Linguistics in the Netherlands - Volume 30, Issue 1, 2013

One of the cues that children might use in learning words is the level of certainty that speakers demonstrate in their naming of a novel object. This study presented 52 4–5 year old Dutch children with a word-learning task in which two puppets each used the same label for a different novel object. In three conditions, puppets expressed their level of speaker certainty lexically (e.g. ‘I know this is a mit’ vs. ‘I think this is a mit’), they used discourse means to convey certainty (e.g. ‘I play with this a lot. Yes, a mit’, vs. ‘I’ve never played with this. Well, a mit’) or they combined the two. In all conditions, children were more likely to pick the object referred to by the more certain puppet as the referent of the new word, demonstrating that speaker certainty is a relevant cue in the word learning process.

It is commonly noted that French velar plosives tend to take a fronted realization when followed by a front vowel. These observations are generally not accompanied by representative data, and consequently, little is known about the actual characteristics and spread of the phenomenon. This study provides a corpus analysis of velar palatalization in contemporary French, and addresses the potential linguistic and sociolinguistic factors involved. Moreover, the synchronic results are considered in the light of the palatalization processes that took place in the history of French.

The paper models the acquisition of quantity insensitive metrical stress through constraint induction. A single constraint format is specified that regulates the alignment of prosodic categories. A binary and ternary foot-based prosodic hierarchy are compared in their conduciveness to learning a range of stress patterns, with clear advantages for the latter. The paper also points out the interaction between grammatical modeling and acquisition modeling with regards to the typological predictions of the grammar formalization.

Typological work shows that voiced fricatives like /β ð/ occur more often without their voiceless counterparts than with them, contrary to what would be expected on the basis of markedness relations between voicing and obstruents. This paper suggests that many of the offending fricatives are more appropriately viewed as sonorants, whose unmarked status is to be voiced. This view has an important consequence for the interpretation of intervocalic voicing (e.g. afa > ava), which we suspect is the diachronic origin of most of the fricatives in our corpus. We propose that intervocalic voicing is sonorization, formalized in terms of the suppression of melodic material.

Song, Sundara & Demuth (2009) find an asymmetrical pattern for verbal inflection errors in child English: They observe more errors in sentence medial position than in sentence final position. To account for this asymmetry, they point towards the surface differences of both sentence positions. A similar asymmetry in Dutch, in which embedded clauses cause fewer problems for verbal inflection than main clauses, has been related to V2 (van Kampen 1997; Bastiaanse & van Zonneveld 1998; Weerman, Duinmeijer & Orgassa 2011). The present study disentangles both explanations (sentence position, i.e. ‘phonology’ vs. V2, i.e. ‘syntax’), and aims to provide a unified account for both the patterns found in English and Dutch. The inclusion of PP-over-V constructions in a sentence repetition task with monolingual Dutch children (aged 4;0 to 6;2) enables us to show that the phonological account proposed for English can account for the Dutch pattern as well.

Schafer & Roeper (2000) have traced the acquisition order of the various occurrences of there in English monolingual children. One of their claims is that expletive there triggers the emergence of there as a discourse anaphor. Taking their approach as a starting point, we report here on a similar search that we have carried out on files from Dutch corpora in CHILDES, focussing on the two Dutch counterparts daar and er. Dutch children face a particular acquisition puzzle in having to deal with both of these equivalents for ‘there’. Our results show that discourse anaphoric daar and er emerge prior to expletive er. This clearly contradicts Schafer & Roeper’s claim for the need of an expletive trigger. We argue instead that the discrepancy between the English and Dutch findings is caused by the much larger variety of discourse anaphoric constructions with daar and er in Dutch.

Dutch prescriptive grammar rules dictate that the complementizer dan ‘than’ should be used in comparative constructions of inequality. This has been an issue for grammarians from the sixteenth century onwards when als ‘as’ started to be used as an alternative form in this type of context. In order to find out why and when people choose one comparative marker over the other, we examined the use of these markers in the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN). We found that the use of dan is overall more common than als in comparative constructions of inequality, even though from a linguistic point of view als might be favoured. The choice between als and dan turns out to be strongly correlated with the level of education. Although this factor has been assumed to be of influence for a long time, as far as we know it has never been quantitatively tested before. We conclude that the effect of the level of education we found reflects the strong influence of the prescriptive rule taught in schools, repressing the use of als in comparatives of inequality.

This paper contributes to current advances in the cross-linguistic variation of syntactic contexts that allow sluicing. We investigate a relatively rare sluicing strategy: TP-ellipsis inside relative clauses. We analyse this phenomenon in Gungbe based on Van Craenenbroeck and Lipták’s (2006) implementation of the [e]-feature characteristic of sluicing.

This paper advocates a new conception of the properties which determine the distribution of finite clausal complements (FCCs) in English. I argue against the orthodox view that FCCs are selected by matrix predicates on the basis of their interpretive type (Grimshaw 1979; Rizzi 1997; Ginzburg & Sag 2000), and propose that distribution rather depends on the specification of the FCC in terms of the syntactically encoded properties [+/-wh, +/-factive]. This proposal is motivated by new distributional patterns which emerge when the typology of English FCCs is expanded to take into account complementiser-how clauses (CHCs) (Legate 2010; Nye 2012). CHCs have their own unique interpretation, yet, strikingly, have exactly the same distribution as embedded exclamatives. This is unexpected under the traditional view of FCC selection, but is explained if CHCs and exclamatives are selected on the basis of a common [+wh, +factive] syntactic specification.

Null-subject languages are said to track reference and discourse-pragmatic information exploiting the array of specialized forms provided by their grammar. This argument is normally used as the baseline against which language acquisition and contact varieties (L1, 2L1, L2, L1-attrition) are evaluated. However, recent studies on Italian question the empirical validity of this pattern and call for an analysis of these issues from an empirical perspective. This paper presents the results of a study on mechanisms for introduction and tracking of reference in narratives (Frog Stories) in Italian L1/Dutch L2, Dutch L1/Italian L2, Italian/Dutch bilinguals and age-matched monolingual Italian controls. All utterances were scrutinized for form, antecedent, and discourse-pragmatic function. The results so far show an overextended use of null subjects, also in contexts of topic-shift, where overt subjects would be expected. These constructions are not ambiguous, as speakers make use of alternative devices for anaphora interpretation that exploit contextual cues.

This paper elaborates on a factor that plays a role in receptive multilingualism, namely the influence of a second language (L2). We investigated whether knowledge of German can help Dutch people to decode written Danish words when they do not know any Danish. We instructed 32 participants with Dutch as a native language (L1) and different levels of proficiency in German as an L2 to translate 42 written Danish words into Dutch. The results showed that participants with a higher level of German performed better on this translation task. Furthermore, our data provides evidence for the existence of a ‘foreign language mode’, i.e. the knowledge of German as an L2 seems to take over from the knowledge of the L1 if the participants’ proficiency in German is high.

Right-dislocation constructions, including backgrounding and specificational afterthoughts, are subject to various limitations. Dislocated phrases themselves are islands for extraction. Moreover, there are proximity effects between dislocated phrases and their correlate in the host clause. The main effect reduces to the regular constraints on A-bar movement. This is explained from the perspective of a biclausal analysis in which the dislocated phrase is fronted within its own, elliptical clause. As a result, right-dislocated phrases related to a deeply embedded correlate are only possible if the embedded clause is sentence-final. Otherwise, a dislocated constituent may surface in an intraposed position, next to the embedded clause. Finally, there is an additional prosodic constraint on backgrounding, which is irrelevant for afterthoughts; consequently, the latter must follow the former if they are combined in one sentence.

This article presents a case study on the role of L1 transfer of language-specific features of information structure in very advanced L2 learners. Cross-linguistic differences in the information status of clause-initial position in a V2 language like Dutch compared to an SVO language like English are hypothesized to result in overuse of clause-initial adverbials in the writing of advanced Dutch learners of English. This hypothesis was tested by evaluating advanced Dutch EFL learners’ use of clause-initial adverbials in a syntactically annotated longitudinal corpus of student writing, compared to a native reference corpus. Results indicate that Dutch EFL learners overuse clause-initial adverbials of place as well as addition adverbials that refer back to an antecedent in the directly preceding discourse. Although there is a clear development in the direction of native writing, transfer of information structural features of Dutch can still be observed even after three years of extended academic exposure.

This paper questions the assumption made in classic Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993 [2004]) that markedness constraints are an innate part of Universal Grammar. Instead, we argue that constraints are acquired on the basis of the language data to which L1 learning children are exposed. This is argued both on general grounds (innateness is an assumption that should not be invoked lightly) and on the basis of empirical evidence. We investigate this issue for six general markedness constraints in French, and show that all constraints could be acquired on the basis of the ambient data. Second, we show that the order of acquisition of the marked structures matches the frequency of violations of the relevant constraints in the input quite well. This argues in favour of a phonological model in which constraints are acquired, not innate, i.e. a model in which grammatical notions such as constraints are derived from language use.

The present study investigates whether immediate repetition improves consecutive interpreting performance during training. In addition, the study tries to shed light on whether the effects of immediate repetition differ between BA and MA interpreting trainees. In the experiment, ten raters judged six major quality measures of the accuracy and fluency of the interpreting output recorded from seven BA trainees and five MA trainees. The seventh quality measure expressed linguistic complexity as the number of clauses per AS-unit. The results show that the main effects of repetition and proficiency are both significant on accuracy and fluency, but the main effects are absent on linguistic complexity. Moreover, in terms of fluency BA trainees benefit significantly more from repetition than MA trainees. Accuracy improvement through repetition does not differ significantly between the two groups. The results have implications for consecutive interpreting training at different stages.