Nazzal, Zhu, & Gavarró (2025). Early knowledge of word order in Palestinian Arabic: An eye-tracking study

19 març, 2025

Autors:

Nazzal, Zhu, & Gavarró

Títol:

Early knowledge of word order in Palestinian Arabic: An eye-tracking study

Editorial: Language Acquisition
Data de publicació: 19-02-2025

Més informació

This paper addresses the underexplored realm of early parameter setting in language acquisition before the two-word stage, in a less researched language, Palestinian Arabic. Building on Franck et al.’s (2013) exploration of the verb–direct or indirect object/direct or indirect object–verb (VO/OV) parameter in infants exposed to French, we investigate the acquisition of the VO order (as opposed to OV) in 17-month-old native Palestinian Arabic infants using a combination of the preferential looking paradigm, the weird word order paradigm, and pseudo-verbs. The results from our study show that Palestinian Arabic infants have established VO by the age of 1;5 and ignore sequences of ungrammatical OV. This pattern is different from that of the adults, who do not ignore ungrammatical sequences. Additionally, we find no correlation between the infants’ performance and vocabulary size or age within the range tested. The infants in the study constitute, with Mandarin infants in a similar study, the youngest age group to show sensitivity to the VO/OV contrast.

Zhu & Gavarró (2025). Early acquisition of complex syntax in Mandarin-speaking infants

22 maig, 2025

Autors:

Zhu & Gavarró

Títol:

Early acquisition of complex syntax in Mandarin-speaking infants

Editorial: Scientific Reports
Data de publicació: 17-06-2025
Pàgines: 18

Més informació
Text complet

Although Mandarin is an S(ubject)V(erb)O(bject) language, other non-canonical sentences with the object marker ba are also possible, yet their comprehension in child Mandarin is underexplored. This study uses eye-tracking and the intermodal preferential looking paradigm, as well as the use of pseudo-verbs, to explore how 24 Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.5 months) and 48 adults process these structures. The results of our experiments show that both infants and adults looked longer at the target scenes for the three grammatical sentence types tested: SVO, SbaOV and O, SbaOV. While comprehension of SVO and SbaOV could be achieved with an AGENT-first parsing strategy, the fact that PATIENT-first O, SbaOV constructions were also parsed by infants suggests access to grammatical, language-specific knowledge.

El infinitivo en español

15 maig, 1982

Autors:

M. Lluïsa Hernanz

Títol:

El infinitivo en español

Editorial: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Servei de Publicacions
Col·lecció: Sèrie Lingüística #2
Data de publicació: 1982
Pàgines: 570

Text complet

El presenta trabajo constituye un intento de estudiar desde una perspectiva generativo-transformacional el infinitivo en español. No pretende ser un estudio exhaustivo: se trata de una investigación el la que se ha intentado contrastar las hipótesis con respecto a la naturaleza sintáctico-semántica de dicha forma no personal principalmente con una parcela dentro del campo de la oración compuesta: las completivas.


Títols de la col·lecció / Also in this series:

Grammaticalization and Parametric Variation

19 agost, 2005

Autors:

Montserrat Batllori, Maria-Lluïsa Hernanz, Carme Picallo, and Francesc Roca

Títol:

Grammaticalization and Parametric Variation

Editorial: Oxford University Press
Data de publicació: 2005
Pàgines: 332
ISBN13: 9780199272129

Més informació

In this book the methods and theories of formal syntax are focussed on grammatical variation and change.
The book opens with a detailed introduction to the ideas and techniques deployed in the book and the phenomena and issues on which they are brought to bear. Seventeen chapters follow, divided into two parts, the first part concerned with grammaticalization and the second part with parametric variation. These show what the application of contemporary theories of syntax and language variation can reveal about syntactic change and variation and the processes of parametric change which lie behind them.
The chapters also demonstrate the value of testing and constructing synchronic theories on the basis of historical data. The analyses range over many languages and language families, including Germanic, Romance, Greek, and Chinese.

Lampitelli, Roseano, Torres-Tamarit (2022). Vowel length in Friulian verbs: a case of mora affixation

25 abril, 2022

Autors:

Nicola Lampitelli, Paolo Roseano, Francesc Torres-Tamarit

Títol:

Vowel length in Friulian verbs: a case of mora affixation

Editorial: Morphology, 32(1):1-28 (Springer)
Data de publicació: Febrer del 2022

Text complet

This paper deals with vowel length in Friulian, and shows that this is sometimes phonologically predictable and sometimes an instance of mora affixation in conjugation 1 verbs. Building on newly collected data on verbal morphology, we make the hypothesis that the Theme morpheme in conjugation 1 verbs in the dialect of Negrons has distinct allomorphs, among which a mora. This analysis of morphological length in Negrons Friulian shows that there is no need for a morphome-based analysis of the data. In our analysis, each morph, including length, spells out a morphosyntactic property.