> The paper has the following structure: Section 1 contains some general observations with respect to the study and development of Modern Greek dialects. Dialectal word order is presented next (Section 2), followed by certain observations on the use of complementizers (Section 3), negation (Section 4), and sentential particles (Section 5). The issues of infinitival forms and periphrastic tenses (perfect and future) are examined in Section 6, while elements appearing in wh-questions constitute the topic of Section 7. The case form of the indirect object is tackled next (Section 8), and the paper ends with the well-described topic of verbal clitics, which is presented in Section 9. The paper concludes with remarks stressing the importance of research in the field of Modern Greek dialectology.

Clitic Phenomena in European Languages (review)

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

Un Cas Familier De Non-Cliticisation

It is traditionally observed in French grammars that, exceptionally, an indirect object pronoun cannot be cliticized to a verb which has a first person, second person or reflexive direct object clitic. Instead, the indirect object pronominal manifests as a strong pronominal form. It is generally believed today that this failure of cliticization is due to constraints on possible sequences of verbal clitics. The present note shows that this dominant view must be incorrect.