A recurring hypothesis about the agreement phenomena generalized as closest‐conjunct agreement takes this pattern to result from reduced clausal conjunction, simply displaying the agreement of the ...verb with the nonconjoined subject of the clause whose content survives ellipsis (Aoun, Benmamoun & Sportiche 1994, 1999; see also Wilder 1997). Closest‐conjunct agreement is the dominant agreement pattern in the South Slavic languages Slovenian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. A natural question is whether closest‐conjunct agreement in these varieties may indeed be analyzed as entirely derived from conjunction reduction. In this article, we report on two experiments conducted to test this. The results reject the hypothesis as far as these languages are concerned, thereby upholding the relevance of models developed to account for closest‐conjunct agreement within theories of agreement.
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Following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, Croatian was declared officially to be a separate language, distinct from Serbian, and linguistic issues became highly politicized. This book ...examines the changing status and norms of the Croatian language and its relationship to Croatian national identity. It focuses on the period following the creation of an independent Croatian state in 1991, but encompasses broader historical developments to provide a context for understanding the contemporary linguistic situation. The complex history of language standardization in the Yugoslav lands and the emphasis on language planning in Croatia make this an especially interesting case study that offers insight into wider debates about linguistic identity, language policy, and language planning issues in general.
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Keith Langston is Associate Professor of Slavic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Georgia, USA. He is the author of Čakavian Prosody: The Accentual Patterns of the Čakavian Dialects of Croatian and other studies on Slavic phonology and morphology, in addition to research on the sociolinguistic situation in the former Yugoslavia. Anita Peti-Stantić is Professor of South Slavic Languages and the Chair of Slovene Studies at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She is the author of Language, Ours and/or Theirs: An Essay on the Comparative History of South Slavic Standardization Processes and a Slovenian-Croatian and Croatian-Slovenian Dictionary , as well as studies on South Slavic word order and clitic placement.
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Greenberg, Robert. 2004. Language and identity in the Balkans. Serbo-Croatian and its disintegration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paperback edition 2008. Currently the only monograph in English dealing with the linguistic situation in the former Yugoslavia. It provides a brief history of the development of standard Serbo-Croatian and language policies in post-World War II Yugoslavia, then focuses on post-1990 language policies in separate chapters on Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. One of the strengths of this work is that it deals with all four successor states using a neoštokavian-based standard language. Consequently, however, it treats them in less detail, and does not examine actual changes in usage.
Gröschel, Bernhard. 2009. Das Serbokroatische zwischen Linguistik und Politik. Munich: Lincom Europa. This provides a detailed discussion of key concepts (standard language, variant, variety, etc.) in the linguistic debates in the post-Yugoslav landscape, making extensive reference to works published within Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Montenegro. Rather than providing an objective analysis of the linguistic situation, he focuses more on trying to 'prove' that Serbo-Croatian represents a single language, and that any assertions to the contrary are purely political manipulations of the linguistic facts.
Relationship of the proposed book to previous scholarship:
Numerous studies on the Croatian standard language, its development, and contemporary norms of usage have been published by Croatian scholars, but this literature is largely insular in nature, often making no explicit reference to general sociolinguistic research on language standardization or language planning. Most of these works are individual articles published in Croatian for a Croatian audience, and therefore they tend to be biased towards the mainstream Croatian interpretation of the facts.
Works published in English that deal with the general topics of language planning or language and national identity often mention the languages of the former Yugoslavia as examples, but these are typically very brief discussions, which often present a picture that is radically oversimplified or even inaccurate in some respects. Vanessa Pupavac's book Language Rights: From free speech to linguistic governance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) includes a chapter on the politics of language rights in the former Yugoslavia.
There are also several collections of articles published in English that are devoted to the languages of the former Yugoslavia or the South Slavic region as a whole (for example, Ranko Bugarski and Celia Hawkesworth, eds. Language in the former Yugoslav lands. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2004). These collections include some papers on the Croatian language and Croatian linguistic identity since the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, but while these articles may provide an overview of language planning efforts in the 1990s and beyond, they are necessarily limited in scope.
The proposed book differs from previous book-length treatments in several significant ways. By focusing on Croatia, it treats the topics of Croatian language planning and linguistic identity in much greater depth. The use of survey and corpus data allows the authors to gauge the effects of language planning efforts, rather than just relying on anecdotal evidence, as most previous works have done. Finally, the book combines the perspectives of its two authors: an insider (a Croatian linguist living and working in Croatia) and an outsider (an American linguist). This provides a more objective approach to the topic, while still taking into account all the nuances and complexity of the linguistic situation in Croatia today.
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Following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, Croatian was declared to be a separate language, distinct from Serbian, and linguistic issues became highly politicized. This book examines the changing status and norms of the Croatian language and its relationship to Croatian national identity, focusing on the period after Croatian independence.
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PART I: THE CROATIAN LANGUAGE QUESTION IN CONTEXT 1. The Croatian Language Question and Croatian Identity 2. Language and Identity: Theoretical and Conceptual Framework 3. Language, Dialect, or Variant? The Status of Croatian and its Place in the South Slavic Dialect Continuum 4. The History of Croatian and Serbian Standardization PART II: CROATIAN LANGUAGE POLICY AND PLANNING IN THE 1990s AND BEYOND 5. Language Rights and the Treatment of Croatian on the International Level 6. Croatian Language Policy at the National Level and the Regulation of Public Language 7. Institutions of Language Planning 8. Language Purism, Handbooks, and Differential Dictionaries 9. Models of Linguistic Perfection: The Role of the Educational System in Croatian Language Planning 10. The Media and the Message: The Promotion and Implementation of Language Planning in Print, Broadcasts, and on the Internet 11. The Croatian Language Question Today on the Boundary of Identity and Ideology
O obliku i tipu informacije u jezičnom procesiranju Masnikosa, Irina; Tonković, Mirjana; Peti-Stantić, Anita
Rasprave Instituta za hrvatski jezik i jezikoslovlje,
2019, Volume:
45, Issue:
2
Journal Article, Paper
Peer reviewed
Open access
U literaturi je pokazano
kako se sintaktička struktura, za razliku od značenja iskaza, vrlo kratko zadržava
u pamćenju, osobito nakon rečenične granice (Caplan 1972, Jarvella 1971). Unatoč
tomu ...postoje istraživanja koja pokazuju kako sintaktička struktura koja
prethodi elipsi glagolske skupine utječe na njezinu obradu i interpretaciju
(Hankamer i Sag 1976, Shapiro i Hestvik 1995). Frazier i Clifton (2005)
formuliraju
hipotezu glavne tvrdnje
prema
kojoj se novi jezični materijal povezuje s glavnom tvrdnjom prethodne rečenice
ako je ona lako dostupna te
hipotezu domene koordinacije
prema kojoj je u obradi koordinirane strukture dostupna čitava koordinirana struktura ili samo recentna sastavnica. Te su hipoteze
eksperimentalno potvrđene u engleskom jeziku ispitivanjem odabira antecedenta
eliptičnih rečenica koje otvaraju mogućnost višestruke interpretacije. U ovom
su radu hipoteze glavne tvrdnje i domene koordinacije eksperimentalno testirane
u hrvatskom jeziku ispitivanjem odabira antecedenta eliptičnih rečenica kojima prethode
zavisnosložene (
Tina je otišla kući nakon što
je popila piće. I Marija je.
//
Nakon
što je popila piće, Tina je otišla kući. I Marija je
.)
i nezavisnosložene rečenice (
Tina je otišla kući i popila
piće. I Marija je.
//
Tina
je popila piće i otišla kući. I Marija je
.).
U ispitivanju je dodatno mjereno i vrijeme reakcije ispitanika. Rezultati
eksperimenta pokazuju da su ispitanici, neovisno o vrsti rečenice koja im je
prethodila, dominantno birali koordiniranu strukturu kao antecedent elipse. Uz
to, u interpretaciji elipse nakon zavisnosloženih rečenica zabilježen je
utjecaj glavne tvrdnje, ali i utjecaj recentnosti na odabir antecedenta.
Psycholinguistic research
of language processing has provided evidence that memory for the syntactic
structure, as opposed to memory of the meaning of the utterance, is short lived,
especially across the sentence boundaries (Caplan 1972, Jarvella 1971).
However, the syntactic structure of the preceding text influences processing
and interpretation of the ellipsis. (Hankamer and Sag 1976, Shapiro and Hestvik
1995). Frazier and Clifton (2005) formulated the (1)
Main Assertion Hypothesis
(MAH): comprehenders prefer to relate material in a
new sentence to the main assertion of the preceding sentence; (2)
Conjunction Domain Hypothesis
: the processing of conjunction allows either the entire
conjoined phrase to be processed or just the closer conjunct. These hypotheses are
experimentally confirmed in the study of the interpretation of ambiguous
elliptical sentences (Frazier and Clifton 2005). In this paper we experimentaly
test the role of the Main Assertion Hypothesis and the Conjunction domain
Hypothesis in the interpretation of VP ellipsis in Croatian. The differences in
interpretation and reaction times were measured in comprehension task for
two-sentenced discourses including complex sentences (e.g.
Tina je otišla kući nakon što je popila piće. I Marija
je
. ‘Tina went home after she had a drink. So did
Marija.’) and compound sentences (
Tina
je otišla kući i popila piće. I Marija je.
‘Tina
went home and had a drink. So did Marija.’). Results suggest that the dominant
strategy is choosing the cojoined structure as an antecedent of VP ellipsis.
However, the effects of the main assertion and clause order are observed in the
interpretation of the ellipsis following complex sentences. Results for the
preferred interpretation of elliptical sentences that follow compound sentences
confirm the Conjunction Domain Hypothesis i.e. the role of the clause order in
processing.
This article presents the initial results of the project The Building Blocks of Croatian
Mental Grammar: Constraints of Information Structure, within the scope of which the Croatian Psycholinguistic ...Database is being constructed. The database contains empirically established values for the categories of concreteness, imageability, subjective frequency and age of acquisition for 3000 lexemes (nouns, verbs and adjectives) of Croatian extracted from the hrLex lexicon whose frequency was extracted from the hrWaC corpus. The article starts with an overview of research dealing with concreteness and imageability, followed by a presentation of the methodology employed in the construction of the Croatian Psycholinguistic Database. The central section of the article presents the statistics concerning concreteness and imageability estimates for the sample taken in its entirety, as well as divided according to lexical class. The results show that both concreteness and imageability differ according to lexical class. These results are discussed from the perspective of constructional cognitive linguistic theories.
Psycholinguistic databases containing ratings of concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, and subjective frequency are used in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies which require words ...as stimuli. Linguistic characteristics (e.g. word length, corpus frequency) are frequently coded, but word class is seldom systematically treated, although there are indications of its significance for imageability and concreteness. This paper presents the Croatian Psycholinguistic Database (CPD; available at:
https://doi.org/10.17234/megahr.2019.hpb
), containing 6000 Croatian nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, rated for concreteness, imageability, age of acquisition, and subjective frequency. Moreover, we present computationally obtained extrapolations of concreteness and imageability to the remainder of the Croatian lexicon (available at:
https://github.com/megahr/lexicon/blob/master/predictions/hr_c_i.predictions.txt
). In the two studies presented here, we explore the significance of word class for concreteness and imageability in human and computationally obtained ratings. The observed correlations in the CPD indicate correspondences between psycholinguistic measures expected from the literature. Word classes exhibit differences in subjective frequency, age of acquisition, concreteness and imageability, with significant differences between nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. In the computational study which focused on concreteness and imageability, concreteness obtained higher correlations with human ratings than imageability, and the system underpredicted the concreteness of nouns, and overpredicted the concreteness of adjectives and adverbs. Overall, this suggests that word class contains schematic conceptual and distributional information. Schematic conceptual content seems to be more significant in human ratings of concreteness and less significant in computationally obtained ratings, where distributional information seems to play a more significant role. This suggests that word class differences should be theoretically explored.
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Pitanja o pozadinskim
procesima automatske obrade i interpretacije rečenica, odnosno jezično-specifičnim
čimbenicima koji uvjetuju te procese, već su dugi niz godina aktualna tema
brojnih ...psiholingvističkih istraživanja. Jedna od struktura koja je doprinijela
novijim spoznajama jest relativna rečenica i pitanje procesa u podlozi vezanja
relativne rečenice na odgovarajućega antecedenta. S obzirom na to da međusobni
odnos imenica u imenskoj skupini može utjecati na obradu rečenice, a s druge je
strane upravo utjecaj toga odnosa nedovoljno razjašnjen, u ovome se istraživanju
ispituje obrada relativnih rečenica u hrvatskome te preferencije vezanja izvornih govornika na
primjerima u kojima je antecedent koordinirana skupina. U skladu s time, dva su
glavna cilja rada: 1) ispitati koji element koordinirane imenske skupine modificira
relativna rečenica i 2) istražiti koja ograničenja utječu na odabir antecedenta
relativne rečenice. U istraživanju su sudjelovale 62 odrasle osobe, izvorni
govornici hrvatskoga, a ispitivanje je provedeno dvjema metodama –
ispunjavanjem upitnika prosudbe i mjerenjem pokreta očiju tijekom čitanja u
stvarnome vremenu. Rezultati upitnika, tj. odabira antecedenta, pokazuju da
vezanje relativne rečenice na linearno bližu sastavnicu prevladava nad vezanjem
na hijerarhijski višu sastavnicu subjekta glavne rečenice. Podatci dohvaćeni
objema metodama dodatno pokazuju da je odabir antecedenta s jedne strane
olakšan
sročnošću, dok su s druge strane raznovrsnost strategija i višestruka
mogućnost interpretacije uzrokom teškoća u obradi. Provedeno istraživanje upućuje
na potrebu za ispitivanjem jezično-specifičnih čimbenika koji utječu na odabir
i način vezanja relativne rečenice s ciljem širenja spoznaja o jezičnoj obradi
općenito, kao i za sustavnim eksperimentalnim istraživanjima različitih
fenomena u pojedinačnim jezicima.
The language-specific phenomena
underlying automatic sentence processing and interpretation have long been the
topic of psycholinguistic investigations. Recent studies on processing relative
clauses and the strategies that influence attachment preferences have shed new
light on this question. Despite the well-attested observation that the
structure of the complex noun phrase preceding the relative clause can
influence sentence processing, the effect of the structural relations on
attachment preferences still remains unclear. Therefore, current study examines
sentence processing and attachment preferences in relative clauses headed by
coordinated structure. The two main aims of this study are: 1) to establish attachment
preferences and 2) to investigate language-specific constraints affecting these
preferences. In total, 62 native adult speakers of Croatian language
participated in the study. The study combined offline and an online method; the
attachment preference questionnaire and the eye-tracking methodology. The
results indicate strong preference towards the linearly closer antecedent (low
attachment), as opposed to hierarchically higher (high attachment). The data
further indicate that the conjunct agreement facilitates, while the parallel
availability of multiple interpretations hinders the processing of relative clauses. These findings support the initiative to study language-specific phenomena that
affect attachment preferences as these contribute to broadening our
understanding of language processing in general, as well as to experimental
investigations of various language-specific phenomena.
When linearity prevails over hierarchy in syntax Gold, Jana Willer; Arsenijević, Boban; Batinić, Mia ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
01/2018, Volume:
115, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Hierarchical structure has been cherished as a grammatical universal. We use experimental methods to show where linear order is also a relevant syntactic relation. An identical methodology and design ...were used across six research sites on South Slavic languages. Experimental results show that in certain configurations, grammatical production can in fact favor linear order over hierarchical structure. However, these findings are limited to coordinate structures and distinct from the kind of production errors found with comparable configurations such as “attraction” errors. The results demonstrate that agreement morphology may be computed in a series of steps, one of which is partly independent from syntactic hierarchy.
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This study presents the results of an analysis of Croatian Language and Natural Sciences textbooks used in the fourth and sixth grade of primary education in Croatia. Textbooks are therein seen as ...core educational materials, influencing teacher practices—specifically, the reading comprehension instruction. Five textbooks were coded for text type, learning goals, and instructional strategies and activities. Our results show that simpler text structures prevail in textbooks for both subjects and grades. We observed only minor differences in the structure of textbooks for younger and older students—more specifically, the textbooks for older students were found to contain more questions encouraging various levels of inferencing. Most of the questions, however, aim to test factual knowledge, revealing a superficial approach to reading comprehension in all of the analysed textbooks. Since post-reading questions, instructional strategies and activities reflect the intended learning goals, they can influence teaching practices. Therefore, teachers unsatisfied with the approach taken by textbook authors might distance themselves from using textbooks, while others might use the one-dimensional (or even trivial) templates present, both thereby unintentionally creating a lack of opportunities for their students to develop their reading skills and more sophisticated patterns of critical thinking through intelligent textbook use.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
This study analyzes a newly developed measure for assessing the knowledge of general academic vocabulary in upper-elementary school students in Croatia. This researcher-designed instrument assesses ...students’ command of synonymy and the limits of collocational use as a proxy for academic vocabulary breadth and depth. Elementary school students in the 5th, 6th, and 7th grade participated in the study (N = 152, 69,7% girls). In addition to the newly developed measure for assessing general academic vocabulary, students completed the Mill Hill Vocabulary Scales, a standardized measure of general vocabulary knowledge. The results show that the newly developed instrument for measuring general academic vocabulary knowledge is reliable and valid—it has adequate internal consistency, is sensitive to the expected age and gender differences in vocabulary, and correlates highly with the results obtained by the Mill Hill Vocabulary Scales. This new instrument could fill the gap in academic vocabulary-related research since the currently available vocabulary assessment measures in Croatian do not focus on this particular register. More specifically, our new measure could be used to evaluate various types of academic vocabulary interventions in schools.Key words: collocations; general academic vocabulary; synonymy---U ovom se radu analizira novorazvijena mjera procjene poznavanja općega akademskog vokabulara učenika viših razreda osnovne škole u Hrvatskoj. Njome se procjenjuje poznavanje sinonima (kao mjera širine vokabulara) i ograničenja kolokacijske upotrebe (kao mjera dubine vokabulara) unutar općega akademskog registra. U istraživanju su sudjelovali učenici petog, šestog i sedmog razreda osnovne škole (N = 152, 69,7 % djevojčica). Osim mjere općega akademskog vokabulara, učenici su ispunili i Mill Hill ljestvice rječnika, standardiziranu mjeru općega vokabulara. Rezultati pokazuju da je novi instrument za mjerenje poznavanja općega akademskog vokabulara pouzdan i valjan—ima dobru unutarnju konzistentnost, osjetljiv je na očekivane dobne i spolne razlike u dubini i širini vokabulara te visoko korelira s rezultatima dobivenim na Mill Hill ljestvicama rječnika. Ova bi nova mjera mogla popuniti prazninu u istraživanju akademskoga vokabulara jer nekoliko trenutačno dostupnih mjera procjene vokabulara na hrvatskom jeziku ne testira specifično taj segment, te bi se mogla koristiti za evaluaciju različitih intervencija usmjerenih na razvoj akademskoga vokabulara u školama.Ključne riječi: kolokacije; opći akademski vokabular; sinonimi
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