Clause Word Order Research Articles

Intransitive clause word order in Neo-Aramaic: information structure, pragmatics and word order shifts

Intransitive clause word order in Neo-Aramaic: information structure, pragmatics and word order shifts

Differential Object Marking in Structurally Complex Contexts in Spanish: Evidence from Bilingual and Monolingual Processing

This study examines whether Differential Object Marking (DOM) realization and word order in relative clauses (RCs) in Spanish affect processing and interpretation among monolinguals and highly proficient Catalan–Spanish bilinguals. RCs are parallel in Catalan and Spanish, but DOM is much more restricted in Catalan than in Spanish, and, interestingly, the distinction between subject and object RCs relies mainly on the presence/absence of DOM. To examine DOM optionality, we concentrate on the top portion of the animacy scale and test the human/non-human contrast. Exploring these two populations allows us to test whether they resort to different strategies for the following three reasons: (1) bilingualism places an increased burden on memory processes); (2) the partial overlap between both DOM systems might lead to the influence from Catalan into Spanish); and (3) optionality has been proposed to characterize bilingual grammars). Findings from a word-by-word non-cumulative self-paced reading task showed that DOM modulates RC processing. With [+human] obligatorily marked objects, both monolinguals and bilinguals read subject RCs faster than object RCs, suggesting a strategy favoring subject RCs. However, monolinguals solved the interpretation early while processing but bilinguals, despite the more restricted DOM character of Catalan, are sensitive to DOM albeit displaying delayed spill-over effects. With [−human] optionally marked objects, bilinguals performed faster than monolinguals. We suggest that the uneven experience with DOM in Catalan, particularly with the non-standard variety that frequently displays DOM and that our bilinguals also speak in everyday conversations, facilitates bilinguals’ adaptation to the optional marking of non-human objects in Spanish, much in the same manner that they accommodate the presence or absence of DOM with both human and non-human objects in other native language.

Students’ Difficulties in Writing in English Language

English language is no doubt one of the most used and influential languages around the world. In Albania, English language learning starts since 6-year-old age. Therefore, many studies and research have been done concerning English language and competences. When studying a foreign language, writing is considered as the most demanding and crucial competence. Based on previous studies in Albania, students tend to face difficulties during the writing process. They lack the necessary writing skills needed to have a successful writing performance and they claim that further attention and importance should be given to the writing process by teachers. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to identify the most common errors that Albanian students make in writing and what difficulties they have when it comes to it. The data is provided through a writing task in the form of an essay to second year English language students. There were 47 students of English Language at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Tirana, taking part in the research. Based on the study data, students mostly made grammatical and vocabulary mistakes. They were aware of the patterns used in different writing types and they made less mistakes compared to other errors considered in the study. Even though they tend to be careful not to think in Albanian, its influence is obvious in their writing, especially when it comes to the word order of clauses and sentences. Considering the findings, some practical recommendations have been made in the end.

Examining Cross-linguistic Influence of Japanese Word Order: An Eye-Tracking Study on L2 English Learners’ Text Comprehension

Cross-linguistic influence is a systematic and unavoidable feature of language learning. This study aimed to investigate whether prepositive word order in Japanese noun clauses can serve as a cross-linguistic influence element in the acquisition of relative clauses (a form of a postpositive modifier) in English. To test this hypothesis, this study conducted an eye-tracking experiment with native Japanese speakers and showed the following results statistically. First, Japanese participants generally paid more attention to modifier clauses than the noun phrases they modified when reading English sentences with relative clauses. Second, when interpreting accusative relative clauses, longer fixations were observed both in the modifier clauses and in the antecedents, likely due to their complexity for Japanese L2 learners of English, as evidenced by the lowest accuracy rate. Finally, and most notably, the findings revealed that the participants who had not fully acquired the relative clause construction focused more on the left side of the relative pronoun than those who had. This tendency was most prominent when interpreting subjective relative clauses, a result that supports the hypothesis that prepositive L1 modifiers could be a CLI element in the acquisition of English postpositive modifiers.

Salience and Evaluation of Morphosyntactic and Semanto-Structural Variation

This paper presents the results of an online survey studying both salience and evaluation of specific morphosyntactic and semantic features in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The study, for example, addresses weil ‘because’ clauses with main clause word order, nachdem ‘after’ clauses with causal meaning, and erinnern ‘remember’ selecting an accusative object. The salience of the phenomena that were studied differs considerably depending on whether the feature has been subject to metalinguistic discourses or not and on how widespread the variant is across language regions. Especially features that have been subject to metalinguistic discourses and features that are restricted to relatively small language regions appear to be highly salient. Features that are common in a broader linguistic area are less salient to all speakers.

New perspectives on grammatical change in heritage Norwegian

This study introduces two speaker types, which have not yet been studied, to the study of heritage Norwegian: one adult (48, i.e., not elderly) and one adolescent speaker (16), “Kari” and “Jess”. They are both North American, English-dominant heritage speakers of Norwegian (AmNo), but differ from an older, previously studied cohort of American Norwegian speakers (old AmNo) in several respects. Kari and Jess have had more continuous contact with Norway throughout their lives. They are both Norwegian-literate and consume Norwegian-language media. Jess has attended Norwegian language courses in Norway, which motivates seeing her as a heritage language relearner. In this pilot study, we test the hypothesis that such extra-linguistic factors lead to grammatical differences between the groups. The hypothesis is tested by the analysis of three variables previously studied in old AmNo speakers: verb-second word order in non-subject initial clauses, possessive placement, and grammatical gender. We drew data from a 48-minute semi-structured speech recording. The study found that Kari and Jess indeed differ from old AmNo speakers. Kari’s language shows very little grammatical innovation, placing her among the most stable AmNo speakers. Jess’ language, in contrast, shows strongly innovative tendencies in all studied variables. To explain the innovations in Jess’ language, we appeal to heterogeneous input during childhood acquisition and cross-linguistic influence from English. Both factors, we argue, are active in the process of heritage language relearning.

What Characterizes the Productive Morphosyntax of Norwegian Children with Developmental Language Disorder?

Little is known about the productive morphosyntax of Norwegian children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The current study examined morphosyntax in Norwegian-speaking children with DLD (n =19) and a control group that was pairwise matched for age, gender, and intelligence quotient (IQ; n = 19). The children's sentence repetitions were studied through the lens of Processability Theory. The group differences were largest for grammatical structures at the latest developmental stage of the processability hierarchy. The Norwegian subordinate clause word order, belonging to the latest stage of the processability hierarchy, stood out as particularly challenging for children with DLD. Only 2 children with DLD but 16 children in the control group produced a subordinate clause with subordinate clause word order. Categorization of children's errors revealed that children with DLD made more errors of all types (addition, omission, substitution, inflection and word order) but especially errors of omission and inflection.

Learning embedded verb placement in Norwegian: Evidence for early overgeneralization

ABSTRACT This article investigates how children acquire word order generalizations from ambiguous and infrequent input. We focus on verb placement in Norwegian relative and complement clauses. In two elicitation experiments we explore where children (age 3–7) place verbs in three embedded clauses types: one requiring a purely syntactic generalization and two requiring a semantic-pragmatic generalization. We find that children overgeneralize the main clause word order to embedded clauses. However, this happens with different probabilities across all three clause types. We take this to mean that children overgeneralize and that they entertain both coarse and fine-grained hypotheses simultaneously. We also suggest that children make use of frequency information, both in making initial hypotheses and when retracting from overgeneralization.

Subject-verb Word Order in Narratives in Swedish by Immersion and Non-immersion Students

The Swedish V2 word order has been considered a notorious source of difficulty for L2 learners due to its strict rules. This study explores subject-verb word order in texts written in Swedish by 12-year-old and 15-year-old Finnish-speaking immersion students and by 16-year-old non-immersion students. Although the L1 of the informants lacks obligatory inversion, the analyses show that informants in all three groups have reached a high accuracy level in several aspects of word order in main clauses. However, the informants struggle with challenges that are similar to those detected in previous research: inversion is omitted in its obligatory occasions in main clauses but simultaneously overused in subordinate clauses where word order is canonical. In main clauses, the challenges focus on declarative main clauses with inversion. In subordinate clauses, on the contrary, the challenges focus on questions.

Clause Structure and Word Order in Ákè

Ákè is by historical and linguistic facts a dialect of Edo which has not received significant linguistic attention. This neglect informs an inquiry into the in ternal structure and organization of its basic clause. This paper studies data of everyday usage of competent speakers of Ákè and argues that it displays a subject-verb-object order. The study provides a not too elaborate description of the nominal and verbal constructions in Ákè and reduces the description to analysis using the X-bar theory as conceived within the Minimalist Program. It therefore states that nominal phrases can be analysed as a projection of Determiner Phrase (DP) because independent existence is not a requirement for considering an element as the head of a projection. The variable position which the head D occupies in the superficial syntax of Ákè is analysed as the effect of movement for feature checking. In the spirit of the Minimalist Program, this study recognizes the head of the clause as Tense (T), which could be overt or null and predicts that it dominates Negative Phrase (NegP) as Neg is assumed to c-select the Verb Phrase (VP).

Modalizatory jako wielowymiarowe zagadnienie w nauce języka szwedzkiego

Sentence adverbials build a multidimensional constituent in many languages, i.e. they can, among others, modify the meaning of the entire sentence, emphasize a particular element in it, or build the coherence in texts. Due to the multifaced character of this linguistic phenomenon the acquisition of it in foreign language learners can be a complex process. The learner is not only faced with a variety of different words and phrases that can be used in order to deliver a complementary information in the text, but also, depending on the structural requirements of the specific language, has to learn to put this constituent in the correct place in the sentence. In present paper the use of sentence adverbials in Polish learners od Swedish will be presented. The data considered in the analysis comprises two types of texts: a summary of an expository text and a narrative. The results show that foreign language learners at the intermediate stage of the language use a broad repertoire of sentence adverbials and place them in appropriate contexts. In narratives modal expressions predominate, while in summaries connectives and intensifiers are used more often. The learners can place sentence adverbials correctly in the sentence, especially in main clauses. However, the word order in dependent clauses when other sentence adverbials occur, except for sentences with the negation inte, is still under development.

Typological Shift in Bilinguals’ L1: Word Order and Case Marking in Two Varieties of Child Quechua

We compare speech production and find morphosyntactic change among children and adolescents speaking two closely related varieties of Quechua in Cuzco, Peru, and Chuquisaca, Bolivia. Quechua languages traditionally employ Object-Verb (OV) word order in main clauses, but robust case marking permits other orders, especially to focalize new information through constituent fronting. In Chuquisaca, but not Cuzco, we find that schoolchildren often omit the accusative suffix -ta from direct objects while retaining a prosodic trace of -ta. In other varieties, loss of accusative marking is associated with a shift towards Verb-Object (VO) word order, as in Spanish. However, we find that Chuquisaqueños use more canonical OV and possessor-possessed order in declarative sentences than do Cuzqueños, who employ a wide range of word orders at the sentence level and deviate from the possessor-possessed norm for Quechua noun phrases. Our finding of more rigid word order in Chuquisaca highlights the complex factors contributing to typological shift in word order and morphology: Omission of case morphology places a greater burden on word order to identify grammatical roles. Further, we find that Chuquisaqueño schoolchildren alone have begun to use huk, “one,” to mark indefiniteness, perhaps to replace determiner-like functions ascribed to -ta and to obsolescent markers such as evidentials.

Intertextual Variation in Old and Middle English

ABSTRACT The existence of word order differences between individual authors in Old and Middle English is well known. Nevertheless, many empirical investigations of earlier English word order have focused on just one or two texts from each time period. In the early part of the Middle English period, subordinate clause word order changed from a mix between verb-final and subject–verb to overwhelmingly subject–verb. In the transition period between the old and the new order, synchronic variation is expected. In this paper, 2400 subordinate clauses from four late Old English texts and six early Middle English texts are analysed for word order variation between different texts with different authors. The analysis reveals a high degree of variation between texts from the same period, seemingly independent of dialect and genre. The analysis also indicates that the change in English word order must have been slow and gradual.

КВАНТИТАТИВНІ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ ПОРЯДКУ СЛІВ У СУЧАСНІЙ УКРАЇНСЬКІЙ РОЗМОВНІЙ МОВІ (на матеріалі односкладних дієслівних речень)

Мета статті – установити поширеність порядку слів різних типів у сучасній українській розмовній мові. Джерела дослідження – тексти п’єс сучасних українських авторів і тексти приватного листування. Отримані дані свідчать про те, що загалом переважають односкладні речення й приєднувальні конструкції зі структурою Р та РО. Усі синтаксичні одиниці поділено на дві групи залежно від засобу вираження в них головного члена. Виявлено, що кількісну перевагу мають речення й приєднувальні конструкції, головний член яких виражений дієвідмінюваним або безособовим дієсловом. Особливу увагу зосереджено на змінах порядку слів залежно від жанрових різновидів розмовного стилю. З’ясовано, що в текстах різних жанрів трапляється різний порядок слів. Ключові слова: розмовний стиль, порядок слів, односкладні дієслівні речення, парцеляти, приєднувальні конструкції.

C0 and Dutch-English code-switching

This paper aims to show that the mainstream Generative analysis for verb second (V2) languages – a functional head, C0, is responsible for V2 word order – does not hold up to scrutiny when confronted with bilingual data. Dutch-English code-switched data were used to investigate V2 word order in the main clause – but also svo/sov word order in the subordinate clause, an issue that has relevance to the question at hand – using an acceptability judgment task to test how native bilinguals judge code-switched sentences in a verb second context and subordinate clauses. Novel results with regards to V2 word order are presented in combination with a corroboration of established patterns for subordinate clause word order. The results indicate that the language of the finite verb determines word order in both main and subordinate clauses.

Is Biblical Hebrew a non-configurational language? Reconsidering the evidence from discontinuous phrases

The occurrence of discontinuous phrases is an important feature of so-called non-configurational languages, which are characterized by relatively free word order in clauses and phrases. Partly based on this feature, it has been argued that Biblical Hebrew is a non-configurational language. However, after reviewing broader linguistic literature on this topic, the present article shows that the seemingly discontinuous phrases in Biblical Hebrew are not comparable to the typically non-configurational types of discontinuous phrases, and thus need a different explanation. The suggested alternative analyses are afterthought (or right dislocation) and extraposition. Since these constructions occur in languages at various positions on the configurationality continuum, they should not be interpreted as evidence for the assumed non-configurational nature of Biblical Hebrew.

Interpreting into an SOV Language: Memory and the Position of the Verb. A Corpus-Based Comparative Study of Interpreted and Non-mediated Speech

In Dutch and German subordinate clauses, the verb is generally placed after the clausal constituents (Subject-Object-Verb structure) thereby creating a middle field (or verbal brace). This makes interpreting from SOV into SVO languages particularly challenging as it requires further processing and feats of memory. It often requires interpreters to use specific strategies (for example, anticipation) (Lederer 1981; Liontou 2011). However, few studies have tackled this issue from the point of view of interpreting into SOV languages. Producing SOV structures requires some specific cognitive effort as, for instance, subject properties need to be kept in mind in order to ensure the correct subject-verb agreement across a span of 10 or 20 words. Speakers therefore often opt for a strategy called extraposition, placing specific elements after the verb in order to shorten the brace (Hawkins 1994; Bevilacqua 2009). Dutch speakers use this strategy more often than German speakers (Haeseryn 1990). Given the additional cognitive load generated by the interpreting process (Gile 1999), it may be assumed that interpreters will shorten the verbal brace to a larger extent than native speakers. The present study is based on a corpus of interpreted and non-mediated speeches at the European Parliament and compares middle field lengths as well as extraposition in Dutch and German subordinate clauses. Results from 3460 subordinate clauses confirm that interpreters of both languages shorten the middle field more than native speakers. The study also shows that German interpreters use extraposition more often than native speakers, but this is not the case for Dutch interpreters. Dutch and German interpreters appear to use extraposition partly because they imitate the clause word order of the source speech, showing that, in this case, extraposition can be considered an effort-saving tool.

Subject case alternation in negated existential, locative, and possessive clauses in Latvian

[full article and abstract in English]
 The goal of this article is to analyse the alternation between the genitive and nominative cases in Latvian. As the alternation between genitive and nominative cases is possible in all clauses in which the verb būt ‘to be’ is used as an independent verb, this article examines existential, locative, and also possessive clauses, while also demonstrating that distinguishing these clause types is problematic for Latvian utilising the criteria given in the linguistic literature. Clauses containing the negative form of būt ‘to be’, i.e. nebūt, form the foundation of those selected for this study, as only in these sentences the genitive/nominative alternation can be seen for the subject in Latvian.
 There are only fragmentary descriptions of existential clauses as a unique semantic type, primarily in connection with the function of the verb būt ‘to be’ and the problems associated with distinguishing its independent and auxiliary meanings. Word order in existential, locative, and possessive clauses has, until now, been examined in connection with typical clause expanders – adverbial modifiers and the dative of possession as well as the information structure of the clause. At the same time, case choice for objects in negative existential clauses has traditionally been one of the most studied themes regarding language standardisation. In order to determine which factors affect the choice of either the genitive or nominative case, a corpus study was done analysing 979 examples: 882 with a genitive subject and 97 with a nominative subject. 
 It was found that a connection exists between the definiteness of the subject, word order, and case choice; however, this manifests only as a tendency rather than as a strict rule.

Teasing Apart the Effects of Dominance, Transfer, and Processing in Reference Production by German–Italian Bilingual Adolescents

This paper intends to test different accounts of bilingual reference production against the production of referring expressions in Italian by German‒Italian bilingual adolescents. In particular, we investigate to what extent bilingual referring expressions involve transfer from one language to the other, result from processing and dominance variables, and are the outcome of a process of language change. We will show that each of these hypotheses makes a precise prediction about which referential strategy bilinguals should adopt. The production of referring expressions is examined in the context of a story-telling task. Based on the analysis of overspecified forms, clitic omissions, and agreement mismatches, as well as on correlations with dominance factors, we argue in favor of the relevance of dominance and processing factors for bilingual reference production. Finally, we verify the possibility of generalizing our conclusions to a different linguistic domain, concerning the expression of word order in main clauses.

A competitive mechanism selecting verb-second versus verb-final word order in causative and argumentative clauses of spoken Dutch: A corpus-linguistic study

In Dutch and German, the canonical order of subject, object(s) and finite verb is ‘verb-second’ (V2) in main but ‘verb-final’ (VF) in subordinate clauses. This occasionally leads to the production of noncanonical word orders. Familiar examples are causative and argumentative clauses introduced by a subordinating conjunction (Du. omdat, Ger. weil ‘because’): the omdat/weil-V2 phenomenon. Such clauses may also be introduced by coordinating conjunctions (Du. want, Ger. denn), which license V2 exclusively. However, want/denn-VF structures are unknown. We present the results of a corpus study on the incidence of omdat-V2 in spoken Dutch, and compare them to published data on weil-V2 in spoken German. Basic findings: omdat-V2 is much less frequent than weil-V2 (ratio almost 1:8); and the frequency relations between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions are opposite (want >> omdat; denn << weil). We propose that conjunction selection and V2/VF selection proceed partly independently, and sometimes miscommunicate—e.g. yielding omdat/weil paired with V2. Want/denn-VF pairs do not occur because want/denn clauses are planned as autonomous sentences, which take V2 by default. We sketch a simple feedforward neural network with two layers of nodes (representing conjunctions and word orders, respectively) that can simulate the observed data pattern through inhibition-based competition of the alternative choices within the node layers.