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Reconstruction and resumption in indirect A'-dependencies : on the syntax of prolepsis and relativization in (Swiss) German and beyond
\"This monograph investigates A'-dependencies in Standard German, Alemannic and Dutch where the dislocated constituent is indirectly, i.e. not transformationally, related to the position where it is interpreted. The study focuses on relative clauses and shows that an important part of the relativization system in these languages, long relativization, involves a hitherto ignored construction termed resumptive prolepsis. This construction is characterized by base-generation of the operator in the matrix middle-field and a resumptive pronoun in the position of the variable. It is shown that it involves short A'-movement in the matrix clause, empty operator movement in the complement clause and an ellipsis operation that links the two operators. While the link is directly visible in German and Dutch, Swiss German provides a more abstract version of resumptive prolepsis. Through a detailed examination of reconstruction effects and the properties of resumption in these constructions, the book provides new evidence for the role of ellipsis in A'-movement and for a base-generation analysis of resumption. More generally, it makes an important contribution to the modeling of long-distance dependencies and the study of A'-syntax.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Reconstruction and Resumption in Indirect A'-Dependencies
This monograph investigates A'-dependencies in Standard German, Alemannic and Dutch where the dislocated constituent is indirectly, i.e. not transformationally, related to the position where it is interpreted.
The study focuses on relative clauses and shows that an important part of the relativization system in these languages, long relativization, involves a hitherto ignored construction termed resumptive prolepsis. This construction is characterized by base-generation of the operator in the matrix middle-field and a resumptive pronoun in the position of the variable. It is shown that it involves short A'-movement in the matrix clause, empty operator movement in the complement clause and an ellipsis operation that links the two operators. While the link is directly visible in German and Dutch, Swiss German provides a more abstract version of resumptive prolepsis.
Through a detailed examination of reconstruction effects and the properties of resumption in these constructions, the book provides new evidence for the role of ellipsis in A'-movement and for a base-generation analysis of resumption. More generally, it makes an important contribution to the modeling of long-distance dependencies and the study of A'-syntax.
eBook
Nominalization of clauses: The clausal prolepsis strategy
This paper explores the syntax of clausal prolepsis in Dutch, with a specific focus on object clausal prolepsis, the phenomenon where an object pronoun is linked to a CP that is situated at the right edge of the clause. The paper presents new evidence that distinguishes Dutch clausal prolepsis cases where the embedded CP conveys a familiar or a factive interpretation. Previous analyses of clausal prolepsis in other languages, such as German, have proposed two radically different syntactic structures to capture the meaning differences of these two cases. However, this paper proposes a more uniform syntactic structure that reconciles them. The proposed analysis considers clausal prolepsis to realize an underlying syntactic structure of a nominalized clause, similar to structures found in Greek, Persian, and Washo. This analysis captures the meaning differences straightforwardly expressed by clausal prolepsis, using a single lexical D-entry and independently attested structural components that can be merged with D. Furthermore, the proposed lexical entry can be extended to uses of the proleptic pronoun in different contexts, such as a definite D, thus avoiding accidental homophony. Additional advantages of the proposed analysis are that it can capture a new generalization describing with which predicates clausal prolepsis is possible in Dutch as well as other aspects of the distribution of clausal prolepsis such as that in Dutch, it is only allowed with verbs or infinitives, but not with nominals. From a theoretical standpoint, the proposed analysis teases apart factivity from familiarity and shows that familiarity does not arise through D but through nominal structure that can be merged with D. From an empirical perspective, the paper concludes that nominalization of a clause is more pervasive cross-linguistically than is usually assumed. Lastly, this study evaluates earlier accounts of clausal prolepsis and shows that those involving a CP base generated in an extraposed position, like the one in Bennis (
1986
), are not tenable. This is also true for other analyses taking the distribution of the prolepsed CP to be a consequence of phonological rules. Instead, the paper shows that the only necessary mechanism to explain the distribution of the prolepsed CP is Merge, in conjunction with standard assumptions regarding constituency structure.
Journal Article
The role of the second language in third language acquisition: the case of Germanic syntax
In this study of the placement of sentence negation in third language acquisition (L3), we argue that there is a qualitative difference between the acquisition of a true second language (L2) and the subsequent acquisition of an L3. Although there is considerable evidence for L2 influence on vocabulary acquisition in L3, not all researchers believe that such influence generalizes to morphosyntactic aspects of the grammar. For example, Håkansson et al. (2002) introduce the Developmentally Moderated Transfer Hypothesis (DMTH), which incorporates transfer in Processability Theory (PT). They argue against syntactic transfer from L2 to L3. The present study presents counterevidence to this hypothesis from two groups of learners with different L1s and L2s acquiring Swedish or Dutch as L3. The evidence clearly indicates that syntactic structures are more easily transferred from L2 than from L1 in the initial state of L3 acquisition. The two groups behave significantly differently as to the placement of negation, a difference that can be attributed to the L2 knowledge of the learners in interaction with the typological relationship between the L2 and the L3.
Journal Article
Mapping the Left Periphery of Similative Constructions: Dutch Dialects as a Case Study
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.
Journal Article
The missing-VP effect in readers of English as a second language
English sentences with double center-embedded clauses are read faster when they are made ungrammatical by removing one of the required verb phrases. This phenomenon is known as the missing-VP effect. German and Dutch speakers do not experience the missing-VP effect when reading their native language, but they do when reading English as a second language (L2). We investigate whether the missing-VP effect when reading L2 English occurs in native Dutch speakers because their knowledge of English is similar to that of native English speakers (the
high exposure account
), or because of the difficulty of L2 reading (the
low proficiency account
). In an eye-tracking study, we compare the size of the missing-VP effect between native Dutch and native English participants, and across native Dutch participants with varying L2 English proficiency and exposure. Results provide evidence for both accounts, suggesting that both native-like knowledge of English and L2 reading difficulty play a role.
Journal Article
Syntactic predictors for text quality in Dutch upper-secondary school students’ L1 argumentative writing
Among other things, learning to write entails learning how to use complex sentences effectively in discourse. Some research has therefore focused on relating measures of syntactic complexity to text quality. Apart from the fact that the existing research on this topic appears inconclusive, most of it has been conducted in English L1 contexts. This is potentially problematic, since relevant syntactic indices may not be the same across languages. The current study is the first to explore which syntactic features predict text quality in Dutch secondary school students’ argumentative writing. In order to do so, the quality of 125 argumentative essays written by students was rated and the syntactic features of the texts were analyzed. A multilevel regression analysis was then used to investigate which features contribute to text quality. The resulting model (explaining 14.5% of the variance in text quality) shows that the relative number of finite clauses and the ratio between the number of relative clauses and the number of finite clauses positively predict text quality. Discrepancies between our findings and those of previous studies indicate that the relations between syntactic features and text quality may vary based on factors such as language and genre. Additional (cross-linguistic) research is needed to gain a more complete understanding of the relationships between syntactic constructions and text quality and the potential moderating role of language and genre.
Journal Article
Practicing ground rules in police interviews with child witnesses
In police interviews with child witnesses, ground rules like ‘correct me when I say something wrong’ are established. Establishing these ground rules is required by guidelines, with the aim of enhancing the reliability of children's testimonies. In this article, we use conversation analysis to examine how ground rules are practiced in thirty-eight Dutch police interviews with child witnesses. We focus on the police officers’ use of test questions to practice such ground rules. We found that, often, these questions (at first) only consist of an if-clause. Questions with this format leave open whose turn it is and what the appropriate response should be. If-clause questions allow flexibility in the difficulty of the test question, and a subtle pursuit of a response from the child. Yet, they are also treated as problematic by children, shown by silences and hesitations. Surprisingly, the practicing of ground rules sometimes occasions affiliation. (Police interviews, children, testing, practicing, affiliation, conversation analysis, hypothetical questions)*
Journal Article
Analysing Dutch Present Participle Manner Adverbials
As recent research has shown, MAs cross-linguistically show signs of a complex internal structure which can consist of a diverse set of syntactic categories. Notably absent from previously studied MA patterns are those that, at first impression, appear to contain verbal substructure. This raises the question whether or not the category V is among the diverse syntactic categories that feature in the grammar of MAs. In this study, I take a closer look at Dutch MAs that appear to contain a present participle -end form of the verb, like lopend ‘by walking’ or spelenderwijs ‘playfully’. Using tests for verbal substructure, I expand on findings from previous literature that show Dutch -erwijs adverbials do not contain verbal substructure by showing that Dutch present participle MAs without -erwijs also lack verbal substructure. Instead, the adjectival -end form is argued to enter into a small clause structure as a predicate over a manner noun to account for the manner reading of Dutch present participle MAs.
Journal Article
Syntactic features and reanalysis in near-native processing
In order to investigate second language (L2) processing at ultimate attainment, 20 first language (LI) English and 20 LI Dutch advanced to near-native speakers of German as well as 20 native Germans were tested in two experiments on subject-object ambiguities in German. The results from a self-paced reading task and a speeded acceptability judgement task show that the lowerproficient advanced learners in this study display the same processing preferences as natives in reading accuracy yet fail to demonstrate differential response latencies associated with native syntactic reanalysis. By contrast, near-native speakers of either LI converge on incremental native reanalysis patterns. Together, the findings highlight the role of proficiency for processing the target language since it is only at near-native levels of proficiency that non-natives converge on native-like parsing. The results support the view that endstate non-native processing and native processing are qualitatively identical.
Journal Article