The L1 acquisition of clitic placement in Cypriot Greek

Neokleous, Theoni

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2015.04.003

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Syntax was approached by identifying an environment where the two varieties differ, namely, clitic placement in declaratives: Cypriot Greek requires enclisis (1), whereas Standard Modern Greek requires proclisis (2) (Terzi, 1999; Agouraki, 2001; Mavrogiorgos, 2013; Neokleous, 2014; among others). While matrix environments are identified as showing enclisis in Cypriot Greek (1), embedded environments headed by certain complementizers can show either proclisis or enclisis (Pavlou, 2016).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functionally Equivalent Variants in a Non-standard Variety and Their Implications for Universal Grammar: A Spontaneous Speech Corpus

2017

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Findings from the field of experimental linguistics have shown that a native speaker may judge a variant that is part of her grammar as unacceptable, but still use it productively in spontaneous speech. The process of eliciting acceptability judgments from speakers of non-standard languages is sometimes clouded by factors akin to prescriptive notions of grammatical correctness. It has been argued that standardization enhances the ability to make clear-cut judgments, while non-standardization may result to grammatical hybridity, often manifested in the form of functionally equivalent variants in the repertoire of a single speaker. Recognizing the importance of working with corpora of spontaneous speech, this work investigates patterns of variation in the spontaneous production of five neurotypical, adult speakers of a non-standard variety in terms of three variants, each targeting one level of linguistic analysis: syntax, morphology, and phonology. The results reveal the existence of functionally equivalent variants across speakers and levels of analysis. We first discuss these findings in relation to the notions of competing, mixed, and fused grammars, and then we flesh out the implications that different values of the same variant carry for parametric approaches to Universal Grammar. We observe that intraspeaker realizations of different values of the same variant within the same syntactic environment are incompatible with the ‘triggering-a-single-value’ approach of parametric models, but we argue that they are compatible with the concept of Universal Grammar itself. Since the analysis of these variants is ultimately a way of investigating the status of Universal Grammar primitives, we conclude that claims about the alleged unfalsifiability of (the contents of) Universal Grammar are unfounded.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functionally Equivalent Variants in a Non-standard Variety and Their Implications for Universal Grammar: A Spontaneous Speech Corpus

2017

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“…It has been observed (Neokleous, 2013;Tsakali, 2014, among others) that the RI stage and the clitic omission stage in child language coincide and last until the age of three. Although not all languages exhibit both stages, and the two phenomena are said to be syntactically independent (Tsakali, 2014), they have been linked to the same underlying mechanism: the UCC.…”

Section: The Discourse-linking Theorymentioning

confidence: 96%

Acquisition of object clitics in child Polish: Evidence for three developmental stages

Tryzna

2015

Lingua

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“…Legendre, Barrière, Goyet, & Nazzi, 2010). This would also explain why children sometimes incorrectly generalize over position, mapping closed-class items to sentence positions rather than grammatical roles (Chung, 1994;Hakuta, 1982) or failing to learn the placement of closed-class forms whose position is variable (Neokleous, 2015). A computational bias to encode the position of closed-class items can account for all of these findings.…”

Section: Anchored Distributional Learning With Versus Without Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With all of this data, researchers have developed detailed and contrasting theories of children's linguistic representations. Researchers have debated whether these representations are syntactic (Bloom, 1970a;Valian, 1986) or semantic (Bowerman, 1978;Goldin-Meadow, 1979), abstract (Fisher, 2002;Valian, Solt, & Stewart, 2009;Yang, 2013) or item-based (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011, 2015Bannard, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2009;Braine, 1976;Tomasello, 2000), present from birth (Crain & Nakayama, 1987;Crain & Thornton, 1998;Hyams, 1994Hyams, , 1996Rizzi, 1994;Santelmann et al, 2002;Wexler, 1994Wexler, , 1998 or maturationally triggered (Borer & Wexler, 1987;Guilfoyle & Noonan, 1992;Radford, 1990;Vainikka, 1993).…”

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confidence: 99%

Sentence first, arguments after: Mechanisms of morphosyntax acquisition

Getz¹

2021

Preprint

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Natural languages contain complex grammatical patterns. For example, in German, finite verbs occur second in main clauses while non-finite verbs occur last, as in 'dein Bruder möchte in den Zoo gehen' (“Your brother wants to go to the zoo”). Children easily acquire this type of morphosyntactic contingency (Poeppel & Wexler, 1993; Deprez & Pierce, 1994). There is extensive debate in the literature over the nature of children’s linguistic representations, but there are considerably fewer mechanistic ideas about how knowledge is actually acquired. Regarding German, one approach might be to learn the position of prosodically prominent open-class words (“verbs go 2nd or last”) and then fill in the morphological details. Alternatively, one could work in the opposite direction, learning the position of closed-class morphemes (“-te goes 2nd and -en goes last”) and fitting open-class items into the resulting structure. This second approach is counter-intuitive, but I will argue that it is the one learners take.Previous research suggests that learners focus distributional analysis on closed-class items because of their distinctive perceptual properties (Braine, 1963; Morgan, Meier, & Newport, 1987; Shi, Werker & Morgan, 1999; Valian & Coulson, 1988). The Anchoring Hypothesis (Valian & Coulson, 1988) posits that, because these items tend to occur at grammatically important points in the sentence (e.g., phrase edges), focusing on them helps learners acquire grammatical structure. Here I ask how learners use closed-class items to acquire complex morphosyntactic patterns such as the verb form/position contingency in German. Experiments 1-4 refute concerns that morphosyntactic contingencies like those in German are too complex to learn distributionally. Experiments 5-8 explore the mechanisms underlying learning, showing that adults and children analyze closed-class items as predictive of the presence and position of open-class items, but not the reverse. In these experiments, subtle mathematical distinctions in learners’ input had significant effects on learning, illuminating the biased computations underlying anchored distributional analysis. Taken together, results suggest that learners organize knowledge of language patterns relative to a small set of closed-class items—just as patterns are represented in modern syntactic theory (Rizzi & Cinque, 2016).

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The L1 acquisition of clitic placement in Cypriot Greek

Cited by 9 publications

References 23 publications

Functionally Equivalent Variants in a Non-standard Variety and Their Implications for Universal Grammar: A Spontaneous Speech Corpus

Functionally Equivalent Variants in a Non-standard Variety and Their Implications for Universal Grammar: A Spontaneous Speech Corpus

Acquisition of object clitics in child Polish: Evidence for three developmental stages

Sentence first, arguments after: Mechanisms of morphosyntax acquisition

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