scholarly journals V-to-I Movement in the Absence of Morphological Cues:Evidence from Adult and Child Northern Norwegian

Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.41 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristine Bentzen
Keyword(s):  
Preliminary Data ◽  
Strong Correlation ◽  
First Language ◽  
Movement Pattern ◽  
Close Correlation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Verbal Inflection

Several people have pointed out that there seems to be a close correlation between inflectional morphology and verb movement (see e.g. Kosmeijer 1986, Holmberg & Platzack 1988). The nature of this correlation has been claimed to go in both directions. Vikner (1994, 1995) and Rohrbacher (1999) have both suggested that the verb can only move to an inflectional head if the morphology is rich enough. Bobaljik (1995), Thráinsson (1996), and Bobaljik & Thráinsson (1998), on the other hand, argue that the correlation goes in the other direction, i.e. that rich inflection is a reflection of verb movement, rather than the cause for it. A correlation between morphology and verb movement has also been suggested in first language acquisition (Santelmann 1995 on Swedish, Clahsen et al. 1996 on German, Déprez & Pierce 1993, and Meisel 1994 on French). Several of these studies indicate that children use inflectional morphology as a cue for verb movement in the acquisition process, and that they employ verb movement as soon as they acquire verbal inflection. In this paper I will present new data from a dialect of Northern Norwegian which challenge the strong correlation between verb movement and inflectional morphology in both the adult language and in the acquisition of this dialect. More specifically, this dialect appears to have optional independent V-to-I movement despite the fact that the inflectional morphology is very poor. With respect to the acquisition of this dialect, preliminary data from one subject seem to indicate that children to some extent overgeneralise this verb movement pattern into constructions where adult speakers would not allow it.

scholarly journals Cues and economy in the acquisition of verb movement

Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.63 ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristine Bentzen
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
First Language ◽  
Target Language ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Movement Parameter ◽  
Verb Placement ◽  
Traditional Sense

In this paper we will discuss how economy principles interact with cues in the input in bilingual first language acquisition. We will look at the acquisition of verb placement in a child acquiring English and Norwegian simultaneously. Based on data from this child, it will be argued that when faced with ambiguous cues with respect to the verb movement parameter, children do not necessarily adopt the default, less marked setting. Rather, they may opt for a setting which yields an overall consistent grammar, even when this grammar contains operations that are more costly than those used in the target language. We will suggest that economy in acquisition may involve consistency in a grammar in correlation with economy in the more traditional sense within minimalism, where moving an element in general is considered more costly than not moving it (Chomsky 1995).

What are the guiding principles in the evolution of language: Paradigmatics or syntagmatics?

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-142
Author(s):  
Werner Abraham
Keyword(s):  
Critical Mass ◽  
First Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Added Value ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Functional Categories ◽  
Early Language ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
The One

Abstract The main designs of modern theories of syntax assume a process of syntagmatic organization. However, research on first language acquisition leaves no doubt that the structured combination of single lexical items cannot begin until a critical mass of lexical items has been acquired such that the lexicon is structured hierarchically on the basis of hierarchical feature bundling. Independent of a decision between the main views about the design of a proto language (the grammarless “Holophrastic view”, Arbib & Bickerton 2010: 1, Bickerton 2014) or the ‘Compositional View’ as taken by Rizzi (2010), Carstairs-McCarthy (2010), and others. What seems to be the minimal offset for language is the existence of grammatical categories like verb and noun, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, functional categories as needed for the expression of all kinds of agreement between the distinct categories to form recursively structured complexes. I follow the different stages of complexification asking whether there is paradigmatic next to syntagmatic organization and what its added value is for the evolution of grammar. The conclusion will be that paradigmatics is an indismissible part of the organization of early language in that it structures the lexicon so as to make primary and secondary syntactic merge possible and, consequently, is also a prerequisite for movement. The guiding idea of this position is Roman Jakobson’s insistence on the twofold organization of language and grammar. The two organizational designs, syntagmatics and paradigmatics, are manifest within each module: in the phonetic, the morphological, the syntactic, the semantic, and the pragmatic form (consider Jakobson’s 1971a, b reiterated argument).

Two types of wh-omission in first language acquisition

2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yves Roberge ◽  
Nelleke Strik
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
First Language ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Common Phenomenon ◽  
Functional Elements

Omission of various components of a sentence is a common phenomenon in first language (LI) acquisition across different languages. Omission can affect arguments, such as subjects and objects, as well as functional elements, such as determiners and inflectional morphology (Borer and Rohrbacher 2002, Pérez-Leroux et al. 2008, among others).

Bilingual first language acquisition at the interface between syntax and pragmatics

2000 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aafke Hulk ◽  
Natascha Müller
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
First Language ◽  
External Factors ◽  
The Other ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Internal Factors ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
Language Dominance ◽  
Starting Point

This paper has as its starting point the assumption that in acquiring two languages from birth, bilingual children separate their grammars from very early on. This does not, however, exclude cross-linguistic influence – the possible influence of one language on the other. The main focus of the paper is on the acquisition of syntax in a generative framework. We argue that cross-linguistic influence can occur if (1) an interface level between two modules of grammar is involved, and (2) the two languages overlap at the surface level. We show that both conditions hold for object drop, but not for root infinitives. Root infinitives satisfy the first condition: they involve the interface between syntax and pragmatics. However, they do not satisfy the second condition. Therefore, we expect cross-linguistic influence to occur only in the domain of object drop and not in the domain of root infinitives. Comparing the development of the two phenomena in a bilingual Dutch–French and a German–Italian child to the development in monolingual children, we show that this prediction is borne out by our data. Moreover, this confirms the hypothesis that cross-linguistic influence is due to language internal factors and not to language external factors such as language dominance: the periods during which we observe influence in the domain of object drop and non-influence in the domain of root infinitives are identical.

scholarly journals THE ROLE OF IS IN THE ACQUISITION OF FINITENESS BY ADULT TURKISH LEARNERS OF DUTCH

2009 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ineke van de Craats
Keyword(s):  
Universal Grammar ◽  
First Language ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Minimalist Theory ◽  
By Products

This article deals with the interlanguage of adult second language (L2) learners acquiring finiteness. Due to the inaccessibility of bound inflectional morphology, learners use free morphology to mark a syntactic relationship as well as person and number features separately from the thematic verb, expressed by a pattern like the man is go. Results from longitudinally collected production data of Turkish learners of Dutch are reported and present evidence for the claim that (a) verb movement and production of inflectional morphology develop separately in various developmental steps and (b) finite forms in nonfinite contexts (and vice versa) are by-products of this development. Moreover, all is-patterns in different Germanic languages can be explained by the application of minimalist theory of verb movement and recent views on morphology. Is-patterns that correspond neither to the first language nor to the L2—a poverty-of-the-stimulus problem—turn out to be possible in other languages of the world and are constrained by Universal Grammar.

Subject realization in the syntactic development of a bilingual child

2000 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 173-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Juan-Garau ◽  
Carmen Pérez-Vidal
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Word Order ◽  
First Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Dependent Manner ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Syntactic Development

The present article reports on the findings of a case study of bilingual first language acquisition in Catalan and English. It first presents a general overview of a child's syntactic development from the age of 1;3 to 4;2 and then focuses on the question of subject realization in the two contrasting languages he is acquiring simultaneously. In this case, Catalan is a null subject language in opposition to the overt subject properties of English. Such data allow us to provide evidence on a key issue in bilingual acquisition research: the question of language separation in the early stages of acquisition. The data available suggest the absence of any major influence of one language on the other. In other words, our subject seems to be acquiring word order patterns which are different in the two adult systems in a language-dependent manner from the beginning of his production in both languages.

Head Movement and Morphological Strength

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Wouter Zwart
Keyword(s):  
Head Movement ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Verbal Inflection ◽  
Verb Placement ◽  
Time Gap ◽  
The Rich ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Germanic Languages

In the Principles and Parameters framework of Generative Grammar, the various positions occupied by the verb have been identified as functional heads hosting inflectional material (affixes or features), which may or may not attract the verb. This gave rise to a hypothesis, the Rich Agreement Hypothesis (RAH), according to which the verb has to move to the relevant functional head when the corresponding inflectional paradigm counts as “rich.” The RAH is motivated by synchronic and diachronic variation among closely related languages (mostly of the Germanic family) suggesting a correspondence between verb movement and rich agreement. Research into this correspondence was initially marred by the absence of a fundamental definition of “richness” and by the observation of counterexamples, both synchronically (dialects not conforming to the pattern) and diachronically (a significant time gap between the erosion of verbal inflection and the disappearance of verb movement). Also, the research was based on a limited group of related languages and dialects. This led to the conclusion that there was at best a weak correlation between verb movement and richness of morphology. Recently, the RAH has been revived in its strong form, proposing a fundamental definition of richness and testing the RAH against a typologically more diverse sample of the languages of the world. While this represents significant progress, several problems remain, with certain (current and past) varieties of North Germanic not conforming to the expected pattern, and the typological survey yielding mixed or unclear results. A further problem is that other Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Frisian) vary as to the richness of their morphology, but show identical verb placement patterns. This state of affairs, especially in light of recent minimalist proposals relocating both inflectional morphology and verb movement outside syntax proper (to a component in the model of grammar interfacing between narrow syntax and phonetic realization), suggests that we need a more fundamental understanding of the relation between morphology and syntax before any relation between head movement and morphological strength can be reliably ascertained.

PROCEEDINGS OF THE GRONINGEN ASSEMBLY ON LANGUAGE ACQUISITION.Charlotte Koster and Frank Wijnen (Eds.). Groningen, The Netherlands: Centre for Language and Cognition Groningen, 1996. Pp. 389.

1997 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-520
Author(s):  
Robert Yates
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
First Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Experimental Setting ◽  
Lively Discussion ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Language And Cognition

This volume contains 34 papers presented at the Groningen Assembly on Language Acquisition in September 1995. According to the editors, the conference was designed to promote “a lively discussion about the merits and constraints of different approaches to language acquisition.” Not surprisingly, in a conference that explicitly mentions it is continuing in the tradition of GALA 1993, Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, 23 of the papers in one way or the other deal with the innate properties of language and their status in language acquisition, whereas 7 papers have a connectionist perspective. Only 2 of the connectionist papers provide data from language learners. Two papers describe aspects of first language acquisition without an obvious theoretical allegiance. Only 1 paper considers how children make use of negative input provided in an experimental setting for learning about irregular verb forms. There is not a single paper on how interaction with caregivers influences language acquisition or how language is socially constructed.

The Acquisition of Polysynthetic Verb Forms in Chintang

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Stoll ◽  
Balthasar Bickel ◽  
Jekaterina Mažara
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
First Language ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Verbal Inflection ◽  
Acquisition Process ◽  
Complex Part ◽  
Verb Forms

In first language acquisition research so far little is known about the affordances involved in children's acquisition of morphologies of different complexities. This chapter discusses the acquisition of Chintang verbal morphology. Chintang is a Sino-Tibetan (Kiranti) polysynthetic language spoken in a small village in Eastern Nepal by approximately 6,000 speakers. The most complex part of Chintang morphology is verbal inflection. A large number of affixes, verb compounding, and freedom in prefix ordering results in over 1,800 verb forms of single stem verbs and more than 4,000 forms if a secondary stem is involved. In this chapter we assess the challenges of learning such a complex system, and we describe in detail what this acquisition process looks like. For this we analyze a large longitudinal acquisition corpus of Chintang.

Inflectional Morphology in Language Acquisition

2015 ◽  
pp. 350-374
Author(s):  
Sabine Stoll
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
First Language ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Morphological Markers ◽  
Step Process ◽  
Extreme Degree

The acquisition of morphology is one of the major challenges in first language acquisition and the tasks children encounter vary to an extreme degree across different languages. The acquisition of morphological markers is presented from a cross-linguistic perspective with special focus on those characteristics of morphology which are relevant for acquisition. The chapter aims to give an overview of studies illuminating exactly this variation in a wide variety of typologically different languages. Special emphasis is placed on the interplay of individual grammars and learning strategies and on the question of whether morphological learning is better explained by the application of rules or rather by a step-by-step process of learning individual constructions, which are then generalized to more abstract schemas. A major challenge in acquisition studies is the question of how to determine productivity. The chapter presents some recent proposals in this domain, based on research on longitudinal corpora.

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