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Explaining the acquisition and processing of relative clauses has long challenged psycholinguistics researchers. The current volume presents a collection of chapters that consider the acquisition of relative clauses with a particular focus on function, typology, and language processing. A diverse range of theoretical approaches and languages are bought to bear on the acquisition of this construction type, making the volume unique in its coverage. The volume will appeal to students and scholars whose interest lies in the acquisition and processing of syntax with a particular focus on complex sentences in crosslinguistic and functionalist perspective.
Patterns of relative clause formation tend to vary according to the typological properties of a language. Highly polysynthetic languages tend to have fully nominalized relative clauses and no relative pronouns, while other typologically diverse languages tend to have relative clauses which are similar to main or independent clauses. Languages of the Americas, with their rich genetic diversity, have all been under the influence of European languages, whether Spanish, English or Portuguese, a situation that may be expected to have influenced their grammatical patterns. The present volume focuses on two tasks: The first deals with the discussion of functional principles related to relative clause formation: diachrony and paths of grammaticalization, simplicity vs. complexity, and formalization of rules to capture semantic-syntactic correlations. The second provides a typological overview of relative clauses in nine different languages going from north to south in the Americas.
This book presents a comprehensive study of how children acquire complex sentences. Drawing on observational data from English-speaking children aged 2 to 5, Holger Diessel investigates the acquisition of infinitival and participial complement clauses, finite complement clauses, finite and nonfinite relative clauses, adverbial clauses, and coordinate clauses. His investigation shows that the development of complex sentences originates from simple non-embedded sentences and that two different developmental pathways can be distinguished: complex sentences including complement and relative clauses evolve from simple sentences that are gradually expanded to multiple-clause constructions, and complex sentences including adverbial and coordinate clauses develop from simple sentences that are integrated in a specific biclausal unit. He argues that the acquisition process is determined by a variety of factors: the frequency of the various complex sentences in the ambient language, the semantic and syntactic complexity of the emerging constructions, the communicative functions of complex sentences, and the social-cognitive development of the child.
The cross-linguistic differences documented in studies of relative clause attachment offer an invaluable opportunity to examine a particular aspect of bilingual sentence processing: Do bilinguals process their two languages as if they were monolingual speakers of each? This volume provides a review of existing research on relative clause attachment, showing that speakers of languages like English attach relative clauses differently than do speakers of languages like Spanish. Fernández reports the findings of an investigation with monolinguals and bilinguals, tested using speeded ("on-line") and unspeeded ("off-line") methodology, with materials in both English and Spanish. The experiments reveal similarities across the groups when the procedure is speeded, but differences with unspeeded questionnaires: The monolinguals replicate the standard cross-linguistic differences, while bilinguals have language-independent preferences determined by language dominance — bilinguals process stimuli in either of their languages according to the general preferences of monolinguals of their dominant language.
This book presents a cross-section of recent generative research into the syntax of relative clauses constructions. Most of the papers collected here react in some way to Kayne’s (1994) proposal to handle relative clauses in terms of determiner complementation and raising of the relativized nominal. The editors provide a thorough introduction of these proposals, their background and motivations, arguments for and against. There are detailed studies in the syntax and the semantics of relative clauses constructions in Latin, Ancient Greek, Romanian, Hindi, (Old) English, Old High German, (dialects of) Dutch, Turkish, Swedish, and Japanese. The book should be of interest to any linguist working within generative syntax.
A sophisticated analysis of non-standard relative clauses in everyday English, using novel data from live, unscripted radio/TV broadcasts and the internet.
This collection of papers brings together the most recent crosslinguistic research on the syntax of verb-initial languages. Authors with a variety of theoretical perspectives pursue the questions of how verb-initial order is derived, and how these derivations play into the characteristic syntax of these languages. Major themes in the volume include the role of syntactic category in languages with verb-initial order; the different mechanisms of deriving V-initial order; and the universal correlates of the order. This book should be of interest to scholars who work on theoretical approaches to word order derivation, typologists, and those who work on the particular grammars of Celtic, Zapotec, Mixtec, Polynesian, Austronesian, Mayan, Salish, Aboriginal, and Nilotic languages.
In this monograph, the nature of processing strategies is explored in some detail, with an attempt to cut through the maze of often contradictory and confused proposals concerning the nature and form of various strategies. Once a preliminary conception of the nature of cognitive strategies and a hypothesis of how they interact with linguistic structures has been reached, it will be explored how such strategies are employed by examining experiments which address the role played by certain of these strategies in the comprehension and production of sentences. The authors draw a distinction between a strategy on the one hand and a grammatical structure on the other. They argued that, in principle, strategies ought to be formulated as language-independent, cognitively based operations which are involved in cognitive domains other than language, but which, in language processing, interact with language-specific structures to facilitate processing. Moreover, strategies are not linguistic rules, since, unlike rules, they permit exceptions and express tendencies rather than firm yes-no choices.
This is the first book on the acquisition of Spanish that provides a state-of-the-art comprehensive overview of Spanish morphosyntactic development in monolingual and bilingual situations. Its content is organized around key grammatical themes that form the empirical base of research in generative grammar: nominal and verbal inflectional morphology, subject and object pronouns, complex structures involving movement (topicalizations, questions, relative clauses), and aspects of verb meaning that have consequences for syntax. The book argues that Universal Grammar constrains all instances of language acquisition and that there is a fundamental continuity between monolingual, bilingual, child and adult early grammatical systems. While stressing their similarities with respect to linguistic representations and processes, the book also considers important differences between these three acquisition situations with respect to the outcome of acquisition. It is also shown that many linguistic properties of Spanish are acquired earlier than in English and other languages. This book is a must read for those interested in the acquisition of Spanish from different theoretical perspectives as well as those working on the acquisition of other languages in different contexts.