Thu., June 10, 2021

Aspects of linguistic complexity in monolingual and bilingual children’s grammars

Abstract: Linguistic complexity can be invoked as a cause of vulnerability in language development and use at all levels of linguistic analysis, including the lexicon, syntax and discourse. Bilingual grammars are typically shown to differ from monolingual ones mostly in the use of inflectional morphology and vocabulary, but also in the appropriate use of reference management in connected speech. The causes of the differences have been attributed to reduced language input as well as limitations in processing resources. Focusing on the language production of Greek monolingual and Albanian, German and English bilingual children speaking Greek as the weaker language, I will focus on narrative production data. Measures of subordination and reference tracking will be used as indices of complexity in syntax and discourse. The data suggests that syntactic complexity is not a unified construct, as different types of subordinate clauses (complements, relatives and adverbials), are differentially affected by bilingualism. Typological distance between L1 and L2, levels of academic language developed through bilingual education, and vocabulary skills are relevant for the use of different types of syntactically complex sentences. Reference tracking on the other hand is affected by non-verbal cognitive skills as well as typological distance.

Fri., June 11, 2021

Implicational hierarchies in syntax

Abstract: Languages exhibit a variety of different types of complementation, which can be divided into different classes based on their semantic properties and/or their morphosyntactic properties. An important observation made in many works on complementation is that there is a dependency between the meaning of a complementation configuration and the morphosyntactic coding—changing one often also results in a change of the other. This raises the question of whether the meaning of a complementation configuration comes from the matrix verb, the complement clause, or both.

Despite significant cross-linguistic variation in complemenation and the lack of simple surface universals, typological works have also brought out implicational relations, which are an important tool for understanding variation. Specifically, complementation configurations can be ranked according to their semantic properties, forming an implicational complementation hierarchy, along which syntactic or morphological distinctions, if present in a language, operate. I will discuss several phenomena where implicational relations have been observed, among them finiteness, indexical shift, restructuring, and cross-clausal A-dependencies, and show that the uniting factor is the underlying implicational complementation hierarchy. To derive the hierarchy and its implicational nature, I will suggest a synthesis model of complementation where the complement clause and matrix predicate may affect each other and together determine the possible meanings.

Sat., June 12, 2021

Variability and its limits in language processing: Linguistic and speaker-level constraints

Abstract: Much research in linguistics has focused on what is common (perhaps even universal) across different languages and different speakers of a language. At the same time, variability due to, for example, geographical or social factors is also a hallmark of language and language use. Psycholinguistic research faces the same challenge of disentangling variability in language production and comprehension from more general (perhaps universal) mechanisms of language processing. To address this issue, I will report new findings from a large study of language processing in bilingual (Turkish/German) individuals, in comparison to control groups of L1-German and L1-Turkish speakers. Our main finding was that grammatically-based mechanisms of language processing (viz. ‘morphological decomposition’) yielded more uniform performance than lexical access and retrieval processes in bilingual individuals. My conclusion will be that the grammar strongly constrains variability in language processing, even for otherwise heterogeneous individuals.