The research aims at providing a comparative study of the impersonal constructions (NPLOC ^ VP ^ NP) by using data from Chinese, English, Hungarian, Burmese and Persian and analyzing the ...constructions from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. A typological approach is used for the cross-linguistic study. Results show that when translating the impersonal constructions from Chinese into the other four languages, the construction can be best corresponded to Hungarian and Burmese. However, the English and Persian equivalents of the certain Chinese impersonals are in the passive voice. I conclude that grammatical structures are closely related to the speakers’ perception of the world, which might explain the similarities between languages within different genealogical background.
A number of languages allow for flexible word order between arguments that are sufficiently distinguishable, but "frozen" relative word order for arguments that are not. We present a new, ...derivational approach to such effects that involves positing optional scrambling probes that target various formal features that pre-exist on potential goals. In particular, there are no special-purpose "scrambling features," contra Müller (1997; 1998) and Grewendorf & Sabel (1999) a.o. The features that these optional probes can target may be restricted and subject to variation. Evidence for the proposal comes from the observed speaker variation in postverbal word order possibilities in Pangasinan, a predicate-initial Austronesian language of the Philippines. We show that our proposal is also compatible with facts that at first glance suggest a functionalist account of freezing effects.
The current research investigated structural priming in Tagalog, a symmetrical voice language containing rich verbal morphology that results in changes in mapping between syntactic positions and ...thematic roles. This grammatically rare feature, which results in multiple transitive structures that are balanced in terms of the grammatical status of their arguments, provides the opportunity to test whether word order priming is sensitive to the voice morphology of the verb. In three sentence priming experiments (Ns = 64), we manipulated whether the target-verb prompt carried the same voice as the verb in the prime sentence. In all experiments, priming occurred only when the prime and target had the same voice morphology. Additionally, we found that the strength of word order priming depends on voice: stronger priming effects were found for the voice morpheme associated with a more flexible word order. The findings are consistent with learning-based accounts where language-specific representations for syntax emerge across developmental time. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of Tagalog's grammar. The results reveal the value of crosslinguistic data for theory-testing, and the value of structural priming in determining the representational nature of linguistic structure.
Cortical activations during the processing of Kaqchikel transitive sentences with canonical and non-canonical word orders were investigated using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Kaqchikel is ...an endangered Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. The word order in this language is relatively flexible. We observed higher cortical activations in the left inferior frontal gyrus for sentences with the subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, as compared to sentences with the verb-object-subject (VOS) word order, suggesting that Kaqchikel sentences are easier to process when they have the VOS order than when they have the SVO order. This supports the traditional analysis of Mayan word order: the syntactically simplest word order of transitive sentences in Mayan languages, including Kaqchikel, is VOS. More importantly, the results revealed that the subject-before-object word order preference in sentence comprehension, previously observed in other languages, might not reflect a universal aspect of human languages. Rather, processing preference may be language-specific to some extent, reflecting syntactic differences in individual languages.
The distribution of word order across languages is skewed with SOV order (e.g., researchers sentences write) and SVO order (e.g., researchers write sentences) being >100 times more common than OSV ...order (sentences researchers write). It is commonly assumed that cross-linguistic preferences reflect cognitive biases, but it is unknown why some languages exhibit dispreferred patterns, or why languages settle on a specific pattern out of several preferred ones. This paper tests whether larger communities are more likely to rely on cross-linguistically preferred patterns as a way to overcome the greater communicative challenges they encounter. Participants played a communication game in large groups, small groups, or alone. Results support the hypothesis that community size influences word order as well as suggest that SOV and SVO orders are prevalent for different reasons with SVO specifically addressing communicative pressures. The studies thus show how community structure can give rise to cross-linguistic preferences, when these preferences can be overridden, and suggest how language might change with changes in social structure.
Abstract Long-distance dependencies such as relative clauses (RCs) are known to be vulnerable in heritage grammars (e.g., Montrul, 2008 ). Previous studies in RC comprehension have shown that ...heritage language (HL) children show similar comprehension to monolingual children ( Jia & Paradis, 2020 ), while differential performance has also been found ( Kidd et al., 2015 ). The present study investigates 11–13-year-old monolingual and German-dominant HL children’s real-time parsing strategies in subject relative clause (SRC) and object relative clause (ORC) processing in Greek. We conducted a self-paced listening task in Greek in which we manipulated the type of RC (subject vs. object), and the RC internal word order (canonical vs. scrambled). Our analyses revealed no significant group differences between HL and monolingual children. Both groups of children processed SRCs faster than ORCs on the critical RC verb segment. We also examined if case-marked pre-verbal NPs would facilitate the processing of ORC structures. Although children processed pre-verbal faster than post-verbal NPs, ORC structures with pre-verbal NPs received the lowest scores in the grammaticality judgment task. We discuss these findings on the grounds of Relativized Minimality ( Friedmann et al., 2009 ) and Fodor and Inoue’s (2000) Diagnosis and Repair Model.
In this paper, we studied how native (L1) speakers of Russian and speakers of Mandarin Chinese learning Russian as a foreign language (L2) process Russian sentences with different word orders. We ...compared SVO (canonical) and OVS (non-canonical) orders in isolation and in context. Experiments focusing on the L2 processing of different word orders are still not very numerous, and those using context are extremely rare.
In Experiment 1, target sentences were presented in isolation. In Experiment 2, one-sentence contexts introduced one NP mentioned in the target sentence, either the first (so that given information preceded new information, which is characteristic for Russian and many other languages) or the second. As a result, two factors could be compared: the syntactic (word order) and the contextual (whether the context is appropriate from the information-structural perspective). We used different measures to capture online and offline effects: word-by-word reading times, question-answering accuracy and sentence rating on a 1 to 5 scale (for L1 participants).
In both experiments, RTs and question-answering accuracy data showed that non-canonical orders were difficult for L2 participants, but not for L1 participants. However, L1 participants gave non-canonical orders lower ratings in isolation, presumably because in naturally occurring texts, they are used only in particular contexts. As for the context factor in Experiment 2, some effects were the same for L1 and L2 processing: all participants read given NPs faster than new ones and preferred sentences with a 'given - new' word order. The latter may reflect the universal principles of narrative coherence. However, unlike native speakers, L2 readers are not sensitive to more subtle contextual requirements of different word orders.
This study examines the contribution of constituent order, prosody, and information structure to the perception of word-level prominence in Russian, a free word order language. Prominence perception ...is investigated through the analysis of prominence ratings of nominal words in two published narrative texts. Word-level perceived prominence ratings were obtained from linguistically naïve native speakers of Russian in two tasks: a silent prominence rating task of the read text passages, and an auditory prominence rating task of the same texts as read aloud by a native Russian speaker. Analyses of the prominence ratings reveal a greater likelihood of perceived prominence for words introducing discourse-new referents, as well as words occurring in a non-canonical sentence position, and featuring acoustic-prosodic enhancement. The results show that prosody and word order vary probabilistically in relation to information structure in read-aloud narrative, suggesting a complex interaction of prosody, word order, and information structure underlying the perception of prominence.
English nominal premodifications such as adjective word order have piqued the interest of researchers in recent years due to their learning difficulty for all language learners regardless of their ...linguistic backgrounds. Non-native English speakers like EFL students may find this case challenging. In light of this, the current study sought to ascertain the difficulty level of Saudi EFL students in recognising the natural order of English attributive adjectives, taking into account the most challenging order sequence, gender, and language proficiency levels. To accomplish this main objective, a designed pronominal adjective test was developed and carried out on 139 Saudi undergraduate EFL students who were purposively recruited for this study. According to the findings, Saudi EFL students had varying degrees of difficulty recognising the natural English adjective word order. While 66.2% of students had moderate difficulty choosing the appropriate adjective sequence, only 15.1% and 18.7% of participants had low and high difficulty, respectively. The most difficult was nominal premodifications with four modifiers, followed by three and two modifiers. When there were only two modifiers, most participants correctly identified incorrect adjective word ordering and provided corrections. When more modifiers existed, the percentages decreased, and the difficulty level increased. Proficiency language level and gender statistically significant differences were also discovered. Although the former revealed no differences, the latter had differences in favour of males, implying that females performed better in the test than males. Based on these findings, limitations and future research directions were proposed.
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