Passive voice constructions in written texts

Jisa, Harriet; Baruch, E.; Reilly, Judy; Rosado, Elisa; Tolchinsky, Liliana; Verhoeven, Ludo; Zamora, Anita

doi:10.1075/wll.5.2.03jis

Cited by 64 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…In Hebrew, although passives are a part of the normative verbal system, they are not productive in spontaneous speech, and are rarely produced in spoken language as well as written formal text (Berman 1979(Berman , 2008Bolozky, 1999, Dekel, 2014Jisa, Reilly, Verhoeven, Baruch, & Rosado, 2002). For example, Dekel (2014) reports that in a spoken corpus of almost 7000 verbal forms, only 18 were passive.…”

Section: Experiments 2: Restrictiveness and Resumption In Hebrewmentioning

confidence: 99%

It depends: Optionality in the production of filler-gap dependencies

Fadlon

Morgan

Meltzer‐Asscher

et al. 2019

Journal of Memory and Language

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This study investigates the language production mechanisms underlying the creation of filler-gap dependencies (e.g., relative clauses: This is the boy that the girl from Norway saw_ yesterday), which require speakers to establish an argument-predicate relationship between a phrase, the 'filler', (the boy) and a further embedded predicate (saw). We show that filler-gap dependency production involves the retention of a representation of the filler until the relevant embedded position. We then report three elicitation experiments examining how English and Hebrew speakers manage and moderate filler retention demands via production choices. In Experiments 1 (English) and 2 (Hebrew), speakers produced restrictive relative clauses and non-restrictive relative clauses with the latter predicted to impede filler retention. In Experiment 3 (Hebrew), speakers produced relative clauses with and without intervening material creating interference for filler retention. We found that English speakers use passivization to moderate filler-retention demands via the creation of shorter dependencies. In Hebrew, impeded filler retention resulted in increased rate of grammatical resumption. We conclude that the production of filler-gap dependencies invokes cognitive strategies that manage the memory burdens that they impose

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Section: Experiments 2: Restrictiveness and Resumption In Hebrewmentioning

confidence: 99%

It depends: Optionality in the production of filler-gap dependencies

Fadlon

Morgan

Meltzer‐Asscher

et al. 2019

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…indicate that even young children of early grade school age distinguish clearly in linguistic expression between narrative and expository texts (Ravid, 2004) -for example, in use of verb tense, mood, and aspect, in forms of reference, in voice, and in lexical selection (Jisa, Reilly, Verhoeven, Baruch & Rosado, 2002 ;Ragnarsdóttir, Cahana-Amitay, van Hell, Rosado & Viguié, 2002 ;Tolchinsky, Johansson & Zamora, 2002). It is expected that here, too, genre will be a factor in the differential distribution of noun categories, with narratives favoring specific, concrete, and proper nouns, and expositories -categorical, generic, and more abstract nouns.…”

Section: Study Variables and Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic development in textual contexts during the school years: Noun Scale analyses

Ravid

2006

J. Child Lang.

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The paper examines the nominal lexicon in later language acquisition as a window on linguistic knowledge and usage across childhood and adolescence. The paper presents a psycholinguistically motivated and cognitively grounded analysis of the distribution of ten semantic noun categories (the Noun Scale) across development, modality, and genre. Eighty Hebrew-speaking children (9;0 to 10;0), adolescents (12;0 to 13;0 and 16;0 to 17;0), and a group of adult university graduate students participated in the study. Each produced four different texts: a spoken and written narrative and a spoken and written expository, yielding a total of 320 texts. All lexical noun tokens in each of the 320 texts were analysed to determine their score on the Noun Scale. Results indicate that nominal density, which underlies much of the syntactic architecture of texts, increases dramatically in adolescence, towards adulthood. The paper analyses the developmental patterns of each of the ten Noun Scale categories, showing that the nominal lexicon of schoolaged children is already very different from that of young children in having only a small amount of genuinely concrete nouns, and these too only in narrative texts. The quantitative analysis shows that nouns grow more categorical and abstract with age and schooling, especially in adolescence. Written expository texts are the preferred habitat of abstract, categorical nouns from early on. The systematic qualitative analysis of noun tokens in their textual context demonstrates how the nominal lexicon undergoes fundamental changes that are affected by linguistic, cognitive and social development, in interaction with text genre and modality.

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“…Written texts are more informative and planned, and encourage revision, review and rewriting, allowing the retrieval of literate lexical items and morphosyntactic structures without the pressures of online processing. Modality distinctions emerge rather late in language learning, but by age 10, children acquiring seven different languages demonstrate some distinction between how they write and how they speak, shown in denser information packaging via tighter syntactic packaging, in their recourse to passive voice, in greater lexical density (that is, more content words in the text) and in avoidance of interactive discourse markers such as English like, ya know, okay in their written compared with their spoken texts (Berman, 2002 ;Jisa, Reilly, Verhoeven, Baruch & Rosado, 2002). Yet it is not until high school that children manifest a well-developed level of ' linguistic literacy ' in the different ways in which they organize both the structure and the content of the texts they produce in writing compared with speech (Berman & Verhoeven, 2002).…”

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confidence: 99%

Morphosyntactic constructs in the development of spoken and written Hebrew text production

Ravid

Zilberbuch

2003

J. Child Lang.

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This study examined the distribution of two Hebrew nominal structures – N–N compounds and denominal adjectives – in spoken and written texts of two genres produced by 90 native-speaking participants in three age groups: eleven/twelve-year-olds (6th graders), sixteen/seventeen-year-olds (11th graders), and adults. The two constructions are later linguistic acquisitions, part of the profound lexical and syntactic changes that occur in language development during the school years. They are investigated in the context of learning how modality (speech vs. writing) and genre (biographical vs. expository texts) affect the production of continuous discourse.Participants were asked to speak and write about two topics, one biographical, describing the life of a public figure or of a friend; and another, expository, discussing one of ten topics such as the cinema, cats, or higher academic studies. N–N compounding was found to be the main device of complex subcategorization in Hebrew discourse, unrelated to genre. Denominal adjectives are a secondary subcategorizing device emerging only during the late teen years, a linguistic resource untapped until very late, more restricted to specific text types than N–N compounding, and characteristic of expository writing. Written texts were found to be denser than spoken texts lexically and syntactically as measured by number of novel N–N compounds and denominal adjectives per clause, and in older age groups this difference was found to be more pronounced. The paper contributes to our understanding of how the syntax/lexicon interface changes with age, modality and genre in the context of later language acquisition.

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Passive voice constructions in written texts

Cited by 64 publications

References 0 publications

It depends: Optionality in the production of filler-gap dependencies

It depends: Optionality in the production of filler-gap dependencies

Semantic development in textual contexts during the school years: Noun Scale analyses

Morphosyntactic constructs in the development of spoken and written Hebrew text production

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