Search Results (68)

This study investigates the effect of code-switching (CS) on the processing and attachment resolution of ambiguous relative clauses (RCs) like ‘Bill saw the friend of the neighbor that was talking about football’ by heritage speakers of Spanish. It checks whether code-switching imposes a prosodic break at the place of language change, and whether this prosodic break affects RC parsing, as predicted by the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis: a high attachment (HA) preference results from a prosodic break at the RC. A prosodic break at the preposition ‘of’ in the complex DP ‘the friend of the neighbor’ entails a low attachment (LA) preference. The design compares RC resolution in unilingual sentences (Spanish, with a default preference for HA in RC, and English, with the default LA) with the RC parsing in sentences with CS. The CS occurs at the places of prosodic breaks considered by the IPH. The results show sensitivity to the place of CS in RC attachment. CS prompting LA causes longer response times. The preference for HA in Spanish unilingual sentences is higher than in English ones. Heritage speakers are sensitive to the prosodic effects of CS. However, there is high variability across speakers. Full article

In social networks like community Question-Answering (cQA) services, members interact with each other by asking and answering each other’s questions. This way they find counsel and solutions to very specific real-life situations. Thus, it is safe to say that community fellows log into this kind of social network with the goal of satisfying information needs that cannot be readily resolved via traditional web searches. And in order to expedite this process, these platforms also allow registered, and many times unregistered, internauts to browse their archives. As a means of encouraging fruitful interactions, these websites need to be efficient when displaying contextualized/personalized material and when connecting unresolved questions to people willing to help. Here, demographic factors (i.e., gender) together with frontier deep neural networks have proved to be instrumental in adequately overcoming these challenges. In fact, current approaches have demonstrated that it is perfectly plausible to achieve high gender classification rates by inspecting profile images or textual interactions. This work advances this body of knowledge by leveraging lexicalized dependency paths to control the level of abstraction across texts. Our qualitative results suggest that cost-efficient approaches exploit distilled frontier deep architectures (i.e., DistillRoBERTa) and coarse-grained semantic information embodied in the first three levels of the respective dependency tree. Our outcomes also indicate that relative/prepositional clauses conveying geographical locations, relationships, and finance yield a marginal contribution when they show up deep in dependency trees. Full article

Despite the growing number of bilinguals worldwide, research on how bilingualism influences grammatical development in children with learning disabilities remains limited. This may be due to challenges in assessing language in these children, given the heterogeneity of their disabilities, lack of appropriate tools, and variability in language background and exposure common in bilingual populations. This pilot study investigates grammatical abilities in bilingual versus monolingual children with Down syndrome using the LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task, specifically designed for bilingual populations. Sentence repetition tasks are widely used for assessing grammar in neurotypical children and children with language impairments and are part of many omnibus language assessments. Ten children with Down syndrome aged 5–8 were recruited: five bilingual, speakers of British English and various home languages, and five monolingual, age- and language-matched. Both groups produced a high proportion of ungrammatical repetitions, with more omissions of verbs than nouns, function words than content words, and significant difficulties producing complex structures such as relative clauses, wh-questions, and passives. However, qualitative analyses showed that bilingual children speaking morphologically rich home languages (e.g., Polish, Greek) appeared to have fewer difficulties with some function words (e.g., prepositions) and were able to produce complex structures like passives and wh-questions, unlike their monolingual peers. Although the small sample limits generalisability, two insights emerge: First, sentence repetition may be of limited use in assessing expressive grammar in children with Down syndrome due to frequent ungrammatical responses. Second, while both groups showed similar challenges, bilingualism—especially with richly inflected home languages—may support specific grammatical skills. These findings support existing evidence that bilingualism does not hinder grammatical development in children with Down syndrome and suggest that parents should not avoid dual-language input. Further research is needed to determine whether bilingualism confers specific benefits in grammatical morpheme use and complex syntactic constructions. Full article

Native Lower Sorbian, an endangered West Slavic minority language spoken in Germany, possesses a relative clause formation strategy employing the invariant relativizer ak and optional resumption. The focus of this paper lies on the status of ak. In other languages that have them, invariant relativizers are drawn from the set of complementizers, wh-words, or demonstratives. ak seems to differ in that respect because it belongs to neither category. In this paper, I argue that ak is not an outlier. Instead, ak is a variant of the manner wh-word kak ‘how’ in its non-manner use as a complementizer. After I show how the complementizer kak differs from the wh-adverb kak and that relative clauses in Native Lower Sorbian feature empty operator movement, I argue that the empty operator sitting in SpecCP triggers a rule partially deleting the complementizer kak. More specifically, the rule elides the initial [k] of kak, reducing it to ak. This makes Native Lower Sorbian similar to Bern German or West Frisian, both of which also feature the partial deletion of a complementizer in the presence of a moved element in SpecCP. Furthermore, Native Lower Sorbian is yet another language where how has a non-manner use. Full article

Adjunct clauses have traditionally been assumed to be syntactic configurations from which extraction is universally impossible. However, numerous studies have challenged this assumption and extraction from finite adjunct clauses has been shown to be acceptable to varying degrees in the Mainland Scandinavian languages, as well as in English. The relative acceptability of extraction appears to depend on a number of factors, including the type of adjunct clause and the type of extraction dependency. Research on L2 learning has shown that learners often transfer properties of their L1 grammar into their L2 during the process of learning a second language. Our previous studies on L1 English and L1 Danish found a surprising contrast in which L1 English users found relativization out of adverbial clauses to be better than L1 Danish users did. Based on these findings, we conducted an L2 acceptability judgment experiment on extraction from three types of finite adjunct clauses in Danish (corresponding to English if-, when- and because-clauses) in order to test whether language-specific parameters related to extractability are transferred from L1 to L2. Our results show that the judgments from L2 Danish speakers are intermediate between and significantly different from L1 English and L1 Danish, which does not suggest a parameter resetting. Full article

The left periphery of non-standard Dutch similative clauses hosts a variety of different elements (such as gelijk “like”, zo “so”, als “as”, and hoe “how”) that can sometimes co-occur following a strict hierarchy that seems to hold in other (non-standard) Germanic varieties as well. The present contribution aims to show that the fixed ordering of these elements as well as their function in the structure can be accounted for if similative clauses are taken to be prepositional relative clauses with a complex complementizer domain involving at least three CP-projections. Specifically, I show that these elements lexicalize different parts of the relative construction, including the head complex raising to the edge of the similative in line with a head-raising analysis. To support this idea, I will mostly provide data from Dutch and Dutch dialects, although the analysis can (and should) be extended to other Germanic varieties. Full article

While transitive clauses with a subject and object have long been a fundamental focus of grammatical analyses across languages of the world, more recently, it has become apparent that naturally occurring language-in-use is in fact overwhelmingly intransitive and transitive clauses with two arguments have a relatively low frequency. In this study, I examine conversational Indonesian and focus on one construction type, a transitive predicate with two explicit core arguments. This grammatical configuration is considered atypical due to its very low frequency in conversational interaction. The goal of the study is to begin to understand when and why expressions of this type appear. It is found that these atypical configurations regularly occur at points where there is a change in footing, including changes in topic, participation framework, or referentiality. It is further shown that the contrast between explicit and unexpressed arguments in Indonesian conversational grammar contributes to the reasons why predicates elaborated with two arguments tend to appear when there is a change in footing. Full article

The present study compared two sentence–picture-matching tests in Greek, namely the Syntactic Proficiency Test and the sentence comprehension subtest of the Diagnostic Verbal Intelligence Quotient (DVIQ) battery, to assess complex sentence comprehension in 29 Greek-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Crucially, the DVIQ test included more foils and visual details than the Syntactic Proficiency Test. The study had three aims: (1) to examine sentence comprehension performance across various syntactically complex structures (passives, clitic pronouns, subject, and object relative clauses) and identify comprehension asymmetries among these types; (2) to investigate task effects on syntactic comprehension accuracy by comparing performance across the two tests; and (3) to examine differences in error types across tasks. Results showed that autistic children were significantly less accurate in their comprehension performance of passives and clitics in the DVIQ compared to the Syntactic Proficiency Test, with no difference in accuracy observed for subject or object relative clauses, which were consistently high and low, respectively, across both tests. Error patterns also differed across the two tests. More specifically, thematic role reversals in passives were more frequent in the DVIQ than the Syntactic Proficiency Test. The overall findings suggest that the DVIQ’s enhanced perceptual complexity may have affected children’s accuracy in their comprehension of passives and clitics, while object relatives were less affected by task effects because of their high structural complexity. The study highlights how visual complexity and foil count can impact syntactic comprehension in autistic children and underscores the importance of task design in assessing syntactic skills in ASD. Full article

This paper discusses the status of island phenomena in Avatime, an endangered Kwa language of Ghana. We focus on clausal adjuncts, specifically noun complement clauses (NCCs). We show that while standard adjuncts are strong islands in Avatime, NCCs allow argument extraction. We suggest that this is related to the fact that NCCs in Avatime are not a type of relative clause. Instead, NCCs involve a kind of serial verb construction, which independently allows for extraction. Full article

This study examines whether Differential Object Marking (DOM) realization and word order in relative clauses (RCs) in Spanish affect processing and interpretation among monolinguals and highly proficient Catalan–Spanish bilinguals. RCs are parallel in Catalan and Spanish, but DOM is much more restricted in Catalan than in Spanish, and, interestingly, the distinction between subject and object RCs relies mainly on the presence/absence of DOM. To examine DOM optionality, we concentrate on the top portion of the animacy scale and test the human/non-human contrast. Exploring these two populations allows us to test whether they resort to different strategies for the following three reasons: (1) bilingualism places an increased burden on memory processes); (2) the partial overlap between both DOM systems might lead to the influence from Catalan into Spanish); and (3) optionality has been proposed to characterize bilingual grammars). Findings from a word-by-word non-cumulative self-paced reading task showed that DOM modulates RC processing. With [+human] obligatorily marked objects, both monolinguals and bilinguals read subject RCs faster than object RCs, suggesting a strategy favoring subject RCs. However, monolinguals solved the interpretation early while processing but bilinguals, despite the more restricted DOM character of Catalan, are sensitive to DOM albeit displaying delayed spill-over effects. With [−human] optionally marked objects, bilinguals performed faster than monolinguals. We suggest that the uneven experience with DOM in Catalan, particularly with the non-standard variety that frequently displays DOM and that our bilinguals also speak in everyday conversations, facilitates bilinguals’ adaptation to the optional marking of non-human objects in Spanish, much in the same manner that they accommodate the presence or absence of DOM with both human and non-human objects in other native language. Full article

Numerous hospital laboratories in Indonesia need to implement improved bio-risk management (BRM) systems. There are many potential biohazards in laboratory activities that can impact health and the environment, leading to laboratory incidents. To minimize the impact and occurrence of such incidents, it is necessary to evaluate the implementation of BRM in every hospital laboratory that uses biological agents. This study was conducted in eight COVID-19 reference hospitals in Indonesia in the regions of Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Java, which have committed to implementing BRM systems in their laboratory activities. This research employed a descriptive study design and quantitative methods, with the aim of analyzing and evaluating the implementation of BRM systems in laboratories by assessing the achievements and gap analysis obtained from each laboratory. This research utilized primary data in the form of checklist forms referencing ISO 35001:2019 for the laboratory BRM system. Then, the assessments were based on virtual interviews conducted by the researcher with laboratory personnel as the primary data. The evaluation conducted on gap analysis from the seven clauses in ISO 35001:2019 across all hospitals revealed large gaps, particularly in three clauses: leadership, support, and performance. However, the aspects concerning organization, improvement, and performance evaluation were relatively satisfactory. Hence, there is a need for further improvement in leadership, support, and performance evaluation clauses. Additionally, it is essential to highlight the importance of comprehensive performance assessment, including proactive audits and continuous enhancements to achieve optimal bio-risk management. Full article

The distinction between weak and strong islands has been extensively explored in the literature from both a descriptive and analytical perspective. In this paper, I document and analyze island constructions and constraints in Mende, an understudied Mande language spoken in Sierra Leone. Mende has both weak islands (left branch and wh-islands) and strong islands (adjunct clauses, sentential subjects, and coordinate structures). Intriguingly, it has a third class of islands, that I call mixed islands which show a subject–non-subject asymmetry in allowing for movement out of relative clauses, only when they modify the subject. As such, subject-modifying RCs cannot be classified as (strong/weak) islands in Mende. This is the first systematic work on islands and island constraints in the Mande language family, and, as such, it brings novel data from an understudied language family to bear on our understanding of A-bar dependencies and the study of island escape in African languages. It also calls into question a neat paradigm of cross-linguistic island constraints. Importantly, this work also lays down a baseline for future research on island constraints in the broader Mande language family. In order to discuss island constraints, this paper also lays out the first analysis of relative clauses in Mende, while integrating new research on the left periphery, focus constructions, and wh-constructions. Full article

The precise nature of Ā-dependencies that terminate in a pronoun has been a long-standing subject of cross-linguistic research. Traditionally, it has been assumed that there are two derivational strategies to form resumptive Ā-dependencies: movement and base generation. Island configurations have played a crucial role in determining which derivational strategy is employed in a given language, as islands effects are expected to arise from dependencies created by movement but not by base generation. The body of cross-linguistic research on resumption has shown that the situation is more complicated once other diagnostics are taken into account, as languages can have mixed resumption profiles. In this paper, we discuss resumption in Ā-dependencies in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, and illustrate that, despite their general insensitivity to islands, resumptive dependencies also show many classic hallmarks of movement. We situate these findings in the broader context of a general understanding of resumption cross-linguistically and discuss how the conflicting diagnostics might be reconciled with a movement-based analysis. Full article

This paper investigates the formation of spatial locative relativization in three African varieties of Portuguese. While research on relative constructions in Portuguese has deserved considerable attention in the literature, it tends to focus on the European and Brazilian varieties, with locative relativization being only marginally addressed. Using data extracted from spoken corpora of contemporary, urban varieties of Angolan, Mozambican, and Santomean Portuguese, we aim to discuss whether there is a correlation between syntactic and semantic variables and the selection of the two main locative relative morphemes, onde ‘where’ and que ‘that’. Overall, the three varieties at stake behave similarly with respect to the analyzed syntactic variables and follow the tendency found in Portuguese varieties toward the use of pied-piping and P-chopping as the dominant relativization mechanisms, independent of the syntactic relation between the antecedent and the relative clause. Semantically, we identified some fine-grained differences between the three varieties, with Santomean Portuguese generally being the outlier or one of the outliers. Crucially, definiteness of the head noun stands out as the one variable that plays a major role in the selection of the relative morpheme: [−definite] head nouns show a proportionally higher preference for que in both AP and STP, which is particularly visible with bare nouns in the latter. This motivates the hypothesis that less specified head nouns show a preference for the un(der)specified relative morpheme que. We further show that the role of language contact is at best very limited. Full article

The study investigates psycholinguistic mechanisms of sentence parsing and ambiguity resolution by balanced Tatar–Russian bilinguals who learnt English as their additional language. We check the parser’s sensitivity to the selectional properties of the matrix verb and/or social conventions in processing and attachment resolution of ambiguous relative clauses (RCs). We chose English and Russian because they have a documented preference for low attachment (LA) and high attachment (HA), respectively, and Tatar, as we have found out in earlier work, has no attachment ambiguity. We conducted a self-paced reading task in English and Russian which returned 61% HA in Russian, 49% HA in English. It was followed by a pen-and-paper translation task. The translation post-test checked whether an attachment preference demonstrated in either English or Russian showed in RC translations into Tatar. The results return an 80% preference for LA in English–Tatar translations and 61% in Russian–Tatar translations. Both syntactic information and world knowledge influence online RC processing in Russian and English. Therefore, the multilingual parser incorporates information from multiple sources in either L1 or Ln processing. The parser may favor LA as a default parsing option while maintaining sensitivity to individual grammars (Russian), where this preference should be overridden. Full article