Word Order Patterns Research Articles

Word Order Patterns in the Writing of Heritage and Second Language Learners of Russian

Word Order Patterns in the Writing of Heritage and Second Language Learners of Russian

Acquiring a first language in adolescence: the case of basic word order in American Sign Language.

Previous studies suggest that age of acquisition affects the outcomes of learning, especially at the morphosyntactic level. Unknown is how syntactic development is affected by increased cognitive maturity and delayed language onset. The current paper studied the early syntactic development of adolescent first language learners by examining word order patterns in American Sign Language (ASL). ASL uses a basic Subject-Verb-Object order, but also employs multiple word order variations. Child learners produce variable word order at the initial stage of acquisition, but later primarily produce canonical word order. We asked whether adolescent first language learners acquire ASL word order in a fashion parallel to child learners. We analyzed word order preference in spontaneous language samples from four adolescent L1 learners collected longitudinally from 12 months to six years of ASL exposure. Our results suggest that adolescent L1 learners go through stages similar to child native learners, although this process also appears to be prolonged.

Symmetry and asymmetry in the Hebrew copula construction

The copula construction in Hebrew has received much attention in the linguistic literature. Nevertheless, one non-canonical variant has been largely neglected. In this variant the copula, flanked by two NPs, exhibits agreement with the post-copular NP, contrary to the canonical variant, where the agreement controller is the initial NP. This phenomenon challenges the notion of subject and its relation to agreement. The current corpus-based study investigates the word order and agreement patterns exhibited by the Hebrew copular constructions and shows that their distribution is largely motivated by information structure considerations. The proposed analysis accounts for the syntactic symmetry and semantic asymmetry between the two NPs.

Ordini marcati delle parole nell'italiano scritto: apprendenti germanofoni, apprendenti anglofoni e parlanti nativi a confronto

Marked word orders in written Italian A comparison between native speakers, L1-German learners, and L1-English learners This paper focuses on cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of Italian as an L2 by learners with Germanic L1s (English and German). The general domain under investigation is information structure, notably marked word orders. The English and German languages differ from each other in this domain, since English has a rigid word order (SVO), while German is a Verb-second language, with a relatively flexible word order. The hypothesis tested in this study is that English learners are more reluctant to deviate from a basic word order SVO in response to information structure than their Germans pairs. Approximately 300 written texts were selected from two comparable corpora freely available online, VALICO and VINCA. VALICO is an Italian corpus which includes narratives produced by Italian L2 learners and VINCA is the corresponding control corpus produced by native Italian speakers. Data analysed in this paper lend support to the hypothesis that English learners are more prone to conform to the basic SVO word order pattern than German speakers: They apparently avoid VS orders with inaccusative verbs and overuse presentational sentences with esserci, which are largely employed in their L1. In the last section of the paper some instructional interventions to foster the noticing of marked word orders and their relative functions will be suggested.

Simultaneous Acquisition of Words and Syntax: Effects of Exposure Condition and Declarative Memory.

This study examined the simultaneous acquisition of vocabulary and grammar by adult learners and the role of exposure condition and declarative memory. Most experimental studies investigating the acquisition of artificial or natural languages focus on either vocabulary or grammar, but not both. However, a systematic investigation of the simultaneous learning of multiple linguistic features is important given that it mirrors language learning outside the lab. Native English speakers were exposed to an artificial language under either incidental or intentional exposure conditions. Participants had to learn both novel pseudowords and word order patterns while also processing stimulus sentences for meaning. The results showed that adult learners are able to rapidly acquire basic syntactic information of a novel language while processing the input for meaning (plausibility judgments) and attempting to learn novel vocabulary at the same time. The results further indicated that exposure condition (incidental versus intentional) made no difference in terms of either vocabulary or grammar learning gains. Findings also revealed that learners developed explicit, not implicit, knowledge of lexis and syntax. Finally, the results indicated that individuals’ declarative memory capacity was not related to vocabulary learning but only to grammar learning. Our study underscores the importance of studying the simultaneous acquisition of different language features and from different perspectives of comprehension versus production, incidental versus intentional learning conditions, implicit/explicit knowledge, and individual differences in cognitive abilities.

Strict vs. free word order patterns in Korean nominal phrases and Cyclic Linearization

AbstractKorean nominal phrases display both flexibility in their internal word order and also rigidity in the sequencing of certain elements. This paper focuses on a linear ordering constraint on the occurrence of arguments of nouns which requires a strict relative sequencing of such elements, no matter where they are distributed across different locations within DPs. The paper suggests that the most appropriate mechanism to capture the complex patterns observed is Fox and Pesetsky's () Cyclic Linearization approach, which records and compares the linear ordering of elements across different Spell‐out domains. It is argued that the patterns found in Korean can be successfully captured in a Cyclic Linearization analysis if it is assumed that Korean nominal projections consist in two Spell‐out domains–DP and nP – in a way resembling the bi‐cyclic composition of clauses, and that Korean provides novel support from the syntax of nominal phrases for Cyclic Linearization, originally motivated by patterns found in clausal domains.

Late Latin Verb Second: The Sentential Word Order of the “Itinerarium Egeriae”

En aquest article duem a terme un estudi sistematic de l’Itinerarium Egeriae, un dels textos del llati tarda mes ben coneguts, per tal de determinar la caracteritzacio adequada de l’ordre de mots del text i veure, en particular, si l’Itinerarium Egeriae es pot considerar legitimament que presenta una gramatica de verb segon (V2) de manera semblant a les gramatiques ben estudiades del romanic medieval. Els resultats, basats en detallades analisis quantitatives i qualitatives del text i, on es pertinent, en comparacions adequades amb el romanic medieval, confirmen la naturalesa innovadora de la sintaxi de l’Itinerarium Egeriae, els patrons d’ordre de mots de la qual es demostra que segueixen una restriccio asimetrica de V2. L’article, per tant, ofereix evidencia original i valuosa a favor de la hipotesi sovint proposada pero fins ara no demostrada que la sintaxi V2 del romanic medieval representa la continuacio d’una fixacio parametrica ja ben establerta en la gramatica del llati tarda.

Mirative fronting in German

Abstract This paper presents an examination of syntactic constructions that are associated with the mirative interpretation of marking propositional content as being surprising or unexpected to the speaker. I report experimental evidence showing that certain options of marked word order in German are particularly suitable in mirative contexts. Cross-linguistic evidence offers good reasons to assume that mirative marking is also reflected in word order patterns. Having identified word order variation as one option to trigger mirative interpretations of utterances, I discuss the issue of distinguishing between information-structural and mirative effects of marked syntactic configurations.

Morphological Derivations: Learning Difficulties Encountered by Public Secondary School Students in Amman/Jordan

This study aims at investigating the difficulties encountered by public school students in Amman/ Jordan. The study raises the following questions: What are the obstacles that students may encounter in relation to the derivations? What are the causes of such obstacles? To achieve the aims of the study, the researchers manipulate two methods: A quantitative approach in which students of public secondary schools are tested and pre-tested in order to fulfil the reliability and validity of the results and a qualitative approach using interviews with teachers at the same secondary schools and one supervisor in Amman Third Educational Directorate (AL-Qwesmeh). The main results the study reaches can be summed up as follows: students are so poor not only in derivations and derivational suffixes but also in other linguistic topics. In other words, the problem of committing mistakes in derivational suffixes can obviously be regarded as being accumulative problem resulting from other problems which students are encountering in relation to, for example, parts of speech, word order or sentence patterns. Derivations and derivational suffixes should be taught in early stages such as the 8th grade or 9th grade rather than in the last ones like 11th grade or 12th grade.

Die Wortstellung des Präteritum-Auxiliars in den ältesten tschechischen Prosatexten

Summary The aim of the paper is to analyze word-order positions of preterite auxiliary forms (AuxP) in the Old Czech prosaic texts from the 14th and 15th centuries, e. g. in Pasionál (‘Passional’), in Život Krista Pána (‘Life of Christ the Lord’), in Životy sv. Otců (‘Life of Holy Fathers’/ ‘Vitae Patrum’) and in Tkadleček (‘The Weaver’/ A Czech version of Ackermann aus Böhmen). The aim of the paper is to detect all possible word-order positions of these auxiliary forms in analyzed texts. The analysis demonstrates that the AuxP maintains some properties of an orthothonic word in several rare cases. However, the overwhelming majority of examples give evidence that the Old Czech AuxP was an enclitic. According to the explored data it seems that the post-initial (2P) word-ordering of the Czech enclitic became established in Old Czech as a prototypical word-order pattern of Czech enclitic forms and that verb-adjacent (VA) word-ordering had a quality relating to style.

Pragmatic effects of polarity items revealing focal prominence in Mandarin word order

This paper investigates the information structure of Mandarin Chinese word order through studying the distribution of minimizers, a distinct class of negative polarity items. The emphatic nature of minimizers is an effective indicator for distinguishing the strength of focal prominence in different syntactic construals. The corpus analysis compares the frequency of minimizers in different word order patterns, in different strategies of modification, and in different forms. The results show that their distribution is associated with how arguments are profiled in the information structure since minimizers tend to occur in the positions where their pragmatic inferences are maximally induced. The distribution of minimizers is the result of weighing syntactic constraints and pragmatic effects. The study contributes to characterizing the fine differences of the word order patterns in terms of focal saliency.

Innovation of Word Order Harmony Across Development.

The tendency for languages to use harmonic word order patterns—orders that place heads in a consistent position with respect to modifiers or other dependents—has been noted since the 1960s. As with many other statistical typological tendencies, there has been debate regarding whether harmony reflects properties of human cognition or forces external to it. Recent research using laboratory language learning has shown that children and adults find harmonic patterns easier to learn than nonharmonic patterns (Culbertson & Newport, 2015; Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012). This supports a link between learning and typological frequency: if harmonic patterns are easier to learn, while nonharmonic patterns are more likely to be targets of change, then, all things equal, harmonic patterns will be more frequent in the world’s languages. However, these previous studies relied on variation in the input as a mechanism for change in the lab; learners were exposed to variable word order, allowing them to shift the frequencies of different orders so that harmonic patterns became more frequent. Here we teach adult and child learners languages that are consistently nonharmonic, with no variation. While adults perfectly maintain these consistently nonharmonic patterns, young child learners innovate novel orders, changing nonharmonic patterns into harmonic ones.

Word order denotes relevance differences: The case of conjoined phrases with lexical gender.

This work explores the order of linguistic references to the two genders (e.g., men and women vs. women and men). It argues that a gender is more likely to be mentioned first when it is perceived to have higher relevance in a context rather than lower relevance, and audiences assign stronger relevance to a party when the party is mentioned first rather than second. Studies 1-3 document the current prevalence of male-first conjoined phrases in the public (but not family) domain and link the pattern to historical changes in women's public presence over the 20th century. Study 4 shows that contextual relevance cues affect the odds of first mention, such that people are more likely to refer to a woman before a man, when the two are in a primary school classroom rather than a corporate office. At the same time, Studies 4 and 5 find that people often choose to reproduce collectively preferred word order patterns (e.g., men and women). Studies 6 and 7 show that these choices matter because people assign more relevance to a party when it comes first rather than second in a conjoined phrase. Overall, this work offers theoretical grounding and empirical evidence for word order as a means of expressing and perpetuating gender stereotypes. (PsycINFO Database Record

Сопоставительное исследование моделей порядка слов в простом предложении в английском и арабском языках

It is sociolinguistically acknowledged that humans are uniquely distinct from other living species due to the fact that they communicate with one another through the use of a particular human language. Furthermore, the number of human languages that exist worldwide is huge. Unsurprisingly, languages can be similar or different form one another as well as the main aims of each language. Standard Arabic and Standard English languages, for instance, are distinct from one another but at the same time they are alike. Explicitly, the two languages are originally different from one another (one Semitic while the other German) but they do share at least some general linguistic features at all levels: phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatics’ level. In this research paper, fields which are closely connected to the linguistic analysis and comparison of languages known as Contrastive Analysis, Comparative Linguistics and Universal Grammar will be referred to in comparing between Standard Arabic and Standard English in terms of their word-order patterns of simple sentences.

Chopping down the syntax tree

Word order, argument structure and unbounded dependencies are among the most important topics in linguistics because they touch upon the core of the syntax-semantics interface. One question is whether “marked” word order patterns, such as The man I talked to vs. I talked to the man, require special treatment by the grammar or not. Mainstream linguistics answers this question affirmatively: in the marked order, some mechanism is necessary for “extracting” the man from its original argument position, and a special placement rule (e.g. topicalization) is needed for putting the constituent in clause-preceding position. This paper takes an opposing view and argues that such formal complexity is only required for analyses that are based on syntactic trees. A tree is a rigid data structure that only allows information to be shared between local nodes, hence it is inadequate for non-local dependencies and can only allow restricted word order variations. A construction, on the other hand, offers a more powerful representation device that allows word order variations – even unbounded dependencies – to be analyzed as the side-effect of how language users combine the same rules in different ways in order to satisfy their communicative needs. This claim is substantiated through a computational implementation of English argument structure constructions in Fluid Construction Grammar that can handle both comprehension and formulation.

Statistical learning of an auditory sequence and reorganization of acquired knowledge: A time course of word segmentation and ordering

Previous neural studies have supported the hypothesis that statistical learning mechanisms are used broadly across different domains such as language and music. However, these studies have only investigated a single aspect of statistical learning at a time, such as recognizing word boundaries or learning word order patterns. In this study, we neutrally investigated how the two levels of statistical learning for recognizing word boundaries and word ordering could be reflected in neuromagnetic responses and how acquired statistical knowledge is reorganised when the syntactic rules are revised. Neuromagnetic responses to the Japanese-vowel sequence (a, e, i, o, and u), presented every .45s, were recorded from 14 right-handed Japanese participants. The vowel order was constrained by a Markov stochastic model such that five nonsense words (aue, eao, iea, oiu, and uoi) were chained with an either-or rule: the probability of the forthcoming word was statistically defined (80% for one word; 20% for the other word) by the most recent two words. All of the word transition probabilities (80% and 20%) were switched in the middle of the sequence. In the first and second quarters of the sequence, the neuromagnetic responses to the words that appeared with higher transitional probability were significantly reduced compared with those that appeared with a lower transitional probability. After switching the word transition probabilities, the response reduction was replicated in the last quarter of the sequence. The responses to the final vowels in the words were significantly reduced compared with those to the initial vowels in the last quarter of the sequence. The results suggest that both within-word and between-word statistical learning are reflected in neural responses. The present study supports the hypothesis that listeners learn larger structures such as phrases first, and they subsequently extract smaller structures, such as words, from the learned phrases. The present study provides the first neurophysiological evidence that the correction of statistical knowledge requires more time than the acquisition of new statistical knowledge.

Ditransitive idioms in Hebrew

This paper is a study of 55 ditransitive idioms in Hebrew, to the best of our knowledge, the first of its kind. The examination of these idiomatic constructions reveals asymmetries in their composition, thereby providing us with new insights into their internal structure and the principles governing their formation. In particular, we show that idioms reflect properties of their literal counterparts, explain word order patterns ditransitive idioms exhibit, argue that idioms do not have to be continuous constituents, and investigate the distribution of their free position. In addition, the paper provides support for Rappaport Hovav and Levin’s (2008) “verb sensitive” approach to the dative alternation and Landau’s (1994) seminal observation that Hebrew manifests the alternation, though it fails to mark it morphologically.

The effect of being human and the basis of grammatical word order: Insights from novel communication systems and young sign languages

This study identifies a central factor that gives rise to the different word orders found in the world’s languages. In the last decade, a new window on this long-standing question has been provided by data from young sign languages and invented gesture systems. Previous work has assumed that word order in both invented gesture systems and young sign languages is driven by the need to encode the semantic/syntactic roles of the verb’s arguments. Based on the responses of six groups of participants, three groups of hearing participants who invented a gestural system on the spot, and three groups of signers of relatively young sign languages, we identify a major factor in determining word order in the production of utterances in novel and young communication systems, not suggested by previous accounts, namely the salience of the arguments in terms of their human/animacy properties: human arguments are introduced before inanimate arguments (‘human first’). This conclusion is based on the difference in word order patterns found between responses to depicted simple events that vary as to whether both subject and object are human or whether the subject is human and the object inanimate. We argue that these differential patterns can be accounted for uniformly by the ‘human first’ principle. Our analysis accounts for the prevalence of SOV order in clauses with an inanimate object in all groups (replicating results of previous separate studies of deaf signers and hearing gesturers) and the prevalence of both SOV and OSV in clauses with a human object elicited from the three groups of participants who have the least interference from another linguistic system (nonliterate deaf signers who have had little or no exposure to another language). It also provides an explanation for the basic status of SOV order suggested by other studies, as well as the scarcity of the OSV order in languages of the world, despite its appearance in novel communication systems. The broadest implication of this study is that the basic cognitive distinction between humans and inanimate entities is a crucial factor in setting the wheels of word ordering in motion.

Word order patterns in the Old High German right periphery and their Indo-European origins

I investigate deviations from the OV order in the OHG texts Isidor and Tatian. Abstracting away from cases of verb-second, post-verbal constituents tend to be heavy or focused. OHG thus has a head-final VP with extraposition of NPs and PPs. Likewise, verbal complexes with the order finite before non-finite are derived by Verb (Projection) Raising. Ancient Indo-European languages are also underlyingly OV with evidence for extraposition. This suggests that OHG inherited the head-final VP, extraposition and even V(P)R from Proto-Indo-European. Because extraposition and V(P)R are at the periphery of grammar, the resulting surface orders have not resulted in parametric change to the VP from Proto-Indo-European to present-day German.

Suomen ja viron kyl(lä)/küll ja kieltolauseen sanajärjestys

Finnish and Estonian kyl(la)/kull and the word order of negative clauses This paper looks comparatively at the Finnish kyl(la) and Estonian kull, which function as an epistemic adverb and a particle in both languages, and have a common origin in the noun ‘abundance’. Even though the word is mostly used to formulate positive answers, it also occurs in negative utterances. This is the focus of the current paper, which at the same time touches on the complex area of word order. Even though both languages feature more or less free pragmatic word order, the patterns for negative utterances which contain both the negation word ei and kyl(la)/kull are varied, especially regarding the placement of adverbs and particles. On the basis of conversational data the study establishes four patterns for Finnish((X+)ei,en+X+kyl(la);ei+X+kylla#;ei+V+kyl(la)+Y;X+ei+ kyl(la) +Y, where X denotes one or several noun phrases and Y an adverbial) and three patterns for Estonian (X + ei + V (+X) + kull + other; ei + V + kull# (+ other); X/Y + kull + ei + V + other), where only the last one is frequent. Accordingly, Finnish reveals more flexibility in word order and negation-initial patterns, while in Estonian ei regularly follows kull, which is impossible in Finnish. The negation word and the finite verb have to occur near each other in Estonian but not in Finnish. In order to analyze the interactional functions of these patterns, the conversation analytic method is used which makes it possible to reveal participants’ local understanding of each prior action. The study shows that there are two relatively small functional areas where the word order patterns coincide in Finnish and Estonian: in a concessive use ((X+) ei, en + V + kyl(la)/kull), and when kyl(la)/kull is used as an utterance-final epistemic marker. The latter pattern, however, is extremely rare in Estonian, and has developed a special implication of ‘as a matter of fact’ in Finnish. In other functions, the word order is different. In particular, in answers to polar questions the ordering of the negation word and kyl(la) or kull is the opposite, with negation preceding kyl(la) in Finnish and following kull in Estonian. While in Finnish the word kyl(la) functions as an epistemic reassurance for the recipient, in Estonian the kull + ei pattern is typically used for building contrast with the prior and setting the initial element into focus. Regardless of the phonological and historical similarity, the syntactic patterns for this adverb/ particle are different, which may reflect more overarching differences in word order between the two languages – something that remains to be explored. At least when it comes to kyl(la) and kull, Finnish word order is more flexible, while Estonian displays a distinct grammaticalized pattern. Accordingly, the function of the “same” epistemic word emerges in a more content-related manner in Finnish, where it expresses speaker certainty, and as more of a syntactic device in Estonian, where it marks another element in the clause as being contrasted. This illustrates the decisive role of interactional and syntactic context in (the development of) word meaning.