The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, Morphosyntax, and Semantics 9781032535005, 9781032535012, 9781003412373

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“At long last, here is the much-needed authoritative guide for students and researchers interested in the second language acquisition of grammar and meaning from a linguistic perspective. Its interdisciplinary scope and the comprehensive coverage of acquisition studies across various bilingual populations are truly impressive. It will have pride of place on my bookshelf for many years to come.” Professor Holger Hopp, University of Braunschweig – Institute of Technology, Germany

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, MORPHOSYNTAX, AND SEMANTICS

This handbook provides innovative and comprehensive coverage of research on the second language acquisition (SLA) of morphosyntax, semantics, and the interface between the two. Organized by grammatical topic, the chapters are written by experts from formal and functional perspectives in the SLA of morphosyntax and semantics, providing in-depth yet accessible coverage of these areas. All chapters highlight the theoretical underpinnings of much work in SLA and their links to theoretical syntax and semantics; making comparisons to other populations, including child language acquirers, bilinguals, and heritage speakers (links to first language acquisition and bilingualism); dedicating a portion of each chapter to the research methods used to investigate the linguistic phenomenon in question (links to psycholinguistics and experimental linguistics); and, where relevant, including intervention studies on the phenomenon in question (links to applied linguistics). The volume will be indispensable to SLA researchers and students who work on any aspect of the SLA of morphosyntax or semantics. With its coverage of a variety of methodologies and comparisons to other populations (such as child language acquirers, early bilinguals, heritage speakers, and monolingual adults), the handbook is expected to also be of much interest to linguists who work in psycholinguistics, first language acquisition, and bilingualism. Tania Ionin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. She is also Associate Editor of Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics. Silvina Montrul is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, USA. She is also Co-Editor of Second Language Research. Roumyana Slabakova is Professor and Chair of Applied Linguistics at the University of Southampton, UK and Adjunct Research Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway. She is also Co-Editor of Second Language Research.

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOKS IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Susan M. Gass and Alison Mackey, Series Editors Kimberly L. Geeslin, Associate Editor

The Routledge Handbooks in Second Language Acquisition are a comprehensive, must-have survey of this core sub-discipline of applied linguistics. With a truly global reach and featuring diverse contributing voices, each handbook provides an overview of both the fundamentals and new directions for each topic. THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND SPEAKING Edited by Tracey M. Derwing, Murray J. Munro and Ron I. Thomson THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND SOCIOLINGUISTICS Edited by Kimberly Geeslin THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Edited by Shaofeng Li, Phil Hiver and Mostafa Papi THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND PSYCHOLINGUISTICS Edited by Aline Godfroid and Holger Hopp THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND NEUROLINGUISTICS Edited by Kara Morgan-Short and Janet G. van Hell THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, MORPHOSYNTAX, AND SEMANTICS Edited by Tania Ionin, Silvina Montrul, and Roumyana Slabakova For more information about this series, please visit: https://www​ .routledge​ .com​ /The​ -Routledge​ -Handbooks​-in​-Second​-Language​-Acquisition​/book​-series​/RHSLA

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, MORPHOSYNTAX, AND SEMANTICS

Edited by Tania Ionin, Silvina Montrul, and Roumyana Slabakova

Designed cover image: © Getty Images | simonidadjordjevic First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Tania Ionin, Silvina Montrul, and Roumyana Slabakova; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Tania Ionin, Silvina Montrul, and Roumyana Slabakova to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ionin, Tania, editor. | Montrul, Silvina, editor. | Slabakova, Roumyana, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition, morphosyntax, and semantics/edited by Tania Ionin, Silvina Montrul, and Roumyana Slabakova. Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2024. | Series: The Routledge handbooks in second language acquisition | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023034983 (print) | LCCN 2023034984 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032535005 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032535012 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003412373 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Second language acquisition. | Grammar, Comparative and general—Morphosyntax. | Semantics. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P118.2 .R687 2024 (print) | LCC P118.2 (ebook) | DDC 415.071—dc23/eng/20231031 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034983 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034984 ISBN: 978-1-032-53500-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-53501-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-41237-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003412373 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing, Services, Chennai, India

CONTENTS

List of contributors

xi

1 Introduction Tania Ionin, Silvina Montrul and Roumyana Slabakova PART I

The lexicon

11

2 Lexicosemantic development Nan Jiang and Dilin Liu

13

3 Transfer of reference: Metaphor and metonymy Beatriz Martín-Gascón and Antonio Barcelona

24

4 Thinking for speaking Emanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopoulos

37

5 The bilingual mental lexicon Judith F. Kroll

47

PART II

Argument structure



1

61

6 The causative/inchoative alternation Eve Zyzik and Josefina Bittar

63

7 Intransitive verbs Makiko Hirakawa

76

vii

Contents

8 Psych verbs Dongdong Chen

93

9 The dative and locative alternations Alan Juffs

108

10 The passive Noelia Sánchez-Walker

123

PART III

Morphosyntax and semantics of the nominal domain

139

11 Plural marking and the semantics of plurality Sea Hee Choi and Tania Ionin

141

12 Gender and number agreement Vicky Chondrogianni

154

13 Adjective placement Tiffany Judy

167

14 Articles: (In)definiteness Jacee Cho

182

15 Articles: Genericity Tanja Kupisch and Neal Snape

195

16 The morphosyntax of case Ayşe Gürel

210

17 Semantically based case Silvina Montrul

224

PART IV

Morphosyntax and semantics of the verbal domain

241

18 Finiteness and negation Christine Dimroth

243

19 Tense and temporality Yasuhiro Shirai

257

20 Lexical aspect M. Rafael Salaberry and Llorenç Comajoan-Colomé

270

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Contents

21 Viewpoint aspect María J. Arche and Laura Domínguez

284

22 Future tense and future expressions Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig

297

23 Mood and modality Amber Dudley

311

24 Copular clauses Sílvia Perpiñán and Rafael Marín

326

PART V

Clause-level syntax

339

25 Verb movement Lydia White

341

26 Learning and unlearning Verb Second word order Ute Bohnacker and Marit Westergaard

355

27 Interrogatives Gita Martohardjono and Pamela Franciotti

368

28 Non-canonical word orders Rex A. Sprouse

382

29 Relative clauses David Stringer

397

30 Quantifier scope Heather Marsden

412

31 Weak pronouns: Clitics and clitic placement Juana M. Liceras

426

32 Ellipsis Nigel Duffield

441

33 Binding and co-reference: Pronouns Eun Hee Kim

459

34 Binding and co-reference: Reflexives Chung-yu Chen

473

ix

Contents PART VI

Interfaces 487 35 Null and overt pronouns Fernando Martín-Villena, Khadij Gharibi and Jason Rothman

489

36 Information structure: Topic and focus Tania Leal

502

37 Scalar implicatures Shuo Feng

518

38 The syntax-phonology interface Heather Goad and Lydia White

531

39 Semantics and cognition: Spatiotemporal metaphors and time perception in L2 users 545 Panos Athanasopoulos and Emanuel Bylund Author Index Subject Index

559 567

x

CONTRIBUTORS

María J. Arche is Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Research & Enterprise in Language at the University of Greenwich, UK. Panos Athanasopoulos is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lund University, Sweden, and Extraordinary Professor of General Linguistics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He is also a former editor of Language and Cognition and PLOS ONE. Antonio Barcelona is Professor Emeritus at the University of Córdoba, Spain. He is also an Associate Editor of Cognitive Linguistic Studies. Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig is Provost Professor of Second Language Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA. She is also a former editor of Language Learning. Josefina Bittar is Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. Ute Bohnacker is Professor of Linguistics at Uppsala University, Sweden, and Reader in Scandinavian Languages at Lund University, Sweden. Emanuel Bylund is Professor of General Linguistics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He is also a former associate editor of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. Chung-yu Chen is Assistant Professor in the MA/PhD Program in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Dongdong Chen is Professor of Chinese in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Seton Hall University, NJ, USA. Jacee Cho is Associate Professor of English Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Sea Hee Choi is Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, USA. Vicky Chondrogianni is Professor of Bilingualism and Language Development in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is also Associate Editor for Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. 

xi

Contributors

Llorenç Comajoan-Colomé is Associate Professor at the Department of Philology and Language and Literature Teaching at the Universitat de Vic-Universitat Central de Catalunya, Catalonia, Spain. Christine Dimroth is Professor of Linguistics at the Department of German Philology at the University of Münster, Germany. Laura Domínguez is Professor of the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, School of Humanities, at the University of Southampton, UK. Amber Dudley is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Education at the University of York, UK. Nigel Duffield is Professor of Linguistics and Language Acquisition at Konan University, Kobe, Japan. Shuo Feng is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Peking University, Beijing, China. Pamela Franciotti is Lab Manager and Research Associate of the Second Language Acquisition Lab at The CUNY Graduate Center, USA. Khadij Gharibi a Researcher in the Psycholinguistics of Language Representation (PoLaR) Lab and AcqVA Aurora Center at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway. Heather Goad is Professor of Linguistics at McGill University, Canada. She is also on the editorial boards of Language Acquisition, John Benjamins’ Language Acquisition and Language Disorders series, and Oxford Studies in Phonology and Phonetics. Ayşe Gürel is Professor of Applied Linguistics/TEFL in the Department of Foreign Language Education at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Türkiye. Makiko Hirakawa is Professor of the Faculty of Letters at Chuo University, Japan. She is also Associate Editor of Language Acquisition. Tania Ionin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. She is also Associate Editor of Language Acquisition. Nan Jiang is Professor of Second Language Acquisition at the University of Maryland, USA. Tiffany Judy is Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Wake Forest University in WinstonSalem, North Carolina, USA. Alan Juffs is Professor in the Department of Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh, USA. He was the Director of the English Language Institute at the University of Pittsburgh from 1998-2020. Eun Hee Kim is Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University, USA. Judith F. Kroll is Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine, USA. Tanja Kupisch is Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, Germany, Member of the Excellence Cluster “The Politics of Inequality” and Associated Professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway. She is also Editor of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. Tania Leal is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Arizona, USA. She is also Associate Editor of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. xii

Contributors

Juana M. Liceras is Distinguished University Professor and Professor of General and Hispanic Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the Department of Linguistics of the University of Ottawa, Canada. She is also Co-Editor of Spanish Review of Applied Linguistics and the Director of the Nebrija-Santander Global Chair in Spanish as a Language of Migrants and Refugees. Dilin Liu is Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics/TESOL in the Department of English at the University of Alabama, USA. Rafael Marín is a CNRS researcher of Linguistics at the Université de Lille (UMR 8163), France. Heather Marsden is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York, UK. Beatriz Martín-Gascón is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish Language and Literature Theory at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Fernando Martín-Villena is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. Gita Martohardjono is Professor Emerita in the Linguistics Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, USA. She is also the director of the Second Language Acquisition Laboratory and of the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society at CUNY. Silvina Montrul is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, USA. She is also Co-Editor of Second Language Research. Sílvia Perpiñán is a Beatriz Galindo Senior Researcher in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. Jason Rothman is Professor of Linguistics at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway, and Senior Researcher at the Nebrija Research Center in Cognition, Nebrija University, Spain. M. Rafael Salaberry is Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Humanities at Rice University, USA. Noelia Sánchez-Walker is a Lector in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, USA. Yasuhiro Shirai is Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, USA. He is also Associate Editor of First Language and Frontiers in Psychology. Roumyana Slabakova is Professor and Chair of Applied Linguistics at the University of Southampton, UK, and Research Professor at the Center for Language, Brain & Learning (C-LaBL), the Arctic University of Norway. She is also Co-Editor of Second Language Research. Neal Snape is Professor in the Department of English at Gunma Prefectural Women’s University, Japan. He is also Associate Editor of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. Rex A. Sprouse is Professor of Second Language Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, USA. He is also Associate Editor of Language Acquisition. David Stringer is Associate Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA. Marit Westergaard is Professor of English Linguistics at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and Adjunct Professor at NTNU Norwegian University of Science of Technology, Norway. She is also Director of the Center for Language, Brain & Learning (C-LaBL).

xiii

Contributors

Lydia White is James McGill Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at McGill University, Canada, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is Co-Editor of the book series Language Acquisition and Language Disorders (John Benjamins) and Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics. Eve Zyzik is Professor in the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. She is also Executive Director of Language Learning.

xiv

1 INTRODUCTION Tania Ionin, Silvina Montrul and Roumyana Slabakova

The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, Morphosyntax and Semantics provides a comprehensive overview of research on the second language acquisition (SLA) of morphology, syntax, semantics and the interfaces among these areas, as well as interfaces with phonology, pragmatics, discourse and cognition. Limiting the scope of this volume was challenging for several reasons. The first issue that arises is the very definition of the linguistic domains of morphosyntax and semantics. The second issue is which populations to focus on. The volume is about second language acquisition, which is commonly defined as the acquisition of an additional language after the structural foundations of the first or native language are in place. However, other types of language acquisition scenarios are relevant as well, because the study of the grammatical knowledge of second language learners has a historical relationship with first language acquisition, and because SLA has recently been investigated as part of the general ecosystem of bilingualism and multilingualism, which encompasses the emerging fields of heritage language acquisition and third language (L3) or multilingual acquisition. We begin by stating our own view and conception of morphosyntax, semantics and SLA, which shaped the way we went about bringing this collection together. First, we adopt a formal linguistic approach to second language acquisition. Second language learners acquire the grammatical system of the second language, just as they acquired the grammatical system of their first language. Grammar consists of distinct and interacting levels, such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and the functional lexicon. So, a second language learner must learn the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse and vocabulary of the second language. First we have the mental lexicon: the vocabulary of the second language. Morphology is the part of grammar that deals with the structure of the words that form the lexicon: roots and functional morphemes. Some functional morphemes are derivational (they derive one word from another so they are related in meaning but may change category function) while others are inflectional and carry grammatical information (number, gender, tense, case). The syntax is the set of rules that combine words into phrases and sentences and determine word order. However, grammatical morphemes like gender, number, tense, agreement play an important role in syntax, and for that reason it is not possible to deal with morphology without also dealing with syntax: many phenomena are at the interface between syntax and morphology, or morphosyntax. The same situation arises with semantics, which is the part of grammar that deals with meaning. But meaning happens at the level of words, phrases, sentences, discourse. The morphology/ semantics interface is about the contribution of morphemes to meaning, while the syntax/semantics interface is about the meaning of different types of syntactic elements. DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-1

1

Ionin, Montrul and Slabakova

Lexicon FL

Morphosyntax

Phonetics/ phonology

Semantics

Figure 1.1 A schematic view of linguistic models and their interfaces

In Figure 1.1, we present a schematic graph of the shape of the grammar. Figure 1.1 shows the major modules and their important interfaces. This is a syntax-centric view of the grammar (Chomsky, 1995, 2005): we adopt this view because the messages of the human language are largely represented by sentences and their constituents, building up to higher-level discourse. Notably, three important modules interface with Morphosyntax: the sound system (Phonetics/Phonology), the meaning system (Semantics) and the Lexicon, where the lexical representations reside. The Functional Lexicon (FL) is a critical subset of the Lexicon, which interfaces with Morphosyntax. It contains the grammatical features that are represented as feature bundles on lexical items (Borer, 1984) and which regulate the syntactic composition of internal movement within sentences. All of the modules are interconnected, but in Figure 1.1 we use overlapping shapes to represent essential interfaces where the modules intersect. Round shapes contain the grammar-internal modules, while rectangular shapes designate the external interfaces between grammatical modules and discourse as well as general cognition. Given this conception of the grammar, the book is organized by grammatical topic into six major parts, each comprising four to ten chapters; each chapter provides an overview of research in a specific topic of the SLA of morphosyntax and/or semantics. The last part of the volume furthermore addresses interfaces between morphosyntax/semantics and other domains, including phonology, discourse and pragmatics. All chapters have been written by experts in the SLA of morphosyntax, semantics and interface phenomena, some coming from formal (generative) and others from functional perspectives. The book will be indispensable to SLA researchers and students who work on any aspect of the SLA of morphosyntax or semantics. With its coverage of a variety of methodologies and comparisons to other populations (such as child language acquirers, early bilinguals, heritage speakers and monolingual adults), the book is expected to also be of much interest to linguists who work in psycholinguistics, first language acquisition and bilingualism. The main goals of this volume are:

• To provide in-depth coverage of all topics in morphosyntax, semantics and the interface between the two on which a substantive amount of research has been done with second language learners. • To serve as a high-level reference book on the SLA of morphosyntax and semantics for scholars and students in second language acquisition, linguistics and applied linguistics. 2

Introduction

• To strengthen links between SLA and related fields by highlighting the theoretical underpin-

nings of much work in generative SLA (links to theoretical syntax and semantics); making comparisons to other populations, including child language acquirers, bilinguals and heritage speakers (links to first language acquisition and bilingualism); dedicating a portion of each chapter to the research methods used to investigate the linguistic phenomenon in question (links to psycholinguistics and experimental linguistics); and, where relevant, including intervention studies on the phenomenon in question (links to applied linguistics).

Although the book’s organizing principle is the grammar, the second language acquisition of the grammar cannot be discussed without making reference to theoretical approaches and to the methodologies used to study the development of different linguistic phenomena in a second language. Many of the chapters discuss theoretical analyses of the phenomena grounded in generative linguistics (Chomsky, 1965, 1986, 1995), largely because this approach has generated a significant body of descriptions and explanations of aspects of the morphosyntax and semantics of many languages, but also because it embraces cross-linguistic comparative analyses that are exceptionally suited to investigate second language acquisition. One of the main questions that guides SLA research is the extent to which previous linguistic knowledge determines, predicts and influences the development of the second language grammar (interlanguage) from initial state to ultimate attainment (Lardiere, 2009; Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996; Slabakova, 2016). The generative approach has also propelled the cross-linguistic study of first language acquisition. A guiding question in early theoretical approaches to SLA (Thomas, 2004) was to describe and explain how children come to acquire the grammar of their native language naturally, seemingly effortlessly, and successfully by age five or six, while many second language learners, after several years of full immersion in a second language, can have lingering problems with morphosyntax and phonology (Lardiere, 2017). This question has generated a significant body of research on native vs. non-native acquisition comparisons, and perhaps fueled the need to include control groups of native speakers in most generative SLA studies. To investigate the kind of linguistic knowledge second language (L2) learners develop, many methodologies used in first language acquisition have also been adapted to second language acquisition. As many of the chapters in the volume discuss, some morphosyntactic phenomena can be easily elicited in oral production or tested through picture comprehension tasks, as in first language (L1) acquisition, which is especially appropriate if the L2 learners are children. Many aspects of morphosyntax render themselves ideal to be tested via grammaticality/acceptability judgment tasks, and aspects of semantics via the truth-value judgment task and other comprehension tasks. More recently, the field of SLA has embraced new methodologies from psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics that assess linguistic processing and/or production in real time. For more on methodologies used in SLA, please see Mackey and Gass (2022). The chapters in this volume include the following organization, with some variation:

• Brief description of the linguistic phenomenon. • A brief overview of the theoretical analyses of this phenomenon, both from the perspective of theoretical syntax/semantics and from the perspective of SLA theories.

• A discussion of the methodological approaches commonly used to study the linguistic phenomenon in SLA.

• As relevant, a brief overview of studies from any of the following areas: psycholinguistics, child language acquisition and/or bilingualism/heritage language acquisition.

• The central part of the chapter: a critical review of the SLA studies on the topic, with a focus

on studies conducted over the previous decade, but with inclusion of groundbreaking earlier work on the topic. • A section on future directions and areas for further research in SLA of the linguistic ­phenomenon. 3

Ionin, Montrul and Slabakova

Main organization The volume consists of 38 chapters (not counting this introductory chapter) divided into the following six parts: I. II. III. IV. V. VI.

The lexicon Argument structure Morphosyntax and semantics of the nominal domain Morphosyntax and semantics of the verbal domain Clause-level syntax Interfaces

Part I: The lexicon The lexicon is at the core of language acquisition studies, as multiple theoretical accounts agree that the features regulating morphosyntax reside in the lexicon. In addition, semantic misalignment between lexical item meanings in the L1 and L2 give rise to a number of interesting acquisition puzzles. Part I comprises four chapters devoted to various aspects of vocabulary acquisition and processing. In Chapter 2, Nan Jiang and Dilin Liu provide an overview of Lexicosemantic Development, discussing a theoretical model comprising comprehension and development stages. The process involves restructuring of native-language semantic spaces, adjusting the semantic boundaries to accommodate new semantic spaces and learning new semantic features. The authors address the existing evidence for this process, factors affecting it and reasons for delays at the development stage. Beatriz Martín-Gascón and Antonio Barcelona in Chapter 3 take up Transfer of Reference: Metaphor and Metonymy, the lexical process where one name is substituted for another. Metaphor and metonymy are two conceptual mechanisms which allow speakers to communicate through shortcuts by mapping a conceptual entity, the source, onto another, the target. Metonymic and metaphoric language serve a wide range of communicative functions, from textual cohesion to euphemism, humor or irony. Developing an ability to understand and use metaphor and metonymy is essential for successful language learning. In Chapter 4, Emanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopoulos discuss the Thinking for Speaking hypothesis (Slobin, 1996), which posits that speakers channel their attention according to the linguistic categories of their language when they produce and comprehend the second language. Research on this topic takes a usage-based perspective and examines the development of learners’ L2 lexicalization patterns. The emphasis in this chapter is on motion event construals and the difficulties learners encounter in developing targetlike thinking patterns. In Chapter 5 on The Bilingual Mental Lexicon, Judith Kroll scrutinizes the processes that are part of lexical access during production and comprehension. Research in this field determines the type of connections between the lexical forms in the two languages of the bilingual, including how these forms are linked to the corresponding, shared semantic representations within the common conceptual system. There is a consensus among the various theoretical models of bilingual memory that both languages of the bilingual are activated while speakers comprehend and produce words in one language. Research investigating the cognitive resources needed for controlled lexical retrieval, as well as the cross-linguistic dynamic between languages, reveals the workings of the human mind/brain.

Part II: Argument structure Part II comprises five chapters that focus on the relationship between lexical semantics, argument structure and syntax. The concern is with how certain aspects of meaning (the semantic primitives 4

Introduction

by which word meanings can be expressed, the event types expressed by verbs, the thematic roles of arguments) are realized in syntax, as well as the morphological forms by which such meanings are expressed. The following issues are discussed: (i) semantic constraints on argument structure alternations; (ii) cross-linguistic differences in how semantic primitives may combine or conflate; (iii) thematic properties of arguments and how they are realized syntactically; and (iv) the effects of morphology which adds or suppresses arguments. In Chapter 6, Eve Zyzik and Josefina Bittar discuss The Causative–Inchoative Alternation. This is an argument structure alternation where the same verb appears in transitive or intransitive frames, such as the verb break (The cat broke the vase/The vase broke). This chapter discusses the studies done in the L2 acquisition of several typologically and morphologically different languages and the learnability problems that these verbs present. Intransitive Verbs is the topic of Chapter 7, written by Makiko Hirakawa. Unaccusativity divides intransitive verbs in two varieties, unaccusatives and unergatives, depending on the semantics of the argument (theme or agent). The semantics of the argument determines the morphological shape and the syntactic structure and behavior of these verbs in different languages. There is an important body of research in L2 acquisition of different languages about these verbs and the phenomenon of passive unaccusatives so common in interlanguage grammars. Another important topic in argument structures is Psych Verbs, discussed in Chapter 8 by Dongdong Chen. Psychological verbs like fear and frighten differ in how they map the experiencer to subject or object positions. In languages like Italian and Spanish, there is a third class of verbs (gustar in Spanish) whose subject is marked with dative case. These verbs cause significant acquisition challenges for L2 learners, even though many languages have them. This chapter covers L2 acquisition studies on English, Spanish and other languages on these verbs. In Chapter 9, Alan Juffs discusses The Dative and Locative Alternations, which deal with the syntactic behavior of verbs like give versus donate and verbs like load vs. put. These verbs have generated significant research on the acquisition of English and many other languages that have a similar alternation, especially when the L1s of the learners do not exhibit such alternation. The dative alternation is one of the most studied topics in the L1 and L2 acquisition of lexical semantics. Finally, Chapter 10, written by Noelia Sánchez-Walker, is about The Passive. Transitive verbs in English and many other languages can be used in the passive voice, a structure in which the theme or patient becomes the subject and the agent is optionally expressed in a prepositional phrase, as an adjunct. Other languages have reflexive passives and impersonal passives as well. The passive is a well-studied phenomenon in L1 acquisition. Sánchez-Walker covers the L2 acquisition of the passive in English and more recent work on different types of passives (verbal, adjectival) in Spanish.

Part III: Morphosyntax and semantics of the nominal domain The chapters in Part III concentrate on the nominal domain broadly construed and cover both morphosyntactic and semantic properties of nouns, adjectives and determiners. In Chapter 11, Sea Choi and Tania Ionin explore Plural Marking and the Semantics of Plurality, with a focus on how speakers of generalized-classifier languages (such as Korean, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese) acquire plural-marking languages such as English. Experimental research on this topic has, on the one hand, examined how both native and non-native speakers interpret singular count, plural and mass-denoting nouns with regard to the object/substance divide, and on the other hand, whether second language learners can detect errors with plural marking in both offline and online tasks. This chapter reviews both strands of research, paying particular attention to the semantic universal of atomicity, and its role both in morphosyntactic expression of plurality cross-linguistically, and in the SLA of the English plural marker. Chapter 12 by Vicky Chondrogianni examines Gender and Number Agreement. In many languages (including Romance languages, German, Dutch and Greek), nouns are inherently specified for gram5

Ionin, Montrul and Slabakova

matical gender, and other nominals (such as adjectives or determiners) agree with the noun in gender and/or number. Such agreement is notoriously difficult for L2 learners, especially in the case of gender agreement for learners whose L1 (such as English) does not have grammatical gender. After describing the major theoretical approaches to agreement in both syntactic and SLA theories, this chapter provides a critical overview of SLA studies on the production, comprehension and processing of gender and number agreement. Chapter 13 by Tiffany Judy looks at Adjective Placement, starting from the fact that the position of the adjective before vs. after a noun is subject to both cross-linguistic and intralinguistic variation. In languages such as Spanish, which have both prenominal and postnominal adjectives, adjective placement has interpretive consequence. This chapter examines what L2 learners know both about the morphosyntax of adjective placement, and about its relationship to interpretation. The next two chapters take up the topic of articles, known to be one of the most challenging L2 phenomena for learners to acquire, especially learners from article-less native languages. In Chapter 14 on Articles: (In)definiteness, Jacee Cho focuses on the semantics of definite and indefinite articles in L2 English and provides an overview of studies that have looked at the role of semantic universals (such as definiteness and specificity) in the SLA of articles. The chapter also investigates the pragmatics of articles and discusses recent evidence on how articles are processed. Chapter 15 on Articles: Genericity, by Tanja Kupisch and Neal Snape, considers articles on their generic uses: in noun phrases that make reference to kinds/species, and in sentences that make generic statements. Genericity marking varies cross-linguistically, and there are subtle differences among different types of generic NPs within a single language. This chapter reviews the literature on generic interpretation in both child and adult learners and in both early and late bilinguals. The final two chapters in this section turn their attention to the morphosyntactic and semantic properties of case in case-marking languages. In Chapter 16, Ayşe Gürel gives an overview of The Morphosyntax of Case, providing coverage of the SLA of a variety of case-marking languages, including Turkish, Korean, Russian and Finnish. This chapter sets out the formal syntactic framework on both morphological and syntactic case and reviews studies on case in L2 learners’ production, judgments and processing. Silvina Montrul’s Chapter 17 considers Semantically Based Case, examining the interpretive consequences of Differential Subject Marking and Differential Object Marking. In languages that have semantically based case (such as Spanish), the presence vs. absence of a case marker can be related to such properties as definiteness, specificity and/or animacy (among others). This chapter discusses studies with both L2 learners and heritage speakers of a variety of case-marking languages and the challenges presented by this phenomenon.

Part IV: Morphosyntax and semantics of the verbal domain Part IV concentrates on a variety of morphosyntactic and semantic properties manifested in the verbal projections and the functional categories related to them.  In Chapter 18, Cristine Dimroth discusses Finiteness and Negation. In Klein’s work on the Basic Variety (Klein & Perdue, 1997), it was established that adult L2 learners make semantically finite assertions without overtly marking their utterances for finiteness. Finiteness is not just a matter of inflection but a major organizing factor in the structure of an utterance. This chapter explores how finiteness relates to the root infinitive body of work and the position of negation. In addition, the presence or absence of finiteness marking is discussed from the point of view of different theoretical approaches.  Chapter 19, written by Yasuhiro Shirai, covers Tense and Temporality. The acquisition of past tense morphology (regular and irregular) has been extensively investigated in language acquisition research. This chapter reprises the famous past tense debates as they relate to SLA. Another important aspect of past tense acquisition that has received particular attention in the form of the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai & Andersen, 1995) is the semantic bias in early past tense marking. Child and adult learners have been found to use past tense marking first on telic verbs (accomplishments and achievements), 6

Introduction

and later on atelic aspectual classes of verbs. Such findings have been used as evidence for Bickerton’s (1984) Language Bioprogram Hypothesis.  Lexical Aspect is the topic of Chapter 20, written by M. Rafael Salaberry and Llorenç Comajoan-Colomé. Languages of the world have verbal expressions that can be described as belonging to several lexical classes, including states, activities, accomplishments and achievements. These lexical classes are language universals since they are ontologically based. These universal classes aid but also impede L2 acquisition, when individual verb phrase classification contrasts. This chapter also explores the interplay of lexical aspectual classes with viewpoint aspect and tense. In Chapter 21, María J. Arche and Laura Domínguez provide a critical overview of Viewpoint Aspect, one of the most widely studied topics in second language research. While the Aspect Hypothesis is discussed mainly in the two previous chapters, this chapter engages in a wide and interdisciplinary survey of findings about viewpoint aspect from a variety of cognitive perspectives. Looking into the future, Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig’s Chapter 22 reviews studies of Future Tense and Future Expressions. The future tense can be used to talk about the future, but also expresses probability. There are different morphosyntactic options to express future temporality. Languages mark futurate meanings in very different ways, and that is the primary difficulty for acquisition. However, different meaning expressions also affect how learners perceive and acquire the meanings themselves. This chapter covers at length the future form–meaning interplay in interlanguage grammars. Mood and Modality is the topic of Chapter 23 by Amber Dudley. The grammatical category of Mood refers to the status of the proposition expressed in a sentence and establishes whether a sentence is realis or irrealis. This is a category closely related to Tense and Aspect. In theoretical terms, realis and irrealis are linked to the concept of “assertion,” with the subjunctive mood expressing nonassertion. Most SLA research has been done on comprehension and production of the subjunctive mood in Romance languages. The emergence of deontic and epistemic modality, expressed through modal verbs and other verbal means, is an understudied topic in SLA, with a few studies in the 1980s and 1990s. However, understanding and correctly marking the vast system of modal meanings is a major challenge for second language learners. This chapter surveys the findings and identifies avenues for further research. The final chapter in this part, Chapter 24, is about Copular Clauses, written by Sílvia Perpiñán and Rafael Marín. Copular constructions have non-verbal predicates and are headed by a linking verb or copula, like the verb to be in English. The predicate is prepositional, adjectival or nominal. Some languages have no copula, others have only one and Spanish has two (ser and estar). The choice of copula in Spanish depends on the syntax and the semantics of the predicate. This chapter covers the L2 acquisition of copulas in English and the copulas ser and estar in Spanish.

Part V: Clause-level syntax The chapters in Part V consider the SLA of a variety of syntactic phenomena and syntactic relations at the clausal level. The first five chapters in this section all consider different types of word order permutations at the clausal level. In Chapter 25, Lydia White discusses Verb Movement, starting with a much-investigated difference between verb placement (with adverbs, with negation and in questions) in English vs. French. After discussing the theoretical syntactic accounts which trace these differences to the parametrization of the verb movement parameter, this chapter discusses the experimental and intervention SLA studies on verb movement, starting with White’s own classic research on this topic. Chapter 26, on Learning and Unlearning Verb Second Word Order, continues the discussion of verb placement in SLA. This chapter, written by Ute Bohnacker and Marit Westergaard, discusses the Verb Second (V2) phenomenon, found in most Germanic languages, by which the verb is required to occur in the second position of matrix clauses. The chapter provides an overview of how both child and adult learners acquire the V2 order, investigating microvariation across different Germanic V2 languages. 7

Ionin, Montrul and Slabakova

In Chapter 27, Gita Martohardjono and Pamela Franciotti discuss Interrogatives, with an overview of studies on the SLA of wh-questions, yes/no questions and embedded questions. This chapter discusses SLA studies on question formation from a variety of perspectives, including studies that look at wh-movement and island effects from the generative perspective, studies that investigate the computational complexity of different types of wh-questions, and studies on the processing of interrogatives. Chapter 28 on Non-canonical Word Orders, by Rex A. Sprouse, also looks at wh-movement, along with a variety of other phenomena that result in word order permutations, including topicalization, left-branch extraction and remnant movement. This chapter provides formal generative accounts of the phenomena in question and gives an overview of SLA studies on both the (un)grammaticality and the interpretation of different word orders, addressing such topics as the role of Universal Grammar (UG) and the Poverty of the Stimulus problem in SLA. In Chapter 29, David Stringer discusses Relative Clauses, a topic with a vast body of literature in both syntax and SLA. After addressing the typological variation in the syntax and semantics of relative clause constructions, this chapter reports on SLA studies that address such issues as typological universals and cross-linguistic influence. The literature on relative clauses discussed in this chapter includes a great variety of tasks, from production to judgment and comprehension tasks to psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic tasks. Chapter 30 by Heather Marsden takes up Quantifier Scope, considering the interpretation of sentences that contain either two quantifiers or one quantifier plus negation. In some languages, such sentences are ambiguous between surface-scope and inverse-scope readings, while in others, only the surface-scope interpretation is available. Such cross-linguistic differences have consequences for both cross-linguistic influence and Poverty of the Stimulus considerations in SLA studies. The final four chapters in this section all take up different types of anaphora. Chapter 31 by Juana M. Liceras looks at Weak Pronouns: Clitics and Clitic Placement. Focusing on pronominal clitics, primarily in Romance languages, the chapter discusses SLA studies on such topics as clitic omission, clitic doubling, clitic climbing and clitic left dislocation. Chapter 32 by Nigel Duffield examines Ellipsis, a cover term for the relationship between a silent anaphoric expression and its antecedent, and a phenomenon that has received a vast amount of attention in the theoretical syntactic literature. This chapter addresses the challenges faced by L2 learners in discovering how ellipsis works in their L2, especially when it works differently in the L1. The chapter also addresses the methodological challenges of studying ellipsis in SLA. In Chapter 33, Eun Hee Kim addresses Binding and Co-reference: Pronouns. This chapter discusses the involvement of both syntactic and pragmatic processes in pronoun interpretation, the crosslinguistic variability in this domain, and the offline and online SLA studies that have investigated pronoun interpretation. Chapter 34 by Chung-yu Chen turns to Binding and Co-reference: Reflexives. This chapter discusses cross-linguistic variation in the binding domain of reflexive anaphors and focuses largely on the differences between languages that allow long-distance interpretation of reflexives (e.g., Mandarin Chinese and Japanese) and those that do not (e.g., English). The SLA studies discussed in this chapter address both the role of cross-linguistic influence and L2 learners’ preference for local antecedents of reflexives.

Part VI: Interfaces The five chapters in this final section of the handbook look beyond the core grammar. Morphosyntax and semantics frequently interact and impose pressures on each other. The chapters in Part VI explore the interactions of syntax–semantics with other cognitive systems and modules, such as phonology, discourse and pragmatics. Chapter 35, by Fernando Martín-Villena, Khadij Gharibi and Jason Rothman, discusses Null and Overt Pronouns. Languages which allow null pronouns (e.g., Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin) impose various constraints on the distribution of null and overt pronouns; some of the constraints are discourse-based, placing the distribution of null vs. overt pronouns at 8

Introduction

the syntax-discourse interface. The production and processing of overt vs. null pronouns is one of the most well-studied areas in SLA, as well as bilingualism more generally. This chapter presents a review of the large body of literature on this topic. In Chapter 36, Tania Leal examines Information Structure: Topic and Focus, which has to do, roughly, with the ordering of old and new information in the clause. While it is part of discourse rather than semantics, the study of information structure is closely intertwined with the study of semantics. Information structure interfaces with morphosyntax (word order), semantics (articles), and phonology (prosodic contour). The chapter introduces typological differences among different Topics (thematic, contrastive) and Focus types (e.g., information, contrastive), along with some of their characteristic attributes, and discusses why they present difficulty to learners. Chapter 37 by Shuo Feng investigates how learners compute Scalar Implicatures, a linguistic phenomenon at the interface between semantics and pragmatics. Items that generate scalar implicatures (e.g., quantifiers such as some and all) limit possible ambiguity by introducing an additional boundary (e.g., uttering some implies not all). While scalar implicature has been much investigated in first language acquisition, there is relatively little work on scalar implicature in SLA; however, this is an important topic that is now attracting more attention in a truly interdisciplinary field of research. Although morphosyntax and phonology constitute different language domains, it seems undisputed that they relate to each other in nontrivial ways. Tackling The Syntax–Phonology Interface in the functional domain, Heather Goad and Lydia White suggest, in Chapter 38, that failure to acquire and/or use the L2 grammar in a nativelike manner often reflects difficulties arising at this interface, rather than being due to either phonology or syntax alone. The authors also consider clause-level syntax (relative clause ambiguity resolution, pronoun interpretation), demonstrating how prosodic factors such as stress, pause and constituent length can influence interpretation. Finally, Chapter 39 by Panos Athanasopoulos and Emanuel Bylund investigates the links between Semantics and Cognition: Spatiotemporal Metaphors and Time Perception in L2 users. It is common across languages to express time in terms of space. However, this is encoded differently in languages of the world and is described as a typological distinction. The authors present evidence that speakers of languages with different space–time mappings understand temporal relations differently. The acquisition question that arises is whether it is possible to acquire a language that is typologically different, and what the challenges are in changing the construal or perception of time.

Acknowledgments We are delighted to contribute this new collection and we are deeply grateful to all the contributors and to the editors of the Routledge Handbook Series, Susan Gass, Alison Mackey and the late Kimberly Geeslin, for their enthusiasm, encouragement and support of this project. We also want to thank John Archibald and all the reviewers who provided critical and invaluable feedback on the content and presentation of the chapters in the volume. Finally, this work would not have been possible without the dedication and professionalism of the editorial team of Routledge: Ze'ev Sudry, Bex Hume, Amy Laurens and Helena Parkinson. Although there are many different approaches to second language acquisition, interest in the development of the second language itself remains at the heart of nearly all these approaches. We hope that advanced undergraduate students, graduate students and researchers find the collection inspiring to generate new research and develop this exciting field further.

References Bickerton, D. (1984). The language bioprogram hypothesis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7(2), 173–188. Borer, H. (1984). Parametric syntax: Case studies in semitic and romance languages. Foris Publications.

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Ionin, Montrul and Slabakova Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language. Praeger. Chomsky, N. (1995). The minimalist program. MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (2005). Three factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry, 36(1), 1–22. Klein, W., & Perdue, C. (1997). The basic variety (or: Couldn’t natural languages be much simpler?). Second Language Research, 13(4), 301–347. Lardiere, D. (2009). Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 25(2), 173–227. Lardiere, D. (2017). Ultimate attainment in second language acquisition: A case study. Routledge. Mackey, A., & Gass, S. (2022). Second language research: Methodology and design (3rd ed.). Routledge. Schwartz, B.D., & Sprouse, R.A. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the full transfer/full access model. Second Language Research, 12, 40–72. Shirai, Y., & Andersen, R.W. (1995). The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology: A prototype account. Language, 71, 743–762. Slabakova, R. (2016). Second language acquisition. Oxford University Press. Slobin, D. I. (1996). From “thought and language” to “thinking for speaking.” In J. J. Gumperz & S.C. Levinson (Eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity (pp. 70–96). Cambridge University Press. Thomas, M. (2004). Universal grammar in second-language acquisition: A history. Routledge.

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PART I

The lexicon

2 LEXICOSEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT Nan Jiang and Dilin Liu

2.1  Introduction: The importance of lexical semantics in SLA Words are often considered as the building blocks of language, and vocabulary learning is of paramount importance in the learning of a second language (L2). Word learning can be a complicated process, but, at the most basic level, it consists of three elements: form learning, meaning learning, and form–meaning mapping. There has been an ample amount of research on L2 vocabulary learning in recent years. However, much of this research has focused on form learning and form–meaning mapping, as can be seen in the way vocabulary acquisition is assessed (e.g., Bordag et al., 2017; Icht & Mama, 2019; Kemp & McDonald, 2021; Legault et al., 2019; Peter & Webb, 2018; Suk, 2017). In contrast, meaning learning, or lexicosemantic development, has received considerably less attention. This lack of attention is likely a result of the fact that many L2 word forms can be mapped onto existing meanings. In both classroom teaching and research, semanticization, the process of helping a learner to understand the meaning of a new word, is often done by associating a new word form to a translation in the learner’s first language (L1), through a picture or other means such as a definition and context. The outcome is the mapping of a new word form to the existing L1 meaning. Little semantic development occurs in the process. However, languages differ in how lexical meanings are categorized and structured, such that each language has its own unique semantic system underlying its lexical system. The accurate use of an L2 depends on the development of a new, L2-specific semantic system and thus the mapping of L2 word forms to L2-specific meanings. Hence, the learning of new word meanings, or lexicosemantic development, deserves more attention in both L2 vocabulary acquisition research and classroom teaching.

2.2  What needs to be developed in lexicosemantic development When a word exists in a language to express a meaning or concept, this meaning or concept is said to be lexicalized in that language. What meanings are lexicalized and how they are lexicalized differs across languages. As a result, the relationship between the lexicosemantic systems of any two languages can be very complicated. For example, the English word bottle and its Chinese translation ping may refer to the same object, but under some circumstances, a bottle becomes a tong (“bucket”) in Chinese, as size is an important feature for categorizing meaning for containers in Chinese but less so in English. This complicated relationship means that what must be developed in lexicosemantic

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-3

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development differs for different L2 words and for different L1–L2 pairings. We outline three different tasks L2 learners face in developing an L2-specific lexicosemantic system, which is based on an analysis of three different patterns of lexicosemantic overlap between languages. The distinction of these three tasks is also intended to offer a useful framework for considering specific cases of lexicosemantic development in L2 vocabulary research. This discussion is based on a distributed featural model of semantic representation as envisioned by researchers such as Jackendoff (1990) and as applied to bilingual lexicosemantic organization (e.g., de Groot, 1993) where lexicalized meanings are seen as consisting of a set of semantic features rather than holistic units. a. Developing new meanings. Every language has concepts that are unique to the culture of the speakers of the language. This results in the presence of words (i.e., lexicalized concepts) in one language that do not have a translation equivalent in another. These words are abundant in the areas of food, sports, and holidays, for example, but can be found in many other semantic domains. Pavlenko (2009) provided an example with the word fortochka in Russian, which denotes an upper part of a window that can be opened separately. Wierzbicka (1986) offered another example with the Polish verb tęsknić, which has the meaning of being homesick, missing somebody, or nostalgia, but none of these English words expresses the exact same meaning. The Chinese verb chao was cited as another example in Jiang (2018). It refers to a method of preparing Chinese dishes such as chow mein (chow = stir-fry; mein = noodle) that does not have a ready English counterpart. Thus, the renowned linguist Yuen Ren Chao had to coin a new English compound stir-fry for his wife when she was writing her book How to cook and eat in Chinese (Yang Chao, 1945). Where an L2 word denotes a meaning that is not part of the learner’s existing semantic system, the acquisition of this word entails the development of this new meaning or concept in order to fully understand the word and use it correctly. b. Reset semantic boundaries. A majority of meanings lexicalized in one language are likely to be lexicalized in another. That is, most L2 words are likely to have a translation in a learner’s L1. However, the same meaning may be lexicalized differently between languages. To use the space metaphor, the same semantic space may be divided or drawn differently in different languages. One difference lies in the level of detail in semantic distinction or categorization. Where the meaning is lexicalized in a single word in one language, the same meaning may be further distinguished and mapped to multiple lexical forms in another. Paradis (1981) provided an example of the English word book whose meaning is further categorized as livre and cahier (the latter of which typically refers to a notebook) in French. The following pairs of English words are usually translated into single Chinese words (in parentheses), doubt-suspect (huaiyi), begin-start (kaishi), question-problem (wenti), further illustrating semantic distinctions made in one language but not in another. Such distinctions do not have to be binary as in these examples, but can take multiple forms. For example, a three-way distinction is made in Spanish for the meaning of walls: paredes (walls inside a house), muros (walls around a castle), and murallas (walls around a city) (Gathercole & Moawad, 2010). Sometimes, a semantic domain may be lexicalized in great detail in one language but very broadly in another. For example, Mandarin Chinese has a general verb zhou (“walk”) to denote human movement on foot. An indication of how one walks is usually conveyed with an adverbial. In contrast, the same semantic space is lexicalized in much more detail in English, making distinctions related to speed (creep vs. hasten), aimlessness (wander, roam), steps being heavy (plod) or light (tiptoe) or unsteady (toddle, hobble, limp), or attitude being sad (slouch), confident (stride), proud (swagger), or secretive (sneak). On the flip side, the English verb carry covers the meaning of more than a dozen of Chinese verbs such as ding, tuo, ling, ju, kua, kang, bei that are differentiated on the basis of the body part involved in carrying. Another difference in semantic categorization lies in a partial overlap or crossover of semantic space between languages. A set of words in one language may share similar semantic space with their counterparts in another but differ in how semantic boundaries are set. For example, the English 14

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word brush covers two lexicalized meanings of shuanzi (brushes for cleaning) and maobi (brushes for writing and artistic painting) in Chinese, and the Chinese word bi refers to any instrument used for writing, drawing, or painting, thus including not only the semantic space of pen, pencil, marker, crayon, but also that of brush if it is used for calligraphic writing or artistic painting (but not for painting a wall). More examples from Chinese and English include words such as tile, brick, rail, ruler, chimney that differ in semantic space from their Chinese translations. All these cross-linguistic differences illustrate how languages differ in the structuring of the same semantic spaces. Where such differences exist, lexicosemantic development means the restructuring of semantic spaces or the resetting of the semantic boundaries to approximate that of the target language. c. Incorporating new semantic features. Languages may also differ in whether or to what extent a semantic feature is recognized in lexicalization. When semantic spaces are mapped differently, the difference in mapping may involve a semantic feature that is recognized in one language but not in another. Choi and Bowerman (1991) provided an example of the Korean word kkita (“put in”, “put on”), whose semantic features include that of tightness of fit which is absent in its English translation. Paradis (1981) mentioned the French words balle and ballon (both translated into “ball” in English) that are differentiated in size. In Chinese, two words are used to express the meaning of “support”: zhichi for an abstract meaning such as supporting one’s decision and zhicheng for a concrete meaning such as supporting a roof. Thus, abstractness (or concreteness) is a feature used in Chinese but less so in English. Chinese also uses humanness as a semantic feature in categorizing meaning more than English. Words such as nan (“male”), nu (“female”), and nianqing (“young”) are used only to refer to humans; different adjectives are used for animals and plants. Similarly, lingdao is only used for humans but its English translation leader can refer to nonhuman entities. These examples illustrate that when semantic boundaries differ between two languages, it is often because a semantic feature is used to categorize meaning in one language but not in another. In these cases, learning to remap the semantic boundaries is to incorporate a new semantic feature in L2 that is absent in L1. Dealing with cross-linguistic differences in semantic structures, or semantic restructuring, is not all that is involved in lexicosemantic development. For instance, L2 learners have to understand the connotations and figurative meanings of words. Lexicosemantic development also involves the understanding of a word’s associative network and its position in this network, e.g., the degree of prototypicality of a member in a category which can also differ cross-linguistically. However, developing new meanings, resetting the semantic boundaries, and incorporating new semantic features are the most basic and fundamental aspects of developing an L2-specific lexicosemantic system.

2.3  Issues and findings When new L2 words are first introduced to learners, lexical forms are often initially mapped onto the existing L1 semantic system, as recognized by many researchers (e.g., Ellis, 1997; Giacobbe, 1992; Hall, 2002). For L2 words whose meanings are also lexicalized in the L1, lexicosemantic development can be seen as consisting of two stages, as outlined in Jiang (2004a). The first is the comprehension stage, whereby a learner becomes familiar with the basic meaning of a word through linguistic (e.g., L1 translation, definition, context) or nonlinguistic means (e.g., pictures, objects, actions). The outcome is the mapping of the new lexical form to an existing L1 meaning. At this point, “every word in the second language was a mere replica of a word in the first language with a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the two translation equivalents (Jakobovits, 1968, p. 29). This form–meaning mapping can happen quickly, e.g., in one experimental session of several minutes, even though firmly establishing this form–meaning connection may take a much longer time. As basic meanings of translation equivalents are similar, this initial form–meaning mapping can also allow learners to use L2 words correctly under many circumstances. At the same time, the mapping 15

Nan Jiang and Dilin Liu

of L2 word forms onto L1 meanings also leads to many lexical-transfer errors that are semantic in nature, as documented in many studies (e.g., Hall & Ecke, 2003; Trimasse, 2019; Zughoul, 1991). Due to cross-language differences in semantic structures, accurate use of L2 words requires the development of L2-specific meanings and the mapping of L2 word forms to such meanings. Thus, the comprehension stage should be followed by a development stage when new meanings are developed, the existing semantic boundaries are reset, or new semantic features are incorporated. We may refer to these three tasks collectively as a process of semantic restructuring. The outcome is the emergence of a new semantic system that becomes increasingly more similar to that of the target language and the remapping of L2 word forms to new meanings. Comprehension and development do not have to be two discrete stages. They can occur simultaneously, for example, when a word is introduced to a learner with a clear indication of how it differs from its L1 translation in meaning. However, the two stages are likely to be sequential for most L2 words due to the complicated semantic relationship between languages. In such a comprehension-development model of lexicosemantic development, the primary research issue is how successful sequential or adult L2 learners will be in semantic restructuring, such that L2 word forms will be eventually remapped to L2-specific meanings. A related question is what factors may affect an L2 learner’s success in semantic restructuring. Earlier research showed that semantic development can be quite limited among many L2 speakers and, as a result, L2 word forms often continue to map with L1 meanings even in relatively advanced L2 speakers (e.g., ElstonGüttler & Williams, 2008; Jiang, 2002, 2004b; Malt & Sloman, 2003; see Jiang, 2018 for a review). We review the research on this topic that was published more recently below. We include a sample of studies that were specifically designed to examine semantic restructuring in L2 learners or bilinguals. Other lexicosemantic development topics have also been explored such as how L2 learning may affect the semantic structures of a learner’s L1 (e.g., Malt et al., 2015; Pavlenko & Malt, 2011), the development of convergence in semantic representation (Ameel et al., 2009; White et al., 2017), and how accessing lexical meaning in L1 is different from that in L2 (e.g., Smith et al., 2019), but they are not covered in this review due to length constraints. The review is organized in terms of the methods used, with experimental studies followed by corpus-based examination of L2 production data. It should be noted that all these studies are related to resetting semantic boundaries. Studies involving the development of new concepts or new semantic features are scarce.

2.3.1  Experimental studies of semantic restructuring Multiple research methods and lexicosemantic structures have been used in this research. One of the methods is a video-based description task where participants are asked to watch a video clip and then describe what happens in the video. In this approach, researchers can design the videos to focus on a specific semantic area and the participants’ use of target words is analyzed as an indication of their semantic development. In one of these studies, Saji and Imai (2013) examined the learning of the Chinese hold/carry verbs by Korean and Japanese learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL). Semantic distinctions are made in Chinese to indicate which part of the body is involved in carrying or holding an object. Thus, Chinese has a rich set of such verbs. In contrast, Korean and Japanese are quite limited in such verbs. To explore CSL learners’ development of the semantic distinctions embodied in these Chinese verbs, Saji and Imai (2013) selected 13 such verbs and created 26 video clips, two for each verb. Japanese and Korean CSL learners were asked to view the video clips and then write down the most appropriate Chinese verb for the action depicted in each video. The results showed that both CSL groups used only a subset of the 13 verbs. More importantly, their use of these verbs was clearly influenced by how the meanings are lexicalized in their L1s. They were more likely to use a specific verb (instead of the general verb na meaning ‘hold/carry’) when such a specific verb existed in their L1. For example, Japanese has a specific verb for holding something on one’s shoul16

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der, katsugu, which is similar to the Chinese verb kang. Japanese CSL participants were found to often use the Chinese verb kang. In contrast, Korean CSL speakers used the general verb na instead, as this meaning of kang is not lexicalized in Korean. In a similar video description study, Alferink and Gullberg (2014) considered the use of placement verbs. A semantic distinction is made in Dutch between placing a vertically and horizontally oriented object. This results in two placement verbs, zetten for placing a vertically oriented object (e.g., a cup) and leggen for placing a horizontally oriented object (e.g., a banana). This distinction is not made in French. The French-Dutch bilingual participants were asked to describe in L1 French and L2 Dutch what happened in a video clip and their performance was compared to that of monolingual French and Dutch speakers. The most important finding in this context was that the participants failed to use the two Dutch verbs as they were distinguished by Dutch native speakers. Instead, they overused leggen for both vertical and horizontal objects. This lack of semantic development in the case of placement verbs has also been reported among Romansh speakers who were highly proficient in L2 German (Berthele, 2012) and in the opposite direction of moving from a more specific to a more general semantic category (Gullberg, 2011). Some researchers, most prominently Malt and her collaborators, examined the topic in the area of object classification. Languages differ in how objects are categorized semantically and lexically. The same object may be named as a bottle in one language but a jar in another. This difference reflects how the semantic space for a particular domain is laid out and structured in different languages. Such differences provide a good opportunity for studying lexicosemantic development by comparing the patterns of object classification among L2 and L1 speakers of the same language. If semantic restructuring has successfully occurred, L2 speakers should show a similar classification pattern to that of the native speakers of the same language. However, if L2 words are mapped to L1 semantic structures, object classification will reflect how these objects are categorized in L1, thus deviating from the classification of native speakers of the target language. Malt and collaborators published a series of studies examining lexicosemantic development in object classification. In Malt et al. (2015), object classification was assessed through a picture-naming task. They asked Chinese-English bilinguals to name pictures of two types of household items (67 dishware and 73 containers) in both L1 Chinese and L2 English, and their performance was compared to that of monolingual Chinese and English speakers. The cross-linguistic differences in object classification was clearly demonstrated in how monolingual English and Chinese speakers named these objects. For example, while a majority of English speakers named 27 objects as bowls, the same set was named with 7 different names in Chinese. More importantly, the naming patterns bilinguals produced in their L2 English was quite different from those of English monolinguals. For example, where mugs and cups are differentiated in English, Chinese-English bilinguals name most of them as cups. The lack of semantic differentiation was particularly pronounced in the domain of containers. Where monolingual English speakers named 73 objects with 13 English names in this domain, the bilingual group used only 6 names. This is consistent with the fact that these objects were named with only four Chinese names by these participants in the Chinese session. They tended to use a more general name bottle for a majority of the items. Where production is involved in studying lexicosemantic development, whether it is video description or picture naming, a lack of nativelike lexical distinction may be due not just to a lack of semantic distinction, as pointed out by Malt and Lebkuecher (2017). Lexical access difficulty may also play a role. For example, the participants in Saji and Imai’s (2013) study may know one has to use ding when the head is involved in carrying, but the word is of lower frequency and less accessible than the much more frequent and semantically more general verb na. As a result, na was selected. The same explanation can be given for the overuse of the verb bottle by the ChineseEnglish bilinguals in Malt et al. (2015), which is more frequent and thus more accessible than canister. Thus, the use of fewer and more general words by L2 speakers may reflect a processing 17

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difficulty associated with semantically more specific and less frequent words rather than a lack of semantic distinctions. This problem can be alleviated to some extent by employing a receptive task that does not require the productive use of the target words. Several studies took this approach. Malt and Lebkuecher (2017) used a forced-choice picture-word matching task. They displayed pictures of dishware or container objects one by one along with a list of possible names for the picture. The participants’ task was to pick the word that they consider most appropriate for naming the object. There were several indications of a difference between the performance of ESL speakers and that of monolingual English speakers. The first was the number of objects that were classified into a single category (i.e., matched to the same word). For example, monolinguals considered 26 of the dishware objects as bowls, but that number was 23 and 20 for higher- and lower-proficiency ESL speakers. The discrepancy was also clear when individual objects were considered. For example, among the seven dishware objects that were considered as dishes by L1 English speakers, they were matched to tray, dish, plate, glass, bowl, and pot among ESL speakers. Additionally, the researchers calculated an agreement score for each participant based on the matching results of monolingual English speakers. This mean agreement score was significantly lower for L2 speakers than for L1 speakers, particularly for the container objects. Thus, changing the task from production to reception did not remove the nonnative patterns among the L2 speakers. Gathercole and Moawad (2010) reported another picture-word matching study where Arabic learners of English were tested with words that were different in semantic boundaries between the two languages (the test items referred to as the “classical categories” in the study). For example, the meaning of the English word folding includes those of the Arabic words yitwi (as in folding clothes) and yirabie (as in folding arms). On the other hand, the Arabic word yistad covers the meanings of hunting and fishing in English. In the experiment, each test item consisted of six pictures presented with a word, and the participants had to decide which of the six pictures could be labelled by the word. The bilingual participants completed the task in both their L1 Arabic and L2 English, and their performance was compared to that of both English and Arabic native speakers. The results showed that the bilingual speakers’ performance in their L1 Arabic was similar to that of monolingual Arabic speakers, but their accuracy scores were significantly lower in L2 English compared to that of L1 English speakers, and this was true for both types of items (i.e., when the English meaning was broader and when the Arabic meaning was broader). It should be noted that the L2 speakers tested in these studies can be best characterized as advanced in L2 proficiency. They were often L2 speakers studying in a higher education institution and living in an L2 environment where they had to use their L2 on a daily basis. The ESL speakers Gathercole and Moawad (2010) tested were not living in an L2 environment, but they were English literature and translation majors at college. Saji and Imai (2013) characterized their Chinese L2 learners as being “able to comprehend and speak Chinese well enough to learn the required college-level class contents in Chinese” (p. 75). The bilingual participants in Alferink and Gullberg (2014) “were functional bilinguals, meaning that they used two languages (French and Dutch) fluently and proficiently on a day-to-day basis” (p. 27). The nonnative patterns shown by these advanced L2 speakers in both production and reception tasks represent compelling evidence for the challenge L2 speakers face in semantic restructuring.

2.3.2  Corpus-based studies of semantic restructuring Other researchers have approached the topic by examining more spontaneous L2 production often taken from an L2 learner corpus. Lindqvist (2010), for example, examined the spontaneous spoken production data from a group of advanced nonnative speakers of French, and instances of meaningbased transfer were found in spite of their high proficiency. In another study, Trimasse (2019) exam18

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ined 600 paragraphs written by EFL university students in Morocco and found a large number of semantic transfer errors (n = 240). From the examples provided by the author, these errors mostly occurred when a distinction was made in English but not in their L1 Arabic. For example, the Modern Standard Arabic verb žamaea or the Moroccan Arabic verb žmε include the meanings of both collect and gather in English. A sentence such as “Our president collected a lot of people to ask them about their problems” clearly indicated a lack of a semantic distinction between the meanings of collect and gather. Assuming that “the complete meaning of a word is always contextual” and “we know a word by the company it keeps” (Firth, 1957, p. 11), an effective way to understand the lexicosemantic development is to examine the contextual or distributional information of L2 word use. Contemporary computerized corpora provide an ideal tool for distributional semantic analysis because well-designed corpora, along with powerful corpus query/analysis tools, allow researchers with ample data to closely examine how exactly a given lexical item is used in context and hence gain an understanding of its meaning and usage. An example of such corpus-analysis studies is reported by Liu (2018). In a corpus of English produced by upper-intermediate Chinese college EFL learners, this study closely examined how they used three English words, circumstance, demand, and significant, which were challenging due to the fact each of the words has one or more semantically related words that are translated into the same Chinese word. For example, circumstance, along with case/environment/situation/setting, can all be translated as qingkuang in Chinese, and circumstance and environment can both be translated into huánjìng. They again represent cases where a semantic distinction is lexicalized in L2 but not in L1. The results revealed some substantial misuse of the three words by Chinese EFL learners. For example, 44% of the tokens of “circumstance” in the corpus represented incorrect uses referring to a physical “environment” or “setting” as shown in the following two examples: “white pollution [the excessive use of paper] is the most serious one to destroy [our] beautiful circumstance” and “to live alone in a total new circumstance is very difficult.” The errors clearly resulted from the fact that the meanings underlying “circumstance” and “environment” are not differentiated and the two words were mapped onto the Chinese meaning of their shared translation huánjìng. As another example of such research, Liu and Zhong’s (2016) cross-sectional study used both corpus and elicited data in examining intermediate and advanced Chinese EFL learners’ use of a set of synonymous nouns (authority/power/right) and a set of synonymous adverbs (erroneously/incorrectly/mistakenly) in comparison with native English speakers’ use of them as a benchmark. The study yielded the following interesting results. First, there was a significant difference across the three groups in the synonym selection performance, with both EFL groups being significantly different from the native English group. The fact that even advanced EFL group’s synonym selection decisions were still significantly different from those of the native English speakers highlights the challenges of semantic restructuring. Second, although the advanced group’s performance was still significantly different from that of the native group, it represented a significantly better approximation towards that of the native speakers than the intermediate EFL speakers’ selection patterns, suggesting some level of semantic restructuring. The third finding was that both EFL groups performed significantly better on high-frequency words than on low-frequency ones in a synonym set. EFL speakers showed greater difficulty with synonym selections in situations where a unique construal of the linguistic context required the use of a less frequent/salient synonym in a set, suggesting that frequency (which may translate to salience) of input plays an important role in semantic restructuring. Several points can be made following this brief review. First, semantic restructuring does occur, as shown in the more nativelike performance by more advanced L2 speakers as compared to lowerproficiency learners (Liu & Zhong, 2016; Malt & Lebkuecher, 2017). At the same time, all published studies reported deviant performance among L2 speakers as compared to that of native speakers, including highly proficient L2 speakers such as those tested in Alferink and Gullberg (2014). These 19

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findings suggest that semantic restructuring can be a long, slow, and often incomplete process. It is also clear that success in lexicosemantic development can be affected by multiple variables such as L2 onset age (Gathercole & Moawad, 2010), frequency of exposure (Liu & Zhong, 2016), frequency of L2 use (Malt et al., 2015), and semantic domains (Malt & Lebkuecher, 2017). There are multiple causes for this slow lexicosemantic development, as suggested by Jiang (2018). For example, where a great deal of semantic overlap exists between an L2 word and its L1 translation, L2 learners are often able to use such words based on their L1 meanings without creating a communication problem. Second, L2 input often does not provide sufficient information to demonstrate to a learner the subtle semantic difference between L2 words. For example, it is difficult to imagine a sentence context that informs an ESL speaker that the word standard is appropriate, but not the word criterion, or vice versa. Furthermore, such semantic differences are often very difficult to describe for instructional purposes, and native speakers are often reluctant to point out a meaning-based lexical error as far as there is no communication difficulty involved. Continued use of L2 words under such circumstances, i.e., with some degree of communication success and with insufficient information from the input, instruction, or feedback for semantic restructuring, will only strengthen the connections between L2 lexical forms and L1 meanings, thus resulting in semantic entrenchment or fossilization for such words.

2.4  Future directions We are just beginning to understand lexicosemantic development in L2 learning. Further progress in this much ignored area in SLA research is dependent on developments on several fronts. The first is a full appreciation of the importance of this topic. Accurate use of an L2 is unlikely without the development of an L2-specific semantic system. Thus, this topic is of paramount importance from a functional perspective. Semantic development is also a complicated cognitive process. Research into this process affords an opportunity for understanding human cognition, and thus is of theoretical significance, as well. Further progress also depends on the progress in two areas. One is more research on contrastive semantics, so that the differences in semantic structures between two languages are better understood. Currently, such contrastive analysis of semantic structures is surprisingly limited. The second is the development of a shared framework for studying semantic representation in L2 and bilingual speakers. Researchers differ in their conception of how meanings are represented. Some treat semantic or conceptual representations as holistic or localist units (e.g., Kroll & Steward, 1994), whereas others adopt a distributed featural approach (e.g., de Groot, 1993). Whereas some researchers advocate for the separation of semantic and conceptual levels of representations (e.g., Pavlenko, 1999), others work within a model where no such a distinction is made (e.g., Duyck & Brysbaert, 2004). A shared model of semantic representations is desirable for studying lexicosemantic development as it affects how semantic structures are described and compared between languages, how the questions of lexicosemantic development are formulated in a specific study, and how the results are interpreted. In sum, an increasing appreciation of the importance of the topic, progress in the contrastive analysis of semantic structures between languages, and a shared conceptual framework of semantic representations are the cornerstones of progress in future research. Finally, further progress in this research can be achieved by expanding the current scope of investigations in at least three directions. First, only a small number of individual semantic domains such as placement verbs and houseware object classification have been explored. Given developments in contrastive semantic analysis, more semantic domains can be examined. Second, current research has primarily focused on resetting the semantic boundaries. This is understandable as differences in semantic boundaries are the most prevalent semantic differences between languages. However, research into the development of new meanings and the incorporation of new features 20

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can equally illuminate the process and outcome of lexicosemantic development in L2. Furthermore, current research has mostly considered the outcomes of lexicosemantic development. Research into the process of lexicosemantic development, e.g., in what ways semantic boundaries are reset, is scarce, perhaps with the exception of research related to convergence and divergence (e.g., White et al., 2017, 2020). However, process-oriented research, albeit more challenging, may offer more insights into the cognition of L2 learning and for pedagogical interventions. As an example, some language-specific semantic distinctions are easy to perceive and understand. For instance, the distinction of the three “wall” words in Spanish, paredes (walls inside a house), muros (walls around a castle), and murallas (walls around a city) can be easily demonstrated with pictures and linguistic contexts. It is interesting to know, under such circumstances, how many exposures with linguistic and nonlinguistic contexts it takes for learners to discover the differences on their own. Such differences may also be explained to learners as explicit knowledge. In this case, how long will it take for them to integrate such knowledge into their developing semantic system, such that they can make use of such distinctions in spontaneous L2 use? From a pedagogical perspective, where verbal explanations are difficult (e.g., for the difference between criterion and standard), what linguistic input and other semanticization methods are useful to help learners discover the semantic distinctions? These questions are all related to the process of development. In short, a great deal of progress is yet to be made before a better picture of lexicosemantic development in L2 learning becomes available.

References Alferink, I., & Gullberg, M. (2014). French–Dutch bilinguals do not maintain obligatory semantic distinctions: Evidence from placement verbs. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17, 22–37. Ameel, E., Malt, B. C., Storms, G., & Van Assche, F. (2009). Semantic convergence in the bilingual lexicon. Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 270–290. Berthele, R. (2012). On the use of PUT verbs by multilingual speakers of Romansh. In A. Kopecka & B. Narasimhan (Eds.), Events of “putting” and “taking”: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 145–166). John Benjamins. Bordag, D., Kirschenbaum, A., Rogahn, M., & Tschirner, E. (2017). The role of orthotactic probability in incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition L1 and L2. Second Language Research, 33, 147–178. Chao, Y. B. (1954). How to cook and eat in Chinese. Echo Point Books & Media, LLC. Choi, S., & Bowerman, M. (1991). Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language specific lexicalization patterns. Cognition, 41, 83–121. De Groot, A. M. B. (1993). Word-type effects in bilingual processing tasks: Support for a mixed-representational system. In R. Schreuder & B. Weltens (Eds.), The bilingual lexicon (pp. 27–52). John Benjamins. Duyck, W., & Brysbaert, M. (2004). Forward and backward number translation requires conceptual mediation in both balanced and unbalanced bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 30, 889–906. Ellis, N. C. (1997). Vocabulary acquisition: Word structure, collocation, word-class, and meaning. In N. Schmitt & M. McCarthy (Eds.), Vocabulary: Description, acquisition and pedagogy (pp. 122–139). Cambridge University Press. Elston-Güttler, K. E., & Williams, J. N. (2008). First language polysemy affects second language meaning interpretation: Evidence for activation of first language concepts during second language reading. Second Language Research, 24, 167–187. Firth, J. R. (1957). Papers in linguistics, 1931–1951. Oxford University Press. Gathercole, V. C. M., & Moawad, R. A. (2010). Semantic interaction in early and late bilinguals: All words are not created equal. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 385–408. Giacobbe, J. (1992). A cognitive view of the role of L1 in the L2 acquisition process. Second Language Research, 8, 232–250. Gullberg, M. (2011). Thinking, speaking, and gesturing about motion in more than one language. In A. Pavlenko (Ed.), Thinking and speaking in two languages (pp. 143–169). Multilingual Matters. Hall, C. J. (2002). The automatic cognate form assumption: Evidence for the parasitic model of vocabulary development. IRAL, 40, 69–88.

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Nan Jiang and Dilin Liu Hall, C. J., & Ecke, P. (2003). Parasitism as a default mechanism in L3 vocabulary acquisition. In J. Cenoz, B. Hufeisen, & U. Jessner (Eds.), The multilingual lexicon (pp. 71–85). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Icht, M., & Mama, Y. (2019). The effect of vocal production on vocabulary learning in a second language. Language Teaching Research. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​%2F1362168819883894 Jackendoff, R. (1990). Semantic structures. MIT Press. Jakobovits, L. A. (1968). Dimensionality of compound-coordinate bilingualism. Language Learning, 18(Suppl 3), 29–55. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/j​.1467​-1770​.1968​.tb00221.x Jiang, N. (2002). Form-meaning mapping in vocabulary acquisition in a second language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24, 617–637. Jiang, N. (2004a). Semantic transfer and development in adult L2 vocabulary acquisition. In P. Bogaards & B. Laufer (Eds.), Vocabulary in a second language: Description, acquisition, and testing (pp. 101–126). Benjamins. Jiang, N. (2004b). Semantic transfer and its implications for vocabulary teaching in a second language. The Modern Language Journal, 88, 416–432. Jiang, N. (2018). Semantic development and L2 vocabulary teaching. In S. Rott & P. Ecke (Eds.), Understanding vocabulary learning and teaching: Implications for language program development (pp. 10–27). Cengage Learning. Kemp, L. S., & McDonald, J. L. (2021). Second language vocabulary acquisition: The effects of semantic relatedness, form similarity, and translation direction. Language Learning, 71(3), 716–756. Kroll, J. F., & Steward, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 149–174. Legault, J., Zhao, J., Chi, Y. A., Chen, W., Klippel, A., & Li, P. (2019). Immersive virtual reality as an effective tool for second language vocabulary learning. Languages, 4, 13. https://doi​.org​/10​.3390​/languages4010013 Lindqvist, C. (2010). Inter- and intralingual lexical influences in advanced learners’ French L3 oral production. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 48, 131–157. Liu, D. (2018). A corpus study of Chinese EFL learners’ use of circumstance, demand, and significant: An indepth analysis of L2 vocabulary use and its implications. Journal of Second Language Studies, 1, 309–333. Liu, D., & Zhong, S. (2016). L2 vs. L1 use of synonymy: An empirical study of synonym use/acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 37, 239–261. Malt, B. C., & Lebkuecher, A. L. (2017). Representation and process in bilingual lexical interaction. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20, 867–885. Malt, B. C., & Sloman, S. A. (2003). Linguistic diversity and object naming by non-native speakers of English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 47–67. Malt, B. C., Li, P., Pavlenko, A., Zhu, H., & Ameel, E. (2015). Bidirectional lexical interaction in late immersed Mandarin–English bilinguals. Journal of Memory and Language, 82, 86–104. Paradis, M. (1981). Contributions of neurolinguistics to the theory of bilingualism. In R. Herbert (Ed.), Applications of linguistic theory in the human sciences (pp. 180–211). Department of Linguistics, Michigan State University. Pavlenko, A. (1999). New approaches to concepts in bilingual memory. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2, 209–230. Pavlenko, A. (2009). Conceptual representation in the bilingual lexicon and second language vocabulary learning. In A. Pavlenko (Ed.), The bilingual mental lexicon: Interdisciplinary approaches (pp. 125–160). Multilingual Matters. Pavlenko, A., & Malt, B. C. (2011). Kitchen Russian: Cross-linguistic differences and first-language object naming by Russian–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14, 19–45. https://doi​.org​/10​ .1017​/S136672891000026X Peters, E., & Webb, S. (2018). Incidental vocabulary acquisition through viewing L2 television and factors that affect learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40, 551–577. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/ S0272263117000407 Saji, N., & Imai, M. (2013). Evolution of verb meanings in children and L2 adult learners through reorganization of an entire semantic domain: The case of Chinese carry/hold verbs. Scientific Studies of Reading, 17, 71–88. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/10888438​.2012​.689788 Smith, Y., Walters, J., & Prior, A. (2019). Target accessibility contributes to asymmetric priming in translation and cross-language semantic priming in unbalanced bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 22, 157–176. Suk, N. (2017). The effects of extensive reading on reading comprehension, reading rate, and vocabulary acquisition. Reading Research Quarterly, 52, 73–89.

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Lexicosemantic development Trimasse, N. (2019). The source of lexical transfer in L3 production in a diglossic context. International Journal of Multilingualism, 16, 398–410. White, A., Malt, B. C., & Storms, G. (2017). Convergence in the bilingual lexicon: A pre-registered replication of previous studies. Frontiers in psychology, 7, 2081. https://doi​.org​/10​.3389​/fpsyg​.2016​.02081 White, A., Malt, B. C., Verheyen, S., & Storms, G. (2020). Development of cross-language lexical influence: Divergence, not convergence. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 23, 241–243. Wierzbicka, A. (1986). Human emotions: Universal or culture‐specific?. American Anthropologist, 88, 584–594. https://doi​.org​/10​.1525​/aa​.1986​.88​.3​.02a00030 Zughoul, M. R. (1991). Lexical choice: Towards writing problematic word lists. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 29, 45–59.

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3 TRANSFER OF REFERENCE Metaphor and metonymy Beatriz Martín-Gascón and Antonio Barcelona

3.1 Introduction Metaphor and metonymy are considered fundamental mechanisms of human conceptualization, as they allow us to “use what we know to infer information about what we do not know” (Littlemore, 2009, p. 107). They are also pervasive components of day-to-day speech and are increasingly becoming an important research topic within the field of second language acquisition (SLA). There exist several factors that account for the growing interest in investigating the relationship between these means of reference transfer and SLA.1 To begin with, metonymy permeates language, for it is a conceptual mechanism and a natural inferencing schema (Panther, 2005). Metaphorical language is also ubiquitous not only in native, but also in non-native learners’ discourse (Nacey, 2013). Speakers use expressions like the ones in examples (1) and (2), since basic daily life experiences with our bodily and motor system have an impact on the way we perceive and talk about the world, which catalyzes conceptual metaphors (e.g., ideas are food, Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 48).2 (1) He devoured the book. (2) We don’t need to spoon-feed our students. A key reason for the growth of interest in the study of metaphor and metonymy stems from cognitive linguistics (CL) research. Scholars following this approach and translating it to spheres of applied research, such as SLA, embrace the claim that metaphor and metonymy, far from being mere rhetorical devices, reflect how we reason and imagine (Gibbs, 2006, p. 3). They are thus essential components in our categorization of the world (Lakoff, 1993). In this sense, both metaphor and metonymy can be exploited for the purposes of familiarization, language recall and retention, breaking obstacles across languages and cultures, linguistic awareness raising and ‘languaging’ (i.e., the process of creating meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language, Swain, 2006, p. 98), among others. As such, they prove to be useful tools for enhancing the language acquisition process. According to Low (2008, p. 213), metaphors help practitioners and learners find and use salient labels for otherwise complex concepts, extend thought, locate problems with a particular conceptualization, and bring about changes. In the remainder of this chapter, we will do our utmost to summarize a rather large body of research in SLA that has examined what is here called “transfer of reference” (using the term “refer-

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DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-4

Transfer of reference

ence” in a broad sense), and more specifically, metaphor and metonymy. A description of metaphor and metonymy is first offered along with an overview of CL analyses of these two conceptual and linguistic phenomena. A critical review of the most relevant studies in SLA, language teaching, and psycholinguistics is then provided. Finally, the chapter concludes with some remarks on future directions for research in the field.

3.2  Metaphor and metonymy Ever since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Metaphors We Live By, the study of metaphor has been approached by numerous scholars confirming and modifying the original basis of the theory of metaphor initially proposed in that seminal work (Barcelona, 2000, 2002a, 2009; Gibbs, 2008; Grady, 1997; Kövecses, 2010, 2017, 2020, 2022, among many others). Metaphors were no longer seen as mainly ornamental devices to embellish language, but as conceptual tools for structuring and restructuring our reality. A standard definition of conceptual metaphor presents it as understanding one (typically abstract) domain of experience in terms of another (typically concrete) domain (Kövecses, 2013, p. 13). In other words, metaphor is perceived, from a cognitivist perspective, as a natural cognitive mechanism where one experiential domain (called source or donor domain) is partially mapped onto a different experiential domain (called target or recipient domain). This latter is to a certain extent understood in terms of the former, so that regularities in the metaphorical expressions we use to refer to a given domain reflect how that domain is conceptually represented (Soriano, 2013, p. 4). Consider, for instance, how phrases used to express anger are frequently associated with heat across languages. Speakers of English and Spanish might use expressions such as ‘be burned up’, ‘breathe fire’ or ‘echar fuego por la boca’ (lit. ‘throw fire out through the mouth’), which correlate the experience of an anger episode with an increase in body temperature (Ekman et al., 1983). According to conceptual metaphor theory, such consistencies reveal a conceptual association between the domain of anger and that of heat, and this can be referred to as the anger is heat conceptual metaphor (e.g., Barcelona & Soriano, 2004; Kövecses et al., 2015; Lakoff & Kövecses, 1987; Ogarkova & Soriano, 2018), where a set of elements of the conceptual structure of the source domain heat are systematically mapped onto a set of conceptual counterparts in the specific target domain anger. This metaphor has its experiential basis in the functioning of the human body and is grounded in the experience that when people are angry, they often feel hot. Metaphor is also a productive way of semantic extension or polysemy (e.g., Deignan, 1999, 2020; Dirven, 1985), as we do not have a unique word for each object, action, or abstract concept. Hence, it is a well-known phenomenon in the lexicon that serves to economize on words by allowing the same word to apply to different concepts, so that existing linguistic resources are exploited without necessarily having to create new ones (see, for instance, how the word hand refers to a body part, but also to help, control, or a worker, among others). In the case of metonymy, the literature has referred to this process in different terms (e.g., transfer of reference, using this term in a narrower sense than in the title of this chapter, Nunberg, 1979, 1995; enriched composition, Jackendoff, 1997). Yet, within the CL framework, it has been addressed with the term metonymy (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987). Although there is consensus on some of its primary properties, definitions vary. A simple definition is given by Barcelona (2010), who describes it as “a cognitive process whereby one concept is used to mentally activate (i.e., ‘to make us think of’) another concept with which it is closely related in experience” (p. 134). Barcelona (2002a, 2011, 2019) offers a somewhat more technical definition that seeks to provide an answer to most problematic issues around this concept, especially to the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, by using such notions as frame (Fillmore, 1985) and pragmatic function (Fauconnier, 1997). He defines metonymy as “an asymmetric mapping of a conceptual entity, the source, onto another conceptual entity, the target. Source and target are in the same frame and their roles are linked 25

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by a pragmatic function, so that the target is mentally activated” (p. 356). Metaphor and metonymy, as processes operating in cognition and reasoning, involve, among other phenomena, transfer of reference, i.e., the substitution of one linguistic form for another in a given context. Metonymy is exemplified linguistically through expressions such as the Kremlin or the White House to refer to the Russian and US governments, respectively. Metonymy, like metaphor, is mainly conceptual, and as such, metonymies such as part for whole underlie utterances such as He’s out to prove he’s more than just a pretty face (British National Corpus), in which the face, the salient part of the body, refers to the whole person. Other linguistic expressions, such as the ones found in examples (3) to (6), are all instances of metonymy in combination with metaphor, operating at more than one linguistic level (Barcelona, 2002b, 2012). (3) (4) (5) (6)

She struggled to resist that boxful of clothes. I’ll venmo you. She loves Mexican food even though she’s never been there. I’m sleeping on the couch tonight.

In example (3), we observe an instance of metonymy under the lexicon, motivating a certain derivational morpheme (Barcelona, 2005, 2009; Palmer, Rader & Clarito et al., 2009; Radden, 2005): {ful}, as in ‘boxful’. This derivational morpheme derives nouns from nouns and originates in the adjective full. A definition adapted from Webster’s and the OED presents its meaning as “the quantity of A that fills or would fill B” (see other examples like, e.g., (an) armful, worldful, bottleful, handful). According to Barcelona (2005, 2009), the standard sense of this morpheme seems to be motivated in part by the metonymy degree to which a container is filled for quantity of container’s content. Yet, the domain of quantity is not activated by the domain of content but by the subdomain degree to which the container is filled within the filling frame. The metonymy underlying the very existence of the now conventional nominal derivational morpheme is a mainly historical metonymy and is not readily perceived by present-day native speakers. But it may be convenient to raise the second language learner’s awareness of its operation to facilitate their acquisition of this morpheme {full} in contrast with the homonymous morpheme represented in A playful manner. Example (4) is an instantiation of how lexical metonymies are not restricted to nouns, as metonymy motivates the emergence of the verb ‘venmo’ from the noun ‘venmo’, which denotes a popular smartphone application designed to transfer payments from one user to another user through connected bank accounts. This can be considered as an instance of noun-verb conversion, and the underlying metonymy is instrument for action (as in Dirven’s 1999 example ‘He was angling’). The metonymy that motivates the recent noun-verb conversion in example (4) (and many other conversions in English) is means for action, since the means is used to denote the corresponding action. Again, the new verb may already be conventional to a native speaker, but it is metonymic and, as a result, non-native speakers can benefit from being made aware of this. Example (5) is also a case of metonymy in grammar, and specifically, of metonymy-induced pronominal anaphor. Langacker (2009) contends that factors that constrain anaphora are conceptual rather than syntactic. In example (5), the real antecedent of ‘there’ is a metonymic target in the dominion of a referent point which is already active in discourse: ‘Mexican food’. Here, the metonymy part (typical food) for whole (country) is at work. In example (6), we see pragmatic inferences motivated by metonymy, and thus metonymy is acting at discourse level. Although more context would be needed to fully infer the intended meaning, our world knowledge tells us that when a speaker utters that he is sleeping on the couch tonight, there must have been a recent row with the person he normally sleeps with in bed and that, as a result, the couple will not share a bed that night: action (the speaker is sleeping on the couch because he is angry with his partner) for result (the couple will not sleep together).3 26

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As we have observed, metonymy is not confined to lexical meaning and often operates under the lexicon (as in morphology) and above it (in discourse). From a theoretical perspective, several studies have examined the metonymic motivation of certain derivational morphemes (e.g., Barcelona, 2005, 2009; Palmer et al., 2009; Panther & Thornburg, 2002; Radden, 2005); metonymy-induced pronominal anaphors (e.g., Langacker, 1993, 1999, 2009; Ruiz de Mendoza & Otal, 2002; Ruiz de Mendoza & Pérez, 2001); and pragmatic inferencing (e.g., Barcelona, 2002b, 2003, 2005, 2009; Panther & Thornburg, 2003).

3.3  Psycholinguistic studies on conceptual metaphor and metonymy For conceptual metaphor theories, a metaphor is not merely a linguistic phenomenon, but also a cognitive mechanism that organizes conceptual structure (Valenzuela & Soriano, 2009, p. 33). Yet, this theoretical account has been the object of a lively debate among psycholinguists, some of whom have questioned the role of conceptual metaphor in online language processing (see, e.g., McGlone, 2007). However, other scholars have conducted experiments examining whether conceptual metaphors are accessible online and have provided support to the claims of conceptual metaphor theories (e.g., Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008; Gibbs et al., 2004; Meier & Robinson, 2004; Torralbo et al., 2006). In this line, studies have also explored metaphor in images (Forceville, 2002; Kövecses, 2020) or gesture (Cienki & Müller, 2008; Walker & Cooperrider, 2016). There has been less psycholinguistic work on metonymy. However, there are studies like the one by Frisson and Pickering (2007), in which they tracked eye movements to examine familiarity effects on the processing of the producer for product regular metonymic pattern. The researchers found that familiar metonymies (e.g., read Dickens) were processed more straightforwardly, whereas unfamiliar metonymies (e.g., read Needham) caused processing problems. Chen and Li (2019) have recently conducted research seeking for evidence regarding contextual effects on the processing of unfamiliar metonymies by Chinese speakers, using eye-tracking methods and examining Chinese materials. The results revealed that there was no processing disparity between metonymic and literal comprehension when the preceding context offered longer information. In another experiment, Rundblad and Annaz (2010) compared the development of metonymy comprehension with metaphor comprehension in English speakers of different ages using an off-line task. They discovered that metonymy interpretation developed over time and was significantly correlated with age and vocabulary development.

3.4  Applications of metaphor and metonymy This section aims to provide a robust picture of the most relevant past and current scholarship in some of the areas where metaphor and metonymy have been applied. Metonymic and metaphoric language serve a wide range of communicative functions, from textual cohesion to euphemism, humor, or irony (Athanasiadou, 2017; Barcelona, 2003; Kuczok, 2015; Littlemore, 2015; Veale et al., 2006). All these play a crucial role in meaning and in the development of discourse communities, hence the importance of enhancing the recognition, understanding and use of metaphor and metonymy for successful SLA. In fact, all the areas in CL have been claimed to shed light into SLA and language teaching (e.g., Achard, 1997; Langacker, 2008; Pütz, 2007; Tyler, 2017). Among the wide range of CL concepts, metaphor and metonymy have been identified as crucial for SLA and teaching in “extracting language knowledge from language use” (Littlemore & Juchem-Grundmann, 2010, p. 2).

3.4.1  Metaphor in SLA Metaphor is to date the most studied cognitive mechanism in applied CL, with a substantial body of research focusing on metaphor application in SLA. A central tenet in CL is that language is moti27

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vated, that is, it is based on bodily, physical, and cultural experiences and the relations between form, meaning, and use are not normally arbitrary (e.g., Gibbs, 1994; Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987). Learners who are conscious of the motivated nature of language are, as a result, more prone to acquire it in an emotionally, pragmatically, and cognitively more effective way (Boers & Lindstromberg, 2008). Boers (2013) argues that this positive likelihood is due to the fact that learners are encouraged to become aware of the relationship between form and meaning of the input, which leads to deep language processing and increased learning gains. In this regard, awareness-raising tasks have been found to be more effective, as they focus learners’ attention on the metaphoric nature of language (Gibbs, 1994). The past 25 years have witnessed an increase of studies exploring the role of metaphor in SLA, including experimental investigations (e.g., Boers, 2000a, 2000b; Boers & Demecheleer, 1998; Tyler, 2012). A number of studies have dealt with enhancing metaphor awareness to facilitate vocabulary acquisition. Yet the scope has not been extended beyond this linguistic area. Investigations have shown that activities that require learners to make associations between metaphorical expressions and their concrete senses, alerting them to the source domains, lead to higher vocabulary retention and open a new channel for vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Boers, 2000a, 2000b, 2001).4 Kalyuga and Kalyuga (2008) recommend introducing vocabulary in metaphorical chunks and activating prior knowledge to lower cognitive overload. Velasco-Sacristán (2009) affirms that metaphor awareness-raising activities boost cross-linguistic awareness and critical thinking, among other skills. Attention has been given to the application of metaphor to the acquisition of prepositions or phrasal verbs (Boers & Demecheleer, 1998; Deignan et al., 1997; Lindstromberg, 1996) and idioms (Kövecses & Szabó, 1996). However, studies have also found that for metaphor acquisition to happen and for metaphor awareness to become a long-term strategy, the corresponding instructional techniques should be applied over a long period and not be confined to a few occasions (Beréndi et al., 2008).

3.4.2  Metaphor in L2 pedagogy The potential benefits of metaphor application to SLA require embracing conceptual metaphor theories as a pedagogical approach. Hoang (2014) argues that this is because metaphor draws learners’ attention to the metaphorization processes in language and thus facilitates the understanding of unfamiliar figurative language (see Kövecses & Szabó, 1996; Yasuda, 2010). The latter is, as we have highlighted, pervasive in everyday speech, and therefore worthy of attention in an instructional environment. Explicitly teaching conceptual metaphor in the classroom relies on the interaction between source and target domains, encourages deep processing, and allows for ‘languaging’ or “making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language” as Swain (2006, p. 98) refers to it. Studies conducted by Csábi (2004) and Kömür and Çimen (2013) have shown that metaphor-based instruction is a complementary option to vocabulary teaching, as it enhances learners’ engagement in learning idioms. In Beréndi et al.’s (2008) experiments, idioms were explicitly presented with their underlying metaphors, and their findings showed significant improvements in learners’ performance. Littlemore and Juchem-Grundmann (2010) highlight how metaphoric thinking potentiates learners’ comprehension of linguistic metaphors that are novel to them and their ability to use language in a creative manner. Lantolf and Bobrova (2014) offer didactic examples to teach metaphors that communicate emotions using colors, animals, and sports as source domains (e.g., being angry is being red, as in Se puso roja de ira or fear is white, as in Se quedó blanco del susto). Acquaroni-Muñoz and Suárez-Campos (2019) demonstrate how working explicitly with metaphors results in characterizing students’ interlanguage and enhancing their metaphoric and communicative competence. A similar proposal is made by Suárez-Campos and Hijazo-Gascón (2019). 28

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3.4.3  Metonymy in SLA In the past decade, empirical studies on the acquisition of metonymy have proliferated, showing the productivity of raising the learners’ metonymic awareness. Among the most remarkable investigations are Chen and Lai’s (2012, 2015) series of empirical studies, which examine Chinese speakers’ awareness of English figurative language. In their (2012) study, Chen and Lai looked at learners’ responses to 40 metonymic and metaphoric expressions. Their findings revealed that learners recognized metaphoric expressions more easily than metonymic ones, yet their performance showed they were able to use their shared experiences to identify figurative language uses. Littlemore, Arizono and May (2016) explored metonymy comprehension by Japanese learners of English. Researchers first asked about the meanings of twenty expressions that included a wide range of metonymy types and found comprehension problems due to the misuse of contextual clues, cross-linguistic influence, and the interpretation of metonymies as if they were metaphors. In the second part of the study, learners were asked to interpret twenty metonymies, each serving a particular function. Findings showed that metonymies involving humor and irony were harder to comprehend than those performing indirect reference and evaluation. Castañeda-Castro and Sánchez-Cuadrado (2021) examined the application of conceptual metonymy in the teaching of the Spanish verbal system to non-native speakers. The authors discussed the advantages of inferential reasoning using metonymy and focused on tense uses involving metonymic processes (i.e., meaning extensions in the preterit and the imperfect). To conclude, they highlighted the pedagogical potential of metonymic and metaphoric reasoning and called for consciousness-raising activities involving meaning paraphrase. As regards psycholinguistic work on metonymy processing involving second language speakers, Slabakova, Cabrelli and Kang (2016) focused on the acceptability of unconventional and conventional metonymy by Korean and Spanish learners of English and found that intermediate learners of English exhibited transfer from their mother tongue in understanding metonymic shifts of meaning. Zibin et al.’s (2020) study also aimed to examine the comprehension of English metonymies by Arabic native speakers. They investigated if and how the learners’ conceptual and linguistic knowledge of metonymies in their native language affects the processing of metonymies in English. Results yielded faulty answers and led the researchers to discuss several factors that might have contributed to participants’ difficulties. Among others, they identified the non-conventionality of metonymies, the non-compositional nature of metonymy processing, the lack of direct exposure to metonymy as a referential device in the target language, and cross-linguistic differences.

3.4.4  Metonymy in L2 pedagogy Unlike research on metaphor, empirical work applying metonymy in L2 pedagogy has been rather scarce. Investigations focusing on this relatively under-researched area have been almost exclusively carried out within the CL framework. Barcelona (2010) and Littlemore (2009) have, however, suggested the importance of explicitly teaching metonymy in the classroom, in line with findings showing that enhanced metaphor awareness facilitates vocabulary retention. Littlemore (2009) cautions about the challenge of metonymy for SLA, since it serves a variety of significant functions in languages (i.e., reference, evaluative attitudes, euphemism, humor, vagueness, and pragmatic inferencing, among others) and its use varies significantly across languages. This author claims that exploiting the conceptual motivation of language is a beneficial departure from a teaching approach that is exclusively communicative. In agreement with evidence of the usefulness of metaphor awareness, a number of general suggestions are included in Littlemore (2009) and further complemented in Barcelona (2010) and Martín-Gascón (2022). In particular, raising learners’ awareness of the pervasiveness of metonymy-guided inferencing and of the role of metonymy inferencing in concept-formation is high29

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Figure 3.1  She remembered the loud crash

Figure 3.2  She remembered the loud dress

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lighted. They suggest a number of practical techniques to this end, one of them being to use some of the main conceptual, cultural, and general contextual factors together with rich metonymy triggers. With regard to the latter technique, a picture could be used of, say, singer Lola Flores, a paragon of Andalusian folklore, with one text saying Lola Flores was one of Spain’s greatest singers and another one displaying María José Llergo es la nueva Lola Flores: ‘María José Llergo is the new Lola Flores’. This activity can activate the metonymy-based understanding of the sentence by English learners of Spanish as a paragon use of the name Lola Flores. Another technique suggested is to exploit the metonymic motivation of conceptual metaphors. This can be especially useful when the metaphor is linguistically represented in a different way in the learner’s mother tongue and in the target language. The metonymic basis of the metaphor deviant colors are deviant sounds (Barcelona, 2019) can be identified using two images of the same person (Barcelona, 2010). Learners can be presented with a picture of a person affected by a strong car crash followed by the sentence She remembered the loud crash (Figure 3.1) along with a second picture in which the same woman remembers a gaudy-colored dress and the text says She remembered the loud dress (Figure 3.2).

3.5  Conclusions and future directions Despite vigorous growth in recent years, research on metaphor and metonymy processing and their application to SLA and language pedagogy still have a long way to go until the practical potential of these mechanisms and their interrelationship with SLA are fully established. Research results so far suggest that SLA will benefit enormously from this synergy, yet more studies are needed to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Among the most urgent aspects, scholars have highlighted the need for more experimental analyses of second language use within natural discourse, conducted both cross-linguistically and longitudinally (e.g., Ellis & Wulff, 2014; Tyler, 2017). In this regard, attention should be given to cross-linguistic explorations of metaphorical and metonymic patterns in native and second languages looking not only at comprehension, but also at production and processing. According to Littlemore (2009, p. 190), future research needs to go beyond the study of experimental and control group and short-term measurable learning gains, and to combine qualitative and quantitative methods longitudinally. Theoretical discussions also need to be translated into classroom implementations to enhance learners’ figurative language acquisition. Implications of metaphor and metonymy research have thus practical repercussions that affect all parts in a classroom environment: from curriculum design and material developing to practitioners and learners. Findings of current literature on metaphor applications have proposed a typology of activities (Acquaroni-Muñoz, 2008; Boers & Lindstromberg, 2009; O’Keeffe & McCarthy, 2010; to name but a few). However, these have not been translated into systematic and teacher-friendly textbooks. Among the possible directions, the following are of immediate interest. First, future experimental research should examine what happens in learners’ minds when producing and listening to metaphorical and metonymic language, to elucidate whether metaphor and metonymy are products of an associative thinking or mere strategic words chosen for communicative purposes. Second, and in line with the first point, it would be of great interest to look at learners’ use of metaphor and metonymy in discourse (e.g., to start a conversation) to observe whether it characterizes idiosyncratic and cultural aspects or whether it is in line with native speakers’ use. Third, theoretical analyses within CL have claimed that many lexical items radially extend their uses by means of metaphor and metonymy. Hence, investigating how learners develop those radial networks could help gain a better insight into how words are acquired (i.e., separately or linked by their different senses). Fourth, metonymy has been found to develop with age (Rundblad & Annaz, 2010), whereas other studies have shown that metaphor is present at very young ages (Piquer-Píriz, 2008a, 2008b, 2011). Nevertheless, how metaphoricity and metonymicity evolve with age and the variances in their use 31

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across age groups are still a mystery. Fifth, when introducing metaphors and metonymies to learners, a question that might arise is in which order they should be presented. Studies evaluating different criteria such as the learners’ linguistic and cultural background, the topic of the lesson or the objective of the activity could raise the benefits of applying these conceptual mechanisms to SLA. This chapter has addressed the current state of metaphor and metonymy research, mainly focusing on SLA, and has offered worthwhile directions for further research. It is expected that metaphor and metonymy will receive the attention they deserve to gain more insight into their processing to promote innovative teaching practices leading to better SLA.

Notes 1 Metaphor and metonymy, as conceived in cognitive linguistics, are fundamentally conceptual processes, rather than substitution or paraphrase processes. The fact that a degree of “reference” transfer does occur in many linguistic manifestations of these processes is a secondary result of their application. The notion “transfers of reference” is used in this chapter because this is a standard term in SLA research, that, if understood broadly enough, can encompass the notions of conceptual metaphor and metonymy. Yet metaphor and metonymy normally go beyond reference and substitution, since they regularly defy literal paraphrase, a point repeatedly made from the very start of conceptual metaphor theory by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). 2 As is customary in cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphors and metonymies are labeled in small capitals throughout this chapter. 3 In sentences (5) and (6), the literal meaning is not the intended meaning. Which is the literal antecedent of there? There is no place mentioned in the preceding context. The inference invited (in the right context) by sentence (6) is not literally expressed at all; it is inferred with the help of context and metonymy. 4 Take, for instance, the description of socio-economic processes (target) in terms of machines and mechanisms (source) (Boers, 2000a: 138).

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Martín-Gascón and Barcelona Frisson, S., & Pickering, M. J. (2007). The processing of familiar and novel senses of a word: Why reading Dickens is easy but reading Needham can be hard. Language and Cognitive Processes, 22(4), 595–613. Gibbs Jr, R. W. (1994). The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and understanding. Cambridge University Press. Gibbs Jr, R. W. (2006). Metaphor interpretation as embodied simulation. Mind & Language, 21(3), 434–458. Gibbs Jr, R. W. (Ed.). (2008). The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. Cambridge University Press. Gibbs Jr, R. W., Lima, P. L. C., & Francozo, E. (2004). Metaphor is grounded in embodied experience. Journal of Pragmatics, 36, 1189–1210. Grady, J. E. (1997). Foundations of meaning: Primary metaphors and primary scenes. University of California. Hoang, H. (2014). Metaphor and second language learning: The state of the field. TESL-EJ, 18(2), 1–27. Jackendoff, R. (1997). The architecture of the language faculty. MIT Press. Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. University of Chicago Press. Kalyuga, M., & Kalyuga, S. (2008). Metaphor awareness in teaching vocabulary. The Language Learning Journal, 36(2), 249–257. Kömür, Ş., & Çimen, Ş. S. (2013). Using conceptual metaphors in teaching idioms in a foreign language context. Sosyal Ve Beşeri Bilimler Araştirmalari Dergisi, (23), 205–222. Kövecses, Z. (2010). Metaphor: A practical introduction. OUP. Kövecses, Z. (2013). The metaphor-metonymy relationship: Correlation metaphors are based on metonymy. Metaphor and Symbol, 28(2), 75–88. Kövecses, Z. (2017). Conceptual metaphor theory. In E. Semino & Z. Demjén (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of metaphor and language (pp. 13–27). Abingdon: Routledge. Kövecses, Z. (2020). Visual metaphor in extended conceptual metaphor theory. Cognitive Linguistic Studies, 7(1), 13–30. Kövecses, Z. (2022). Extended conceptual metaphor theory: The cognition-context interface. Metaphorical Conceptualizations:(Inter) Cultural Perspectives, 45, 23. Kövecses, Z., & Szabó, P. (1996). Idioms: A view from cognitive semantics. Applied Linguistics, 17(3), 326–355. Kövecses, Z., Szelid, V., Nucz, E., Blanco-Carrión, O., Akkök, E. A., & Szabó, R. (2015). Anger metaphors across languages: Cognitive linguistic perspective. In R. Heredia & B. Cieslicka (Eds.), Bilingual figurative language processing (pp. 341–367). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kuczok, M. (2015). Adult drinks and hanky-panky. The types of metonymic motivation in English x-phemisms. Linguistica Silesiana, 111–125. Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. The University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. (1993). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought (second edition) (pp. 202–251). Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. The University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G., & Kövecses, Z. (1987). The cognitive model of anger inherent in American English. In D. Holland & N. Quinn (Eds.), Cultural models in language and thoughts (pp. 195-–21). Cambridge University Press. Langacker, R. W. (1993). Reference-point constructions. Cognitive Linguistics, 4, 1–38. Langacker, R. W. (1999). Grammar and conceptualization. Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive grammar as a basis for language instruction. In P. Robinson & N. C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 66–88). Routledge. Langacker, R. W. (2009) (Ed.). Investigations in cognitive grammar. Berlin–New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lantolf, J. P., & Bobrova, L. (2014). Metaphor instruction in the L2 Spanish classroom: Theoretical argument and pedagogical program. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 1(1), 46–61. Lindstromberg, S. (1996). Prepositions: Meaning and method. ELT Journal, 50(3), 225–236. Littlemore, J. (2009). Applying cognitive linguistics to second language learning and teaching. Palgrave Macmillan. Littlemore, J. (2015). Metonymy. Cambridge University Press. Littlemore, J., & Juchem-Grundmann, C. (Eds.). (2010). Applied cognitive linguistics in second language learning and teaching. AILA Review, 23(1), 178. Littlemore, J., Arizono, S., & May, A. (2016). The interpretation of metonymy by Japanese learners of English. Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association, 14(1), 51–72. Low, G. (2008). Metaphor and education. In R. W. Gibbs, Jr. (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought (pp. 212–231). Cambridge University Press.

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Transfer of reference Martín-Gascón, B. (2022). Metonymy in Spanish/L2 teaching: A cognitive analysis of color idioms and their inclusion in the Córdoba project database. In G. Corpas Pastor & R. Mitkov (Eds.), Computational and corpus-based phraseology (pp. 146–159). Springer. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/978​-3​-031​-15925​-1​_11 McGlone, M. (2007). What is the explanatory value of a conceptual metaphor? Language & Communication, 27(2), 109–126. Meier, B. P., & Robinson, M. D. (2004). Why the sunny side is up: Associations between affect and vertical position. Psychological Science, 15, 243–247. Nacey, S. (2013). Metaphors in learner English (Vol. 2). John Benjamins Publishing. Nunberg, G. (1979). The non-uniqueness of semantic solutions: Polysemy. Linguistics and Philosophy, 3, 143–184. Nunberg, G. (1995). Transfers of meaning. Journal of Semantics, 12, 143–184. Ogarkova, A., & Soriano, C. (2018). Metaphorical and literal profiling in the study of emotions. Metaphor and Symbol, 33(1), 19–35. O’Keeffe, A., & McCarthy, M. (Eds.). (2010). The Routledge handbook of corpus linguistics (Vol. 10). Routledge. Palmer, G., Rader, R. S., & Clarito, A. D. (2009). The metonymic basis of a ‘semantic partial’: Tagalog lexical constructions with ka. In Metonymy and metaphor in grammar (pp. 111–144). John Benjamins. Panther, K. U. (2005). The role of conceptual metonymy in meaning construction. In F. J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez & S. Peña Cervel (Eds.), Cognitive linguistics: Internal dynamics and interdisciplinary interaction (pp. 353–386). Mouton de Gruyter. Panther, K. U., & Thornburg, L. (2002). The roles of metaphor and metonymy in English -er nominals. In R. Dirven & R. Pörings (Eds.), Metaphor and metonymy in comparison and contrast (pp. 279–319). Mouton de Gruyter. Panther, K. U., & Thornburg, L. (Eds.). (2003). Metonymy and pragmatic inferencing. John Benjamins. Piquer-Píriz, A. M. (2008a). Reasoning figuratively in early EFL: Some implications for the development of vocabulary. Applications of Cognitive Linguistics, 6, 219. Piquer-Píriz, A. M. (2008b). Young learners’ understanding of figurative language. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, 173, 183–198. Piquer-Píriz, A. (2011). Motivated word meanings and vocabulary learning: The polysemy of hand in the English for Young Learners classroom. Metaphor and the Social World, 1(2), 154–173. Pütz, M. (2007). Cognitive linguistics and applied linguistics. In D. Geeraerts & H. Cuyckens (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics (pp. 1139–1159). OUP. Radden, G. (2005). The ubiquity of metonymy. In J. L. Otal Campo, I. Navarro, I. Ferrando, & B. Bellés Fortuño (Eds.), Cognitive and discourse approaches to metaphor and metonymy (pp. 11–28). Universitat Jaume I. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, F. J., & Otal Campo, J. L. (2002). Metonymy, grammar and communication. Comares. Ruiz de Mendoza, F., & Pérez, L. (2001). Metonymy and the grammar: Motivation, constraints and interaction. Language and Communication, 21(4), 321–357. Rundblad, G., & Annaz, D. (2010). Development of metaphor and metonymy comprehension: Receptive vocabulary and conceptual knowledge. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 28(3), 547–563. Slabakova, R., Cabrelli Amaro, J., & Kang, S. K. (2014). Regular and novel metonymy: Can you curl up with a good Agatha Christie in your second language? Applied Linguistics, 37(2), 1–24. Slabakova, R., Cabrelli Amaro, J., & Kang, S. K. (2016). Regular and novel metonymy: Can you curl up with a good Agatha Christie in your second language? Applied Linguistics, 37(2), 175–197. Soriano, C. (2013). Conceptual metaphor theory and the GRID paradigm in the study of anger in English and Spanish. In J. J. R. Fontaine, K. R. Scherer, & C. Soriano (Eds.), Components of emotional meaning: A sourcebook (pp. 410–424). OUP. Suárez-Campos, L., & Hijazo-Gascón, A. (2019). La metáfora conceptual y su aplicación a la enseñanza del español LE/L2. In I. Ibarretxe, T. Cadierno, & A. Castañeda (Eds.), Lingüística cognitiva y español LE/L2 (pp. 235–252). Routledge. Swain, M. (2006). Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language proficiency. In H. Byrnes (Ed.), Advanced language learning: The contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky (pp. 95–108). Continuum. Torralbo, A., Santiago, J., & Lupiáñez, J. (2006). Flexible conceptual projection of time onto spatial frames of reference. Cognitive Science, 30, 745–757. Tyler, A. (2012). Cognitive linguistics and second language learning: Theoretical basics and experimental evidence. Routledge. Tyler, A. (2017). Second language acquisition. In B. Dancygier (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of cognitive linguistics (pp. 73–90). CUP.

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Martín-Gascón and Barcelona Valenzuela, J., & Soriano, C. (2009). Are conceptual metaphors accessible online? A psycholinguistic exploration of the CONTROL IS UP metaphor. In J. Valenzuela, A. Rojo & C. Soriano (Eds.), Trends in cognitive linguistics: Theoretical and applied models (pp. 31–50). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Veale, T., Feyaerts, K., & Brone, G. (2006). The cognitive mechanisms of adversarial humor. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 19(3), 305–338. Velasco-Sacristán, M. S. V. (2009). A translation approach to metaphor teaching in the LSP classroom: Sample exercises from a Business English syllabus. Ibérica, 17, 83–98. Walker, E., & Cooperrider, K. (2016). The continuity of metaphor: Evidence from temporal gestures. Cognitive Science, 40(2), 481–495. Yasuda, S. (2010). Learning phrasal verbs through conceptual metaphors: A case of Japanese EFL learners. TESOL Quarterly, 44(2), 250–273. Zibin, A., Altakhaineh, A. R. M., & Hussein, E. T. (2020). On the comprehension of metonymical expressions by Arabic-speaking EFL learners: A cognitive linguistic approach. Topics in Linguistics, 21(1), 45–61.

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4 THINKING FOR SPEAKING Emanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopoulos

Introduction At the heart of linguistic diversity is the fact that languages across the world differ with regard to the grammatical and lexical categories they have at their disposal. For instance, some languages have grammatical gender, others do not; some languages have tense marking, whereas other languages lack such marking. A natural consequence of this diversity is that the experience of reality may be differently described by speakers of different languages. Imagine, for instance, that you see a dog on a lawn running into a greenhouse. If someone asks you what happened, you might describe the event in English as “The dog ran into the greenhouse”. If you speak a language with the grammatical category of evidentiality (e.g., Turkish), you will need to add a marker conveying that the event was witnessed first-hand. If you speak a language that marks aspectual contrasts (e.g., Russian or Spanish), you will need to mark the verb for whether the event was completed or not. If you speak a language that systematically encodes animacy (e.g., Telugu), you will need to mark the dog and the greenhouse differently, according to their status as sentient/non-sentient. The list can be made long, as crosslinguistic differences of this type are well-documented within typology. However, a contested issue concerns whether these differences in linguistic categories have any consequences for the way in which you think about reality. More specifically, does the need to use your language’s specific lexical and grammatical categories require you to think in a specific way when talking? According to Slobin’s (1996) hypothesis of Thinking-for-Speaking (TFS), linguistic categories indeed exert such an effect. The present chapter summarises current research on the TFS and second language (L2) acquisition. In doing so, the scope and predictions of the TFS hypothesis are first presented, followed by a section on the methodological paradigms of TFS research. Subsequently, TFS research within psycholinguistics and bi-/multilingualism is summarised. Against this background, the chapter proceeds to review the studies investigating TFS processes in L2 learners specifically. The chapter closes with a series of methodological recommendations for future inquiry.

Thinking-for-Speaking: definition, scope, and predictions In essence, the TFS holds that when an individual is in the process of preparing content for speech, the grammatical and lexical categories of their language will channel their attention in specific ways.

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-5

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For instance, a speaker of a language with the grammatical category of evidentiality will need to retrieve information about the source of the statements they make, whereas this will not be the case for a speaker whose language does not encode evidentiality on an obligatory basis. The same principle of attention-channelling would apply to other grammatical and lexical categories (e.g., number, gender, aspect, tense). The cognitive consequence of this, according to Slobin (1996), is that a particular form of language-specific thought is “mobilized for communication” (p. 76). The focus of TFS is thus on the thought processes that occur in relation to speech. Owing to this focus, TFS is different from other approaches to language and thought, subsumed under notions such as “linguistic relativity”, the “Whorfian hypothesis”, or the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” (see chapter by Athanasopoulos & Bylund, this volume). Because these latter approaches are typically concerned with the effects of linguistic categories on habitual cognitive and perceptual processing (e.g., Levinson, 2012; Lucy, 1992), they seek to assess thought as independently as possible from speech (i.e., thought as it occurs outside of overt speech production and comprehension). Most research on TFS to date has centred on motion events. In its most generic definition, a motion event entails physical displacement: an object occupies different spatial positions at different points in time. The scene described above with the dog running into a greenhouse is an example of a motion event. The diversity found in how languages across the world express motion has constituted the starting point for TFS research. Compare the following examples: (1)

(1)

a.

b.

Motion event (Swedish) Hunden sprang in i The dog ran into ‘The dog ran into the greenhouse.’

växthuset. the greenhouse.

Motion event (Spanish) El perro entró (corriendo) The dog entered (running) ‘The dog entered the greenhouse.’

en in

el invernadero. the greenhouse.

In Swedish, the manner in which the dog enters the greenhouse is encoded in the main verb (springa, ‘to run’). Information about the trajectory, or path, of the motion is conveyed in the particle construction in i (‘into’). Spanish, in contrast, encodes information about the path in the main verb (entrar, ‘to enter’), and only optionally conveys information about manner through an adjunct (the gerundive form of correr, ‘to run’). Languages that encode manner of motion in the main verb and path of motion in a particle, such as Swedish and other Germanic languages, for this type of events are called “satellite-framed languages”. Languages that instead encode path of motion in the main verb, as is the case of Spanish and other Romance languages, are labelled “verb-framed languages” (Talmy, 2000).1 A third group, so-called equipollent languages, has also been identified, in which manner and path are encoded with equal salience through serial verb constructions (e.g., Zlatev & Yangklang, 2004). Slobin (1996) suggests that in the process of acquiring their first language (L1), children also acquire a certain way of thinking for speaking. Because both verb-framed and satellite-framed languages encode path (albeit in different constituents), children who acquire these language types must learn to attend to this dimension. Children who acquire a satellite-framed language would also learn to pay attention to the manner in which objects move, as this feature has to be encoded when describing motion in this language type. In contrast, children who acquire a verb-framed language would be less prone to pay the same amount of attention to manner of motion. From this perspective, L1 acquisition can be viewed as a process of learning to take particular points of view during 38

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speech production. In view of this reasoning, Slobin (1996) goes on to suggest that the attention/ viewpoint patterns acquired during L1 acquisition are “exceptionally resistant” to restructuring in second language (L2) acquisition. To support this idea, Slobin cites research (Perdue, 1993) showing that learners have more difficulty acquiring those grammatical categories of the L2 that are not found in the L1.

Methodological approaches to Thinking-for-Speaking Empirical studies on the topic of TFS have made use of a wide array of methodological techniques. The early investigations (Berman & Slobin, 1994) used a wordless picture book (Frog, where are you? by M. Mayer) as the main tool of data collection. Speakers of different ages and different languages were asked to use the pictures to retell the story of a little boy who goes looking for a runaway frog. Transcriptions of the retellings were analysed with regards to narrative content, in particular the grammatical and lexical devices used for expressing spatial and temporal relations. Comparisons between languages then allowed the identification of crosslinguistic differences in how information about time and space was described. The elicited narratives, established with the 1994 publication, have largely served as a methodological blueprint for subsequent research. Early publications on L2 speakers either used the exact same experiment (i.e., retellings of Frog, where are you?), or a similar paradigm (e.g., picture cards) (e.g., Verhoeven & Strömqvist, 2001). Another frequently used technique is video retelling, whereby the speaker watches a video clip (of varying length) and either simultaneously or subsequently retells its content (e.g., Bylund, 2011b). This technique is particularly suitable for studying the TFS of motion events: because motion is an inherently dynamic phenomenon, depicting it with video, rather than with static pictures, affords ecological validity to the experimental design (e.g., Cadierno, 2010; Hickmann & Hendriks, 2010; von Stutterheim & Nüse, 2003). There are also methods that go beyond speech itself with the intention to probe other ways of gaining insight into the thought processes that TFS purports to take place during the act of speaking. One such method involves studying the gestures that accompany speech (e.g., Özçalişkan, 2016). Under the view that gestures are a semiotic modality that represent a window onto human thought, the argument here is that important information about conceptual processing during speech production can be obtained through gesture, because speech and gesture rely on the same representational system (McNeill, 1992). The focus is typically on so-called “co-speech gestures”, which are gestures that co-occur with speech. Investigating such gestures can prove useful for TFS purposes, as demonstrated by McNeill (2001): in this study, it was shown that even though Spanish speakers may not encode manner of motion in speech, they may nonetheless encode it in gesture. For instance, whilst expressing example (1b) (without the optional participle), the speaker can point their index finger and middle finger downwards and move them crosswise in a swift pendular motion to simulate the act of running. Such a finding would have consequences for any claims made about the speaker not paying attention to manner because of its absence in speech, as it clearly shows this dimension of the motion event is attended to, but simply not conveyed through the spoken word. Another method in TFS research that may complement speech data is eye-tracking. Because TFS is by and large concerned with how linguistic categories channel speaker attention, recording the allocation of visual attention in relation to speech production provides researchers with a direct way of addressing this question. For instance, because speakers of verb-framed languages typically encode path of motion in the main verb, TFS predicts greater attention to path components for this speaker group compared to satellite-framed language speakers. In a study of these issues, Papafragou and associates (2008) showed that speakers of Greek (a verb-framed language) allocated a greater degree of visual attention to path components whilst describing motion events, whereas speakers of English (a satellite-framed language) instead focused more on components of manner. These patterns 39

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of language-specific attention allocation were only present in conditions that required participants to produce speech, not during free inspection of motion event scenes.

Overview of TFS research Because TFS concerns thought processes during speech production, it is often linked to Levelt’s (1989) model of speech production. Specifically, TFS processes are assumed to occur during the first stage of speech production, called conceptualisation. The process of conceptualisation entails so-called macroplanning and microplanning. The former concerns selecting the information that is to be verbalised (i.e., deciding ‘what to say’), whereas the latter concerns organising that information in a specific way (i.e., deciding ‘how to say it’). In Levelt’s original model, only the processes pertaining to microplanning were assumed to be language-specific, whereas macroplanning was regarded as a universal process, the outcome of which would not differ between languages. Crosslinguistic research in the TFS tradition later showed that linguistic categories may indeed compel speakers to not only organise information differently, but also to select different pieces of information for verbalisation. For instance, the category of imperfective aspect has been shown to influence both micro- and macroplanning (von Stutterheim & Nüse, 2003). Imagine a scene where a man is busy preparing a slow roast. He throws various spices into a bowl for the marinade, pours the marinade over the meat and puts it into the oven. Speakers of German, a language that does not have imperfective aspect, would be likely to describe the situation as in example (2a). A speaker of English, in contrast, would be more likely to do it as in example (2b). (2)

a.

Event series (anaphoric linkage) “A man mixes different ingredients into a bowl, he then pours it over the meat, and then he puts the meat in the oven.”

(2)

b.

Event series (deictic linkage) “A man is mixing different ingredients in a bowl, he’s holding the bowl, pouring its contents over the meat, now he’s opening the oven drawer and places the meat inside.”

In these examples, there is a difference in the information selected, that is, in the macroplanning or the ‘what to say’: in the English retelling, the situation is broken up into more detailed events, whereas in the German retelling, the events are less granular and more holistic. There is also a difference in information organisation, that is, in the microplanning or the ‘how to say it’: in German, the temporal order of events is often explicitly conveyed through the use of anaphoric adverbials (‘then’), whereas in English, event order is often left to be inferred (von Stutterheim et al., 2003). These differences in event conceptualisation are arguably a result of the fact that imperfective aspect (and its subcategories, e.g., progressive aspect) renders the internal phase of events salient. When confronted with an unfolding event sequence, speakers of languages with imperfective aspect are then more likely to adopt an internal event perspective, which implies segmenting situations into more granular ongoing events. Speakers of languages that lack imperfective aspect can of course conceptualise events in this way, but they are less likely to do so because there is no category that systematically guides their attention to event-internal phases. In their extensive crosslinguistic comparisons of the frog story retellings, Slobin and Berman (1994) compared speakers of the same language at different ages in order to track the development of languagespecific ways of conceptualising events. Convergence with adult behaviour was often shown to occur towards the end of the first decade of life. Tracking the development of L1 patterns is important from an L2 perspective: as discussed above, the TFS predicts that once the L1 patterns have been laid down, they will interfere with the learning of an L2. Implicit in the prediction that L1 patterns are exceptionally resistant to restructuring is also the idea that they are unlikely to change under the influence of an L2. Research on 40

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heritage language acquisition and L1 attrition confirms this notion to a certain extent. Speakers who experienced reduced contact with the L1 in childhood, either because the L1 was always scarcely represented outside the home or because they moved from an L1-dominant to an L2-dominant environment, have been found to exhibit L2 influence in their L1 TFS patterns (e.g., Bylund, 2009b; Daller et al., 2011; Hohenstein et al., 2006; Pavlenko, 2010). For instance, Bylund (2009b) found that L1 Spanish speakers who grew up in Sweden (where Spanish is a minority language) encoded motion endpoints (e.g., a person walking to a house, vs. a person walking) to a greater extent than L1 Spanish speakers who grew up in Spanishspeaking countries. This was presumably because of influence from their L2 Swedish, which expresses motion endpoints with greater frequency than Spanish. There seems to be an age dimension to these findings, in the sense that the more the L1 contact is reduced in the second decade of life or later, the less the L1 conceptualisation patterns are subject to L2 influence (note nonetheless that L1 TFS patterns may still be subject to restructuring in adult speakers). There may be various reasons behind this tendency. It could be the case, as proposed by Slobin (1996), that, once L1 patterns have been acquired (which is often towards the end of the first decade), they consolidate and exhibit less flexibility. However, there is also a change in the susceptibility to loss of L1 knowledge in general at the end of the first decade/beginning of the second decade (Bylund, 2009a; Montrul, 2008), in the sense that past this time window, L1 proficiency is less dependent on L1 contact in order to be retained. The fact that the attainment of TFS patterns coincides with a change in attrition susceptibility makes it difficult to determine whether one of these factors is boosting the retention of L1 patterns more than the other. If TFS phenomena represent a domain of language that is affected by age factors in the same way as other domains of language (e.g., syntax and morphology), it would be reasonable to assume that it is the change in attrition susceptibility, not the attained mastery of TFS patterns, that underlies L1 pattern retention. Research into developmental aspects of TFS and bilingualism has yet to determine whether this is indeed the case.

Thinking-for-Speaking in a second language If you think in distinct ways when speaking your L1, what happens if you learn an additional language with contrasting linguistic categories? Will you acquire new ways of thinking, or will you still think in an L1-specific fashion when using the L2? The original prediction of the TFS, which at the time was largely uninformed by empirical data, indeed holds that L1 transfer is the likely outcome in this scenario. Since then, a considerable amount of empirical data has been collected and the picture that emerges is more nuanced than was previously assumed. With regards to the construal of motion, it has been found that at early stages of L2 acquisition, learners are likely to exhibit L1 transfer. For instance, to describe the event of a man running into a house, Cadierno (2010) found that learners of L2 Danish (a satellite-framed language) with L1 Spanish (a verb-framed language) were likely to use non-manner verbs in their narrations. Consider the following examples: (3)

a.

Motion event (L2 Danish) Manden kommer ‘The man comes

ind i into

huset. the house.’

(3)

b.

Motion event (L1 Danish) Manden løber ‘The man runs

ind i into

huset. the house.’

In example (3a), the particle construction ind i (‘into’), used to convey path, is target-like, and the sentence is grammatically correct. However, the learner’s choice to use the verb komme (to come), which is void of manner information, to encode the motion of running is different from the pref41

Emanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopoulos

erence of L1 Danish speakers, who instead use the manner verb løbe (‘to run’). The verb choice resembles the way in which motion would be expressed in Spanish (with information of manner typically left unspecified or encoded in a gerundive construction) and is thus indicative of L1 transfer (Cadierno, 2010). Studies have found that this type of L1 influence tends to become less frequent as proficiency in the L2 increases, and that advanced learners may actually converge with native speakers of the target language (e.g., Cadierno & Ruiz, 2006; Donoso & Bylund, 2014; Lewandowski & Özçalışkan, 2021). (See, however, Hohenstein et al., 2006 for a different finding.) To further test the interpretation that such omission of manner information is really a product of the typology of the learner’s L1, patterns of manner and path encoding are often compared across learners whose L1s fall on different sides of the verb-framed/satellite-framed dichotomy. To this end, Cadierno (2010) included a group of L1 German learners of Danish. The fact that these learners, whose L1 is in the same satellite language category as Danish, did not exhibit the same degree of manner omission as the L1 Spanish learners was taken as evidence in support of the transfer interpretation. It is, however, not always the case that L2 learners exhibit non-targetlike forms that are consistent with the L1 typology. For instance, Brown (2015) examined manner and path construal in Japanese (a verb-framed language) and Mandarin-Chinese (a so-called “equipollent language”2) learners of L2 English. Contrary to what would be predicted on the basis of the learner L1 typologies, she found that both groups were sparse in their encoding of manner in L2 English. These similarities were attributed to two different sources. First, the fact that English has a large inventory of manner verbs likely constitutes a challenge for the L2 English learner, who will have to master a non-negligible amount of specific motion vocabulary in order to encode manner in a target-like fashion. In other words, manner encoding among L2 learners in part depends on the size and depth of the L2 lexicon. The second reason why differences between L1 groups were not found relates to the different prominence of manner and path. According to Talmy (2000), path is conceived of as a more integral part of motion than manner, presumably because the physical displacement that is the essence of motion inevitably occurs along a path. Therefore, attention to path is likely to take priority over attention to manner, rendering manner a component that can more easily be left out in speech. Another factor of importance in the acquisition of motion event construal concerns the typology of the target-language. Judging from the available evidence, the rate of acquisition seems to be larger going from an L1 satellite-framed language to an L2 verb-framed language than the other way around (Lewandowski & Özçalışkan, 2021). In their study of L1 English–L2 French (a verb-framed language) learners, Hendriks and Hickmann (2015) found that, even at early stages of acquisition, path was often encoded in the main verb, much in line with French native-speaker preferences. Cadierno (2004) recorded a similar behaviour in her study of L1 Danish–L2 Spanish learners. However, even if their verb usage mostly patterns with native speakers, these learners may still exhibit idiosyncratic path constructions, such as “satellisation”, whereby path information is encoded in particles not found in the target language (Cadierno, 2004). Examples (4a) and (4b) concern the description scene in Frog Story where the boy climbs onto a boulder: (4)

a.

Motion event without satellisation (L1 Spanish) El niño se subió a una roca. ‘The boy ascended to a rock.’

(4)

b.

Motion event with creative satellisation (L2 Spanish) *El niño fue arriba de una roca. ‘The boy went on top of a rock.’

42

Thinking for speaking

Spanish does not normally allow the construction in (4b), as the preposition arriba (‘on top’) cannot convey directed motion. Analyses of co-speech gesture have revealed that while L2 learners may still verbally express path and manner information consistently with the target-language preferences, their gesture might convey different information. For instance, in her longitudinal case study of an L2 English speaker with Spanish as L1, Stam (2015) documented that while the speaker would talk about motion in a targetlike manner (e.g., using manner verbs as main verbs and encoding path information in particles), she still resorted to L1 gestural patterns. This would suggest that even though the speaker had mastered the linguistic forms of event construal, her conceptualisation of motion was still different from L1 speaker patterns. Interestingly, it was also found that in those instances of non-targetlike construal in which manner of motion was not encoded in speech, it was nevertheless encoded in gesture, suggesting that the speaker was still attending to manner, albeit gesturally as opposed to verbally. Moving beyond the encoding of manner and path of motion, research on grammatical aspect and conceptualisation offers an opportunity to study how larger chunks of information are selected and organised. Here, it has been found that even at very advanced levels of L2 acquisition, learners still exhibit L1-influenced ways of construing events (von Stutterheim, 2003; von Stutterheim et al., 2021). In view of this, it has been hypothesised that, much in line with the predictions of TFS, adult L2 learners may never come to fully master the ways in which information is organised in the target language (Carroll & von Stutterheim, 2003). In a test of this, Bylund (2011a) studied patterns of event segmentation and temporal structuring in L2 speakers of Swedish with Spanish as L1. Swedish, a language without imperfective aspect (similar to German), prefers coarse larger event units and links these by means of anaphoric temporal adverbials (“event a, then event b”). Spanish, in contrast, has imperfective aspect and prefers fine-grained event segments and implicit temporal linkage between the events (“event a, event b”). The L2 speakers, who were adults at the time of testing, had acquired Swedish between 1 and 19 years of age (average length of stay in Sweden was 24 years), and they were selected because of their seemingly nativelike proficiency in a screening interview. An analysis of the elicited retellings showed that the L2 speakers used anaphoric linking to the same extent as the L1 Swedish group, independently of age of L2 acquisition. However, it was also found that the L2 group exhibited higher granularity than the L1 Swedish group in their event segmentation (yet not as high as the L1 Spanish monolingual group), and this behaviour too was unaffected by age of acquisition. Because both early and late learners showed the same segmentation pattern, it is important to ask whether non-convergence with native speakers really was an L2 phenomenon, or whether this could be a consequence of the co-existence of two languages in one mind. Other studies on TFS and language and cognition in general have found that bilingual individuals may behave differently in each of their languages compared to monolingual speakers. For instance, this was found for a group of early Spanish–Swedish bilinguals (Bylund, 2011b), who exhibited the same event granularity in each of their languages, different from monolingual patterns. This finding would then support the interpretation that the idiosyncratic event segmentation found in the L2 speaker group was an effect of functional bilingualism rather than L2 acquisition. Moreover, these findings suggest that the mastery of TFS patterns is not subject to age of acquisition effects as other domains of language may be (e.g., syntax or phonology). This would challenge Slobin’s (1996) prediction about the non-attainment of nativelike L2 TFS patterns due to attentional biases acquired during L1 acquisition. It may be that the mastery of TFS patterns occurs only at more advanced levels of L2 development, but existing evidence suggests that they are nonetheless attainable. In those instances where nativelike attainment is not found, it is important to consider the possibility that the exhibited behaviour – rather than being an L2 effect – may be a result of the co-existence of two language-specific TFS patterns in one mind. 43

Emanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopoulos

Future directions Research on TFS and L2 acquisition has come a long way since its inception in the 1990s. The accumulated evidence paints a picture of thinking processes in speech production that is more complex than initially conceived of – as is often the case once empirical data start informing theoretical standpoints. An important question here concerns at what level of L2 development target-like mastery actually occurs. A problematic aspect is that, even though the studies published to date do characterise their participants in terms of proficiency (e.g., “beginners”, “intermediate, “advanced”, “near-native”), no unitary proficiency test has been employed to allow for more precise and objective characterisations. Because of this, there is little possibility to draw more informed conclusions across studies as to the progression of TFS patterns in relation to L2 development in general. As suggested by Brown and Gullberg (2012) and implemented by, for instance, Lewandowski and Özçalışkan (2021), one way is to draw on instruments such as the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR, Council of Europe, 2001) to produce L2 speaker descriptions that would allow for greater generalisability across samples. This, in turn, would serve to link the acquisition of TFS patterns to other developmental stages of L2 learning. Another issue that is worthy of attention relates to the thinking processes that are assumed to take place during speech production, that is, the very essence of TFS. A large number of studies rely on elicited speech as their primary source of evidence. As argued elsewhere (Athanasopoulos & Bylund, 2013), it is problematic to use speech alone as an indicator of cognitive and perceptual processing. This is evident from studies that analyse both speech and gesture, showing a discrepancy between the semantic distinctions encoded in each of these modalities. Had data on gesture not been collected, it would have been easy to (erroneously) conclude that the learner’s speech production was indeed indicative of their thought content during speaking. In research on linguistic relativity, it has been a long-standing endeavour to make use of various experimental techniques to uncover the influence of language on thought. A similar methodological aspiration should permeate TFS research: even though TFS concerns thinking during speech production, there are ways other than analysing speech alone to arrive at a more nuanced picture of TFS processes. Gesture is, in other words, one type of co-verbal behaviour that has a demonstrated potential in this regard. Another such co-verbal measure is visual attention allocation. Here studies have shown that even though speakers may differ in what components of a scene they choose to mention (e.g., motion endpoints), they might still visually attend to these components, but do so on different time scales (e.g., looking at the endpoint before or during mention: von Stutterheim et al., 2012). Findings of this kind are crucial for testing the predictions made by the TFS regarding the channelling of attention during speech. The importance of using co-verbal measures relates to what Lucy (1997) calls the “effects of language on language”, which rests on the fact that language use is rule-governed: we express what the lexical and grammatical categories of our language(s) demand us to encode. For instance, speakers of a language with grammatical gender cannot choose not to encode gender, because it is commanded by the grammar. Likewise, speakers of a verb-framed language may sometimes not encode manner in the main verb because the grammar simply does not allow it. In other words, just because language compels us to express ourselves in certain ways, it does not follow that language compels us to think in those same ways. It is therefore only really possible to test the TFS as a hypothesis as long as there are measures of cognitive and perceptual processing, in addition to speech. It is encouraging that an increasing number of studies avail themselves of experimental techniques that go beyond elicited speech, as this will allow scholars to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the thinking processes of L2 speech. As a final point of consideration, we would like to draw attention to the potential pedagogical implications of the findings on TFS and L2 acquisition reported to date. While there is a scarcity of empirical studies on this topic, the low incidence of target-like TFS patterns – even at advanced levels of L2 acquisition – suggests that it may be beneficial to highlight crosslinguistic differences 44

Thinking for speaking

in information packaging in the classroom. Intervention studies that evaluate different pedagogical techniques to teach and create awareness of such differences (e.g., Wong et al., 2018) would be a most important contribution.

Notes 1 It should be noted that the typology of satellite- vs. verb-framed primarily applies to the expression of motion events that are of a boundary-crossing nature. For example, the event of a dog running into a greenhouse entails two different locations: the dog being outside of the greenhouse and the dog being inside the greenhouse. It is the transition between these locations that constitutes the boundary-crossing. If the event concerned a dog running inside the greenhouse only, or outside on a lawn, there would be no boundary-crossing, and thus no restrictions on the verb. 2 In equipollently framed languages, which represent a third group in motion event typology (Slobin, 2004), manner and path are encoded in equal structural terms, for instance through the use of serial verb constructions (i.e., ‘the man runs and enters the house’).

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5 THE BILINGUAL MENTAL LEXICON Judith F. Kroll

5.1 Introduction The history of research on the mental lexicon of individuals who learn and use more than one language has been reviewed extensively in the recent and past literature (e.g., Bobb & Kroll, 2018; Dijkstra et al., 2019; Kroll, 2017; Kroll et al., 2022). Although a number of different questions have been asked about how words are represented and retrieved when bilinguals read, listen to speech, and produce speech in one of their two languages, the profound discovery in this body of research is that both languages are active and interacting when bilinguals use one language alone. The models of word recognition first proposed by Dijkstra and colleagues for reading (e.g., Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998; Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2018) set the stage for thinking about the bilingual lexicon across all modes of lexical access. This work moved the field from a focus on whether lexical knowledge in the bilingual’s two languages was represented independently for each language (e.g., see Kroll & Tokowicz, 2005 for a review) to attention on the dynamics of control (e.g., Green, 1998). If lexical access is fundamentally nonselective with respect to language and if information in both languages comes online in parallel, then shared information across the two languages would be expected to interact and to have consequences for both language processing and for cognition. In the history of research on second language (L2) learning and bilingualism, the questions that framed the research agenda have typically been focused on the acquisition of the L2 phonology and grammar (e.g., Flege et al., 1995; Johnson & Newport, 1989). The lexicon has often been seen as being less revealing of constraints that shape the course and consequence of L2 acquisition. For late learners in particular, the traditional story was that there are limits in the ability to fully acquire the nuances of speech and syntax beyond early childhood. The lexicon has typically been viewed as being less constrained and therefore less interesting with respect to the architecture of the bilingual language system. But the finding of language nonselectivity has deep significance and requires that we reconsider aspects of the traditional story about L2 learning. From this perspective the lexicon is not only of interest in its own right, but as a lens to reveal how language accommodates having two or more languages in play. There are now literally hundreds of studies that support the claim that the two languages are active in parallel. Cross-language lexical interactions have been documented for the orthography, phonology, and semantics. The open exchange across lexical information in the two languages has been demonstrated for bilinguals whose two languages share the same writing system (e.g., Dijkstra et al., 1998; Schwartz et al., 2007) and for those who do not (e.g., Hoshino & Kroll,

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-6

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2008; Thierry & Wu, 2007). They have been shown between spoken or written languages and signed languages (e.g., Morford et al., 2011). These effects are present not only at early stages of L2 learning but also for highly proficient bilingual speakers. Although the shape of the observed interactions varies as a function of language experience, they are not restricted to any one group of bilinguals or any particular language pairing. This body of evidence also suggests that the dynamic interplay across the bilingual’s two languages not only determines the state of the L2 lexicon but also the L1. The native or dominant L1 has been shown to change as the L2 is learned and as it is used (e.g., Bice & Kroll, 2015; Brice et al., 2021; Chang, 2013). In the almost three decades of research on these issues, there have also been transformative discoveries about the neuroscience of language. While the initial data on bilingual lexical access was based on behavioral methods of response time and accuracy and the use of eye tracking to assess the comprehension of spoken or written words, the more recent evidence has included measures of brain activity during these tasks. In Section 5.3, we review some of these different methodological approaches to the lexicon. The picture from these studies of lexical processing in the bilingual brain data sometimes converge with the behavioral findings but also sometimes reveals cross-language interactions that were not seen in the behavioral data alone. In virtually all cases, they support earlier claims that the two languages are active simultaneously and competing with one another. In the brief review of the research in the following sections, we first consider some of the foundational background, review some of the methodological innovations that have been introduced in research on the bilingual lexicon, and then place this work in the current research context. That context not only exploits a range of methods, but also seeks to use lexical processing as a means to understand the variation in bilingual experience and its consequences (e.g., Beatty-Martínez et al., 2020).

5.2  Theory and background: models of the bilingual lexicon Early models of the bilingual lexicon asked initially whether memory representations in the two languages were independent of one another or shared (e.g., McCormack, 1977). Later models differentiated different types of linguistic information and focused on the form of the connections between words in the bilingual’s two languages. The history of this research has been reviewed in a number of earlier chapters (e.g., Kroll & Tokowicz, 2005; Schwartz & Kroll, 2006). Here we identify the ideas in that research that have come to influence contemporary approaches. Two types of models were central in framing the discussion of the bilingual lexicon. The Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) proposed by Kroll and Stewart (1994) extended earlier proposals about whether bilinguals accessed translation equivalents via lexical transfer or by direct conceptual processing (Potter et al., 1984). The RHM assumed independent lexical representations that included both lexical and conceptual connections that varied in strength. The model took a developmental approach in assuming that adult L2 learners might initially exploit word-to-word connections from the L2 to the L1 to enable access to meaning for new L2 words. As proficiency was gained in the L2, a shift was then expected to result in increasing strength of connection between L2 words and concepts. The less proficient and less dominant L2, initially dependent on the L1 to access the meaning of words, was hypothesized to have strong lexical connections to the L1 but weak connections to meaning. By comparison, the proficient and dominant L1 was hypothesized to have privileged access to meaning but little need for lexical-level connections to the L2. The empirical support for the RHM came from data on translation production. Translation in the forward direction, from L1 to L2, is typically slower than translation from L2 to L1. The model accounted for this asymmetry by assuming that the L1 engages semantics quite automatically but that, in the absence of a strong connection between the semantics and the L2, it becomes difficult to access the L2 word, making forward translation slow. In contrast, translation from L2 to L1 can exploit the direct lexical-level connection thought to be in place from initial L2 learning, making it 48

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relatively fast. Kroll and Stewart (1994) tested the RHM by having bilinguals translate in each of the two directions of translation but in list contexts that varied in their semantic organization, with some categorically organized and others randomly mixed. As the RHM predicted, not only was translation in the forward direction, from L1 to L2, slower than backward translation, from L2 to L1, but it was also sensitive to the categorical organization of the list, whereas translation from L2 to L1 was not. Many studies subsequently tested the predictions of the RHM, focusing primarily on the issue of whether lexical-level mediation of the L2 was necessary for semantic access (e.g., Brysbaert & Duyck, 2010 and see Kroll et al., 2010 for a discussion of this evidence). Earlier studies on L2 comprehension had suggested that, even at relatively low levels of proficiency, it is possible for learners to retrieve the meaning of L2 words directly (e.g., Dufour & Kroll, 1995). Later studies asked how the asymmetries described by the RHM might change as adult learners acquire greater proficiency in the L2. A series of experiments using a translation-recognition paradigm, in which individuals decide whether two words are translation equivalents (De Groot, 1992), provided initial evidence showing that there was a developmental trajectory for adult learners, from reliance on the L1 translation equivalent to increased reliance on meaning (Talamas et al., 1999). Because translation recognition does not require spoken production, it is a task that can be performed even by learners who have not yet acquired the ability to speak the L2 at any level of proficiency. Subsequent studies provided mixed evidence, with some suggesting that all learners were sensitive to meaning but that there was unique sensitivity to the L1 translation equivalent for learners at the earliest stages (e.g., Sunderman & Kroll, 2006) and other studies showing that even highly proficient bilinguals may show sensitivity to the L1 translation equivalent (e.g., Ferré et al., 2006). We will return to this issue in later discussion. In contrast to the RHM, the Bilingual Interactive Activation Model, or BIA (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998; Van Heuven et al., 1998) and BIA+ Model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002) extended the connectionist framework developed for within-language word recognition (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981) to the bilingual context. The focus of these models was on the parallel activation of orthographic, phonological, and semantic codes both of the bilingual’s two languages even when word recognition takes place in one language alone. More recently, Dijkstra et al. (2019) reported a new model, Multilink, that updates the BIA/BIA+ to accommodate the processing of translation equivalents. For present purposes, and with the goal of understanding the historical context of this area of research, the important point about the models that have emerged from the BIA framework is that they assume nonselective activation of the bilingual’s two languages. Although these models differ in the computational mechanisms they draw on to resolve the competition that results when lexical features in both languages are engaged in parallel, the assumption is that both languages are in play. As noted at the onset of this chapter, the empirical evidence for this assumption is extensive, both within the domain of visual word recognition, the initial focus of these models, for spoken word recognition (e.g., Marian & Spivey, 2003; Shook & Marian, 2013) and also for spoken word production (e.g., Kroll et al., 2006; Kroll & Gollan, 2014). The empirical support for nonselective lexical activation comes from studies that exploit crosslanguage ambiguity in aspects of lexical form or meaning. In languages that share the same writing system, there are cognate translations that have the same or similar lexical form and meaning (e.g., hotel in Dutch and English) but also interlingual homographs or false friends, words that share the same or similar lexical form but have different meaning (e.g., room in Dutch refers to the cream for coffee). The logic in the many studies performed to examine lexical nonselectivity was to see whether bilinguals were able to recognize words in one language as if they were monolingual, i.e., without influence of the language not in use. The findings from a large number of experiments over more than two decades suggest that bilinguals are unable to ignore the relationship of the language not in use to the target language. They may not be consciously aware of that relationship, but their performance using a range of different types of behavioral and neuroscience measures demonstrates sensitivity to the lexical features of the other language (e.g., Dijkstra et al., 1998). For example, 49

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when Dutch-English bilinguals are asked to make a lexical decision (i.e., is this string of letters a real word in English?) in English, their L2, they are typically faster when the English word is a cognate with Dutch but generally slower when the English word is an interlingual homograph. The way that lexical access becomes tuned to the bilingual’s knowledge reflects not only their proficiency in the L2 but also the level of convergence and competition across all aspects of lexical form and meaning. As we noted at the start, cross-language interactions are not constrained in the absence of obvious ambiguities across the two languages. We see parallel activation of the language not in use across in virtually all contexts in which two languages are processed. While the decontextualized nature of lexical access in word-recognition experiments might be hypothesized to be an artificial source of the observed parallel activation, a line of research on bilingual lexical access in context has shown that, even if context, in principle, should restrict access to the target language alone, there are persisting effects of the language not in use (e.g., De Bruijn et al., 2001; Schwartz & Kroll, 2006; Van Assche et al., 2012). How can we reconcile the claims of nonselectivity against the case for asymmetries across the two languages proposed by the RHM? Although the BIA models and the RHM have been set up against one another as alternative frameworks for the bilingual lexicon (e.g., Brysbaert & Duyck, 2010; Dijkstra et al., 2019), they in fact each provide different perspectives about lexical processing that are needed to support a more comprehensive account. The evidence for the parallel activation of the two languages is compelling and the consequences of nonselectivity are profound because they require that we understand not only how lexical information is understood and spoken, but also how it is controlled. If bilinguals cannot willfully turn off one of the two languages, they must develop a means to regulate the use of the two languages to enable proficiency in each language but also the ability to navigate between them, for example, when they code switch (e.g., Green, 1998). Two features of the RHM have emerged as important in characterizing the way that bilinguals achieve control. One is that the reliance on the L1, proposed by the RHM initially as a means to exploit access to meaning for L2 learners, may play a critical role in how the regulation of the two languages is achieved. The ability to adjust the activation of the L1, and potentially to inhibit the L1, may be important in understanding how L2 learners and bilinguals are able to manage cross-language competition between two languages that typically include one language that is more dominant than the other (e.g., Kroll et al., 2021). The more dominant language is typically the L1 or native language but for some bilinguals, particularly heritage speakers whose L1 is a home language, the L2 may become the more dominant language. We return to this issue in a later section. The other aspect of the RHM that has endured in discussions of the bilingual lexicon is that we must have a developmental and dynamic account to understand how lexical representations and processing change with increasing L2 skill and how lexical processes may continue to be dynamic and changing even once a high level of skill has been attained. The initial story, that L2 learners move from an early stage of dependence on lexical form, only later to achieve full access to meaning, has been challenged by findings that even at early stages, learners may have access to the semantics in L2 (e.g., Potter et al., 1984) and by other findings that suggest that even highly proficient L2 learners may have somewhat degraded semantic representations in the L2 (e.g., Bordag et al., 2022). To anticipate one of the issues we will discuss below, the contemporary developmental perspective is much more dynamic than the traditional view that the goal of L2 learning was to achieve native-like attainment. It assumes that the bilingual’s two languages may not be like those of monolingual native speakers in either language, a point made in a different context by Grosjean many years ago (Grosjean, 1989) and may not be constrained only by age of acquisition and proficiency. In addition to the modulation of the two languages that occurs as a function of bilingualism, the fact that both languages are always in play has the consequence that there are dynamic changes from moment to moment and from one context to another, even among those who have achieved a high level of proficiency. The lexicon is 50

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obviously not the only level of language to be affected by these dynamics but lexical processing has been used quite effectively to investigate them. In the section that follows we briefly consider methodological developments in the field, and particularly the tools of cognitive neuroscience that have recently altered the ability to investigate lexical processes. We then consider what we take to be some of the most exciting developments about the bilingual lexicon that exploit a range of methods to answer the question of how words are understood and spoken in two languages and how bilinguals achieve the ability to control the two languages effectively.

5.3  Methods: from behavior to neuroscience Much of the research that we have described has used behavioral methods of response time and accuracy and the tracking of eye movements during reading or during the comprehension of spoken language. These studies ask how quickly and accurately L2 learners and bilingual speakers can recognize words when they are written or spoken in each language and also plan speech in each of their two languages. Some studies also include phonetic measures of produced speech. The behavioral measures of lexical access have typically been supplemented with a set of language-history instruments to enable characterization of the bilingual sample (e.g., the LEAP-Q, Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire, Marian et al., 2007; the BLP-Bilingual Language Profile, Birdsong et al., 2012). More recently, these instruments have been expanded to enable more sensitive characterization of the social and cultural context in which these studies are embedded including measures of language entropy (Gullifer & Titone, 2020) and social context (e.g., Anderson et al., 2018; Wigdorowitz et al., 2023). The methodological innovation in the same period of time in which studies of bilingual language processing have been reported is that we are now able to track brain activity during the performance of language tasks. Cognitive neuroscience has been exploited as a means to investigate language learning and language processing with the use of a variety of tools, two of the most prominent being electrophysiology and neuroimaging (e.g., Green & Kroll, 2019; Kutas & Federmeier, 2011). It is beyond the scope of the present chapter to do more than very briefly illustrate the contribution of neuroscience approaches to the study of the bilingual lexicon. It is also important to state at the outset of reviewing this research that although some of the evidence from studies using neuroscience methods might be taken to suggest that brain data are more sensitive than behavior, the field is still quite far from understanding the mappings between brain and behavior. Roughly, the electrophysiological data based on EEG recordings tend to be more sensitive than behavior to the timing of events as bilinguals read written or hear spoken words or plan speech in one of the two languages. The neuroimaging approach has been used to localize the brain networks that are engaged during language tasks (function magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI) or to identify structural changes in the brain (e.g., grey matter volume or white matter connectivity) that might result as a consequence of bilingualism. These methods do not replace behavioral studies but provide a source of converging evidence that ultimately contributes to a more comprehensive model of lexical and language processing. The many studies that have investigated brain activity during lexical comprehension and production have corroborated the claims of nonselective lexical access across the bilingual’s two languages (e.g., Abutalebi et al., 2008; Midgley et al., 2011; Van Heuven & Dijkstra, 2010). More critically, they have revealed new findings about lexical processing that go beyond the behavioral results and that also address predictions of the models we have described. Studies on word learning and lexical access in both the L1 and L2 have particularly benefitted from the use of Event Related Potentials (ERPs) in which the EEG is time-locked to the sequencing of linguistic events. In a series of studies on new language learning, Osterhout and colleagues (e.g., McLaughlin et al., 2004; Osterhout et al., 2008) used ERPs as a means to track lexical and 51

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grammatical development during the earliest stages of learning a second language. Using a variant of the lexical decision task we described earlier, McLaughlin et al. showed that, even in the first hours of learning a new language, individuals begin to show sensitivity to words in the L2, but only in the record of brain activity, not in behavior. A similar approach has been taken to ask how the L1 changes during L2 learning. Bice and Kroll (2015) examined lexical decision performance for native English speakers who were enrolled in beginning Spanish classes. Their performance was compared to monolingual native English speakers who were not enrolled in a language class and had minimal L2 experience. The materials in the lexical decision task included cognates in English and Spanish (tomato/tomate). The question was whether in the first stages of acquiring Spanish, the English of the learners would change in response to the Spanish so that the processing English words with cognate translations in Spanish would be distinguished relative to words in English whose Spanish translations are not cognates. They recorded behavioral button-press responses indicating whether the string of letters in lexical decision was a word or not in English and also EEG while the task was performed. The behavioral data were indistinguishable for the Spanish learners and the monolinguals, in that neither group showed any difference between lexical decisions for English words that were or were not cognates with their Spanish translations. In contrast, brain activity showed that these learners who were only at early stages of acquiring Spanish were nonetheless sensitive to the cognate status of these English words. The result suggests that the native and dominant language begins to adapt to the consequences of L2 learning almost from the start. The behavioral data alone did not reveal this adaptation, at least at this early stage of learning. We will eventually want to have longitudinal studies that track the trajectory of change as learners acquire skill in the L2. Other research has used ERPs to adjudicate claims based on the RHM about the availability of the L1 translation equivalent by learners and by proficient bilinguals. As reviewed earlier, the behavioral evidence on translation-recognition performance initially suggested that there was a developmental shift from reliance on the L1 translation equivalent for less proficient L2 learners to reliance on the semantics directly for more proficient L2 speakers. But a later set of behavioral studies using the same translation recognition task challenged that interpretation, with mixed evidence showing that even learners at early stages sometimes appear able to directly access the meaning of L2 words (e.g., Sunderman & Kroll, 2006) and even highly proficient bilinguals may sometimes reveal access to the L1 translation equivalent (e.g., Ferré et al., 2006). A later series of ERP experiments used the translation-recognition paradigm but while recording EEG as a way of asking not only whether there is sensitivity to meaning and to the L1 translation but to ask when it comes online for individuals at different levels of L2 proficiency. Guo et al. (2012) hypothesized that the L1 translation may be activated differently for learners who are just in the early stages of acquiring the L2 and for highly proficient L2 speakers. For learners, the L1 translation may be used the way the RHM suggested, to provide access to meaning for the L2 via the stronger language. For proficient speakers, the L1 translation may become available after the meaning of the L2 words is already accessed. Guo et al. noted that behavioral studies reporting effects of the L1 translation for highly proficient bilinguals (e.g., Ferré et al., 2006) typically included a long interval between the presentation of the L2 and L1 word in translation recognition. Using both a short and long interval between the two words, they replicated Ferré et al.’s finding of both semantic and translation interference for highly proficient bilinguals using both a short and long inter-word interval. But the ERP data for the same conditions told a different story. At the short interval, there was only semantic interference. At the long interval, both effects were present. If the L1 translation effect is absent at the short interval but present at the long interval, it suggests that proficient speakers do indeed access the L1 translation equivalent, but only after they have understood the meaning of the L2 words. Critically, Ma et al. (2017) replicated the Guo et al. experiment but with L2 learners and found a pattern in the ERP record that was virtually the same as the one reported earlier for high proficiency bilinguals. The result suggests that it is all in the timing, with the presence of translation interference depending on having a relatively long 52

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processing interval. Contrary to the claims of the RHM, the L1 translation may not be required to access meaning, at least in tasks that rely on comprehension rather than production. Only by having the ERP data was it possible to tease apart these alternatives. The triangulation of behavioral and neuroscience methods to test competing hypotheses about the bilingual lexicon is at an early stage of development but already quite promising in demonstrating how different methods may produce data that support alternative theoretical accounts. Only by considering these methods together, can we begin to develop a more comprehensive account.

5.4  The status of the bilingual lexicon: a window into the interplay between language processing and cognition If the two languages are continually active and interacting with one another, it should come as no surprise that lexical access in each language comes to reflect those interactions. But those interactions are not simple – they reveal not only the individual profile of the bilingual but also the context in which they find themselves. Green and Abutalebi (2013) proposed the Adaptive Control Hypothesis as a framework to understand the shape of these interactions. They argued that the way that bilinguals recruit cognitive resources is determined at least in part by the demands placed on speakers by the nature of the environment. Some bilinguals live in contexts in which everyone is similarly bilingual. Other bilinguals may use the two languages in separate contexts. Some bilinguals code switch whereas other bilinguals of similar proficiency may not. Bilinguals may not be two monolinguals in one (Grosjean, 1989), but they are also not identical to one another (Luk & Bialystok, 2013). Just as the age at which they acquire the two languages and/or their proficiency in the two languages may shape language processing, so too do the environments in which they come to learn and use both languages. All of these factors of course affect every aspect of language processing, not only the lexicon. Curiously, some of the most provocative discoveries about the interactions across languages and across different contexts have come from research on the lexicon. A focus on context and on the social networks in which bilinguals live and work has long been the domain of sociolinguistics. More recently, there has been an effort to understand the consequences of the social environment for psycholinguistic processes and much of that effort has focused on the bilingual lexicon (e.g., Titone & Tiv, 2022). Here we briefly review some of the most exciting of the recent findings. In the earlier section on the evidence for cross-language activation, we discussed a study by Bice and Kroll (2015) that showed that the brains of L2 learners at very early stages of acquiring the L2 are already revealing an influence of the new L2 knowledge on the L1. That result is of interest in revealing the bidirectionality of cross-language influences, but on its own does not go beyond a demonstration of sensitivity in the L1 to the L2. Other studies have identified changes to the L1 that have been hypothesized to reflect the active regulation of the two languages. Traditionally, changes to the L1 that have the consequence of making it less accessible have been identified as examples of attrition (e.g., Schmid, 2010). Although attrition is a legitimate phenomenon, the changes to the L1 that may induce costs or interference in processing, increased errors, and temporarily reduced access have been interpreted to be a reflection of the ordinary regulation of the L1 rather than attrition. The L1, which may be the native or dominant language depending on the form of an individual’s bilingualism, may be in continual flux to enable the L2 or less dominant language to be engaged fluently. Under some circumstances, bilinguals may need to down-regulate or inhibit the L1 for the L2. Under other circumstances, they may need to up-regulate the L1. Here we illustrate two of the contexts in which these processes have been investigated at the lexical level, one within the laboratory context and the other under conditions of language immersion. In each case, the focus has been on lexical production. In a classic experiment, Meuter and Allport (1999) applied task-switching logic to bilingual language production by asking bilingual speakers to name numbers in one language or the other in 53

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response to a language cue. Response latencies were longer following a switch of language. Crucially, they reported asymmetric switch costs for the two languages, with larger switch costs when L1 followed L2 than when L2 followed L1. The results were interpreted within the Inhibitory Control framework proposed by Green (1998) with greater inhibition of the more dominant language to enable planning of speech in the less dominant language. The switch-cost asymmetry has been replicated in many subsequent studies and its interpretation debated (e.g., Bobb & Wodniecka, 2013). The differential processing cost to the L1 has been observed not only when bilinguals switch from trial to trial but also when they switch languages after speaking the L2 for an extended period of time and then switching into the L1 (e.g., Van Assche et al., 2013). These effects have also been reported in measures of brain activity (e.g., Guo et al., 2011; Misra et al., 2012). Under conditions of uncertainty, when speaking the two languages in a mixed context, the same asymmetry is observed, a phenomenon that has been labeled “dominance reversal” (Declerck et al., 2020). Bilinguals speaking their dominant L1 in a mixed language context are not only slower to speak it than in a blocked language context, but may actually be slower to speak the L1 than the L2. Understanding the basis of these switching effects is a topic of ongoing investigation (e.g., see Casado et al., 2022). Of particular interest has been identifying who reveals these asymmetric lexical costs and who does not (e.g., Costa & Santesteban, 2004; Stasenko et al., 2021). This work shows that the costs to the L1 are typically larger for those who are less balanced or less proficient in the L2 and for those who, for other reasons (e.g., aging), may have difficulty engaging the processes that enable inhibitory control. But as we have noted throughout this chapter, it has become clear that bilingualism takes different forms beyond the traditional assessments of proficiency and age of acquisition (e.g., Fricke et al., 2019). An account of the variation in the forms of bilingualism, both with respect to who the bilinguals are (Luk & Bialystok, 2013) and characterizing the environments in which they use the two languages actively (Green & Abutalebi, 2013), becomes critical to place the observed lexical dynamics. In recent studies, an effort has been made to identify the features of bilingual speakers and the environments in which they live to enable a more comprehensive account. Research on the consequences of language immersion for L2 learners and for proficient bilinguals, using lexical production tasks, demonstrated that the L1 was suppressed during L2 immersion (Baus et al., 2013; Linck et al., 2009). Linck et al. used a category verbal fluency task in which L2 learners were asked to generate as many exemplars of a particular semantic category as they could think of in 30 seconds. They compared intermediate L2 learners studying abroad with those at home in the classroom in the L1 environment. The immersed learners produced fewer words in the L1 than the non-immersed learners, suggesting that there was a down regulation of the L2 during L2 immersions. But what has become clear is that we need to know more than whether a learner or bilingual is immersed in the L1 or L2. Individuals and environments are not binary categories. Beatty-Martínez et al. (2020) reported a study that began to address the variation in L2 speakers. They reported a lexical production study that examined highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals immersed in three distinct interactional contexts. One group lived in Granada, Spain, where the two languages are used separately. A second group lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the two languages are used more interchangeably. A third group lived in State College, Pennsylvania, where few people speak Spanish. The logic of the study was to use a cognitive assessment of inhibitory control as means to ask whether performance on a simple picture-naming task in each of the two languages would differentially recruit cognitive resources. The study used the AX-Continuous Performance Task (e.g., Braver, 2012) to assess proactive and reactive components of cognitive control. BeattyMartínez et al. reported different patterns of production in each context, with the most interesting outcome associated with the Spanish-English bilinguals living in the US, immersed in a predominantly English-only context. They found that those bilinguals who were high in proactive control, meaning that they were predicting outcomes rather than waiting for events to happen and then responding, were more likely to name pictures accurately in Spanish, their L1. Beatty-Martínez et al. hypoth54

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esized that the ability to monitor the communicative environment for those with whom Spanish could be spoken, enabled these proactive bilinguals to maintain their Spanish in what was effectively a hostile environment for Spanish. Most notable, for the purpose of the present review, is that these effects were manifest in a measure of simple lexical production. In past studies, these three groups might have been aggregated into a simple category as proficient speakers of Spanish and English (and see Zhang et al., 2021, for converging support for Mandarin-English speakers). Related research has focused on the social networks in which bilinguals find themselves, with evidence suggesting that interactional context is not only likely to reflect the distinct demands of different geographical contexts, but also the changing dynamics for bilingual speakers moving between different social groups within the same environment. Gullifer and Titone (2020) developed a measure of language entropy to identify the number of different languages that a speaker uses in different social contexts. Using both behavioral and neuroimaging measures, they showed that bilingual speakers with high language entropy, so a person who switches languages in different social situations, appeared to engage greater proactive cognitive control than bilingual speakers living in a more uniform environment (Gullifer et al., 2018; Gullifer & Titone, 2020). Like the Beatty-Martínez et al. (2020) findings, the research on language entropy demonstrates that variation in the context of language use may be a critical factor for understanding differences across otherwise similar groups of bilinguals. Each of these studies, using different measures of lexical access, documents the dynamic changes that occur as a function of having two languages in contact with one another, from initial learning to proficient language use. In an important sense, they demonstrate that immersion needs to be conceptualized more broadly than it typically has been in research on bilingualism. Immersion is not only moving into a primarily L2 environment, but all the contexts in which speakers and listeners find themselves over the course of their lives and even over the course of a single day or week. The final example we describe highlights the point that we need to take a broad view of immersion to include individuals who are not strictly bilingual. Bice and Kroll (2019) conducted a word-learning experiment that was intended to compare different types of learners engaged in a task that was arguably more difficult than standard paired-associated tasks used in vocabulary learning studies. The learners included bilinguals who spoke Spanish and English and also monolinguals who spoke English only. They taught the participants Finnish vowel harmony, a rule that does not exist in either Spanish or in English. They measured both EEG and behavior over a number of sessions as individuals learned and were tested on the rule. Critically, half of the participants were tested in a highly monolingual environment in the US in Central Pennsylvania. The other half were tested in a linguistically diverse environment in Southern California. Bice and Kroll reported an unexpected finding: the monolingual English speakers living in the linguistically diverse environment showed evidence of generalizing the Finnish vowel harmony rule in the measure of brain activity. The monolingual English speakers in the predominantly English-only context did not. Although caution is required in interpreting this serendipitous finding, it suggests that the ambient linguistic diversity of the environment may be important in facilitating new language learning for all speakers and listeners, not only bilinguals. Previous research on the bilingual lexicon, and on bilingualism more generally, has rarely taken into account the linguistic diversity of the environment as a factor in constraining the interplay between the two languages.

5.5  Looking to the future The narrative in this chapter takes us from the initial formulations about the bilingual lexicon to contemporary research that is more complex but that also begins to create important bridges across approaches to bilingualism that have been pursued quite separately in the past. The cross-language dynamics that we have reviewed suggest that the two languages are in a continual state of exchange 55

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and that lexical processes reflect that exchange. There is a great deal that requires us to be modest because there is much that is unknown. Showing that there is more than age of acquisition and proficiency does not mean that they are unimportant but rather that we need a more nuanced account to understand how the dynamics we have identified may follow a trajectory that changes as individuals acquire and use two languages (see Pliatsikas, 2020, for a developmental account of neural changes for bilinguals). We know very little about how the phenomena we have reviewed at the lexical level reflect other levels of language processing for the phonology, sentence processing, or discourse. Likewise, we are only beginning to have an account of how heritage speakers who acquire their L1 at home and then typically become dominant in the L2 of the community, may be similar to other types of bilinguals who have acquired the two languages in different contexts. In the controversies that have resulted about the consequences of bilingualism (e.g., Bialystok, 2017; Luk & Rothman, 2022; Navarro-Torres et al., 2021) there has been a notable absence of research on language processes themselves. The research reviewed in this chapter is a first step to consider how the modulations within the bilingual lexicon may extend to cognition, the social world, and to other aspects of language processing. This is the beginning of what we hope will become a comprehensive account of the consequences of bilingualism for language, for cognition and its neural substrates, and for the varied lives of bilinguals themselves.

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PART II

Argument structure

6 THE CAUSATIVE/INCHOATIVE ALTERNATION Eve Zyzik and Josefina Bittar

6.1  The causative alternation The causative alternation, also referred to as the causative-inchoative or the causative-anticausative alternation, is the phenomenon that allows certain verbs to be used in causative constructions (transitive sentences in which the cause is the subject), as in (1), or in inchoative constructions (intransitive sentences in which the subject is the affected entity, and the cause is not expressed), as in (2). This alternation is highly productive in English (Rappaport Hovav, 2014), with over 200 verbs like break that participate in both causative/transitive (example 1) and inchoative/intransitive (example 2) constructions (Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1993). (1) John broke the vase. (2) The vase broke. (Rappaport Hovav, 2014, p. 8)

The causative alternation is common across many of the world’s languages, but its realization varies widely cross-linguistically (Haspelmath, 1993). Two factors that contribute to this variation are (1) which verb form is treated as the basic and (2) which verbs participate in the alternation. With respect to the morphological form, Haspelmath (1987, 1993) considers the unmarked verb to be the basic form, that is, the one that lacks a derivational morpheme. Verb pairs, thus, are classified as follows: (1) causative pairs in which the inchoative is the basic form (e.g. some Turkish verbs); (2) anticausative pairs in which the causative is the basic form (e.g. Spanish); and (3) non-directed alternation pairs in which no form is derived from the other (e.g. Japanese). With respect to semantics, it has been proposed that, cross-linguistically, verbs that express change of state tend to participate in the alternation (Schäfer, 2009). These include classic change-of-state events like break, open, melt, and cognitive and emotion events like worry and scare. However, languages differ in the types of causation that are lexicalized in underived verbs (Talmy, 2000). For example, some Japanese verbs lexicalize the inchoative (intransitive) type, as in (3); the agentive type has a morphological marker, as in (4). On the contrary, for the same event (open), Spanish lexicalizes the agentive (transitive) type, as in (5) and derives the inchoative type with the clitic se, as in (6). (3)

Mado-ga aita. window-NOM openintra-past ‘The window opened.’

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-8

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John-ga mado-o ak-e-ta. John-NOM window-ACC opentrans-past ‘John opened the window.’ (Nagano, 2015, p. 326)

(5)

Abrió la he opened the ‘He opened the door.’

(6)

La puerta se abrió. the door REFL opened ‘The door opened.’ (Talmy, 2007, p. 117)

puerta. door.

This lexicalization of causation types has a direct impact on the participation of verbs in the causative alternation because certain encoded elements can conflict with the construals of events. For example, a verb like kick, which encodes agency, cannot appear in an intransitive construction and, therefore, it does not participate in the causative alternation. As languages’ lexicalization patterns vary widely, so do the verbs that can alternate. The universally productive but language-specific nature of the causative alternation has sparked interest in both first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition research. The main question that researchers have attempted to answer is: how do learners identify which verbs participate in the causative alternation and which ones do not? The current chapter is a summary of the latest research on this topic. More specifically, we will discuss the acquisition of lexical and morphological (anti) causatives: forms that share the same stem in the causative and inchoative constructions. Although closely related to this phenomenon, this chapter will not cover periphrastic causatives (like make + verb in English) nor middles, passives, and reflexives because these constructions vary in terms of their semantic and syntactic properties across languages (Croft, 2022; Kemmer, 1993; Suárez Palma, 2020).

6.2  Theoretical analyses of the causative/inchoative alternation Understanding and conveying the relationship among perceived entities is an essential aspect of the human experience. A prominent way to relate entities (e.g., objects, animate beings) is through a causation lens. For linguists, three questions have been at the center of understanding causation: (1) What is the nature of a causative event? (2) Can causative and inchoative verbs be explained semantically by the dichotomy of external vs. internal causation? (3) Is there a basic morphological form for causative/inchoative verbs, as well as a derived form? In what follows, we will summarize the discussion on each one of these questions. To study the first question (What is the nature of a causative event?), some linguists have represented causation situations as involving two related events: the initiation of an action and the change of state of an entity. Shibatani (1976) refers to these events as a ‘causing event’ and a ‘caused event,’ respectively. For example, the verb cook in the context of a man applying heat to food can be paraphrased as ‘the man caused the food to become cooked.’ Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995, 2005) capture this idea by postulating a complex event structure with two predicates: CAUSE on one hand and BECOME on the other. Many verbs (like English cook, melt, break) encode both CAUSE and BECOME subevents, and are therefore called lexical causatives. These verbs are transitive and express direct causation (Shibatani, 1976; Wolff, 2003). Prototypically, direct causation involves an agent that performs a volitional physical act on an object without 64

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intervening entities. Causation events, however, can deviate from this prototype (for example, there could be lack of volition or physical force). Summarizing, the lexical semantic representation of lexical causatives is shown in (7): (7) [ [ x ACT ] CAUSE [ BECOME [y ] ] ]

Other linguists have represented causation situations as a single event of transmission of force across participants. Langacker (2008) calls this interaction of participants an action chain, while Croft (2012) calls it a causal chain. In this chain, there are archetypal roles: an agent (or an initiator), and patient (or an endpoint). Additionally, there could be an instrument and a beneficiary. The causal chain in example (8) (from Croft, 2012, p. 198) is represented by the arrows, which link the participants and show the transmission of force. (8) Sue broke the coconut for Greg with a hammer. Sue ------> hammer ------> coconut ------> Greg

To explore the second question (Can the semantic dichotomy of external vs. internal causation explain the syntactic alternation?), linguists have studied the connection between syntactic structure (mainly transitivity) and verb semantics. According to Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995), semantically, verbs like break have an external cause that starts the event. In contrast, verbs like bloom are internally caused, meaning that their sole argument is the entity that undergoes the change specified by the verb. The proposed syntactic implication of the semantic dichotomy is that externally caused verbs like break allow for the syntactic realization of one or two arguments. On the contrary, internally caused verbs like bloom occur only as intransitives. Talmy (2000, 2007) criticizes the equation of external causation with transitive sentences, and internal causation with intransitive sentences, and provides a thorough typology of causation events. For example, among the causative event types, he makes a distinction between author causation (unintended result: I misplaced the pen) and agent causation (intended result: I hid the pen). Among non-causatives, he distinguishes the undergoer type (unintended event that affects the subject: I broke my arm) from the autonomous type (The vase broke). Talmy notes that while certain sentences, like I broke my arm, are syntactically transitive, they are semantically non-causative. In languages like Spanish, undergoer situations of the breaking an arm type need not be expressed with a prototypical transitive sentence but with a special argument structure, exemplified in Se me rompió el brazo (lit: ‘The arm broke itself [to me]’). Some scholars have pointed out that verbs that lexicalize type of cause or method cannot alternate between transitive and intransitive constructions (Alexiadou et al., 2006; Haspelmath, 1987). That is, verbs must be semantically broad enough to alternate, which is why cause-unspecified verbs like break and open tend to alternate across languages. Rappaport Hovav (2014), however, claims that English break and open can be construed as both agentive and autonomous because language users have an easy time imagining a scenario where something breaks or opens because of an unidentifiable cause (e.g. the wind) or a distant agent. Furthermore, she proposes that many canonical nonalternating verbs could alternate in the appropriate context. For example, an English speaker would not normally accept a sentence like *The trash can emptied, except if someone out of their sight is causing the trash can to become empty with a remote control (2014, p. 27). To answer the third question (Is there a basic morphological form for causative/inchoative verbs?) scholars have looked at cross-linguistic patterns. Alexiadou and colleagues argue that "the class of alternating verbs is not stable across languages" (2006, p. 201). This applies to both semantics (as explained above) and morphosyntactic accounts of the alternation. Morphosyntactically, scholars 65

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have proposed a transitivization account (the causative form is derived from the basic inchoative form) and an intransitivization account (the inchoative form is derived from the basic causative form). For a thorough explanation of these approaches, see Schäfer, (2009). However, the quest for a basic morphological form appears to be an impossible task when confronted with cross-linguistic data. Languages vary widely when coding for (anti)causation (Alexiadou et al., 2006; Haspelmath, 1987). Some languages have the causative as the basic, and the anticausative is the derived form (e.g., Spanish). Some languages have the opposite pattern (e.g., Georgian), and some have neither (e.g., Modern Greek). Furthermore, this cross-linguistic variation becomes even wider when considering the interaction between causation and aspect. Different verbs lexicalize stative (being in a state), inchoative (entering into a state), and agentive (putting into a state) differently (Talmy, 2007). For example, posture verbs in English are generally stative, while in Spanish they are agentive (compare stative I sat (there all morning) vs. agentive Yo senté al niño en la mesa, ‘I sat the child on the table’). In sum, a universal basic form of the causative alternation is unlikely to account for causative alternation patterns across languages.

6.3  Methodological approaches used to study the causative/inchoative alternation The most commonly used methodology to study the causative/inchoative alternation has been the Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT), and specifically context-based AJTs. Within this category of AJTs, many researchers have used pictures that are intended to show an agent acting upon an object (e.g., a person breaking a window) or an inchoative event in which no agent is present (e.g., a door opening on its own). Montrul (2000, 2001a) designed such a task for her research with Spanish, English, and Turkish native speakers. A variation on the context-based AJT is to have participants decide if a sentence accurately describes an accompanying picture (see Toth, 2022). In analyzing the data from this kind of task, Moranski and Zalbidea (2022) describe the items as congruent (i.e., a good match with the picture) or incongruent (i.e., not matching the picture). In the context of L1 acquisition research, AJTs are adapted in various ways to make them easily understood by young children. Ambridge, Pine, Rowland and Young (2008) devised a five-point acceptability scale with happy and sad faces. The children viewed animations depicting the event being described, heard the experimental sentences, and indicated their judgment by moving a red or green counter onto one of the cartoon faces. In lieu of pictures or images, another option for providing information about the intended meaning of the experimental sentences is to include a short, written context or preamble. This has been done in many studies, including Gómez Soler (2015), Ortega et al. (2018), García-Tejada et al. (2023), and Zyzik (2014). For Ortega et al., it was important to create discourse contexts that could be interpreted as externally caused. For García-Tejada et al. (2023), the goal was to create contexts that were interpreted as eventive (inchoative) rather than stative. In Zyzik (2014) the contexts were designed to cue participants to a causative meaning. In all the studies described here, the written contexts were in the same language as the experimental sentences (note that it is possible to provide a context in the participants’ L1). In addition to AJTs, another option for testing the acceptability of sentences targeting the causative/inchoative alternation is a forced-choice preference task. García-Tejada et al. (2023) designed such a task for Spanish which consisted of short preambles followed by two sentences. The relevant contrast was the verb with or without “se” to express a physical or psychological change of state. In a forced-choice task, the contrast between the two forms is salient. In this way, it is more likely that the learners focus on the part of the sentence that we want to target, rather than some other (extraneous) element. However, preference tasks only give us information about which form is preferred; they do not necessarily tell us that the dispreferred form is unacceptable (see Ionin & Zyzik, 2014 for additional discussion). 66

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Finally, several studies have opted to elicit production via structured elicitation tasks. Zyzik (2006) adapted a methodology from Berman (2000) in which source input is provided with an accompanying picture. Subsequently, the participant is asked to describe a second picture using the same verb, but manipulating it as required by the target language. For example, the experimenter describes a transitive scene of a person drying dishes; this is followed by a picture of clothes drying outside on a clothesline. The participant is expected to use the intransitive form of the verb to describe this second picture. In this way, the source input primes the learner to use a particular verb. A similar productionpriming methodology is described in Bidgood et al. (2021), whose goal was to induce argumentstructure overgeneralization errors among children ages 5-6. In the transitive prime condition, the participants (English-speaking children) were primed with a transitive sentence such as Lisa brought the letter and shown a corresponding animation of Lisa bringing the letter. Subsequently, they were given “clue words” to describe the next animation, which showed Bart making a girl laugh. If the child produced a sentence using the same construction as the prime, this would lead to an overgeneralization error (*Bart laughed the girl). The methodology included both transitive and intransitive primes, and the entire experiment was conducted in the content of a bingo game to make it appealing for the children. As described in this section, context-based AJTs have been the most popular method for studying the causative/inchoative alternation. In such tasks, lexical causatives can be represented rather easily and unambiguously. The problem, however, is how to transmit inchoative events without an external cause. Static images that are intended to represent an inchoative event may not be interpreted as such. For example, how do we represent a window breaking spontaneously or lights turning off by themselves? Movie clips or animations are clearly preferable in this regard, as they depict actions more directly and completely than pictures (cf. Muylle et al., 2020). In L1 acquisition research, the use of computer animations to represent different kinds of events has been standard practice for many years (cf. Ambridge et al., 2008). In second language research (SLA) research, Nagano (2015) created video clips to represent different scenes involving an animate agent and a patient; after viewing each clip, the participant then judged the corresponding sentence on a fivepoint Likert scale.

6.4  Studies in L1 acquisition and heritage language bilingualism We begin with a review of the extensive research that has been done in L1 acquisition, and in particular, errors stemming from overgeneralization. Causative alternation errors are considered a type of overgeneralization because children extend the alternating pattern of verbs, like break (which can be both transitive and intransitive), to verbs that do not alternate, like laugh (intransitive-only) and hit (transitive-only). The two main questions that have guided the study of child language acquisition are (1) why do children make these mistakes? and (2) how do they retreat from them? Early research in the field of L1 acquisition relied on spontaneous production data to note children’s overgeneralization errors (cf. Bowerman, 1982a, Lord, 1979) and their directionality. Lord (1979) did not find that her children favored one type of alternation error over the other. On the other hand, Bowerman (1982a) found that alternation errors were predominantly of the inchoative-to-causative type. This finding led her to posit that children semantically derive the causative from the inchoative by adding a CAUSE component. The bidirectionality of alternation errors has also been explored in languages other than English. In a longitudinal study of a Brazilian-Portuguese-speaking child from age 2;8 to 5;0, Figueira (1984) found that the persistent error type changed with age. From 2;8 to 4;1, the child made inchoative-tocausative errors significantly more frequently than causative-to-inchoative errors. This pattern was reversed from 4;2 to 5;0. Figueira (1984) claims that this bidirectionality can be explained syntactically: the child learns to associate an NVN sentence with an agentive event, and a VN sentence 67

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with a non-agentive event, regardless of the verbal item involved. The role of agentivity was also highlighted by Allen (1996) in her study on Inuktitut, a language with lexical and morphological causatives. Allen (1996) shows that Inuktitut-speaking children tend to omit the causative suffix in verbs that do not participate in the causative alternation. This omission is, however, very infrequent in imperative sentences. Allen (1996) claims that the fact that children do not omit the causative suffix in constructions that emphasize agentivity, like imperative sentences, suggests that children are sensitive to agentivity. Going beyond the observation of spontaneous errors, some scholars have used error judgment tasks and elicitation tasks to study the directionality of causative errors and the role of exposure in the acquisition of causatives. In her experiment with transitivity errors, Hochberg (1986) asked twenty 3- and 4-year-old children to award a sticker to the puppet that produced a grammatical sentence. Overall, she found that children were better at identifying incorrect intransitives than incorrect transitives. Hochberg suggested that these results favor the ‘transitive bias’ hypothesis (Slobin, 1982), which states that children, from an early age, are sensitive to the prototypical transitive event (an animate agent exerts physical force on a patient). Braine et al. (1990) designed an elicitation experiment that included six novel verbs that conveyed actions for which there is not an existing word in English. The goal of the study was to see the influence of exposure in the use of (anti)causative verbs in children and adults. For the novel actions, participants were exposed to the novel verbs transitively (e.g., Watch me leat the cow), intransitively (e.g., Look, the horse is kazing), or neutrally (e.g., This is called sebbing). In the test phase, participants had to answer agent-oriented questions (What am I doing?), patient-oriented questions (What is the cow doing?) and open questions (What’s happening?). One of the most interesting findings of the study was that children tend to use novel forms causatively even when the causativity was not modeled in the input. However, this transitive use is reduced when answering a patient-oriented question. In their discussion of the results, Braine et al. agree with Bowerman (1982b) in that it is the fact that English verbs can appear in different constructions that leads children to make causativity errors. With respect to the question of how children recover from causative alternation errors, Pinker (1989) proposes that at some point in their development, children abandon the innate broad-range rules that lead them to overgeneralize and start applying innate narrow-range rules. This model, however, has been inconsistent when tested with corpus data (Marcotte, 2005, 2006), and experimental data (Bowerman & Croft, 2008). Following construction grammar approaches, Marcotte (2005, 2006) suggests that children have a hypothesis-testing language acquisition mechanism (HLAM), through which sentences produced by adults provide positive feedback for the child’s hypothesis on their form-meaning pair. Similarly, Bowerman and Croft (2008) propose a usage-based model of acquisition that predicts that children will stop making causative errors with verbs that have a highfrequency suppletive form (like kill and die) before those with less frequent suppletive forms (like remind and remember). However, the predictions did not hold with the two children that participated in the study. Given these findings, the authors claim that frequency and entrenchment might play a different role in error recovery than what they had hypothesized. Most recently, Bidgood et al. (2021) designed a study to test the effects of entrenchment, preemption, and semantics in the perception and production of causative alternation errors. The authors went beyond the raw frequency of the verb and assigned a predictor value to each of the 120 verbs they tested. The entrenchment predictor value accounted for the verb’s bias towards or away from transitive and intransitive use (e.g., laugh has a bias towards intransitivity). Verbs were also assigned a preemption predictor: a bias towards a specific construction (e.g., destroy has a bias towards the passive construction) and a semantic rating (from less causative to more causative). In their grammaticality judgment task, Bidgood et al. found that adults’ and children’s judgments show an effect of semantics and statistics (preemption and entrenchment combined) across all verb types, and that, as expected, these effects increase with age. The primed production of causative errors, however, did 68

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not show statistically significant effects of entrenchment, preemption, and semantics. Nonetheless, error patterns emerged: the higher the semantic rating for causation, the higher the transitivization errors and the lower the intransitivization errors. As for entrenchment and preemption, the more frequently the verb appears in transitive constructions, the fewer the transitivization errors; and the more frequent the verb is in intransitive constructions, the fewer the intransitivization errors. Finally, in line with the speakers’ statistical tracking of verbs, Irani (2019) claims that causative alternation errors can be accounted for with the Sufficiency Principle (Yang, 2016), which hypothesizes that a minimum number of items are required to form a generalization. Therefore, as their vocabulary increases, children improve their ability to make generalizations and eventually stop making errors. The causative alternation phenomenon remains relatively unexplored in heritage language research. Zyzik (2014) conducted an AJT study on causative errors among heritage speakers of Spanish and documented the effects of transfer from the dominant language, English. More recently, Park-Johnson (2020) examined the transitivity alternation among heritage speakers of Korean in the United States. The study focused on speakers’ sensitivity to the Korean transitivity particle –i, which attaches to the verb root. For example, the transitive (causative) verb boil requires the –i particle while the inchoative version of the same verb prohibits it. This contrast is illustrated with examples (9) and (10) from Park-Johnson (2020, p. 360). (9)

Mul-ul kkel-i-ess-ta. water-ACC boil-TRANS-PST-DECL ‘(Pro) boiled the water.’

(10)

Mul-i kkel-es-ta. water-NOM boil-PST-DECL ‘The water boiled.’

Park-Johnson (2020) tested six verbs that participate in the transitivity alternation as shown above. These were included in an aural AJT in sentences that manipulated the presence and absence of the –i particle. For example, acceptable items were transitive sentences with the –i particle and intransitive sentences without the –i particle. The results indicate that heritage speakers of Korean showed some degree of sensitivity to the –i particle, but that their judgments were less clear-cut than the monolingual control group. Specifically, they did not reject the ungrammatical sentences to the same degree, with mean scores around three (on a five-point scale). In addition to the AJT experiment, ParkJohnson included a translation task with another group of heritage speakers in order to determine how they interpret the transitivity particle. This task showed mixed results, but it should be noted that translation may not be ideal for sentences that are unacceptable; indeed, some of the participants noted that a given sentence “cannot be translated” or attempted to correct it.

6.5  SLA studies on the causative/inchoative alternation In the field of SLA, the literature on the causative/inchoative alternation inevitably involves a focus on the types of errors made by learners of different L1 backgrounds. To present this line of research coherently, we will describe the problem as involving overgeneralization or omission, although the scenarios play out differently depending on the target language. Indeed, cross-linguistic influence (CLI) has been a major question in the study of causative/inchoative alternations in SLA. We begin with an overview of phenomena that stem from overgeneralization. In English, the causative/inchoative alternation is not morphologically marked, so we might assume that it causes no problems for L2 learners. However, decades of research have shown that L2 69

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learners of English tend to overgeneralize certain unaccusative verbs such as happen or die (unaccusative verbs are a subtype of intransitive verb that have a non-agentive subject). Specifically, this is known as overpassivization (Ju, 2000; Kondo, 2005; Oshita, 2000; Zobl, 1989, among others). Overpassivization is a complex problem because, although it has been documented among various L1 groups, there are important differences with respect to the nature of the phenomenon (i.e., how pervasive it is, which verbs are most susceptible to being overpassivized). Montrul (2001b), citing earlier research by Hirakawa (1995), explained that the lack of overt morphology in English encourages L2 learners to prefer passive forms (e.g., *the snow was melted rather than the snow melted). Indeed, Montrul found that L1 Spanish speakers tended to reject inchoative verbs in contexts with no visible agent such as the door opened and instead favored the periphrastic-get construction (the door got opened). Kondo (2005) found that Japanese L1 speakers tended to overpassivize both kinds of unaccusative verbs (alternating and non-alternating), whereas L1 Spanish speakers were more likely to overpassivize unaccusative verbs that had transitive counterparts (i.e., alternating, such as close, freeze, dry). Thus, when researching overpassivization, it makes sense to distinguish between the two types of unaccusative verbs: happen-type verbs (which do not have a transitive counterpart) and sink-type verbs (which alternate in transitivity). Ortega et al. (2018) make the crucial point that alternating verbs provide confusing positive evidence for the learner because they appear in a range of different constructions, including transitive (active) sentences as in (11), passives like (12), and inchoatives like (13). (11) The officer closed the door. (12) The door was closed (by the officer). (13) The door closed.

Thus, they hypothesized that alternating unaccusatives will pose more of a learning challenge than non-alternating unaccusatives (e.g., happen, appear). This prediction was tested with an AJT that targeted eight alternating and eight non-alternating unaccusative verbs. Each category was further divided into high- and low-frequency verbs. The results confirm the main effects of verb frequency and verb type (alternating versus non-alternating). Specifically, L2 learners of English were less accurate in judging sentences with the low-frequency verbs and also with alternating verbs. One of the potential problems that L2 researchers face when including low-frequency verbs is that learners may not know the core meaning of these verbs, much less anything about their argument structure. Some researchers (cf. Cabrera, 2010; Montrul, 2000) have utilized translation tasks to determine if learners know the core meaning of a verb, and if they do not, their responses on the AJT for that item are not considered. Another type of overgeneralization occurs when learners use or accept intransitive verbs such as disappear in causative contexts. Nagano (2015) designed a study to test this phenomenon in L2 English among native speakers of Japanese. Nagano describes the learnability problem as stemming from an asymmetrical relationship between the L1 and the L2. Japanese is more permissive in the sense that many verbs of (dis)appearance and verbs of inherently directed motion can be lexically causative. Nagano’s study included verbs from four classes: change of state, manner-of-motion, (dis) appearance, and inherently directed motion. Within each verb class, the stimuli were divided among high-, mid-, and low-frequency lexical items. The data showed that L1 Japanese speakers had difficulty rejecting causative errors such as *The man vanished the coin and that frequency had a significant effect on participants’ judgments (lower-frequency verbs were more likely to be accepted in such sentences). However, Nagano underscores the absence of frequency effects for prototypical causative verbs such as break. The participants made native-like judgments on transitive sentences such as Someone broke the car window regardless of the frequency of the verb. Considering these results, 70

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Nagano questions usage-based theories of language acquisition and speculates that other mechanisms must be considered in L2 learners’ linguistic competence. The causative/inchoative alternation has been studied extensively for Spanish as an L2. Recall that the alternation in Spanish is morphologically marked. Thus, alternating verbs such as romper(se) (to break) are obligatorily marked with the clitic se when used intransitively. The learnability problem is similar to what has been described for other languages: L2 learners of Spanish must figure out which verbs alternate, and which ones do not. If their L1 is English, CLI predicts that they will omit the se when it is required, given the lack of overt morphology in their native language. However, if they perceive the se as a marker of intransitivity, they may begin to overgeneralize it to verbs such as llorar (‘to cry,’ unergative) and llegar (‘to arrive,’ unaccusative). Research on L2 Spanish has investigated both possibilities, beginning with the influential work of Montrul (1999, 2000), followed by replication studies such as Cabrera (2010), and lastly, with instructional interventions designed to teach the functions of se (Toth & Guijarro-Fuentes, 2013). Although the focus of this chapter is not on instructed SLA, these intervention studies offer interesting perspectives on how learners develop their knowledge of the causative/inchoative alternation in Spanish over time. Moranski and Zalbidea (2022) analyze the data from an intervention study on non-agentive uses of se. Data were collected with a picture-based AJT and a written picture-description task (see Toth, 2022, for details). The instructional intervention was divided between deductive and inductive presentation of the target structure. Outcomes reveal a complex picture: the deductive group had superior performance in terms of production and judgments, but only in contexts where the se was congruent/ expected. In contrast, instruction did not have a positive effect on those contexts where the se was incongruent with the picture (on the AJT) or where it should be omitted in the picture-description task. In other words, learners in the instructed groups were more likely to overgeneralize se, and this trend was more pronounced for the deductive group. Moranski and Zalbidea interpret these results in the context of Zyzik’s (2006) proposal that classroom learners acquire se as part of the verb, which then leads to overgeneralization errors. Juffs and Fang (2022) analyzed the same data set as Moranski and Zalbidea but with a different analytical approach. With respect to the AJT, they found that acceptance of grammatical sentences with se for inchoative events increased over time, that is, learners added anticausative se to their grammar. On the picture-description task, instructed groups increased their production of se with alternating verbs to 50%. However, these instructed learners also tended to overgeneralize se to other classes of intransitive verbs, specifically unaccusatives. Many of the studies on Spanish causative/inchoative alternation have focused on classroom learners at the beginner and intermediate levels of proficiency. These learners tend to have indeterminate intuitions about sentences on AJTs, which may make it difficult to interpret the data without further information. For example, the lower proficiency groups in Gómez-Soler (2015) had mean scores around three on a five-point Likert scale AJT. Specifically, they accepted alternating verbs with se, but they also accepted unaccusative and unergative verbs with se to some degree (i.e., overgeneralization). One possibility of investigating why learners reject a particular sentence is to ask them to provide a correction. Cabrera (2010) found that beginner and intermediate learners who rejected intransitive sentences with se tended to correct them by either deleting the se or by making the sentence transitive. Interestingly, the advanced learners in Cabrera’s study also re-wrote some of the intransitive sentences to make them transitive (e.g., someone broke the window). This suggests that the use of static images does not fully capture the nature of an inchoative event, a possibility that we raised earlier in the section on methodology. Most recently, García-Tejada, Cuza and Lustres Alonso (2023) explored the acquisition of se among L2 learners and heritage speakers by focusing on the [+inchoative] reading of verbs that express physical change of state (e.g., romperse, ‘to break’) and psychological change of state (e.g., asustarse, ‘to get scared’). Crucially, the authors hypothesize that the overt marking of aspectual 71

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morphology in English with psychological change-of-state verbs (e.g., get scared) will lead to better performance with this class of verbs for the L2 learners. The results show a clear advantage for the heritage speakers over L2 learners across conditions and tasks. Moreover, on the AJT, there were different patterns for the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Specifically, there was some degree of acceptance for the omission of se with both physical and psychological changes of state. Such ungrammatical sentences were rated above three (on a five-point scale) by the L2 learners, suggesting that omission of the intransitive marker se is a persistent problem for L2 learners whose first language background (English) does not mark the causative alternation morphologically. As discussed in this section, most SLA studies on the causative-inchoative alternation focus on one target language. A notable exception of cross-linguistic research is Montrul (2000), who compared the acquisition of Spanish, Turkish, and English. By using the same experimental task with all three groups of L2 learners, Montrul was able to explore the interaction of Universal Grammar (UG) and L1 knowledge. The results reported in Montrul (2000) confirm that there is strong L1 influence at the morphological level. For example, although the general trend across languages was in favor of transitive verbs (i.e., learners were more accurate at accepting transitive forms than intransitive forms), Montrul explains that this may stem from L1 effects at the morphological level. The case of L2 Turkish is particularly interesting (Montrul, 2001a) because this language has two patterns for alternating verbs: a causative morpheme on transitive verbs like sink and an anticausative morpheme on intransitive verbs like open. With verbs that follow the causative pattern, Spanish- and Englishspeaking learners tended to accept sentences without the required causative morpheme. Thus, in L2 Turkish, we observe a different kind of omission error (of the causative morpheme, -DIr), but one that is analogous to the omission of the Spanish intransitive marker se in the sense that both are traced to influence from the L1.

6.6  Future directions and areas for further research In this section we propose ideas for how future research might approach the complex questions involved in studying the causative-inchoative alternation. These ideas focus on (1) aiming for more language representation, (2) expanding experimental studies to test more verbs, (3) controlling for verb frequency in more comprehensive and systematic ways, and (4) diversifying the methodological approaches used to study this phenomenon. Typological studies on the causative alternation show that languages use different strategies to convey various types of (non-)causation events (Haspelmath, 1993; Talmy, 2000). However, our understanding of L1 and L2 acquisition of causative alternation patterns is mostly based on English. Some studies on languages other than English (e.g., Figueira, 1984 on L1 Portuguese; Allen, 1996 on L1 Inuktitut; Montrul, 2001a on L2 Turkish) have shown that morphological marking of (anti-)causatives, word order and other language-specific features play an important role in the development of L1 and L2 perception and production patterns in those languages. Thus, a comprehensive account of the acquisition of the causative alternation must necessarily include descriptions of multiple languages and cross-linguistic comparisons. Perhaps the first step to achieve this goal is to explore the already available data, for example, in the CHILDES corpora. Naturally, experimental studies also show potential for the study of other languages. Although stimuli might have to be adjusted for a specific language, videos and pictures for elicitation tasks can be retrieved from a variety of open sources (for example, in the Language and Cognition L&C Field Manuals and Stimulus Materials by the Max Planck Institute). Finally, our review of the research did not reveal any studies on third language (L3) acquisition that focus on the causative alternation. This is certainly an avenue that holds promise for future research since it would add to our understanding of CLI across linguistic properties (cf. Jensen et al., 2023). In addition to testing more languages, one of the limitations of existing research is the fact that experimental studies test relatively few verbs per class. Studies such as Gómez Soler (2015) and 72

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García-Tejada et al. (2023) included only six verbs per class, which is not uncommon. Park-Johnson (2020) also tested six verbs, manipulating the transitivity of each sentence and the presence/absence of the transitive particle in Korean. With a relatively small number of verbs, we run the risk of making generalizations about argument-structure alternations based on a limited data set. In order to investigate variability by lexical item, or to control for frequency, it is crucial to test a wider range of verbs per class and to consider results for individual verbs (see Gonzalez, 2023, for further discussion). Related to the previous point, we believe that frequency deserves more serious attention in future research on the causative-inchoative alternation, especially in the field of SLA. Many studies have included some estimate of verb frequency when selecting verbs for an experimental task, but this has primarily been a measure of raw frequency. For example, Nagano (2015) compared verbs at three different frequency thresholds (high-, mid-, and low-frequency), but these classifications were based on raw frequency counts in three different corpora. Ortega et al. (2018) reflect on this issue in interpreting their data, signaling that their frequency estimates only gauged the incidence of verb forms rather than the constructions in which these verbs tend to appear. For example, the verb change is more frequent than the verb shatter in terms of overall frequency, but this does not tell us whether each verb is biased towards the transitive or intransitive construction in English. There are ways to overcome this problem, such as the exhaustive statistical approach described in Bidgood et al. (2021). In that study, the researchers tabulated overall uses of the target verbs, which were then used to calculate the bias of a particular verb with respect to two competing constructions. Finally, we would like to challenge researchers to diversify the methodological approaches they use to study the causative-inchoative alternation, moving beyond the AJT, which has been de rigueur in most SLA studies on this topic. To our knowledge, no studies have targeted the causative-inchoative alternation using an elicited imitation task (EIT). Researchers are becoming increasingly aware of the EIT as a measure of general L2 proficiency (see Kostromitina & Plonsky, 2022 for a meta-analysis). Furthermore, research with L1 Spanish-speaking children (Eisenchlas, 2003) and Spanish-English bilinguals (Pérez-Leroux et al., 2011) have demonstrated the validity of EITs for studying clitic placement, so it seems plausible to extend this methodology to causative-inchoative constructions.

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Eve Zyzik and Josefina Bittar Cabrera, M. (2010). Intransitive/inchoative structures in L2 Spanish. In C. Borgonovo et al. (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 12th Hispanic linguistics symposium (pp. 160–170). Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Croft, W. (2012). Verbs: Aspect and causal structure. Oxford University Press. Croft, W. (2022). Morphosyntax: Constructions of the world’s languages (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge University Press. Eisenchlas, S. (2003). Clitics in child Spanish. First Language, 23(2), 193–211. Figueira, R. A. (1984). On the development of the expression of causativity: A syntactic hypothesis. Journal of Child Language, 11(1), 109–127. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0305000900005614 García-Tejada, A., Cuza, A., & Lustres Alonso, E. G. (2023). The production and comprehension of Spanish se use in L2 and heritage Spanish. Second Language Research. 39(2), 301–331. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​ /02676583211016537 Gómez Soler, I. (2015). Acquisitional patterns of Spanish anticausative se: The end of the road. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics, 28(2), 349–381. Gonzalez, B. (2023). Syntactic licensing in heritage Spanish: Psych verbs and the middle voice. International Journal of Bilingualism, 27(5), 776–794. https://doi​-org​.oca​.ucsc​.edu​/10​.1177​/13670069221121750 Haspelmath, M. (1987). Transitivity alternations of the anticausative type. Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität zu Köln. Haspelmath, M. (1993). More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations. In B. Comrie & M. Polinsky (Eds.), Causatives and transitivity (pp. 87–120). John Benjamins. Hirakawa, M. (1995). L2 acquisition of English unaccusative constructions. In D. MacLaughlin & S. McEwen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th Boston University Conference on language development (pp. 291–302). Cascadilla Press. Hochberg, J. G. (1986). Children’s judgements of transitivity errors. Journal of Child Language, 13(2), 317–334. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0305000900008084 Ionin, T., & Zyzik, E. (2014). Judgment and interpretation tasks in second language research. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 34, 37–64. Irani, A. (2019). Learning from positive evidence: The acquisition of verb argument structure [Doctoral Dissertation]. University of Pennsylvania. Jensen, I. N., Mitrofanova, N., Anderssen, M., Rodina, Y., Slabakova, R., & Westergaard, M. (2023). Crosslinguistic influence in L3 acquisition across linguistic modules. International Journal of Multilingualism, 20(3), 717–734. Ju, M. K. (2000). Overpassivization errors by second language learners: The effect of conceptualizable agents in discourse. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22(1), 85–111. Juffs, A., & Fang, S. (2022). A generative approach to the instructed second language acquisition of Spanish se. Language Learning, 72(S1), 83–124. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/lang​.12483 Kemmer, S. (1993). The middle voice (Vol. 23). John Benjamins. Kondo, T. (2005). Overpassivization in second language acquisition. IRAL, 43, 129–161. Kostromitina, M., & Plonsky, L. (2022). Elicited imitation tasks as a measure of L2 proficiency: A meta-analysis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 44(3), 886-911. Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction. Oxford University Press. Levin, B., & Rappaport Hovav, M. (1993). English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary investigation. In B. Levin (Ed.) English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary investigation. University of Chicago Press. Levin, B., & Rappaport Hovav, M. (1995). Unaccusativity: At the syntax-lexical semantics interface. MIT Press. Levin, B., & Rappaport Hovav, M. (2005). Argument realization. Cambridge University Press. Lord, C. (1979). “Don’t you fall me down”: Children’s generalizations regarding cause and transitivity. In Papers and reports on child language development (Vol. 17, pp. 81–89). Stanford University. Marcotte, J. P. (2005). Causative alternation errors in child language acquisition. [Doctoral Dissertation]. Stanford University. Marcotte, J. P. (2006). Causative alternation errors as event-driven construction paradigm completions. In E. V. Clark & B. F. Kelly (Eds.), Constructions in acquisition (pp. 205–232). CSLI Publications. Montrul, S. (1999). Causative errors with unaccusative verbs in L2 Spanish. Second Language Research, 15(2), 191–219. Montrul, S. (2000). Transitivity alternations in L2 acquisition: Toward a modular view of transfer. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22(2), 229–273. Montrul, S. (2001a). The acquisition of causative/inchoative verbs in L2 Turkish. Language Acquisition, 9(1), 1–58. Montrul, S. (2001b). Causatives and transitivity in L2 English. Language Learning, 51(1), 51–106. Moranski, K., & Zalbidea, J. (2022). Context and generalizability in multisite L2 classroom research: The impact of deductive versus guided inductive instruction. Language Learning, 72(S1), 41–82. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​ /lang​.12487

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The causative/inchoative alternation Muylle, M., Wegner, T. G., Bernolet, S., & Hartsuiker, R. J. (2020). English norming data for 423 short animated action movie clips. Acta Psychologica, 202, 102957. Nagano, T. (2015). Acquisition of English verb transitivity by native speakers of Japanese. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 5(3), 322–355. Ortega, L., Lee, S.-K., & Miyata, M. (2018). What is happened? Your amazon​.c​om order has shipped. In L. Pickering & V. Evans (Eds.), Language learning, discourse and cognition: Studies in the tradition of Andrea Tyler (pp. 213–247). John Benjamins. Oshita, H. (2000). What is happened may not be what appears to be happening: A corpus study of ‘passive’ unaccusatives in L2 English. Second Language Research, 16(4), 293–324. Park-Johnson, S. K. (2020). Receptive knowledge of transitivity alternation by Korean heritage speakers. Heritage Language Journal, 17(3), 355–376. Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Cuza, A., & Thomas, D. (2011). Clitic placement in Spanish–English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(2), 221–232. Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition—The acquisition of argument structure. The MIT Press. Rappaport Hovav, M. (2014). Lexical content and context: The causative alternation in English revisited. Lingua, 141, 8–29. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.lingua​.2013​.09​.006 Schäfer, F. (2009). The causative alternation: The causative alternation. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(2), 641–681. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/j​.1749​-818X​.2009​.00127.x Shibatani, M. (1976). The grammar of causative constructions: A conspectus. In M. Shibatani (Ed.), The grammar of causative constructions. Academic Press. Slobin, D. I. (1982). The origins of grammatical encoding of events. In P. J. Hopper & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Studies in transitivity (pp. 409–422). Academic Press. Suárez-Palma, I. (2020). Applied arguments in Spanish inchoative middle constructions. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 5(1), 1–37. https://doi​.org/​https:/​/doi​.org​/10​.5334​/gjgl​.827 Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics: Concept structuring systems. (Vol. 1). The MIT Press. Talmy, L. (2007). Lexical typologies. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description (2nd ed., pp. 66–168). Cambridge University Press. Toth, P. D. (2022). Introduction: Investigating explicit L2 grammar instruction through multiple theoretical and methodological lenses. Language Learning, 72(S1), 5–40. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/lang​.12490 Toth, P. D., & Guijarro-Fuentes, P. (2013). The impact of instruction on second-language implicit knowledge: Evidence against encapsulation. Applied Psycholinguistics, 34, 1163–1193. Wolff, P. (2003). Direct causation in the linguistic coding and individuation of causal events. Cognition, 88(1), 1–48. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/S0010​-0277(03)00004-0 Yang, C. (2016). The price of linguistic productivity: How children learn to break the rules of language. MIT Press. Zobl, H. (1989). Canonical typological structures and ergativity in English L2 acquisition. In J. Schachter & S. M. Gass (Eds.), Linguistic perspectives on second language acquisition (pp. 203–221). Cambridge University Press; Cambridge Core. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/CBO9781139524544​.015 Zyzik, E. (2006). Transitivity alternations and sequence learning: Insights from L2 Spanish production data. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28(3), 449–485. Zyzik, E. (2014). Expressing causation in Spanish: A functional analysis of heritage speakers’ written production. Heritage Language Journal, 11(1), 76–97.

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7 INTRANSITIVE VERBS Makiko Hirakawa

7.1 Introduction Verbs are commonly divided into ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’ based on whether or not they take direct objects. For example, verbs such as kick in ‘the child kicked a ball’ are transitive because the verb takes an object, a ball, whereas verbs such as cry in ‘the child cried’ are intransitive because no object is required. The single argument of intransitive verbs is realized as the subject of the sentence composed of a subject noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP), as in (1) and (2). (1) The man danced on the stage. (2) The man fell on the stage.

Even though these intransitive sentences appear identical on surface, it has been claimed that they belong to two distinct verb classes: danced (dance) in (1) is ‘unergative’ and fell (fall) in (2) is ‘unaccusative’. Split Intransitivity (Sorace, 2000) or the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Burzio, 1986; Perlmutter, 1978) states that the subject of each verb class differs semantically and syntactically. Unergative verbs imply volitional control but unaccusative verbs do not. Thus, the subject of an unergative verb (e.g., dance, laugh, cry) bears an agent role that is actively involved in the action of the verb, whereas that of an unaccusative verb (e.g., fall, arrive, die) bears a patient or theme role that undergoes some change of state or that is affected by the action of the verb. The single argument of unergatives is an external argument (external to the VP), syntactically mapped to subject position like a transitive subject, whereas the single argument of unaccusatives is an internal argument (internal to the VP), which is syntactically the underlying object like a transitive object. The differences can be captured as in (3) (from a Government and Binding (GB) perspective, Chomsky, 1981): (3) a. b. c.

Unergative Verb: Unaccusative Verb: Transitive Verb:

[ NP [VP V ] [ [VP V NP ] [ NP [VP V NP ]

e.g., The man danced. e.g., The man fell. e.g., The boy kicked a ball

Unaccusative verbs fall into two types: nonalternating (e.g., fall and die) and alternating (e.g., break and open). The latter type has a transitive variant (e.g., the door opened vs. Susan opened the door) (See chapter 21, this volume). Furthermore, it is assumed that the unaccusative argument in object 76

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-9

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position moves to subject position via A-movement, as schematized in (4) where t stands for the trace of the moved NP man. The moved NP is linked to its base position via an A-chain that enables the argument to receive its theta role from its initial position (Borer & Wexler, 1987). Note that A-movement and its resultant A-chain will be used interchangeably in the discussion below. (4) a. b.

Base structure: Surface structure:

[ TP [ ] will [ VP fall [ the man] ] [ TP [THEME the mani ] will [VP fall [    ti ] ]      

As the term suggests, ‘unaccusative’ verbs do not license accusative case to the internal argument, thus the argument moves to subject position in which nominative case is licensed (in GB framework, Burzio, 1986). In this chapter, we adopt the view that unaccusativity is syntactically represented but semantically determined (Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1995; Perlmutter, 1978). Since the Unaccusative Hypothesis was introduced, a wide range of phenomena across languages have been identified to support the unaccusative/unergative distinction. We refer to these phenomena as unaccusative diagnostics. For example, the there construction in English is compatible with unaccusative verbs, but not with unergative verbs (Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1995). Unaccusativity is a universal phenomenon, but languages vary as to how they display syntactic and morphological reflexes of unaccusativity. We discuss theoretical background in Section 7.2. Given the Unaccusativity Hypothesis, we may ask whether language learners distinguish the two types of intransitive verbs in their first language (L1) and second language (L2). Research in L1 acquisition has focused on whether young children construct A-chains with unaccusative verbs (Friedmann, 2007). Studies on online processing also suggest that native speakers differentiate unaccusatives and unergatives (Friedmann et al., 2008). Research on child L1 and methodological approaches in L2 research are discussed in Sections 7.3 and 7.4 respectively. The unaccusative hypothesis has motivated L2 research in various languages. In Section 7.5, we first discuss non-target L2 errors, often referred to as ‘overpassivization’ (e.g. The earthquake was happened last night), where passive morphology ‘be + Ved’ is incorrectly used. Interestingly, learners of various L1 backgrounds make this type of error with unaccusatives, but not with unergatives (Oshita, 2000). Research on unaccusativity in other languages including Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish is reviewed, and findings suggest that L2 acquisition is mostly constrained by unaccusativity. The final section offers open questions in the domain of unaccusativity in L2 and suggests some future directions in response to developments in syntactic theories that raise new questions about crosslinguistic influence in L2 acquisition.

7.2  Theoretical analyses for the two types of intransitive verbs 7.2.1  The unaccusative hypothesis and some diagnostics A variety of morphological and syntactic phenomena as well as determining factors have been studied and proposed as diagnostics of unaccusativity. The rationale behind the proposals is the following: the single argument of unergative verbs is a subject at all levels of representation, and therefore shows properties of the subject of transitive verbs. In contrast, the single argument of unaccusative verbs is an underlying direct object, and thus exhibits properties of the direct object of transitive verbs. Here we focus on the there construction, resultative constructions in English, takusan con77

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struction, floating numeral quantifiers (NQs) in Japanese, ne-cliticization, and auxiliary selection in Italian and other Romance languages. We will give an overview of these structures below, which will be used in the experiments examining knowledge of L1 and L2 learners. The there construction in English is a diagnostic of unaccusativity (Burzio, 1986; Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1995). Unaccusative verbs are compatible with the construction (5b), but unergative verbs are not (5a). Levin and Rappaport Hovav refer to the construction as a surface unaccusativity diagnostic because the construction is only possible with the unaccusative argument remaining in the base position at surface syntax.

(5)

a. b.

*There walked a man in the park. There arrived a man in the park.

(unergative) (unaccusative)

Note however that the there construction is restricted to ‘verbs of appearance’ and ‘verbs of existence’, and alternating unaccusatives are not allowed in this construction (Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1995, p. 121): see 6a.1 In addition, definite NPs, such as the ship, make the construction ungrammatical: see 6b. Thus, it has been proposed that unaccusative verbs may license partitive case, but not accusative case (Belletti, 1988; Lasnik, 1992; Yatsushiro, 1999). We should remind ourselves that unaccusative diagnostics do not necessarily pick up the same class of verbs within and across languages (Alexiadou et al., 2004; Sorace, 2000).

(6)

a. b.

*There melted a lot of snow on the streets of Chicago. *There appeared the ship on the horizon.

Another well-known diagnostic in English (and other languages) is the resultative construction, which can only be predicated of a NP in direct object position (Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1995, Burzio, 1986; Perlmutter & Postal, 1984). (Examples from Levin & Rappaport, 1995.)

(7)

a. b. c. d.

Mary broke the glass into pieces. *Dora shouted hoarse. The river froze solid. She was shaken awake by the earthquake.

A resultative phrase describes the state of the NP it is predicated of as a result of the action denoted by the verb. The resultative phrase into pieces in (7a) can be predicated of the object the glass but not the subject Mary, i.e., the glass became into pieces as a result of Mary’s breaking the glass. The resultative phrase underlined can be predicated of the surface subject of unaccusative (7c) and that of passive (7d), but not the unergative subject (7b), which can be explained if we assume that the surface subject of an unaccusative and a passive is the direct object contrasting with the unergative subject. In Japanese, the adverb takusan ‘a lot’ is considered as a diagnostic of unaccusativity; it can only modify the internal argument of the verb (Kageyama, 1993, 1996). Japanese allows subject and object drop (when appropriate), and examples in (8) consisting of the adverb takusan ‘a lot’ plus the intransitive verb show the contrast. 78

Intransitive verbs (8) a.

Takusan uta-ta. (unergative) A lot sing-past ‘(Someone) sang a lot.’ NOT ‘A lot of people sang.’ Takusan koware-ta / kowa-sare-ta. (unaccusative / passive) A lot break-PAST / break-PASS-PAST ‘A lot (of things) broke. / A lot (of things) got broken.’

b.

Floating numeral quantifiers are another unaccusative diagnostic in Japanese (Miyagawa, 1989). A numeral quantifier consists of a numeral and a classifier which agrees with the type of entity being quantified (e.g., san-nin ‘three-classifier’ for human). Unaccusative subjects (9a) but not unergative subjects (9b) can be modified by the numeral quantifier, floating inside the VP. It has been argued that a floating quantifier and its associate NP must be in a syntactically local domain in their base position.2 Thus, the contrast in (9) can be explained as follows: (9a) is unaccusative and its subject gakusei ‘student’ is base-generated inside the VP where it was in the required local domain with the floating quantifier, whereas (9b) is unergative and its subject gakusei ‘student’ is base-generated outside of VP, thus it has not been in the required local domain with the floating quantifier.3 (9)

a.

Gakuseii-ga [VP ofisu-ni ti Student-NOM   office-to ‘Three students came to the office.’ *Gakusei-ga [VP geragera-to Student-NOM loudly-with ‘Three students laughed loudly.’

b.

san-nin three-CL

ki-ta ] . come-PST

san-nin three-CL

warat-ta ] . laugh-PST

In Italian, we discuss two diagnostics, the ne-cliticization and the auxiliary selection. Ne-cliticization is possible with respect to a direct object; i.e., examples in (10) illustrate that the quantified NP is pronominalized in the form of ne, stranding a quantifier element molto ‘many’. Note that the preverbal subject of any type of sentence can appear post-verbally in Italian, but ne-cliticization is sensitive to direct objects at surface structure with an unaccusative subject (10a), but not with an unergative subject (10b). (Examples from Burzio, 1986.) (10)

a. b.

Ne arriveranno molti. of-them will arrive many ‘Many of them will arrive.’ *Ne telefoneranno molti. of-them will telephone many ‘Many of them will telephone.’

(unaccusative) (unergative)

As a morphological reflex of unaccusativity, Romance and Germanic languages (except Spanish and English) show the general distribution of auxiliary verbs ‘be’ and ‘have’ in accordance with the unaccusative/unergative distinction (Burzio, 1986; Sorace, 1993) for forming perfective sentences. In Italian, unaccusative verbs select essere ‘be’ (Giovanni è arrivato. ‘Giovanni is arrived.’) while unergative verbs select avere ‘have’ (Giovanni ha telefonato. ‘Giovanni has telephoned.’) in the form of an auxiliary followed by the past participle of the verb. Although unaccusativity and auxiliary selection are closely related, the auxiliary selection shows systematic variability within and across languages, and the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy is proposed 79

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based on experimental data of native speakers’ intuitions about auxiliary selection in Dutch, German, French, and Italian. (11) The Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (based on Sorace, 2000, p. 863)



Note that ‘telicity’ and ‘agentivity/controllability’ are the two key notions in the ASH. Core unaccusatives at the top of the hierarchy denote a telic change (i.e., having a natural end point) and require BE, while core unergatives at the bottom denote an atelic activity (i.e., having no end point) which requires HAVE. Intermediate verbs are susceptible to variation in the choice of auxiliaries because different languages have different cutoff points. The Hierarchy includes nonalternating intransitives only, and excludes those with transitive variants following the proposal that disregards alternating intransitives as unaccusatives (Haegeman, 1991; see Note 1). To summarize, we discussed six out of many diagnostics of Unaccusativity that have been identified in linguistic theories. It is important to understand that these unaccusativity diagnostics do not uniformly apply to the same class of verbs within and across languages; in other words, the so-called ‘unaccusativity mismatches’ exist (Alexiadou et al., 2004). These syntactic diagnostics are widely used in experimental studies that investigate L1 and L2 learners’ representations of unaccusativity. We will review these studies in Sections 7.3 and 7.4.

7.2.2  Unaccusativity and levels of representations Recall that unaccusativity is syntactically represented, but semantically determined. In other words, when we consider the acquisition of intransitive verbs, we are dealing with the relationship between lexical semantics, argument structure and syntax (White, 2003, p. 203). Alexiadou et al. (2004, pp. 10–11) schematizes this relationship as in (12). Lexical conceptual structure (LCS) is a lexical-semantic representation in which verb meaning is decomposed into semantic primitives such as CAUSE, BE, etc. This semantic description is mapped onto argument structure, a lexical-syntactic representation where the unaccusative-unergative distinction is assumed to be encoded. Argument Structure ‘specifies how many arguments a verb requires and to which syntactic argument positions these are linked, for instance by making a distinction between external and internal theta roles’ (Alexiadou et al., 2004, p. 10). (12)



(Based on Alexiadou et al., 2004, p. 11) 80

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In the sections to follow, we focus on the acquisition of argument structure of unaccusative and unergative verbs. The unaccusative/unergative distinction raises important learnability problems for not only L1, but also for L2 learners as it lies at the semantics-syntax interface for mapping of LCS into syntactic structure. There is a poverty of stimulus problem in the acquisition of intransitive verb argument structures (cf. Baker, 1979; Pinker, 1989; White, 2003): intransitive verbs all look identical at the surface, but they do not behave alike syntactically. How do learners acquire the distinction in the absence of (explicit) evidence in the input?

7.3  Acquisition and processing of intransitive verbs in first language Unaccusativity has been a topic of exploration in L1 acquisition for around 30 years. Past studies of corpus data and experimental studies generally report that children differentiate unaccusative verbs from unergative (and transitive) verbs in languages such as English (Becker & Schaefer, 2013), European Portuguese (Costa & Friedman, 2012), French (Snyder et al., 1995), Hebrew (Costa & Friedmann, 2012; Friedmann, 2007), Italian (Lorusso et al., Capilan et al., 2005; Snyder et al., 1995), Japanese (Sano et al., 2001; Shimada & Sano, 2007), and Russian (Babyonyshev et al., 2001). The focus of these studies has been to test whether young children can produce unaccusative arguments in the SV (NP-VP) word order via an A-chain or A-movement, and whether they know that the preverbal subject is a derived subject, base-generated in object position. As we have seen, unaccusative verbs look identical to unergative verbs in their surface syntax. Then how do children distinguish the two types of intransitive verbs? In this section, we will briefly review the main findings of research in L1 learners of Russian, English, Hebrew, Italian, and Japanese in the first section. We then turn to recent findings of how adult native speakers process intransitive sentences.

7.3.1  L1 children Previous studies on unaccusativity in general report that children are sensitive to the unaccusative/ unergative distinction. Babyonshev et al. (2001) is an exception which claims that Russian children have difficulty with A-chains in unaccusative verbs. They examine children’s interpretation of the genitive of negation construction, which is a diagnostic of unaccusativity, i.e., genitive case appears on the internal argument of either a transitive or an unaccusative when the object is nonspecific/indefinite, within the scope of negation. Children ages 3;0 to 6;6 were tested using a sentence-completion task. Results of the task indicated that children did not consistently use the genitive of negation with unaccusatives (46%), whereas they used it more consistently with transitives (73%). Babyonshev et al. emphasized that the children knew the semantic and syntactic constrains underlying the licensing of genitive of negation, but their behavior differed only in the conditions that required A-chains with unaccusatives. In a study of English by Becker and Schaefer (2013), they argue against Babyonyshev et al. (2001) and claim that children by age three have a correct representation of unaccusative verbs. They examined all files within the available data of three children in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000), Adam (age 2;3-5;2), Eve (age 1;6-2;3) (both from Brown, 1973) and Nina (age 1:11-3;3, Suppes, 1974), using a semantic diagnostic of subject animacy and a syntactic diagnostic of resultative constructions. It was found that children constrained unergative subjects to animate NPs (92%) but allowed unaccusative subjects to occur with animate and inanimate NPs (58% and 42%, respectively). Only a few resultatives were found in one child’s production (Adam), and they were limited to transitive objects and unaccusative subjects, as expected. Further evidence comes from Hebrew children ages 1;6 to 4;0 in Friedmann (2007) who ran experiments including sentence repetitions and an analysis on speech transcripts from CHILDES 81

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(MacWhinney, 2000). In Hebrew, unaccusative arguments appear in both SV and VS orders, and the SV order is created by A-movement. Children younger than two years old already produced SV (and VS) orders for unaccusatives but only the SV order for unergatives, suggesting children’s distinct representations of the two classes of intransitive verbs. Lorusso et al. (2005) conducted a cross-sectional study with Italian children aged 22 to 33 months. Each child was videotaped while playing with a caregiver and the speech data collected were transcribed and analyzed. It was found that overt subjects were more frequent with unaccusatives (36%) than with unergatives (25%) and transitives (22%), and that they were placed in both orders with unaccusatives (SV 46.3% & VS 53.7%) but more preverbally with unergatives (SV 73.9% & VS 26.1%) and with transitives (SV 73.6% & VS 26.4%). These patterns are in accordance with syntactic characteristics of unaccusative arguments. Lorusso et al. concluded that A-chains with unaccusative verbs were formed by young Italian children. Shimada and Sano (2007) tested Japanese children ages 3;6 to 6;4 employing a truth-value judgment task with the -teiru construction. This construction has two distinct readings depending on the verb it attaches to: resultative readings with unaccusative verbs and progressive readings with unergative and transitive verbs. Results showed that the youngest group, three-year-olds, correctly accepted resultative readings for unaccusatives but rejected them for unergatives. Thus, Japanese children were claimed to possess knowledge of A-chains with unaccusatives. In sum, except for Russian children in Babyonshev et al. (2001), all the findings above suggest that children under three years distinguish unaccusatives from unergatives, showing the characteristics of unaccusative subjects having internal arguments base-generated in the object position.

7.3.2  Sentence processing by adult native speakers The Unaccusative Hypothesis has also been tested in adult psycholinguistics, and it is supported by online processing studies that measure reaction times (Bever & Sanz, 1997; Friedmann et al., 2008). Friedmann et al. (2008) investigated whether subjects of unaccusatives reactivate after the verb during native English speakers’ online processing, employing a ‘cross-modal lexical priming’ method (Swinney et al., 1979; Osterhout & Swinney, 1993). Sentence processing is known to be affected by several factors including semantic and syntactic priming. For example, if reactivation of the antecedent occurs at its trace position, the reactivated item should prime a related word at that position. Given the Unaccusative Hypothesis, it was hypothesized that subjects of unaccusatives reactivate after the verb at the trace position and that the probe should be recognized faster while subjects of unergatives do not reactivate as there is no trace after the verb. In the task, sentences were presented aurally, and a letter sequence (real word/nonword) was visually displayed on a screen. One hundred and twenty monolingual English native speakers heard sentences such as (13) and a lexical decision probe (related/unrelated, real/nonword) appeared at three positions (indicated ①–③ in the examples). (13) a. b.

Nonalternating unaccusative The tailor① from East Orange, New Jersey, mysteriously disappeared② when it was③ time to adjust the tuxedos and dresses for the participants in the wedding party. Unergative The surgeon① with a brown felt fedora hat and matching coat eagerly smiled② when the beautiful③ actress walked down the corridor to exam room three.

（Friedmann et al., 2008, p. 362） Participants were asked to make a lexical decision about the visual probes while attending to the audio stimuli. Priming effects were measured by comparing lexical decision times to probes that are 82

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semantically related to the subject NP with reaction times to unrelated probes. Results showed that reactivation was observed (at Probe Position ③) for nonalternating and some alternating unaccusatives but not for unergatives, confirming the predictions. Thus, native English speakers processed surface SV sentences differently between unaccusatives and unergatives, supporting the Unaccusative Hypothesis. Bever and Sanz (1997) investigated the processing of Spanish unaccusatives by native speakers using a visual probe-recognition task. In this task, participants were asked to read sentences including unaccusative and unergative verbs in SV and VS orders in fragments and to decide if the probe presented at the end of the sentence occurred in the sentence they had just read. The probe word was an adjective contained in the subject NP. Results indicated that sentences with unaccusative verbs showed faster reaction times than sentences with unergative verbs. Bever and Sanz concluded that the trace of the moved NP provided an extra representation of its antecedent so that its antecedent became more salient, leading to shorter reaction times. It is obvious that more research is necessary for sentence processing of intransitive verbs, but available evidence from adult native speakers of English and Spanish shows that unaccusative verbs are processed differently from unergative verbs, supporting the analysis that unaccusative subjects are base-generated in object position.

7.4  Methodological approaches to the study of unaccusativity in SLA L2 research often uses grammaticality/acceptability judgment tasks to investigate learners’ knowledge of unaccusativity experimentally, as it enables researchers to determine whether L2 learners make the unaccusative/unergative contrast in certain constructions. Tasks can be timed or untimed, sometimes with a scale (Yusa, 2003) or magnitude estimation (Sorace & Shomura, 2001), and they reveal learners’ final judgments about the grammaticality of test sentences. Through a pencil-and-paper type of judgment task, learners’ knowledge of its ungrammaticality has been directly examined. Controlled or elicited production tasks are also utilized to see whether learners overpassivize unaccusative verbs compared with unergative verbs (Balcom, 1997; Hirakawa, 1995). Learners’ corpus such as Longman Learners Corpus is also analyzed as to what extent such overpassivization errors occur in written production by verb type and by learners’ L1 (Oshita, 2000; Zobl, 1989). Truth-value judgment tasks are another type of methodology, especially when a certain structure corresponds to multiple meanings depending on the verb type. Unaccusative diagnostics such as the resultative construction and the takusan construction in L2 Japanese are incorporated into this method (Hirakawa, 2001). Learners are presented with pictures and are asked to indicate whether the given test stimulus is a true or false description of the situation depicted in the picture. Even in grammaticality judgments, it is common to include a sentence or short story prior to the test stimulus or to embed test sentences in a story so that discourse contexts can be established for a more natural use of unaccusative or inchoative, rather than passives, to follow (Ju, 2000; Yip, 1995). However, this may not give enough information for learners to contextualize a situation. Lozano and Mendikoetxea (2009) examine properties of SV and VS word orders in Spanish, calling for a need to consider properties relating to three interfaces: lexicon-syntax, syntax-discourse, and syntaxphonology. In Spanish (and Italian), VS order is observed among all types of verbs but in fact it is regulated by discourse and phonological factors such as focus, length, and complexity of the subject NP. Hence, we should consider interface properties from crosslinguistic perspectives when manipulating experimental methodology. More recently, psycholinguistic measures are used to examine how unaccusative vs. intransitive verbs are processed during sentence comprehension, such as a visual probe-recognition task (Montrul, 2004, 2006). These studies aim to examine if the trace of a moved unaccusative subject in 83

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object is psychologically real (i.e., the trace is not visible and cannot be heard but exists structurally in the speaker’s mind), and thus plays a role in real-time sentence processing.

7.5  Unaccusativity in L2 acquisition The Unaccusative Hypothesis has attracted a great interest in L2 acquisition research. In this section, we will first consider the well-known overpassivization errors in L2 English. We then discuss studies on unaccusativity in English and other languages. A number of languages have been examined including Spanish (Lozano, 2006; Lozano & Mandikoetxea, 2009; Montrul, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2006), Italian (Sorace, 1993, 1995, 2001), Japanese (Fukuda, 2017a, b; Hirakawa, 1999, 2001; Sorace & Shomura, 2001), Korean (Lee, 2011), and Chinese (Shan & Yuan, 2008; Yuan, 1999). Findings in general suggest that it is possible for learners of any target language (L2) to distinguish the two classes of intransitive verbs. However, if any difficulty arises, then it is always unaccusatives that are problematic for learners.

7.5.1  Overpassivization errors with unaccusative verbs in L2 English English is the language that has been most studied in L2 research on unaccusativity due to errors that are unique to L2 learners, such as the little boy seems to believe that Santa Claus is existed. These kind of errors are called ‘overpassivization’ or ‘passive unaccusative’ because passive morphology is overused for unaccusative verbs (Balcom, 1997; Hirakawa, 1995, 2003; Hubbard, 1994; Oshita, 2000, 2022; Yip, 1995; Zobl, 1989). Two things should be noted: (i) the errors are typically found in written English (free writing and elicited production) among learners of various L1 background including Arabic, Acadian French, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Spanish, Thai, and Turkish (Oshita, 2000, 2022), and (ii) the errors are found among relatively high proficiency learners (Balcom, 1995; Kellerman, 1983; Oshita, 2001; Yip, 1995). For example, Acadian French-speaking learners in Balcom (1995) were considered advanced/near-native English speakers studying at a bilingual university in Canada. Crucially, these types of errors occurred with both alternating and nonalternating unaccusatives, but not with unergative verbs. This is quite intriguing as the unaccusativity is not usually apparent in the input L2 learners are exposed to, all appearing in the SV sequence. Why do only unaccusatives get passivized? In fact, this asymmetry has been taken as evidence to support the claim that L2 learners have knowledge of unaccusativity. In other words, learners know that the unaccusative subject, but not the unergative subject, originates in direct object position. For example, L2 learners see a parallelism, consciously or unconsciously, between unaccusative (14a) and passive (14b) constructions as both involve NP-movement from object to subject position, and they incorrectly apply passive morphology (be + Ven) to unaccusative verbs, resulting in erroneous overpassivization. We refer to this analysis as the NP-movement analysis (Oshita, 2022; Hirakawa, 2003; Zobl, 1989). (14)

a.

[ TP [THEME the man ] [VP fell [ the man] ] (unaccusative)

b.

    [ TP [THEME the man ] [VP was kicked [ the man] ] (passive)      

Other competing analyses include the transitivization hypothesis (Balcom, 1997; Yip, 1995), the conceptualizable agent (CA) analysis (Ju, 2000), telicity effects (Kondo, 2009; Yusa, 2003), and the animacy of subject effects (Otaki & Shirahata, 2017). The transitivization hypothesis assumes that 84

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learners initially transitivize intransitive verbs, then they construct passive sentences. This proposal amounts to saying that the error occurs due to the existence of a transitive variant of nonalternating unaccusatives in L2 representation (e.g., The magician appeared a rabbit.→ A rabbit was appeared (by a magician).) Ju (2000) presents a similar, but more fine-grained, transitivization proposal. She claims that the “conceptualizable agent” (or implicit external causers of events) that language users may envisage plays a critical role. Although no agent is involved in the event of unaccusatives, Ju argues that learners may well imagine some entity that must have been responsible for the event, and such an entity that causes the event to occur is a pragmatically conceptualizable agent of the predicate (Ju, 2000, p. 91). In addition, there are two types of causation: external and internal (Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1995). Assuming the external causation induces the conceptualizable agent more often than the internal causation, Ju predicts that (i) L2 learners are more likely to passivize unaccusatives in externally caused events than in internally caused events, and that (ii) they do so significantly more often with alternating unaccusatives because they are more compatible with the existence of conceptualizable agents. In the examples from Ju’s experimental stimuli below, overpassivization is expected in (15a) more often than in (15b) where the first sentence provides a context for the second sentence. (15)

a. b.

A fighter jet shot at the ship. The ship (sank/was sunk) slowly. The rusty old ship started breaking up. The ship (sank/was sunk) slowly.

(external causation context) (internal causation context)

In a forced-choice judgment task, Chinese-speaking learners of English at intermediate proficiency were presented with test sentences such as (15) in four conditions (2 causation contexts X 2 verb forms). They selected one of the two forms that they thought was grammatical in the given context. The results of 31 participants were in accordance with Ju’s first prediction: they accepted the incorrect passive form was sunk significantly more than the correct form sank in the external causation contexts (nonalternating: 41%; alternating: 40%) than in the internal causation context (nonalternating: 19%; alternating: 18%). A control group of ten native English speakers all chose intransitive forms as expected. However, the second prediction was not confirmed. Even though Ju’s experiment has been replicated by a number of subsequent studies (Kondo, 2009; Luk & Shirai, 2018), there is a potential problem in her analysis. That is, the verb sink in the examples in (15) is an alternating unaccusative so that the passive form is in fact well-formed and cannot be ruled out completely. Kondo (2009) ran a revised version of the experiment, by adding a phrase like by itself and on its own to Ju’s test stimuli (the ship sank slowly by itself) in order to make the intransitive version the only appropriate choice. Kondo tested Japanese- and Spanish-speaking learners of English and found that the acceptance of passive was still high (ranging from 18 to 24% in the four conditions) and that there is no difference in the results between external vs. internal causation, contra Ju’s prediction. Oshita (2022) questioned the CA analysis based on the analysis of the Longman Learners Corpus (Oshita, 2000) where 38 overpassivization errors, but only 11 transitivization errors, were found in essays written by L2 learners of L1 Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. This discrepancy in the numbers, Oshita argues, is rather puzzling if transitivization is a necessary condition for overpassivization errors as assumed by Ju (2000). Hence, the CA analysis may partially explain but may not serve as an adequate analysis for overpassivized unaccusatives. Overpassivization errors were further examined in terms of possible effects of the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (see (11) above, Sorace, 2000) in L2 English. Yusa (2003) argues that the use of auxiliary ‘be’ in the passive unaccusative errors by L1 Japanese learners is not a reflection of the 85

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passive auxiliary but that of the perfective auxiliary ‘be’ in languages like Italian, properties not manifested in L1 Japanese or L2 English but derived from UG. Yusa assumed that telicity plays a crucial role affecting learners’ acquisition of unaccusativity, expecting that L2 learners erroneously use ‘be’ for core, telic unaccusatives more than peripheral, atelic unaccusatives lower on the Hierarchy. Results of a grammatical judgment task showed that 31 participants generally knew the ill-formed passive unaccusatives, but they incorrectly accepted ‘be’ with core unaccusatives significantly more than peripheral unaccusatives or unergatives. Based on these results, Yusa argues that these learners are sensitive to the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy as predicted.4 To summarize this section, overpassivization errors are not language-specific yet systematic in many learners of English. At the same time, it is important to note that L2 learners generally have correct representation for unaccusatives and do not make overpassivization errors very frequently.

7.5.2  L2 and heritage acquisition of unaccusativity In order to prove that learners differentiate the argument structure of intransitive verbs, we need to use diagnostics for unaccusativity at base structure (or deep unaccusativity). As is clear from the previous section, this has been carried out in experimental studies in L1 research, but not so often in L2 research. Hirakawa (2003) investigated L2 learners’ underlying representations for unaccusativity in English by Japanese-speaking learners using the resultative construction in a grammaticality judgment task. The L2 learners and the native English speakers performed very similarly, correctly judging the compatibility/incompatibility of the resultatives with unaccusative, unergative, and transitive verbs. The task also included pseudopassives (or prepositional passives), which are formed by moving an oblique argument of the verb into subject position. They are compatible with unergatives (e.g., the studio was never sung in until yesterday) but incompatible with unaccusatives (e.g., *the stairs are often fallen down by children) (Perlmutter & Postal, 1984), and the results also showed that the learners behaved similarly to native speakers, accepting pseudopassives with unergatives significantly more than with unaccusatives. Hirakawa’s findings indicate that L2 learners observe deep unaccusativity, making the unaccusative/unergative distinction in initial syntactic structure. Unaccusativity and auxiliary selection in Italian has been investigated in relation to the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (Sorace, 2000). Recall that division of the selection of the two perfective auxiliaries ‘be’ and ‘have’ along the Hierarchy varies among Romance and Germanic languages. Sorace (1993) hypothesized that such crosslinguistic differences would lead to indeterminate knowledge of unaccusativity even for very advanced, near-native Italian speakers. She conducted an experiment with L1 English and L1 French learners of L2 Italian and Italian native speakers. In particular, she examined the three groups’ intuitions about auxiliary selection for five classes of unaccusatives along the Hierarchy (change of location, continuation of state, existence of state, transitive alternant, unergative alternant) and restructuring constructions with regard to the following three properties in biclausal sentences: (i) optional auxiliary change in the modal verb of the higher clause when the embedded word is unaccusative (e.g., Mario è/ha dovuto andare a casa ‘Mario is/had to go home’), (ii) obligatory change of the matrix verb avere to essere with clitic ci ‘there’ climbing (e.g., (a casa), Mario ci è /*ha dovuto andare ‘(home), Mario there is/*has had to go’), and (iii) optional change of the matrix verb with no clitic climbing (e.g., (a casa), Mario è /ha dovuto andarci ‘(home), Mario is/has had to go-there’). In terms of these three properties, English does not have any of the properties as the auxiliary choice is always have to form perfective, and there are no clitics. French is similar to Italian selecting avoir (have) with transitive and unergative, but only a subset of nonalternating unaccusatives take être (be) and the majority take avoir, and finally, regarding restructuring, French does not allow auxiliary change or clitic climbing. Overall results indicated that both English and French near-natives behaved differently from 86

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Italian native speakers. More specifically, their judgments differed significantly with respect to restructuring. Sorace argued that French speakers have determinate, though not always native-like, intuitions whereas English speakers have indeterminate intuitions because both L2 groups showed a significant difference between the two auxiliaries for ‘change-of-location’ and ‘change-of-state’, the two highest in the Hierarchy as most core unaccusatives, but not with the others. With respect to restructuring, French speakers showed very similar judgments as natives in the case of clitic climbing (i.e., obligatory change of contexts), but they differed from natives in optional change of contexts; i.e., preferring avoir ‘have’, showing L1 French effect. In contrast, English speakers did not show any significant differences between the conditions, suggesting that they have no intuitions about the auxiliary change with unaccusative verbs. Turning to Japanese, Hirakawa (2001) investigates whether English-speaking learners know syntactic and semantic properties of unaccusativity in Japanese with two picture tasks: (i) a truth-value judgment task involving the adverb takusan ‘a lot’, and (ii) a picture selection task to test two different readings of the -teiru attached to each class of intransitive verbs (‘resultative’ with unaccusatives vs. ‘progressive’ with unergatives). Learners attending an intensive Japanese course in Japan and Japanese native speakers (NSs) were tested on these two constructions including transitive test stimuli. Individual results of Task I show that 75% of the learners consistently observed the transitive subject/object distinction, and 61% of learners also exhibited the unaccusative/unergative distinction. For Task II, participants were asked to select the appropriate picture that matches the sentence given from a pair of pictures, one depicting progressive and the other resultant state. Overall, L2 learners and Japanese NSs performed very similarly, correctly assigning progressive readings to transitives and unergatives, while giving resultative readings to unaccusatives. Fukuda (2017a) investigated the knowledge of unaccusativity in Japanese native speakers, heritage speakers, and L2 learners living in Hawai’i. In particular, he examined how agentivity of subject NPs and telicity of events affect the speakers’ judgments of floating numeral quantifiers. Fukuda asked whether L2 and heritage language groups exhibit knowledge of the floating quantifier diagnostic, and if so, how their grammar differs from that of NSs. Two acceptability judgment tasks were conducted in which verb type (unaccusative vs. unergative), numeral quantifiers (+floating vs. -floating), animacy of subject NPs (human vs. inanimate, with unaccusatives), and telicity of events (telic vs. atelic, with unergatives) were manipulated. Results showed that: (i) heritage and NS’s judgments were largely indistinguishable from each other while only some L2 speakers showed signs of development of floating numeral quantifiers, and (ii) telicity showed clear effects for all three groups, but the effect of agentivity was subtle and was detected only for heritage and NSs. Fukuda concluded that L2 acquisition of unaccusativity may take considerable time and exposure. According to Yuan (1999), Chinese has ample evidence for the unaccusative/unergative distinction (Li, 1990), two of which are used in an acceptability judgment task. First, Chinese is an SVO language, but the single argument of unaccusative verbs can remain in base position at surface structure. Second, when the unaccusative argument remains in its base position (VS), the postverbal NP must be indefinite (due to inherent partitive case assignment in this position like Italian, discussed above). The single argument of unergatives, in contrast, always appears in preverbal position (SV) regardless of its definiteness. Here we focus on the results of postverbal NPs. English-speaking learners of four proficiency groups showed that the least advanced group consistently rejected VS; the two intermediate-level groups accepted postverbal NPs, regardless of the two verb classes, thus failing to make the unaccusative/unergative distinction. They did not observe the indefiniteness effect either. The advanced group showed a tendency to accept postverbal NPs only with unaccusatives as well as a tendency to observe the indefiniteness effect. Individual analyses further revealed that out of 22 advanced-level learners, only six performed consistently on the two perspectives. Since English does not allow VS word order nor does it observe indefiniteness effects for unaccusatives, the least advanced learners may have transferred their L1 English properties. As the intermediate groups 87

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appeared to have overgeneralized the VS word order irrespective of verb types, Yuan claimed that the unaccusative/unergative distinction is acquired quite late by English-speaking learners. Spanish has been examined in a series of experiments by Montrul (2004, 2005, 2006). Montrul (2005) tested the Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis (Oshita, 2001), or U-shaped development stages of unaccusative verbs, with English-speaking learners of Spanish at three different proficiency levels: low-intermediate, intermediate, and advanced. According to this Hypothesis, L2 learners initially treat all intransitive verbs alike as unergative, and, as their grammar develops, intermediate-level learners start making the unergative/unaccusative distinction. This is when typical passive unaccusatives are expected to emerge. Finally at the advanced-level, learners may acquire the correct representation of unaccusative verbs. Results of a grammaticality judgment task involving several unaccusative diagnostics such as bare plural postverbal subject constructions in Spanish (grammatical with unaccusatives but ungrammatical with unergatives) show that the lower proficiency learners did not distinguish between unaccusatives and unergatives in any construction, while intermediate learners distinguished between unaccusatives and unergatives with most construction and advanced learners behaved like the native speakers. Thus, Montrul concluded that these results from L2 Spanish largely supported the Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis. Montrul (2004, 2006) is unique in presenting psycholinguistic evidence for knowledge of unaccusativity in Spanish as L2 and heritage language. Montrul (2004) tested English-speaking learners of Spanish at intermediate to advanced proficiency while Montrul (2005) targeted Spanish-English bilinguals whose Spanish was a heritage language of their family, both groups living in the US. Adopting Bever and Sanz’s (1997) task on L1 processing of intransitive verbs, Montrul administered a visual probe-recognition task in which participants read sentences with unaccusative and unergative verbs on a computer screen, then decided if a probe word had appeared in the sentence. Results of Montrul (2004) indicated that a subgroup of both native Spanish and L2 learners (sequence-sensitive individuals) showed faster reaction time for unaccusatives than for unergatives, suggesting that the presence of a trace of the unaccusative argument facilitated their comprehension. Overall results of the bilinguals in Montrul (2006) showed that they were balanced bilinguals and had comparable competence in processing unaccusativity in the two languages, despite Spanish being their weaker language. To sum up, we have examined research on the unaccusative/unergative distinction in English, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish as an L2 and heritage language. L2 learners’ knowledge of the unaccusative/unergative distinction can be directly tapped and checked through unaccusativity diagnostics identified in the previous studies. L2 studies discussed here mostly agree that L2 learners and heritage speakers possess the syntactic knowledge of unaccusative/unergative distinction, but that L2 learners may suffer from L1 transfer diverging from NS judgments partly because morphological and syntactic reflexes of unaccusativity are often subtle and differ crosslinguistically.

7.6  Open questions and future directions Empirical studies have shown that L2 learners have correct semantic and syntactic representations of unaccusative and unergative verbs, observing the contrast in terms of language-specific constructions as diagnostics in the L2. However, at the same time, unaccusative verbs appear to cause prolonged problems, even for advanced learners (Yuan, 1999). Previous studies have targeted intermediate to advanced-proficiency levels of learners (except Montrul, 2005), but learners with a wider range of proficiency should be involved, especially at beginning to pre-intermediate levels, to test the Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis (Oshita, 2001). Additionally, explicit instruction may help L2 learners overcome problems with unaccusative verbs such as overpassivization that can be considered as developmental errors unique to L2 learners of English. Argument structure of intransitive verbs is 88

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an area to explore to make fruitful contributions to the study of grammar development and language teaching (Hirakawa, 2013). Psycholinguistic evidence in L1 research suggests that the Unaccusative Hypothesis affects not only comprehension but also production processes (Momma et al., 2018). Even though such online studies are far less than offline studies in L1 research, these findings can be applied to L2 research and more research is needed to explore how learners process unaccusative and unergative sentences incrementally while listening, reading, or speaking in the L2. Syntactic theories have advanced since the Unaccusative Hypothesis was proposed. Within the minimalist framework (Chomsky, 1995), the subject of unergative and unaccusative verbs are both generated within the VP and move to the functional domain. However, the core assumption still holds in that the sole argument of unaccusative is a base-generated internal argument whereas that of unergatives is a base-generated external argument (Fukuda, 2017a). More studies with online techniques to explore sentence processing may inform linguistic theories to account for the representation of unaccusative verbs (Friedman et al., 2008). Various proposals are made with respect to syntactic structures with functional categories introducing external arguments. For example, Pylkkänen (2008) proposes the Voice-bundling Parameter, according to which languages are divided into two types: Voice-bundling languages such as English (where heads Voice and Cause are bundled together), and non-voice-bundling languages such as Japanese (where Voice and Cause are separated). The parameter explains crosslinguistic variations of causative structure: Japanese unaccusatives allow by-phrases naming a causing event and instrumental modifiers, while English disallows them (e.g., doa-ga kono-kagi de aita ‘*the door opened with this key’). A preliminary study by Suzuki et al. (2016) reports that Japanese-speaking learners of English were accurate with the unaccusative SV construction but incorrectly allowed instrumental phrases in the unaccusative construction, showing L1 transfer effects (cf. Full Transfer/Full Access, Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996). Even though unaccusativity is a universal phenomenon, there are still issues to investigate with respect to crosslinguistic influence at the semantics-syntax interface, particularly regarding the effects of L1 in L2 acquisition, or L1/L2 in L3 acquisition.

Notes 1 Based on the fact that verbs that alternate between transitive and intransitive (inchoative) usages are incompatible with the there construction, some researchers exclude intransitive variants of transitives as unaccusatives (Haegeman, 1991). 2 More precicely, the NP or its trace and the numeral or its trace must c-command each other (Miyagawa, 1989, p. 29). 3 NOM=nominative, CL=classifier, PST=past 4 See Hirakawa (2006), who also examines the effect of the ASH in Japanese-speaking learners of English but offers different analyses from Yusa (2003).

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Intransitive verbs Lozano, C. (2006). Focus and split intransitivity: The acquisition of word order alternations in non-native Spanish. Second Language Research, 22, 1–43. Lozano, C., & Mendikoetxea, A. (2009). L2 syntax meets information structure: Word order at the interfaces. In J. Chandlee, M. Franchini, S. Lord, & G.-M. Rheiner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Boston University conference on language development (pp. 313–324). Cascadilla Press. Luk, Z. P.-S., & Shirai, Y. (2018). The effect of a ‘conceptualizable’ agent on the use of transitive and intransitive constructions in L2 Japanese. In T. Kageyama & M. W. Jacobsen (Eds.), Transitivity and valency alternations (pp. 357–385). De Gruyter. MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Miyagawa, S. (1989). Structure and case marking in Japanese. Academic Press. Momma, S., Slevc, L. R., & Phillips, C. (2018). Unaccusativty in sentence production. Linguistic Inquiry, 49, 181–194. Montrul, S. (1999). Causative errors with unaccusative verbs in L2 Spanish. Second Language Research, 15, 191–219. Montrul, S. (2004). Psycholinguistic evidence for split intransitivity in Spanish L2. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25(2), 239–267. Montrul, S. (2005). On knowledge and development of unaccusativity in Spanish L2 acquisition. Linguistics, 43(6), 1153–1190. Montrul, S. (2006). On the bilingual competence of Spanish heritage speakers: Syntax, lexical-semantics and processing. International Journal of Bilingualism, 10(1), 37–69. Montrul, S. (2015). The acquisition of heritage languages. Cambridge University Press. Oshita, H. (2000). What is happened may not be what appears to be happening: A corpus study of ‘passive’ unaccusatives in L2 English. Second Language Research, 16, 293–324. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/026765830001600401 Oshita, H. (2001). The unaccusative trap in second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 23, 279–304. Oshita, H. (2022). “Conceptualizable Agent” revisited: A critical evaluation of theoretical construct, testing design, and account of Overpassivization. Lingua, 276. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.lingua​.2022​.103372 Osterhout, L., & Swinney, D. A. (1993). On the temporal course of gap-filling during comprehension of verbal passives. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22, 273–286. Otaki, A., & Shirahata, T. (2017). The role of animacy in the acquisition of ergative verbs by Japanese learners of English. Annual Review of English Language Education in Japan, 28, 177–192. https://doi​.org​/10​.20581​ /arele​.28​.0​_177 Perlmutter, D. (1978). Impersonal passives and the unaccusative hypothesis. Berkeley Linguistics Society, 4, 157–189. https://doi​.org​/10​.3765​/bls​.v4i0​.2198 Pelmutter, D., & Postal, P. (1984). The 1-advancement exclusiveness law. In D. Perlmutter & C. Rosen (Eds.), Studies in relational grammar 2. University of Chicago Press. Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge University Press. Pylkkänen, L. (2008). Introducing arguments. MIT Press. Sano, T., Endo, M., & Yamakoshi, K. (2001). Developmental issues in the acquisition of unaccusatives and passives. In A. H.-J. Do, L. Domínguez, & A. Johansen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25th Annual Boston University conference on language development (pp. 668–683). Cascadilla Press. Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the full transfer/full access model. Second Language Research, 12(1), 40–72. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/026765839601200103 Shan, C.-K., & Yuan, B. (2008). “What is happened” in L2 English does not happen in L2 Chinese. EUROSLA Yearbook, 8, 164–190. Shimada, H., & Sano, T. (2007). A-chains and unaccusative-unergative distinction in the child grammar: The acquisition of  Japanese te-iru constructions. In A. Belikova, L. Meroni, & M. Umeda (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA) (pp. 386–393). Snyder, W., Hyams, N., & Crisma, P. (1995). Romance auxiliary selection with reflexive clitics: Knowledge of unaccusativity. In E. Clark (Ed.), Proceedings of the 26th annual child language research forum (pp. 127–136). CSLI Publications. Sorace, A. (1993). Incomplete vs. divergent representations of unaccusativity in nonnative grammars of Italian. Second Language Research, 9, 22–47. Sorace, A. (1995). Acquiring linking rules and argument structure in a second language: The unaccusative/ unergative distinction. In L. Eubank, L. Selinker, & M. Smith (Eds.), The current state of Interlanguage (pp. 153–175). John Benjamins.

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Makiko Hirakawa Sorace, A. (2000). Gradients in auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs. Language, 76(4), 859–890. https:// www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/417202 Sorace, A., & Shomura, Y. (2001). Lexical constraints on the acquisition of split intransitivity: Evidence from L2 Japanese. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 23, 221–245. Suppes, P. (1974). The semantics of children’s language. American Psychologist, 29, 103–114. Suzuki, K., Shioda, K., Kikuchi, N., Maetsu, M., & Hirakawa, M. (2016). Cross-linguistic effects in L2 acquisition of causative constructions. In Proceedings of the 40th annual Boston University conference on language development. https://www​.bu​.edu​/bucld​/files​/2016​/10​/BUCLD40​_Pro​ceed​ings​Supp​lement​_Suzuki​_et​_al​ _FINAL​.pdf Swinney, D., Onifer, W., Prather, P., & Hirshkowitz, M. (1979). Semantic facilitation across sensory modalities in the processing of individual words and sentences. Memory and Cognition, 7, 159–165. White, L. (2003). Second language acquisition and universal grammar. Cambridge University Press. Yatsushiro, K. (1999). Case licensing and VP structure [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Connecticut. Yip, V. (1995). Interlanguage and learnability: From Chinese to English. John Benjamins. Yuan, B. (1999). Acquiring the unaccusative/unergative distinction in a second language: Evidence from Englishspeaking learners of L2 Chinese. Linguistics, 37, 275–296. Yusa, N. (2003). ‘Passive’ unaccusatives in L2 acquisition. Japanese/Korean Linguistics, 11, 246–259. Zobl, H. (1989). Canonical typological structures and ergativity in English L2 acquisition. In S. Gass & J. Schachter (Eds.), Linguistic perspectives on second language acquisition (pp. 203–221). Cambridge University Press.

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8 PSYCH VERBS Dongdong Chen

8.1 Introduction Psych verbs are the “verbs which express psychological states” (White, 2003, p. 279). For example, fear and frighten in (1) and (2) indicate the fact that “John” is in a state of fear caused by or related to the “dog.” In both sentences, John bears the thematic role Experiencer whereas the dog is the Theme. (1) John fears the dog. (2) The dog frightens John.

Compared to action verbs with an Agent and a Patient (such as in The boy kicked the ball), these verbs present an arbitrary mapping with respect to their thematic roles and syntactic positions. While both “John” and “dog” seem to hold the same semantic relationship in the above two sentences, “John” appears as the subject in (1) and the object in (2). Likewise, a similar flipping applies to “dog,” which occurs in the object position in (1) and the subject position in (2). The fear-type verbs are referred to as Experiencer Subject (ES) verbs and the frighten type as Experiencer Object (EO) verbs (Pesetsky, 1995). An important difference between the two types is that an antecedent can appear after its reflexive pronoun with EO verbs, as in (3a), which is not possible with ES verbs in (3b), or regular transitive verbs in (3c). (3) a.  The picture of himselfi frightens Johni.     b.   *Friends of himselfi fear Johni greatly.      c.    *The picture of himselfi portraits Johni vividly.

Although the sentences (1, 2) and (3a) are grammatical, the two properties do not respect the Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH) (Baker, 1988), which requires that identical semantic elements must be realized by identical syntactic relationships, and the Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981), which constrains the coreferential relationships among noun phrases, pronouns, and reflexives. Similar patterns of psych verbs are observed across languages. Chinese, for example, also has a flip of thematic roles with psych verbs (e.g., Chen, 1995, 1996; Cheung & Larson, 2015; Juffs, 1996), and backward binding like (4) with the EO type, where the reflexive ziji ‘self’ is bound by a non-ccommanding proper noun Lisi, as shown by the co-index. (4) Zijii de pengyou de guanhuai gandong-le Lisii. (Cheung & Larson, 2015, p. 11a) self DE friend DE solicitude touch-Perf Lisi DE: a relative marker ‘The solicitude of selfi’s friends touched Lisii.’

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-10

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The psych phenomena, as presented above, lead to many interesting questions in language acquisition. How do learners map arguments to syntactic positions with these verbs? What challenges do the noncanonical semantic-syntactic mapping and other properties pose for language learners? How do L1 and L2 learners acquire psych verbs? Before delving into some of the answers to these questions, let’s first examine how linguists explain the properties.

8.2  Theoretical accounts of psych verbs Since Lakoff (1970) first noted the irregular behavior of English psych verbs, numerous linguistic accounts have been proposed. I will summarize five major analyses in view of the idiosyncratic linking and backward binding problems. Belletti and Rizzi (1988) observed three classes of Italian psych verbs, as in (5). (5)  a.  Class I: the temere “fear” (Belletti & Rizzi, 1988, p. 1, 2, 3)    Gianni teme questo.   ‘Gianni fears this.’    b. Class II: the preoccupare “worry”    Questo preoccupa Gianni.    ‘This worries Gianni.’   c. Class III: the piacere “please”  A  Gianni piace questo. to Gianni pleases this    d.  Questo piace a  Gianni. ‘This pleases to Gianni.’

Class I is an ES verb. Classes II and III are EO verbs, but the former takes an accusative Experiencer whereas the latter takes a dative Experiencer. Belletti and Rizzi argued that psych verbs share the same thematic roles, [Experiencer, Theme]. However, the Experiencer is always projected to a position higher than the Theme at the D-structures (6a, b), thus observing the UTAH requirement. (6)  a.  ES:           

b.  EO:

(Belletti & Rizzi, 1988, p. 5, 6)



S

S VP

NP NP

VP V'

Gianni

V

NP

teme

questo

ec

94

NP

v

NP

preoccupa piace

questo

Gianni a Gianni

Psych verbs

For EO verbs, if it is Class II, the Theme questo must move to subject position to be case-marked while the Experiencer Gianni receives inherent accusative Case from the VP, generating (5b). If it is Class III, the Theme can either move to subject position, generating (5d), or stay in situ, resulting in (5c). For the structure like (7), (i.e., their 57a), Belletti and Rizzi claimed that the Binding Theory is applied at the D-structure where the antecedent Gianni c-commands the anaphor sé inside the Theme. (7) [Questi pettegolezzi su di séi] preoccupano Giannii più di ogni altra cosa. ‘These gossips about himself worry Gianni more than anything else.’

Unlike Belletti and Rizzi who assumed the same theta-grid for the two types of psych verbs, Pesetsky (1995) proposed different thematic roles: [Experiencer, Target/Subject Matter] for ES verbs, and [Causer, Target/Subject Matter] for EO verbs, where Target/Subject Matter is Object of Emotion. Proposing separate semantic relationships with ES and EO verbs justifies different realizations structurally, thus resolving the mapping problem. However, this solution creates a T/SM restriction: the Causer and the Target/Subject Matter cannot cooccur within an EO verb, but can with the periphrastic causative verb make, as in (8a, b) (Pesetsky’s 171a, 172a). (8)  a.  *The article in the Times annoyed Bill at the government.     b.  The article in the Times made Bill angry at the government.

To account for the T/SM restriction, Pesetsky developed a bimorphemic analysis of EO verbs like annoy, which contains a verb root √annoy and a zero causative morpheme CAUS, as in (9a). (9) a.

b.

VP

c. (Pesetsky, 1995, p. 530)

VP

VP Causer

Causer

V'

V'

Causer

V'

                            V PP V PP DP √ annoy+ Exper CAUSaff

P'

√ annoy+ CAUSaff

P DP CAUSp Causer

*

DP Exper

V make

P'

P at

*

PP

DP Target

AP

DP Exper

A'

P'

P CAUSp

DP Causer

A angry

PP

P at

DP Target

In (9b), CAUS cannot raise to V √annoy due to the Head Movement Constraint (Travis, 1984), which prohibits a head movement from skipping a governing head position. When CAUS moves to at, the nonaffixal category at + CAUS disallows CAUS to move further, hence, the ungrammatical sentence in (8a). (8b) allows the Causer and the Target to cooccur because no movement is involved, as shown in (9c). Pesetsky adopted Belletti and Rizzi’s approach for the binding issue. Assuming Belletti and Rizzi’s tripartite classification of psych verbs and Pesetsky’s thematic distinction of the two types, Landau (2010), based on cross-linguistic data, proposed two logical form (LF) structures for EO verbs, as in (10) (Landau, 168a, b), where object Experiencers are mental locations behaving like locatives and ending up as LF-subjects. Since backward binding is not considered as one of the “core psych properties” (p. 64), no analysis is offered for the phenomenon.

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Dongdong Chen (10) a. LF for Class II (Eventive) verbs TP

TP

e.g., anger, frighten, surprise

PP2

øψ

b. LF for Class II (Stative) and Class III verbs

TP

DP2

DP1

Exp.

Causer

e.g., concern, depress, interest

PP2 T'

T

øψ/PDAT vP

ti

TP

DP2

DP1

Exp.

T/SMr

T'

T

VP

V'

v

t2

V'

VP

t1

V t2

V

  Cheung and Larson (2015) proposed structures like (11) (their 146a, 147, and 148a) for ES verbs, EO agentive verbs, and EO raising verbs. Each verb type has its own theta roles, thus fixing the mapping issue. For the binding problem, they followed Belletti and Rizzi’s strategy.

(11) a. ES verbs         b. EO agentive verbs        c. EO raising verbs vP John

v'

v

v

vP

vP Mary VP

fear

fear

deliberately

v'

v

v' v

XP

dogs may bite him

dogs

v'

v

frighten

 

VP

v

frighten John

frighten

VP

John

V'

frighten

dogs

 

Through a corpus study of around 30 languages, Li (2018) found that the argument structures of bivalent EO verbs are uniformly similar to those of core transitive verbs because the former are causative with a causative chain transmitting from Causer to Causee. In contrast, ES verbs do not involve causation, therefore their argument structures vary cross-linguistically. In a nutshell, all these proposals recognized thematic differences among psych verbs, except Belletti and Rizzi (1988). All except Cheung and Larson (2015) and Li (2018) involved a movement approach. All tackled the binding issue at the D-structure except Landau (2010) and Li (2018). Li did not touch the irregularity, while Landau regarded it unspecific to psych constructions. All treated ES verbs as regular transitive verbs except Cheung and Larson (2015) and Li (2018), which claimed that ES verbs have their syntactic peculiarities. 96

Psych verbs

8.3  Acquisition of psych verbs The arbitrary semantics-syntax linking and other properties with psych verbs pose challenges for language learners. How are psych verbs represented in their grammars? We will examine this question in the context of L1 and L2 acquisition.

8.3.1  L1 acquisition Lord (1979), in diary studies, revealed that two children (2 1/2 to 5 years of age) mistakenly mapped the Experiencer of ES verbs to subject of EO verbs in spontaneous production, e.g., I’m just gonna hold ’em and look at ’them, and uh, interest them. Bowerman (1990), based on longitudinal diary records of two children, observed that children, starting at age six and eight, began to make errors with both types of psych verbs, with more errors like *I saw a picture that enjoyed me. Bowerman concluded that children treated ES verbs as EO verbs because the latter pattern is predominant in their linguistic experience. However, recent studies report opposite findings. Messenger et al. (2012) found that three- and four-year-olds were more accurate with EO verbs than ES verbs, while Hartshorne et al. (2015) discovered that four-year-old and five-year-old children performed better on the frightentype verbs than the fear-type verbs, even though the latter have higher frequency than the former. So, there is individual variation, especially when we consider data from case studies. As for other languages, De Guzman (1992), who studied Tagalog children (aged three to eight) through comprehension and production tasks, found that children did better on ES verbs than EO verbs with topic morphology. Gómez Soler (2012) examined how Spanish children aged three and four acquired four Spanish psych verbs using a truth-value judgment task. It was found that the children acted well on all testing structures, consistent with the findings of Gómez Soler (2011) obtained through an analysis of the data of five children from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000). Hartshorne et al. (2016) examined how four- to five-year-old and six- to seven-year-old Englishspeaking children mapped the arguments of two novel psych verbs, i.e., “gorfin” for the fear type and “wixter” for the frighten type. The researchers first provided a context where the novel verb was used multiple times to deliver its meaning. They then read two stories involving two animal characters, e.g., Bear acting as the Experiencer with Elephant as the Stimulus. After each story, the child was asked a question like ‘‘Who did Bear wixter/gorfin?” All the children correctly applied the fear-type linking pattern for “gorfin,” and the frighten-type pattern for “wixter.” Hartshorne et al. concluded that the children use semantics to guide the mapping, supporting Pesetsky’s (1995) claims that ES and EO verbs possess distinct thematic roles. In brief, the few studies on the L1 acquisition of psych verbs find that these verbs do not come easily to children.

8.3.2  L2 acquisition The past decades have seen significant research on L2 acquisition of psych verbs. I will look at the studies concerning English psych verbs first, followed by those on psych verbs in Spanish and other languages.

8.3.2.1  L2 acquisition of English psych verbs Juffs (1996) investigated Chinese-speaking learners’ L2 acquisition of English EO verbs and change of state locative verbs by proposing a lexical parameter, under which the semantic primitive STATE is conflated into a verb root. CAUSE and STATE can cooccur in a root morpheme in English but not in Chinese. An elicited production task and a grammaticality judgment task containing English sentences with psych verbs and locatives were used to test Chinese learners of English at three proficiency levels. Results showed that learners in higher proficiency groups acted like the English native 97

Dongdong Chen

speaker controls, suggesting that the Chinese learners were able to reset the lexical parameter, while those in the low-proficiency group either had little use of psych verbs, or made errors due to the influence of L1 parameter setting. Chen (1996) examined the L2 acquisition of English psych predicates (including verbs, adjectives, and nominals) by Chinese and French speakers to test knowledge of argument structure, the T/ SM restriction, and backward binding. Chen proposed that Chinese has a causative morpheme, which can be realized overtly by “shi” make, or covertly by zero CASU. English EO verbs like annoy, and annoying adjectives, contain the zero CAUS, while ES verbs, annoyed adjectives, and nominals do not. French is like English in these respects. Chen predicted that if learners noticed the zero CAUS, they would (i) map the arguments correctly for EO verbs and annoying adjectives, (ii) recognize the T/SM violation, and (iii) accept backward binding. Grammaticality judgment with correction, picture identification, and multiple-choice tasks were designed to test Chinese speakers at three proficiency levels and French speakers at two proficiency levels. Results showed that EO verbs and -ing adjectives were more difficult than ES verbs, -ed adjectives, and nominals, and that the structures with the T/SM arguments (*The essay annoyed the politicians at the author) and backward binding (The essay about himself annoyed the politician) were challenging for all participants. However, the advanced French-speaking and Chinese-speaking learners performed like the controls with argument structure, and more than half of them recognized the T/SM violation and the backward binding structures. While the French group did better than the Chinese group on backward binding, the lower-proficiency French subjects had problems with the verb fear. White et al. (1998) and White et al. (1999) examined the L2 acquisition of English psych verbs. While et al. (1998) concentrated on the T/SM restriction by testing French-, Spanish- and Malagasyspeaking learners of English. As discussed in Section 8.2, English EO verbs contain a zero CAUS morpheme, which syntactically blocks the cooccurrence of the Causer and the T/SM argument, while the periphrastic make sentences do not contain CAUS, allowing the two arguments to cooccur. Like English, French and Spanish are assumed to possess zero CAUS, therefore the T/SM constraint should be observed in both languages. Malagasy has two morphemes, maha and mampa, behaving like the zero CAUS and make respectively, thus, the T/SM restriction applies to maha. Group results of the grammaticality judgment task showed that except the Spanish group, all other learners judged the T/SM structures as ungrammatical. However, they did not treat them the same as other ungrammatical sentences. Individual results showed that only the Malagasy-speaking learners truly recognized the T/SM constraint, whereas the French- and Spanish-speaking learners failed to do so. White et al. attributed Romance speakers’ unexpected performance to complex factors such as the interaction of the stativity of psych verbs and L1 transfer. French and Spanish EO verbs have two classes with either the accusative or dative Experiencer. By taking the accusative Experiencer, an eventive interpretation may result, allowing the T/SM argument, as proposed by Parodi-Lewin (1991). As a result, Romance speakers judged the English T/SM sentences under the influence of their L1. In the case of Malagasy, when maha attaches to an ES root, a stative EO verb is formed, disallowing the T/SM argument; Malagasy speakers treated English structures like their L1. White et al. (1999) focused on argument structure. They hypothesized that L2 learners would not treat the mapping of thematic roles to syntactic positions as arbitrary because they know that Experiencer should be projected higher than Theme; if they make errors, the error pattern should be *John frightens exams, but not *Exams fear John. Subjects tested were four groups of English learners, whose L1 is French, Spanish, Japanese, and Malagasy. French and Spanish resemble English in having separate ES and EO verbs, while Japanese and Malagasy need to attach -(s)ase and maha- to the root of ES to form EO verbs respectively. Three experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 involved Malagasy- and Japanese-speaking learners, tested through a written elicitation production task and a translation task. Experiment 2 involved French- and Japanese-speaking learners, who completed a vocabulary task and a picture identification task. Experiment 3 involved Malagasy- and 98

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Spanish-speaking learners, tested with the same tasks as in Experiment 2. The results showed that both Malagasy and Japanese learners had more difficulty with EO verbs (frighten). For French and Japanese learners, only the latter performed worse on the EO type than the ES (fear) type. While both Malagasy and Spanish learners performed better on the ES type than the EO type, it was the Malagasy group who were less accurate on both types. Many learners had problems with the lexical item fear. White et al. concluded that L2 learners are sensitive to the semantic-syntactic mapping with psych verbs, because they do not project arguments randomly, suggesting that their interlanguage is constrained by UTAH and the thematic hierarchy. Sato (2003) examined Japanese learners’ acquisition of English psych verbs. Testing material included two types of psych verbs, disappointed-type and disappointing-type adjectival structures, and periphrastic make constructions. Results of sentence completion and grammaticality judgment tasks showed that the high-proficiency learners behaved like the controls while the lower-proficiency learners had many problems. The findings that the EO verb sentences are more difficult than the sentences with disappointed-type adjectives, and that the disappointing-type adjectival structures are the most difficult, supported the findings of Chen (1996). It was also found that learners did not distinguish the periphrastic make construction from EO verbs and performed worse on the verb “fear” than the other four ES verbs. In sum, Juffs (1996) set a model in developing a parameter and testing it empirically. Chen (1996) confirmed Burt and Kiparsky’s (1972) observation that psych adjectives like the annoying-type and the annoyed-type are challenging for English learners. The major contributions of White et al. (1998) lie in the empirical evidence that they provided: both Romance-speaking learners and the French controls had problems with the T/SM restriction. Chen (1996), White et al. (1999), and Sato (2003) revealed that “fear” presents great difficulties for ESL learners.

8.3.2.2  L2 acquisition of Spanish psych verbs Montrul (1998) investigated English- and French-speakers’ representation of Spanish gustar verbs and the unaccusative se construction. Gustar verbs take a dative Experiencer (as in Italian piacere class in example 5c), which can surface like a subject or object (A Juan le gusta esto/Esto le gusta a Juan). When in subject position, it can be interpreted as the subject of a non-finite verb in an adjunct clause, indicating its subjecthood status, but also has the case marking of a typical indirect object and requires a dative clitic, suggesting its objecthood nature. Such hybrid characteristics create a learnability problem for L2 learners related to argument structure and case assignment. In this regard, French is like Spanish, but the dative Experiencer can only appear postverbally and cannot cooccur with a clitic, whereas English has only nominative or accusative Experiencers. Montrul predicted that if the thematic hierarchy were available, L2 learners of Spanish would have no difficulty interpreting Experiencer as subject of the gustar-type verbs. However, since English has no dative case while French does, English-speakers would have more difficulty than French-speakers in terms of the constructions under study. English and French learners of Spanish were tested three times during an eight-month period through an interpretation task and a preference task. Montrul found that learners had more difficulty with the argument structure of psych verbs than agentive verbs. Regarding clitics and dative case, the English group had more difficulties than the French group. However, the Englishspeaking learners of Spanish could interpret the dative Experiencer as their language proficiency improved, suggesting that the thematical hierarchy is available to L2 learners. Montrul concluded that UG constrains the L2 acquisition of argument structure, but L1 plays an important role in the acquisition of functional categories and case assignment. Gómez Soler (2014) studied the explanatory adequacy of the Interface Hypothesis (IH) (e.g., Sorace, 2011; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006) with Spanish gustar verbs, which are considered as Class III verbs (Parodi-Lewin, 1991). As mentioned above, these verbs require an obligatory dative clitic, and 99

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the object Experiencer can occur as quirky subject case-marked by the preposition a, resulting in an alternation of two orders (Experiencer Verb Theme (EVT)) and (Theme Verb Experiencer (TVE)), mostly determined by pragmatic conditions. Because English does not possess an overt preposition a, or dative clitic le, English learners of Spanish need to figure out not only intricate morphosyntactic properties with the gustar verbs, but also subtle discourse effects. To find out which causes more difficulty, Gómez Soler tested English-speaking learners of Spanish at four proficiency levels through a grammaticality judgment task (GJT), evaluating learners’ awareness of clitic and verbal agreement, and a pragmatic felicity judgment task (PFJ), to assess learners’ knowledge of word order in the discourse contexts (the case in which Theme is a salient topic (T-context) vs. the case where Experiencer is a salient topic (E-context)). The results from GJT indicated that all groups, except the low-level learners, judged the correct sentences as grammatical and incorrect sentences as ungrammatical. The low-level learners were not sensitive to the ungrammatical items involving reverse agreement relations. The results from PFJ showed that L2 learners, like the controls, rated higher the EVT order over the TVE order, since the former is the unmarked construction. However, only the highest proficiency group acted like the controls in preferring the TVE construction in the T-contexts, suggesting that they have achieved a good understanding of pragmatic conditions. The advanced and intermediate groups rated TVE items in T-context and E-context similarly, suggesting that they have not detected the discourse conditions although they knew morphosyntactic properties. Surprisingly, the low-proficiency group rated TVE items correctly in T-contexts over E-contexts, though they did not understand syntactic conditions. Gómez Soler argued that IH cannot explain this acquisition pattern. Gómez Soler (2015) evaluated the “logical problem” (e.g., Schwartz, 1998) with Class II and Class III verbs. Two properties are observed with these two classes: (i) antipassive se can go with Class II verbs, but not with Class III verbs; (ii) Class II verbs allow the TVE order, while Class III verbs allow both TVE and EVT orders. The same participants in Gómez Soler (2014) were tested by two grammaticality judgment tasks. The first tested learners’ knowledge of aspectual distinction of the Class II and III verbs while the second checked learners’ awareness of the se usage with these verbs. The results of the first task showed that, like the control group, the learners recognized the grammatical TVE structure for Class III and the ungrammatical EVT structure for Class II, suggesting that they knew the word order alternation concerning these verbs. The results of the second task showed that learners gave higher ratings for Class II with antipassive se than Class III, suggesting that they knew the restrictions with se. Gómez Soler concluded that learners have acquired Spanish psych verbs. Kanwit and Quesada (2018) explored the features of dative a, verb-theme agreement, and clitic pronoun usage with gustar-type verbs to determine which are the most difficult for English learners of Spanish. Low and high intermediate learners completed a grammaticality judgment task, with reading times recorded for all sentences. They found that the dative preposition a is the most problematic feature of gustar-type verbs for L2 learners. Interestingly, the native controls considered the ungrammatical sentences lacking the dative marker a as the least acceptable, whereas the L2 learners regarded the ungrammatical sentences without verb-theme agreement the least acceptable. Both groups spent more time processing the sentences without the a + NP phrase. Gonzales (2022) investigated L2 acquisition of syntactic distribution of Class II and III verbs by English-speakers in light of Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) (Lardiere, 2008, 2009). Using the semantic feature [change of state], Gonzales summarized Spanish psych verbs as follows: Class II verbs are [+/–change of state], therefore they allow the dative and accusative Experiencer alternation, while Class III verbs, which are [–change of state], can only allow the dative object Experiencer structures. Based on the FRH, English learners of Spanish will have more difficulties acquiring Class II verbs due to more complex features associated, as compared with Class III verbs. Gonzales tested English learners of Spanish with three proficiency levels using two versions of grammaticality judgment tasks: one with audio stimuli and one with written stimuli. The results show that L2 learners at 100

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the higher proficiency level acted like the controls in terms of sensitivity to grammatical distributions concerning both Classes II and III verbs. Gonzales concluded that the findings are within the predictions of the FRH, suggesting an important role of lexical semantic features in L2 acquisition. To sum up, Montrul (1998) initiated the research on L2 acquisition of Spanish psych verbs and charted the directions for subsequent studies. Gómez Soler (2014) is one of the rare studies in the field of generative language acquisition that looked at aspects of pragmatics. Kanwit and Quesada (2018) shed light on the intriguing question why learners, who have studied gustar-type verbs in the classroom for six semesters with explicit instruction, still struggle with the properties related to these verbs. They proposed examining the value of form-focused instruction for effective acquisition (see Toth (2003) and Montrul and Bowles (2010) for details). Gonzales (2022) found that L2 learners did not perform better when faced with written (vs. aural) stimuli.

8.3.2.3  L2 acquisition of psych verbs in other languages Montrul (2001) looked at L2 acquisition of cross-linguistic agentive verbs like break and melt, and EO verbs like frighten and bore, because both are causative and involve change of state and the argument changing morphology. Focusing on EO verbs, English has zero morphology, while Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish have overt causative and/or anticausative morphology. In Turkish and Japanese, EO verbs take the causative pattern, but overt morphemes, -ut- and -(s)ase, should be attached to the verb root respectively. Montrul was interested in whether zero morphology would cause problems for acquiring both psych and agentive verbs, and whether overt morphology in L1 would aid the L2 acquisition of psych verbs with overt morphological form. To examine these questions, three separate experiments were conducted through vocabulary translation and picture judgment tasks. For the English study, Turkish- and Spanish-speaking learners of English were tested; for the Spanish study, Turkish- and English-speaking learners of Spanish were examined; English-, Spanish-, and Japanese-speaking learners of Turkish were tested for the Turkish study. In the English study, Turkish-speakers had more difficulty with zero morphology while the Spanish-speakers patterned with the controls. In the Spanish study, Turkish-speakers had problems with transitive zero-derived forms, while English-speakers were more accurate with inchoative psych verbs with se than inchoative change of state verbs. In the Turkish study, the English- and Spanish-speaking learners were generally accurate with overt causative morphology (although there is a zero morphology in their L1), while the Japanese-speaking learners performed like the controls. Montrul concluded that learners’ morphological errors are constrained by their L1 morphology, supporting the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996). Zhao’s (2005) study of causativity included unaccusative verbs, psych verbs, resultatives, and compound causative constructions. Regarding psych verbs, Zhao claimed that Chinese has no synthetic EO verbs but analytical causative EO verbs containing “shi,” make, and an ES verb. For Chinese resultative and compound causative constructions, he proposed a functional category AspP de to connect V1 and V2, the latter being an ES verb for compounds. English has both ES and EO verbs, and analytical causative make structures. Japanese and Korean, like Chinese, do not have EO verbs, but ES verbs, and analytical causative constructions, which use affixes -sase and -i affixes respectively. English-, Japanese-, and Korean-speaking learners of Chinese at three proficiency levels were tested through acceptability judgment, production, and comprehension tasks. The results relevant to the present study here are: L2 learners accepted ES verbs and lexical causative constructions but rejected ungrammatical sentences with EO verbs. Savchenko (2014) studied the L2 acquisition of Russian applicative Experiencers by English- and Spanish-speaking learners in the context of FRH. Russian has applicative arguments, which are “argument-like elements to which a given verb does not assign a thematic role” (p. 6), such as Possessors, Sources, Recipients licensed by the low applicative head, and Benefactives and Malefactives licensed by the high applicative head. Savchenko proposed Super High Applicative phrase (SHAppl) as a 101

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new type of high applicative Experiencer argument, which appears with impersonal constructions of psych or activity predicates. When the verb is in the active form, the nominative argument appears as Experiencer with psych verbs but as Agent with activity verbs. When the verb surfaces in its impersonal (non-active) form, dative Experiencer shows up with both types of verbs, resulting in intricate interpretation. English has no dative Experiencer, whereas Spanish not only has dative Experiencer, but also presents properties similar to Russian. However, Spanish differs from Russian in that its impersonal sentences are based on activity verbs, taking dative Benefactive rather than Experiencer arguments. On the properties of SHAppl, in accordance with the FRH, English speakers would have less difficulty learning feature-bundles and mapping them onto L2 items compared to Spanish speakers, who need to restructure their L1 feature-bundles first, and then map the features to the lexical items in L2. To verify the prediction, English and Spanish learners of Russian were tested through a grammaticality judgment (GJ) task and a semantic judgment (SJ) task. The GJ task checked learners’ knowledge of Russian morphology while the SJ task assessed their sensitivity to the differences between the semantics of dative and nominative arguments and their respective interpretations in specific contexts. The results from GJ indicate that the English-speaking learners accepted ungrammatical dative arguments more often than the controls, suggesting that they were not sensitive to the morphosyntactic properties of the dative applicative constructions. The Spanish-speaking learners performed worse than the controls on each condition except for the nominative agents, suggesting that they did not acquire the knowledge under study. The results from the SJ showed that the English-speaking learners revealed the same insensitivity to the target properties, while Spanishspeaking learners appeared to pattern with the controls regarding Benefactive and Agent arguments but performed worse on Experiencer arguments. Savchenko concluded that differences in L2 acquisition patterns can be explained from perspectives of L1 semantic features despite some unexpected performances. To summarize the studies, Montrul’s (2001) multi-directional research opened a new way to compare the L2 acquisition of psych verbs across languages. Savchenko (2014) demonstrated how the FRH accounts for the L2 acquisition of Russian constructions with applicative Experiencer by English- and Spanish-speaking learners, but the numbers of subjects tested are small (i.e., 13 and 23 respectively). As the only research on the L2 acquisition of Chinese psych verbs, Zhao (2005) grouped superficially unrelated constructions into the topic of causativity, for which he proposed analyses for the data in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean. However, Zhao assumed that Chinese lacks EO verbs. As Chen (1995, 1996), Juffs (1996), Cheung and Larson (2015), and Liu (2016) show, Chinese has EO verbs. In addition, out of the two psych verbs used as second predicate of causative compounds in the test, “lei” tire, is not a psych verb at issue here.

8.4  Discussion and conclusion Over the past 50 years, psych verbs have attracted significant attention from both linguists and researchers on language acquisition. It appears clear that most theoretical analyses are motivated by limited linguistic data. Therefore, a uniform account of psych verbs is yet to be developed (Pandey, 2021). In reviewing the studies on L2 acquisition of psych verbs, I have made some observations about the methodology adopted, the linguistic properties examined, the target language selected, and the human subjects tested, which I will discuss briefly. I will finally outline some directions for future research. In terms of methodology, grammaticality judgment has remained a popular measure to tap learners’ linguistic knowledge. One nice upgrade is to collect the data of time participants take for judging each sentence. Generally, the more difficult a structure, the longer it would take to process, as confirmed by Kanwit and Quesada (2018), which also shows that both learners and controls used

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more time to judge the ungrammatical sentences with gustar-type verbs lacking the preposition a. This offers extra information about the constructions under study. Furthermore, based on the findings of Gonzales (2022), that there is no modality effect regarding written vs. aural stimuli, testing with either modality could be carried out online. Such an online untimed testing, which records participants’ processing times but prevents them from going back to correct their initial judgment, is ideal in eliciting reliable linguistic intuition for analysis. Regarding the properties of psych verbs, their argument structure properties have caught the most attention. Various morpho-syntactic characteristics related to the preposition a, the dative clitic le and the antipassive se with Spanish psych verbs have also been much investigated. Other items tested include the T/SM restriction in English, EO verbs with overt morphological forms in Turkish, compound causatives involving ES verbs in Chinese, and Russian applicative Experiencer structures. Backward binding was only studied by Chen (1996). Most studies focused on psych verbs, with a few covering psych adjectives (e.g., Chen, 1996; Hirakawa & Suzuki, 2014; Sato, 2003), or psych nominals (e.g., Chen, 1996). Given that psych adjectives, adverbs, and nominals are the most frequently used constructions, as observed by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo (2020), future research should include syntactic categories other than verbs. Of the research on L2 acquisition of psych verbs, English and Spanish are the most studied target languages. That is not surprising, because both are examined extensively by linguists and are the most popular second languages. What is surprising is that L2 acquisition of Italian or French psych verbs is scant. Italian and French psych predicates present their special intricacies. Therefore, a probe into how those properties are acquired by L2 learners would lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the issues. As for the subjects involved, there is a growing amount of research that examined the acquisition of Spanish psych verbs by heritage speakers (Gómez Soler & Pascual y Cabo, 2016; Montrul, 2016b; Montrul & Bowles, 2009; Montrul & Bowles, 2010; Prada Pérez & Pascual y Cabo, 2011; Toribio & Nye, 2006), which could not be reviewed here due to space restrictions. Montrul (2016a) defined heritage speakers as “individuals from language minority groups who grow up exposed to a minority language in the home and the majority societal language” (p. 16). This group of speakers is special in starting to acquire their heritage language naturally from early on, yet ending with various learning outcomes, ranging from achieving a native-like proficiency to retaining only some formulaic expressions. Will their performance resemble more the children in L1 acquisition or the adults in L2 acquisition? So far, most reported in the literature engaged Spanish heritage speakers except Bos (2004), which investigated Moroccan adolescents’ acquisition of Dutch psych verbs. For future research, I suggest some directions. First, it is crucial to develop a well-studied classification of psych verbs to ensure accurate testing materials. Landau (2010) divided Class II verbs into stative and eventive, the latter further divided into non-agentive and agentive. Landau grouped stative Class II verbs and Class III verbs together, leaving eventive Class II verbs separate, as shown in (10). Gómez Soler (2015) claimed that Spanish Class III verbs allow the dative and accusative Experiencer alternation while Class II verbs do not. Gonzales (2022), however, claimed that Spanish Class II verbs allow two possible word order configurations while Class III verbs have only one. Why is there such a discrepancy in Spanish psych verb classification? Is the inconsistency due to the lack of criteria? Related to the classification is the selection of verbs. Factors like frequency and authenticity should be considered seriously. In Kanwit and Quesada (2018), the Spanish psych verbs tested are the most taught in the foreign language classroom. Likewise, Gonzalez (2022) selected Spanish psych verbs from the top 5,000 most frequently occurring words in a corpus of 20 million words (Davies, 2006). When variables like frequency are controlled, different results are generated (Harthoren et al., 2015).

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Second, as reported by Messenger et al. (2012) and Hartshorne et al. (2015), children performed better on the frighten-type verbs as compared to the fear-type verbs. However, opposite results were found for adults except for the verb “fear” that has caused problems for ESL learners of different language backgrounds (e.g., Chen, 1996; White et al., 1999; Sato, 2003). Similar results were observed from patients of Alzheimer's disease, who had no problem with canonical structures, but greater difficulty with EO verb sentences (Manouilidou et al., 2009). Research needs to uncover why L1 children present “an advantage for frighten-type verbs” (Hartshorne et al., 2015, p. 479), and why L2 adults do not show such advantage. Thirdly, based on Landau’s (2010) two-type Psych Passive Typology (p. 64), I make two predictions about L2 acquisition of psych passives: (i) English-speaking L2 learners would have less difficulty acquiring Dutch psych passives, and vice versa for Dutch-speaking L2 learners of English, because both English and Dutch belong to Type A language, allowing pseudo-passive; (ii) Frenchspeaking L2 learners would have less difficulty acquiring Italian psych passives, and vice versa for Italian-speaking L2 learners of French, because both French and Italian belong to Type B language, allowing adjectival passive. Studies of psych passives along these lines would make Dutch, French, and Italian as target languages for L2 learners, whose representations of the phenomena would deepen our understanding of the nature of psych constructions. Finally, replication should be part of future research on L2 acquisition of psych verbs. Taking into consideration “citation counts, broad findings, designs, and measures” (Marsden et al., 2018, p. 332), I suggest replicating two ground-breaking studies. White et al. (1998) created a perfect case for replication research on the T/SM restriction, because (i) the representations of their L2 learners and controls suggested an alternative analysis of the phenomenon, and (ii) French and Italian have no periphrastic causative constructions (Landau, 2010). As such, a replication study involving French and Italian would bring the controversial T/SM issue to light, e.g., whether the constraint is the consequence of the presence of zero CAUS (Pesetsky, 1995), a result of semantic and selectional restrictions coupled with morphological restrictions (McGinnis, 2001), or a property not peculiar to psych constructions only (Landan, 2010). Montrul’s (2001) analysis of English, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish speakers’ acquisition of psych verbs regarding the Typology of Morphological Derivations has paved the way for two types of replication research: (i) to compare the acquisition of psych verbs with that of change of state verbs across different languages, and (ii) to examine the acquisition of Spanish psych verbs by French- or Italian-speaking L2 learners along with those whose L1 is morphologically impoverished. Replicating studies with diverse populations and different target languages would not only further enhance our understanding of psych verbs, but also contribute to elucidating second language acquisition mechanisms.

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The logical problem of second language acquisition of argument structure: Recognizing aspectual distinctions in Spanish psych predicates. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19(6), 627–645. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/1367006914527185 Gómez Soler, I. G., & Pascual y Cabo, D. (2016). Syntactic reflexes of information structure in heritage Spanish: Evidence from psych-predicate constructions. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 54(4), 291–317. https://dx​.doi​.org​/10​.1515​/iral​-2015​-0036 Gonzalez, R. H. (2022). A lexical semantic approach to the L2 acquisition of Spanish psych verbs. Second Language Research. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/02676583211066296 Hartshorne, J. K., O’Donnell, T. J., Sudo, Y., Uruwashi, M., Lee, M., & Snedeker, J. (2016). Psych verbs, the linking problem, and the acquisition of language. Cognition, 157, 268–288. http://dx​.doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.cognition​.2016​.08​.008 Hartshorne, J. K., Pogue, A., & Snedeker, J. (2015). Love is hard to understand: The relationship between transitivity and caused events in the acquisition of emotion verbs. Journal of Child Language, 42(3), 467–504. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0305000914000178 Hirakawa, M., & Suzuki, K. (2014). Is the dog ‘frightened’ or ‘frightening’? Psych adjectives in L2 English by speakers of Japanese and Spanish. In R. T. Miller, K. I. Martin, C. M. Eddington, A. Henery, N. M. Miguel, A. M. Tseng, A. Tuninetti, & D. Walter (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 2012 second language research forum (pp. 134–144). Cascadilla proceedings project. http://www​.lingref​.com​/cpp​/slrf​/2012​/paper3092​.pdf Juffs, A. (1996). Semantics-syntax correspondences in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 12(2), 177–221. https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/43104511 Kanwit, M., & Quesada, M. L. (2018). Learner and native-speaker differences in the acceptability of gustar-type psychological verbs in Spanish. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 56(3), 279–313. https://search​.ebscohost​.com​/login​.aspx​?direct​=true​&AuthType​=sso​&db​=mzh​&AN​=2019650226​ &site​=eds​-live​&custid​=s8475574 Lakoff, G. (1970). Irregularity in syntax. Holt, Reinhart, and Winston. Landau, I. (2010). The locative syntax of experiencers. MIT Press. Lardiere, D. (2008). Feature assembly in second language acquisition. In J. Liceras, H. Zobl, & H. M. Goodluck (Eds.), The role of features in second language acquisition (pp. 106–40). Lawrence Erlbaum. Lardiere, D. (2009). Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 25(2), 173–227. https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/43103794 Li, C. (2018). Argument realization of psychological verbs. Studies in Language, 42(4), 755–797. https://doi​.org​ /10​.1075​/sl​.17016​.li Liu, M. (2016). Emotion in lexicon and grammar: Lexical constructional interface of Mandarin emotional predicates. Lingua Sinica, 2(1), 1–47. https://doi​.org​/10​.1186​/s40655​-016​-0013-0 Lord, C. (1979). Don’t you fall me down: Children’s generalizations regarding cause and transitivity. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 17, 81–91. https://search​.ebscohost​.com​/login​.aspx​?direct​=true​ &AuthType​=sso​&db​=eric​&AN​=ED191268​&site​=eds​-live​&custid​=s8475574

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Dongdong Chen MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Manouilidou, C., de Almeida, R. G., Schwartz, G., & Nair, N. P. V. (2009). Thematic roles in Alzheimer’s disease: Hierarchy violations in psychological predicates. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 22(2), 167–186. https:// doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.jneuroling​.2008​.10​.002 Marsden, E., Morgan-Short, K., Thompson, S., & Abugaber, D. (2018). Replication in second language research: Narrative and systematic reviews and recommendations for the field. Language Learning, 68(2), 321–391. https://search​.ebscohost​.com​/login​.aspx​?direct​=true​&AuthType​=sso​&db​=eric​&AN​ =EJ1180766​&site​=eds​-live​&custid​=s8475574 Messenger, K., Branigan, H. P., McLean, J. F., & Sorace, A. (2012). Is young children’s syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from syntactic priming. Journal of Memory and Language, 66(4), 568–587. https:// doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.jml​.2012​.03​.008 McGinnis, M. (2001). Semantic and morphological restrictions in experiencer predicates. In Proceedings of the 2000 CLA annual conference. University of Ottawa. Montrul, S. (1998). The L2 acquisition of dative experiencer subjects. Second Language Research, 14(1), 27–61. https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/43104558 Montrul, S. (2001). First-language-constrained variability in the second-language acquisition of argument-structure-changing morphology with causative verbs. Second Language Research, 17(2), 144–194. https://www​ .jstor​.org​/stable​/43103593 Montrul, S. (2016a). The acquisition of heritage languages. Cambridge UP. Montrul, S. (2016b). Losing your case? Dative experiencers in Mexican Spanish and heritage speakers in the United States. In D. Pascual y Canbo (Ed.), Advances in Spanish as a heritage language (pp. 99–124). John Benjamins. Montrul, S., & Bowles, M. (2009). Back to basics: Incomplete knowledge of differential object marking in Spanish heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(3), 363–383. https://search​.ebscohost​ .com​/login​.aspx​?direct​=true​&AuthType​=sso​&db​=eric​&AN​=EJ856260​&site​=eds​-live​&custid​=s8475574 Montrul, S., & Bowles, M. (2010). Is grammar instruction beneficial for heritage language learners? Dative case marking in Spanish. Heritage Language Journal, 7, 47–73. Pandey, A. (2021). A literature review of experiencer verb constructions. Language in India, 21(9), 24–36. https://search​.ebscohost​.com​/login​.aspx​?direct​=true​&AuthType​=sso​&db​=ufh​&AN​=152639683​&site​=eds​ -live​&custid​=s8475574 Parodi-Lewin, C. (1991). Aspect in the syntax of Spanish psych-verbs [Doctoral dissertation]. University of California. Pesetsky, D. (1995). Zero syntax: Experiencers and cascades. MIT Press. Prada Pérez, A., & Pascual y Cabo, D. (2011). Invariable gusta in the Spanish of heritage speakers in the US. In J. Hershenschon & D. Tanner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th generative approaches to second language acquisition conference (GASLA 2011) (pp. 110–120). Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Sato, Y. (2003). Japanese learners’ linking problems with English psych verbs. Reading Working Papers in Linguistics, 7, 125–144. Savchenko, U. (2014). Second language acquisition of Russian applicative experiencers by English and Spanish learners [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Toronto. Schwartz, B. D. (1998). The second language instinct. Lingua, 106, 133–160. Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the full transfer/full access model. Second Language Research, 12, 40–72. Sorace, A. (2011). Pinning down the concept of interface in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1(1), 1–33. https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/lab​.1​.1​.01sor Sorace, A., & Filiaci, F. (2006). Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Language Research, 22(3), 339–368. https://doi​.org​/10​.1191​/0267658306sr271oa Toribio, A. J., & Nye, C. (2006). Restructuring of reverse psychological predicates. In C. Nishida & J. P. Montreuil (Eds.), New perspectives on romance linguistics (pp. 263–277). Benjamins. Toth, P. D. (2003). Psych verbs and morphosyntactic development in instructed L2 Spanish. In S. Montrul & F. Ordóñez (Eds.), Linguistic theory and language development in Hispanic languages (pp. 468–497). Cascadilla Press. Travis, L. (1984). Parameter and effects of word order variation [Doctoral dissertation]. MIT. White, L. (2003). Second language acquisition and universal grammar. Cambridge University Press. White, L., Brown, C., Bruhn-Garavito, J., Chen, D., Hirakawa, M., & Montrul, S. (1999). Psych verbs in second language acquisition. In E. C. Klein & G. Martohardjono (Eds.), The development of second language grammars: A generative approach (pp. 171–196). John Benjamins.

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Psych verbs White, L., Montrul, S., Hirakawa, M., Chen, D., Bruhn-Garavito, J., & Brown, C. (1998). Zero morphology and the T/SM restriction in the L2 acquisition of psych verbs. In M.-L. Beck (Ed.), Morphology and its interfaces in second language knowledge (pp. 257–282). John Benjamins. Zhao, Y. (2005). Causativity in Chinese and its representations in English, Japanese and Korean speakers’ L2 Chinese grammars [Doctoral thesis]. Cambridge University.

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9 THE DATIVE AND LOCATIVE ALTERNATIONS Alan Juffs

9.1 Introduction The dative alternation (verbs encoding the transfer of an entity to a recipient or beneficiary such as give) and the locative alternation (verbs representing one entity moving to a location, like load) involve the possible and impossible ordering of noun phrases (NPs) and prepositional phrases (PPs) within the verb phrase. Theories of verb argument structure are central to explanations of these phenomena and language development. Stowell (1981) proposed a list of theta roles that expressed part of a verb’s meaning. For example, send might be represented in the lexicon as [send, v.t., [AGENT, THEME, GOAL]], meaning that the transitive verb send assigns three theta [θ] (‘semantic’) roles: the thing that sends [AGENT], the entity that undergoes sending [THEME], and the entity that receives it [GOAL]. A thematic hierarchy ensured that theta roles mapped to the right grammatical functions (GFs): Agents usually link to grammatical subjects, Themes to grammatical objects, and Goals are frequently objects of prepositions in Nominative-Accusative languages (Baker, 1988). The alternations involve the re-ordering of Theme and Goal in the clause. When the ‘normal’ alignment of theta role to GF is not met, languages often mark this ‘misalignment’ with morphology, as with the passive voice (Baker et al., 1989). Thus, differences in morphology permit a verb’s arguments to appear as different GFs while simultaneously retaining their semantic role. In general, at issue is (a) whether the alternations occur in the lexicon (Pinker, 1989) or whether the alternations are post-lexical and manipulated by syntactic operations (Larson, 1988; Pylkkänen, 2008); (b) how the alternations are constrained, because not all dative and locative verbs permit alternation; and (c) how learners develop knowledge of the limitations in (b). The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. First, descriptions of the phenomena are provided with example sentences from various languages. Theoretical accounts are briefly discussed and followed by findings from the literature in second language acquisition (SLA). Finally, future directions are considered.

9.1.1  The dative alternation The dative alternation in English appears in (1). Prepositional dative (PD) sentences are in (1a), while the ‘alternation’ occurs when the recipient is re-ordered to a position adjacent to the verb in (1b) and the preposition is deleted. This form is called the direct object dative (DOD). Considerable dialectal variation exists in English (Holmberg et al., 2019, p. 678, fn.3) and for all these forms context can be important (Ambridge et al., 2018, fn. 3) as illustrated in (1c) and (1d). 108

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-11

The dative and locative alternations (1) Dative alternation a. b. c. d.

Kris gave a book to Pat. Prepositional dative (PD). Kris gave Pat a book. Direct object dative (DOD). ?Kris gave it me. ?Kris gave me it.

Examples in (2) show that the alternation is less acceptable verbs of more than one syllable and of Romance origin. Nevertheless, (2d) is a multi-syllabic benefactive dative, has a Romance cognate, and is perfectly acceptable. (2) Dative alternation constrained a. b. c. d.

Kris donated some food to the homeless people. *?Kris donated the homeless people some food. ?Kris donated them some food. Sandy reserved Kris/them a place at the table. (Benefactive DOD.)

The animacy of NPs can also limit alternation. In (3a), ‘the border’ is an inanimate place and therefore not a potential possessor of ‘the package’, unlike the animate ‘the boarder’ (a person who rents a room in a house), who may possess it. Thus, the DOD is less acceptable with inanimate objects, although the effect is not absolute. (3)   a. b.

?*The official sent the border a package/ √a package to the border. The official sent the boarder a package/ √a package to the boarder.

In other languages, e.g., French, the dative alternation is not permitted. In both Spanish and French pronominal clitics and in Spanish clitic doubling may play a role in alternation patterns. The transfer of possession DOD structure in Spanish appears similar to the PD in that the preposition is not deleted. However, the difference is clearer with benefactives (Cuervo, 2007, p. 587), where the form in (4a) para ‘for’ is replaced with a ‘dative’ and the preverbal dative clitic le in (4b). (4)   a. b.

Sara hizo el almuerzo Sara cook DET.MASC lunch ‘Sara cooked the lunch for her son.’ Sara le hizo el Sara CL cook DET.MASC ‘Sara cooked her son the dinner.’

para su hijo. DAT.BEN her son almuerzo dinner

a su hijo. DAT.GL her son

Moreover, Cuervo (2007) notes that the Spanish DOD can be used with a greater variety of verbs than in English. However, it is important to emphasize that the Spanish DOD construction with a clitic is fundamentally different from the DOD in English (Perpiñán & Montrul, 2006).

9.1.2  The locative alternation1 Gropen et al. (1991) characterize locatives as verbs that describe events with an entity (a Theme/ Figure) moving to a location (a Goal/Ground). In the English locative alternation, a preposition is always present with two arguments; thus, there is no ‘double object locative’. Verb meaning influ109

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ences whether the arguments within the VP may or may not be re-ordered (Pinker, 1989). Crucial to these analyses are meaning ‘features’, which are associated with the verb. Examples from English are in (5) and (6): (5) No alternation: Feature: ‘Path/Manner’ specified by the verb -> Theme/Figure object. a. Kris poured the water into the jug. b. *Kris poured the jug with water. [Reading: water goes into, not over, the jug.] (6) No alternation: Feature: ‘end state’ specified -> Goal/Ground object a. *Kris filled water into the jug. b. Kris filled the jug with water (‘*into water’, *over water).

Thus, ‘pour’ signifies a ‘manner of directed motion’ and accepts only a Theme direct object, while verbs like ‘fill’ specify an ‘end state’ and thus require a Goal direct object and the preposition ‘with’, which introduces an Instrument semantic role. However, some verbs alternate, such as ‘sow’ and ‘load’ in (7). (7) Alternation allowed with PATH/Manner and Goal/State a. b. c. d.

The farmer sowed wheat in the field. The farmer sowed the field with wheat. The farmer loaded the hay onto the truck. The farmer loaded the truck with the hay.

One issue with alternating verbs is which one should be considered the ‘base’ form. Note that (7a, 7d) are acceptable without the prepositional phrase (PP), whereas (7b, 7c) seem to require a PP. Hence, ‘sow’ would have a Figure object base form, while ‘load’ would have a Ground base form. (The difference between an argument and an adjunct is not always clear based on this ‘omissability’ test, Pinker, 1989, pp. 39–40 and judgments are often unclear). In many languages, verb morphology is important for determining whether the alternation is permitted (Brinkmann, 1997; Juffs, 1996). One example is German, as in (8): (8) schmieren/beschmieren a. b. c.

Johann hat Schlamm auf die Mauer geschmiert Johan has mud on the-ACC wall smear-Past ‘Johan smeared mud on the wall’. * Johann hat die Mauer mit Schlamm geschmiert. Johann hat die Mauer mit Schlamm beschmiert. Johan has the wall with mud ‘besmeared’.

The verb schmieren ‘smear’ describes ‘manner of motion to a location’; as such, it does not permit a Ground object. However, the prefix be in German is used to indicate a transition of change of state, adding the semantic element that requires a Ground object, indicating that a derivational morpheme can license a change in semantic structure that requires a Ground object. A similar effect can be seen in Chinese with a verb such as cha ‘put’ (Kuo, 2019) as in (9a), which does not permit alternation (9b) unless the resultative verb ‘result’ man ‘full’ is added (9c). If the ‘with’ alternation conflicts with a direction focus (9d), the alternation is not possible. (See Kuo (2019) for a more detailed comparison of Chinese, English and Japanese locatives.) 110

The dative and locative alternations (9) cha – cha-dao (‘put-to’ or cha-ru put in ‘insert’) cha-man (‘put-full’) a. b. c. d.

Li Si zai huaping li cha le hua. Li Si at vase in put ASP flowers ‘Li Si put the flowers in the vase.’ *Li Si yong hua cha le huaping. Li Si use flowers put ASP vase ‘Li Si used flowers to put in the vase’. Li Si yong hua cha-man le huaping. Li Si use flowers put-full ASP vase ‘Li Si filled the vase with flowers’. *Li Si yong hua cha-dao le huaping. Li Si use flowers put-to ASP vase ‘Li Si used flowers to put the vase’

These data from Chinese also show that morphology is important in determining the alternation crosslinguistically. It also raises the issue that Stringer (2010) refers to as the ‘gloss trap’, which is whether cha still means ‘put’ rather than ‘fill’ when used with the resultative man ‘full’.

9.2  Theory and background The appropriate module of the grammar for ‘alternations’ remains an active area of research, although any theory must refer to semantics in some way (Bley-Vroman & Yoshinaga, 1992, p. 164; Levin, 2015). Syntactic accounts of the dative alternation have involved VP structure, Case theory, and movement (Larson, 1988; Pylkkänen, 2008). In contrast, semantic approaches fix the alternations in theories of decompositional semantics (Gropen et al., 1989; Jackendoff, 1990; Pinker, 1989). The role of derivational morphology in the alternations, which is traditionally viewed as a lexical process (Kiparsky, 1982, p. 4), is an argument in favor of a lexical approach in some languages. In contrast, usage-based grammar advocates the construction of ‘proto-types’ that serve as core exemplars for other verbs (Goldberg & Casenheiser, 2008) and do not require detailed semantic decomposition or movement. Some researchers even assume that the ‘alternation’ is spurious because different forms are used for different functional purposes (Gries & Stefanowitsch, 2004).

9.2.1  Syntactic approaches The most influential early syntactic account of the DOD was Larson (1988, 1990). He proposed that the alternations are syntactic operations based on a double VP structure from D- to S-structure. Thus, the DOD is a special example of NP movement. Pylkkänen (2008) adopted a functional category approach based on Minimalism (Chomsky, 1995). Relying on data from Bantu and other languages, she suggested that the PD and DOD can be accounted for via differences in the functional category ‘Applicative Phrase’, which also relates to causatives (Baker et al., 2012).

9.2.2  Lexical approaches Lexical theories view the alternations as different semantic structures related to a single root morpho-phonological form based on decompositional semantics (Jackendoff, 1990; Pinker, 1989). (See Stringer (2012) for a succinct review of issues in decompositional semantics.) Thus, the dative verb send would have one semantic structure [X (Kris) CAUSE [ Y (a package) GO Z (to Sandy]] ‘Kris sent a package to Sandy’, which can be changed in the lexicon to [X (Kris CAUSE [Z (Sandy HAVE 111

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Y (a package)]], ‘Kris sent Sandy a package’. This alternation is what Pinker (1989) terms a ‘Broad Range Rule’ (BRR) that converts one meaning into another and thereby alters the order of arguments projected in the syntax (Pinker, 1989, p. 211). The BRR is permitted or blocked by another layer of semantics, the narrow range rules (NRR), which reference semantic features such as ‘MANNER’ (Pinker, 1989, p. 218). An aspectual MANNER feature, e.g., specified as ‘throwing’ (aspectual force, punctual prior to the event) allows the BRR to apply, whereas ‘pulling’ (aspectual force, continuous during the event) prevents it. These features account for acceptability of Kris threw Sandy a ball versus *Kris pulled Sandy a ball. For the locative alternation, the BRR concepts are like those of the dative (Pinker, 1989, p. 228). The semantic structure of ‘spray the wall with paint’ contains a [means] event indicating the ‘instrumental/ how’ the Ground (the wall) was affected [PROPERTY] by the event, whereas ‘spray paint on the wall’ is an event describing locational movement to a place. Alternation is prevented through NRR rules applying to features relevant to these verbs: ‘cover, smother, pave’ only allow the Ground semantic structure (6b) because they belong to a class of verbs indicating an end-state ‘a layer fully covering a surface’, whereas ‘pour, slosh, slop’ allow only locational movement semantic structures (6a) because they belong to a class of verbs describing manner of movement, ‘a mass enabled to move via a force of gravity’ (Pinker, 1989, pp. 124–127). However, while Pinker’s (1989) proposals for BRR have received support and continue to form part of the explanation of learning (e.g., Ambridge et al., 2018), the NRR, which is a key to constraining alternation, has received less support (Juffs, 1996, pp. 138–142; Naigles, 1991).

9.2.3  Construction grammar Ambridge et al. (2018) pointed out that construction grammar accounts owe much to Pinker (1989). Based on these assumptions, learning proceeds by a frequent and salient example in the input of a ‘transferring’ event (e.g., ‘giving’) or a ‘caused movement’ event (e.g., ‘pouring’) forming the basis of a pattern ‘x give y to z’ or ‘x move y to z’ and results in an association with a syntactic form, [NP [VP NP PP]]. Subsequently, the association between the described event and the syntactic structure is reinforced and then ‘spreads’ to other events of a similar nature, e.g., ‘sending’ in the case of datives or ‘spraying’ in the case of locatives. By accumulating enough experience with frequent event-structure pairings with similar verbs, learners come to associate the syntactic sequence [NP [V NP NP]] with a dative semantic structure [X-AGENT CAUSE Y-GOAL to HAVE Z-THEME]. Based on this input, novel verbs (e.g., fax) with this syntax, such as ‘Kris faxed Sandy the letter’, will be interpreted by analogy as ‘meaning’ X CAUSE Y to HAVE Z. New or rare [NP V NP NP] structures will be interpreted as causing a change of possession, location, or benefit. Thus, clause structure may also assist learners in acquiring verb meaning (Gleitman, 1990). Bresnan and Nikitina’s (2007) work on corpora also identified discourse characteristics that influence whether pronouns or the alternative prepositional dative are used. Jäschke and Plag (2016, p. 490) summarized some of the factors that affect the ordering of arguments and, according to them, override any putative semantic narrow range constraints: (10)   a. b. c. d.

animate before definite before pronoun before less complex before

inanimate indefinite non-pronoun more complex

Jäschke and Plag (p. 514, fn. 1) point out that the question of whether these factors constitute the grammar itself or are only used for deciding how the grammar is deployed remains an issue of debate. 112

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9.2.4  The learning problem The problem for acquisition has centered on how speakers learn which alternations are possible and which are not. Although Baker (1979) proposed that learners only use forms that they hear, children and adults do overgeneralize both datives and locatives, producing forms that many adult L1 speakers consider unacceptable or are unattested in the input (Ambridge et al., 2012; Bowerman, 1982; Juffs, 1996; Pinker, 1989; White, 1987). Proposed solutions have involved internal constraints interacting with input (Pinker, 1989), pragmatic constraints on event interpretation (animacy, affectedness (e.g., Jeffries & Willis, 1984)) and event structure (Juffs, 2001; Rosen, 1996). Other proposals are that overgeneralizations ‘fade away’ because they are not supported by input. This is the ‘entrenchment’ hypothesis (Ambridge et al., 2018). Another view, termed ‘preemption’, first proposed in SLA by Rutherford (1989), is that learners know that other forms are used which block the overgeneralized forms in the same way that ‘goed’ is pre-empted by ‘went’. However, consistent crosslinguistic patterns also need to be accounted for within a broader theory of semantic structure, constraints on semantics, alternations, and morphology in languages other than English, which is why abstract semantics-syntax links cannot be excluded from explanations (Ambridge et al., 2018; Juffs, 2000; Whong Barr & Schwarz, 2002).

9.3  Relevant SLA theories SLA theories regarding the acquisition of argument structure have followed those in L1 acquisition with the major exception that learning a second language involves the acquisition of new morphophonological forms for verbs, which creates the problem of translation equivalents (Stringer, 2010).

9.3.1 Markedness Very early work concentrated on markedness, which has several definitions based on linguistic typology and learnability (Eckman, 1996; White, 1987). The DOD is marked because it is less frequent crosslinguistically and having the DOD implies that a language also has the PD but not vice versa. In SLA, if an L1 has a marked structure, it may be transferred to the L2. This transfer creates a learning problem because a language with both the PD and the DOD is a superset of a language with the PD only. For example, English-speaking learners of French who transfer DOD will face difficulties because absence of the DOD in the input is insufficient evidence to show that the DOD is not permitted. In contrast, for French learners of English, the acquisition of the DOD ought to proceed directly from positive evidence – that is hearing sentences such as (1b) in the input (White, 1987, 1991).

9.3.2  Full transfer/full access Schwartz and Sprouse’s (1996) theory of full-transfer full access predicts the transfer of every part of the L1 learner’s grammar to the L2, including argument structure associated with each verb as argued in the more verb-by-verb lexical approach by Stringer (2010). Thus, L1 influence in development would be inevitable and lead to overgeneralizations predicted by theories of markedness.

9.3.3  Lexical parameters The L1 literature makes it clear that input and frequencies of form-meaning mappings are important both for datives and for locatives. Nonetheless, suggestions exist that deeper properties may account for alternations. For datives, Snyder and Stromswold (1997, p. 282) showed that ‘datives, 113

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verb particle constructions, put locatives, and causative constructions are acquired as a group’. (Not the locative alternation, however). Snyder (2001, p. 329) suggested a syntactic compounding parameter related to semantics and complex predicates; in his analysis, Chinese and English are in the same group because both allow root compounds and resultatives, whereas Romance and Slavic do not. In contrast, Juffs’(1996) analysis is more semantic. The proposal is that languages might differ according to a semantic structure schematized by Juffs (1996) as [ACT[+effect][GO[STATE(Property)]]. In this case, Chinese and English are in different typological groups with Chinese not permitting the semantic structure with ACT[+effect] and [GO[STATE]]. This lexical parameter would account for strong tendencies in a language to permit Ground locative verbs that entail the object is completely affected (e.g., ‘cover’), causative psychological predicates (e.g., ‘disappoint’), and the existence of caused change-of-state verbs. Thus, English permits transitive verbs such as ‘the laborer covered the wood with a tarpaulin’, ‘The movie shocked the audience’, and ‘the chef cooked the fish’. All these sentences imply a caused change of state in the direct object. In contrast, Chinese (and many other languages) require additional (causative or telic) morphology to ensure that the object is interpreted as totally affected. The claim is not that locative sentences with Ground objects are never permitted, but that their interpretation differs because they do not entail a complete change of state even though they may allow the same syntax as English’s ‘John filled the pitcher with water’. Therefore, the semantic structure, telicity, and morphological properties of the verb system are all relevant.

9.4  Methodological approaches 9.4.1  Acceptability judgments The main task type in SLA consists of acceptability judgments (Ionin, 2013). Most researchers use a Likert scale in which participants rate sentences from good to bad rather than just accept or reject their grammaticality because the judgments can vary in subtle ways. (Note the use of the Z score procedure to account for individual variation in the use of ordinal scales (Juffs & Fang, 2022; Schütze & Sprouse, 2013). Alternatives to judgment tasks include forced choice tasks such as the Bley-Vroman and Joo (2001) example in Figure 9.1, in which learners should associate the ‘spray paint on the wall’ with the ‘a’ picture and ‘spray the wall with paint’ with ‘b’ if they are sensitive to the ‘completely affected’ interpretation of the ‘with’ version of the locative.

9.4.2  Production tasks Production tasks have also been used extensively because it is important to assess how learners interpret events and encode them in clauses (Bley-Vroman & Joo, 2001; Juffs, 1996). For example, the forced choice task in Figure 9.1 could be adapted for a free production task to determine which form learners would use.

Figure 9.1 Forced choice task for ‘John sprayed paint on the door’ vs. John sprayed the door with paint (reprinted with permission from Bley-Vroman and Joo (2001, p. 211))

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9.4.3  Structural priming Structural priming is a technique based on the assumption that exposure to one of two possible forms in input, e.g., the DOD ‘Kris gave Sandy the ball’, would promote the production of that form rather than the alternative PD. For example, McDonough (2006) conducted an experiment with task-based interaction in which an L1 English interlocutor deliberately used one of the dative forms and then the researchers measured which one the L2 learners favored.

9.4.4  Corpus studies Corpus studies analyze production data from learners as well as L1 speakers. Snyder and Stromswold (1997) is an example of such a study which sought to compare the rate at which PD and DOD datives emerged in children’s production along with other aspects of their syntax, e.g., passive and raising, in a study that investigated subtle links among principles of syntax. Gries and Stefanowitsch (2004) address a range of alternations, including datives, from a usage-based grammar perspective using corpus data. Corpus studies are becoming more important as larger corpora and computational tools have become available.

9.5  A critical review of SLA studies 9.5.1  Historical overview Early SLA research assumed that syntactic transformational rules explained the alternation with certain constraints such as the verb origin (Romance vs. Germanic in English) and the possessor constraint limiting alternation for the dative. If an L2 did not permit the DOD, then the acquisition would be harder due to the need to retreat from overgeneralizations (Hawkins, 1987; Le Compangnon, 1984; Mazurkewich, 1984; White, 1987, 1991). In English as a second language, the issue has been whether learners can retreat from overgeneralizations based on verb type and whether negative evidence, in the form of explicit instruction and correction, can help overcome the generalization (e.g., Carroll & Swain, 1993; Radwan, 2005). The locative alternation did not appear in the L2 literature until the mid-1990s (Juffs, 1996) and has not been the target of instructional intervention.

9.5.2  Syntactic approaches to the dative in acquisition Pyllkänen’s (2008) analysis differentiates the PD/DOD based on the functional category high and low ‘Applicative Phrase’, although these analyses also rely on semantic verb classes (Cuervo, 2007). Cuervo’s (2007) study of L2 Spanish adopted this framework and found that the learners were like L1 Spanish speakers in PD, but differed regarding DOD in Spanish, which involve clitics (4b). An additional factor in this study with clitics was the role of animacy (human recipients were more acceptable than inanimate). This effect with datives was also explored in Olsen and Juffs (2022), who found a preference for human recipients with dative ‘le’. Cuervo’s analysis supports Montrul’s (2000) view that while basic syntactic properties may appear early, knowledge of semantic constraints develops later. Emirkanian et al. (2021) found that English-speaking learners of French L2 were influenced by their L1, especially with verbs that only allow the DOD; however, L1 influence could not explain dative clitic use based on verb meaning. Slabakova (2002) studied English-speaking and French-speaking learners’ acquisition of Snyder’s (2001) Compounding Parameter in Spanish L2. She found only limited support for the cluster, which includes datives: ‘The purported cluster seems to be breaking into two parts, with double objects and N-N compounds easier to delearn, resultatives very difficult to delearn, and verb particles somewhere in between’ (p. 530). 115

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Recently, Fernández Fuertes and Sáchez Calderón (2020) studied mono- and bilingual child language acquisition. They also point out that many competing analyses of the dative alternation still exist, some of which do not have the DOD derived from the PD, and they included the Spanish dative clitic doubled constructions (DCLD), illustrated in (4b). The children’s data revealed that (a) DOD emerges at the same time as PD, supporting Stromswold and Snyder’s analysis and (b) other effects such as input and frequency need to be accounted for.

9.5.3  Decompositional semantics in SLA: broad range and narrow range rules 9.5.3.1 Datives In this framework, the attention has been on second language learners’ knowledge of narrow range rules, with a consensus being that narrow range rules are something that learners struggle with. Early work by Bley-Vroman and Yoshinaga (1992) with Japanese-speaking learners of English L2 revealed that learners transferred the possession constraint (only animates can be recipients in the DOD in English), but with made-up verbs the evidence for narrow range rules was lacking, suggesting that their accurate knowledge of real verbs was based input and not knowledge of a narrow range constraint. In a similar study, Inagaki (1997) contrasted the operation of narrow range rules in Japanese and Chinese with those of English. Although differences were found among the L2 groups, these differences were not always based on the operation of narrow range constraints in the L1. Inagaki suggested that broader typological and frequency considerations need to be taken into account, which is consistent with critiques of narrow range rules (Naigles, 1991). Oh (2010) investigated the difference between the DOD with benefactives, which operate differently in Korean and English. She noted the gradual emergence of the benefactive dative and touched on the role of frequency as being an important factor.

9.5.3.2 Locatives2 In contrast to the dative, locative verbs have been investigated far less in L2. Recent work in L1 during the past ten years with locatives – e.g., Ambridge et al. (2012) – are based on Pinker’s (1989) accounts of the alternations. Juffs (1996, 2000) also took these as the basis for describing how languages vary in their organization of semantic structures and suggested limits on semantic ‘cores’ and how they relate to semantics, bringing the theory closer to but not identical to syntax. Juffs (1996) found that low-level learners seemed to have a basic clause structure for all locatives regardless of meaning, but advanced learners were able to converge on the L1 speaker grammar for psych verbs and locatives, suggesting that L2 BRR are acquirable that affect verbs of different descriptive classes. Joo (2003) studied Korean-speaking learners of English and their knowledge of narrow range rules with the locative. The learners showed little evidence of knowledge of narrow range constraints, even though some verbs could have transferred from the L1. As Joo (2003, p. 325) points out, L2 learners have limited input in communicative settings, which means that the data for fine tuning of this knowledge is absent. Yakhabi et al. (2018) also found a developmental pattern in their study of Persian-speaking learners in an EFL context in Iran. Lower proficiency learners behaved like those in Juffs (1996) in that they did not distinguish among locative classes, while the advanced learners did show sensitivity in a judgement task but were less accurate in a production task. More studies that examine acquisition of non-Indo-European languages are needed. For example, Park and Kim (2017) investigated Chinese-speaking learners of Korean L2 and found that both in off-line tasks and on-line processing advanced learners were able to perform similarly to L1 Korean speakers. Although they do not include the locative alternation itself, Bellucci and Dal Pozzo (2016) studied Italian-speaking learners’ knowledge of Finnish locative morphology. Yuan and Zhao (2010) 116

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addressed English-speaking learners’ knowledge of resultatives and showed that the learners faced challenges overcoming their L1 thematic configurations.

9.5.4  Construction grammar approaches 9.5.4.1 Datives A constant speculation in the discussion sections of formal theory papers has been the potential effect of frequency. Thus, recent L2 research addressed the role of frequency with usage-based approaches and corpus methodology. Year and Gordon (2009) was a rare example of a study that implemented a usage-based approach to the dative in an instructed SLA context in Korea. The results were inconclusive as to the effectiveness of providing proto-types based on ‘give’ to seed acquisition of other verbs and novel verbs and the authors note the complexity of DOD usage. Jäschke and Plag (2016) took up the complex nature of DOD usage, noting examples from Bresnan and Nikitina (2007, p. 73), which undermine narrow range constraints proposed by Pinker (1989): “Nothing like heart burn food. ‘I have the tums.’ Nick joked. He pulled himself a steaming piece of the pie [original emphasis]”. Jäschke and Plag (2016) manipulated factors known to affect whether the PD or DOD would be used in English in a study of German-speaking learners of English L2. In a preference task, learners were provided a context followed by a choice of two possible dative structures. They found that complexity of NPs, animacy, definiteness, pronominality, and givenness all played a role. Overall, the L2 learners showed similarities to L1 speakers but differed in the effect size in the factors, with animacy being more important for the L2 learners compared to pronominality for L1 speakers in choosing recipient DOD structures. Individual differences among the L2 learners were also important, with some reflecting L1 probabilistic patterns, while others seemed to follow a more ‘rule’-like approach (Jäschke & Plag, 2016, p. 512). Song and Sung (2017) analyzed two corpora for occurrence of PD and DOD with 15 verbs. Analysis revealed that the corpora shared only nine of the verbs (bring, send, take, pay, give, show, teach, tell, offer) with a total 141 usable tokens out of 489 for L1 English and 153 out of 713 for Korean-speaking L2 English. These tokens were analyzed for ‘verb’, ‘syntactic weight’ of the NP (e.g., it < the old lady < an opportunity to display whatever skills they may already possess or gain new skill sets) and ‘information structure’ (new vs. old information). Effects for individual verbs were evident: e.g., the verb give was used more with the PD in the L2 corpus (PD: 41; DOD 67) than in the L1 corpus (PD: 5; DOD 70). Second, the L1 corpus had more DOD with heavier NPs, compared to the L2 corpus where DODs were not produced as frequently with heavy NPs. Finally, overall increased use of the PD was also attributable to the lack of effect of new vs. old information, where old information regarding the recipient would favor DOD. Song and Sung (2017) attribute these findings to L1 influence, instruction, and the challenges learners face in integrating discourse factors with sentence level grammar.

9.5.5  Structural priming and instructional intervention Studies of instructional intervention have focused on assisting learners to avoid or preempt overgeneralizations (see Ionin & Montrul, 2023 for an in-depth review of such studies) and appear to be effective with the dative (Carroll & Swain, 1993). McDonough (2006) adopted a structural priming approach and found that using the PD primed production by learners of the PD but using the DOD did not result in increased use of double objects. Kaan and Chun (2017) showed that both L1 speakers and L2 learners responded to priming by producing more PD in the case of L1 English speakers (less frequent) and more DOD datives in the case of Korean-speaking learners of English, whose L1 has a different syntactic expression of dative alternation. Shin and Christianson (2012) included datives in their study of instructional effects of priming in explicit and implicit instruction 117

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with Korean-speaking learners of English, finding improvements in dative DOD with priming, even in the case of longer time intervals between priming events. Hurtado and Montrul (2021, p. 747) found that structural priming increased the production of dative clitics at both immediate and delayed post-test phases and was independent of individual verbs, but positively modulated by frequency of the construction for the L2 learners but not heritage learners. Most research on interventions has been carried out on the dative on the assumption that it is a pair of structures independent of other verb classes (e.g., locative verbs). In this context, more (instructional intervention) studies, such as those by Slababova (2002) and Juffs and Fang (2022) that investigate the interrelated nature of argument structures across ‘verb classes’ (datives, locatives, resultatives, and morphology) are needed. As suggested by Hurtado and Montrul (2021, p. 747), learning appears to emerge from implicit processes; therefore, these deeper connections among verb classes need to be addressed in language instruction through careful planning of input (Juffs & Fang, 2022, p. 115).

9.6  Open questions and future directions 9.6.1  Representation and crosslinguistic comparisons All languages must have basic structures that allow speakers to communicate caused change of possession (datives) and movement (locatives) (Yang et al., 2017). In addition, research has shown that L1 production and, to a lesser extent, L2 production are clearly affected by a range of factors including pronouns, NP weight/length, animacy, and discourse. Even so, theoretical researchers still do not agree on the right level of representation for the links between event structure, verb meaning, and morphosyntax at the level of competence. The problem of the correct level of representation also remains a question for SLA researchers. In this context, results of crosslinguistic work on more fine-grained aspects of semantics (which are reflected in narrow range constraints, derivational morphology, and morphemes that represent functional/inflectional categories (e.g., clitics in Spanish)), points to deeper principles at work. Parametric constraints on the combinations of semantic ‘atoms’ (Talmy, 1985), which surface in morphosyntax, might guide both L1 and L2 learners. Candidates for such constraints might include Snyder’s (2001) syntactic compound parameter (more syntactic) or Juffs’ (1996) lexical conflation parameter. Even though they group languages differently, Snyder’ (2001) and Juffs’ (1996) constraints both reference resultatives and compounding, so they could be related. One possibility is no ‘one size fits all languages’ exists: in other words, the features associated with lexical alternations (end state, manner of transfer) may have to be re-assembled (Lardiere, 2009) at different levels of representation. The overt inflectional morphology seen in Bantu and Spanish dative clitics suggests syntactic GF changing processes are at work with the dative. In contrast, the resultatives in Chinese and German indicate that a derivational, lexical approach may be a better fit for caused change-of-state verbs, such as locatives. Both approaches would need to take discourse and frequency into account.

9.6.2  Combining data collection and analysis techniques Future directions might develop experiments, such as those by Jäschke and Plag (2016), that address both theoretical proposals and provide communicative contexts for them. Although corpus studies are important, research must also establish what learners know is not possible. Thus, usage-based and formal approaches need not be mutually exclusive (Shirai & Juffs, 2017). Yang and Montrul (2017) and Yang et al. (2017) pointed out that the sources of acquisition for verb argument structure include both internal contributions and input, with limitations on the DOD in English at least requiring some inductive learning. Research with non-Indo-European languages such as Park and Kim (2017) is 118

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needed. Finally, many researchers have invoked the role of instruction or the lack thereof (Joo, 2003; Sircar, 2011; Song & Sung, 2017) and so more research that adapts nuanced, theoretically informed SLA findings to classroom contexts to improve learning outcomes is needed.

Notes 1 The locative alternation should not be confused with locative inversion (Bresnan & Kanerva, 1989). 2 Research that addresses Talmy’s (1985) typology of manner-of-motion verbs and directionality (e.g., walk, run, swim) (Inagaki, 2002; Kong, 2021) does not address the locative alternation.

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Alan Juffs Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical patterns. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description (Vol. III: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon, pp. 57–149). Cambridge University Press. White, L. (1987). Markedness and second language acquisition: The question of transfer. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 9, 261–286. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0272263100006689 White, L. (1991). Argument structure in second language acquisition. Journal of French Language Studies, 1(2), 189–207. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0959269500000983 Whong Barr, M., & Schwartz, B. D. (2002). Morphological and syntactic transfer in child L2 acquisition of the English dative alternation. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24(4), 579–616. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​ /S0272263102004035 Yakhabi, M., Lotfi, A. R., & Biria, R. (2018). Locative constructions in English interlanguage: A study of the acquisition of argument realization in English by Iranian EFL learners. Journal of Studies in Learning and Teaching English, 7(1), 99–125. http://jslte​.iaushiraz​.ac​.ir​/article​_666434​_143​5f74​d2e4​cc58​d030​0ebf​ 588b31f7f​.pdf Yang, C., & Montrul, S. (2017). Learning datives: The tolerance principle in monolingual and bilingual language acquisition. Second Language Research, 33(1), 119–144. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0267658316673686 Yang, C., Crain, S., Chomsky, N., Berwick, R., & Bolhuis, R. (2017). The growth of language: Universal Grammar, experience, and principles of computation. Neuroscience and Biohavioral Review, (81), 103–119. http://dx​.doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.neubiorev​.2016​.12​.023 Year, J., & Gordon, P. (2009). Korean speakers’ acquisition of the ditransitive construction: The role of verb prototype, input distribution and frequency. Modern Language Journal, 93, 399–417. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​ /j​.1540​-4781​.2009​.00898.x Yuan, B., & Zhao, Y. (2010). Asymmetric syntactic and thematic reconfigurations in English speakers’ L2 Chinese resultative compound constructions. International Journal of Bilingualism, 15(1), 38–55. https://doi​ .org​/10​.1177​/1367006910371023

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10 THE PASSIVE Noelia Sánchez-Walker

10.1  The passive Each language has a canonical word order. In English, Spanish and several other languages the canonical word order is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO). In languages that typologically follow a basic SVO word order, the passive acquires a noncanonical word order because the object or patient is introduced as the grammatical subject. More specifically, the passive sentence presents a transitive action from the perspective of the undergoer/patient of the action. The undergoer of the action is foregrounded as the grammatical subject of the sentence and the agent or doer of the action is downgraded (i.e., it is either not mentioned or it is included in a non-essential part of the sentence), as in (1). The active sentence, by contrast, follows a canonical word order. The agent or doer is prominent as the subject of the sentence, as expected in a simple sentence from a SVO language, as in (2). (1) Dinner was served (by the father) a. Dinner (NP1) b. was served c. (by the father) (NP2) (2) The father served dinner. a. The father b. served c. dinner

subject/patient (undergoer of the action) verb to be + past participle of verb to serve agent (doer) /optional prepositional phrase subject/agent (doer) verb to serve in the past tense direct object/theme (undergoer of the action)

This chapter focuses mainly on the L2 acquisition of the full verbal or eventive passive shown in (1). This passive has been investigated in several language combinations involving mainly English and another language. Moreover, the full verbal passive also occurs in German, Spanish and many other languages. See Armon-Lotem et al. (2016) for passive formation in other languages. In English the verbal passive is formed with a subject that is the undergoer of the action, the verb to be, a transitive verb in the participle form, and an optional oblique prepositional phrase (opp), generally a by-phrase, with the agent, as in (1). A verbal passive that includes the agent in the opp is known as a full verbal passive. The verbal passive without the agent in the by-phrase is known as a truncated passive (e.g., Dinner was served.).

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-12

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10.1.1  Verb unaccusativity Although only transitive verbs can be passivized, a subclass of intransitive verbs has a transitive construction that can also be passivized. Intransitive verbs are divided into two major subclasses (Burzio, 1986; Perlmutter, 1978): unergative verbs, as in (3), and unaccusative verbs. Unaccusative verbs are further divided into alternating unaccusative verbs which have an intransitive construction, as in (4), and a transitive construction, as in (5), also known as paired ergative verbs. The transitive construction of an alternating unaccusative intransitive verb, as in (5), can be passivized, as shown in (6). The other type of unaccusative verbs is unpaired ergative/non-alternating unaccusative verbs, which do not have a transitive construction, as shown in (7) and (8). (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

She walked. The ice melted. The sun melted the ice. The ice was melted by the sun. The leaves fell. *The leaves were fallen.

(unergative) (unaccusative – intransitive) (unaccusative – transitive) (passive of transitive construction) (unpaired ergative or unaccusative) (unpaired ergative or unaccusative)

10.1.2  Verbal and adjectival passives Besides the verbal passive, there are also adjectival passives (e.g., The task is finished.), which denote a state. They are also referred to as stative passives. Although verbal and adjectival passives are structurally different, in English, they look alike on the surface. There are different linguistic tests to identify the type of passive. For instance, participles in English help differentiate between verbal and adjectival passives. The participle in adjectival passives, but not in verbal passives, can be expressed with the negative prefix ‘un-’ (e.g., The task is finished; The task is unfinished). The distinction between verbal and adjectival passives has been studied extensively––see, among others, Borer & Wexler, 1987; García-Pardo, 2017; Grimshaw, 1990; K. U. Deen, 2011; O’Grady, 1997; and Pierce, 1992. The surface structure resemblance of truncated verbal passives and adjectival passives leads speakers to overgeneralize the adjectival or stative interpretation. However, there are languages like Spanish where verbal and adjectival passives are formed with different copulas: ser,1 as in (9), and estar, as in (10), respectively. (9)

La ciudad fue destruida.   The city destroyed be-ser   NOM.F.SG PRET.SG PTCP.F.SG   subject/patient   “The city was destroyed.” (García-Pardo, 2017).

(10)

La ciudad está protegida.   The city protected be-estar   NOM.F.SG PRES.SG PTCP.F.SG   subject/patient   “The city is protected.” (García-Pardo, 2017).

In addition to its noncanonical word order and the surface similarity between verbal and adjectival passives, other factors of the passive construction pose challenges for learners. Factors that contribute to these challenges include, but are not limited to, the properties of the noun phrases (NPs) in the

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subject and object position, the oblique phrase where the agent is expressed, the type of thematic verb used in the passive (actional, non-actional), the frequency of the passive in the input, the uniqueness of morphological passivization cues, the contextual requirements for the passive to occur, speaker’s adherence to a canonical word order, and the sociopragmatic context in which a passive is typically preferred. We discuss these factors next.

10.2  Factors affecting the acquisition and comprehension of passive constructions 10.2.1  Type of noun phrases (NP) in subject or object position Animacy of the NPs and (ir)reversibility and (im)plausibility of the action expressed by the thematic verb play a role in the interpretation of passives as these are cues that favor a specific interpretation given the role of the NP as either the agent or the patient/theme (Bencini & Valian, 2008; Ferreira, 2003; Huang et al., 2013; Lempert, 1990). Example (11) presents a reversible context because the boy could also kiss the girl, unlike example (12) where a flower watering the boy is not possible. In example (13), a dog biting a man is plausible, but in example (14) a man biting a dog, although possible, is an implausible event. (11) The girl kissed the boy. (12) The flower was watered by the boy. (13) The man was bitten by the dog. (14) The dog was bitten by the man.

(animate NPs, reversible) (inanimate NP1, animate NP2, irreversible) (plausible) (implausible)

10.2.2 Verbs Regarding verbs, verbal passives can be formed with actional and non-actional verbs. Actional verbs (e.g., kick, vandalize, break) change or affect the grammatical subject or theme, as in (15). Nonactional verbs (e.g., see, hear, understand) do not affect it, as in (16). Studies of L1 acquisition of English (Maratsos et al., 1985; Sudhalter & Braine, 1985) have shown that children consistently comprehended passives with actional verbs better than with experiential verbs. (15) The car was vandalized (by the boy). (16) The employee was seen (by the Board).

10.2.3  Frequency of passives and uniqueness of morphological cues Differences in frequency and the specific morphological cues of passivization in the L1 and the L2 are important in L2 passive construction. In some languages, like Spanish, the verbal passive is considered more appropriate for academic written prose (Jisa et al., 2002), and there are other competing forms to downgrade the agent such as the se-passive, as in (17) from Takagaki (2005). See Jisa et al. (2002) for more languages with constructions that compete with the passive in Spanish. (17)

Se construyeron Se build se (oneself) PRET-3PL “New hotels were built.”

nuevos new ADJ.M.PL

hoteles. hotels SUBJ.M.PL

In English, get-passives, as in (18) and (19) also compete with be-passives (Haegeman, 1985; Kong, 2014). 125

Noelia Sánchez-Walker (18) My car got broken into this weekend. (Mitkovska & Bužarovska, 2012) (19) John got killed in an accident. (Haegeman, 1985)

Furthermore, in languages like Spanish and English the morphosyntactic passive cues of the verbal passive are used in many grammatical contexts. The verb ‘to be’, the suffix ‘-ed’, and the preposition ‘by’ in English; and in Spanish the copula ‘ser’ (to be) and the participle are used in other constructions (e.g., I am tall, She walked, I found it by the store, Es estudiante, ‘S(he) is a student’, Ha servido en la Junta, ‘S(he) has served on the Board’). The complexity of morphological cues varies per language. For instance, unlike the English verbal passive, the copula in the Spanish passive must agree with the subject in person and number, and the participle must agree with the subject in gender and number, as in (20) and (21). (20)

La cena fue servida the dinner serve be-ser NOM.F.SG PRET.3SG PTCP.F.SG subject/patient “Dinner was served by the father.”

por by

(21)

Los platos fueron colocados the plates served be-ser NOM.M.PL PRET.3PL PTCP.M.PL subject/patient “The plates were placed on the table at 6:00 PM.”

el papá. the father NOM. M.SG opp/agent

en la mesa a las 6:00 PM. on the table at 6:00 PM PREP PHRASE

In other languages, such as Mandarin, the passive is infrequent in spoken language (Xiao & McEnery, 2010). However, although passiveness in Chinese can be marked in many ways, the most important passive marker (i.e., bei) is exclusively used to indicate that the sentence is a passive with or without an agent (Huang et al., 2013; Xiao & McEnery, 2010) as in (22). (22) 海豹 被 隆鱼   很快就 吃揮了 seal BEI shark quickly eat “The seal is quickly eaten by the shark.”

The oblique or by-phrase presents difficulties because the preposition by is ambiguous. It can introduce the agent and, for instance, a place or locative in the same construction, as in (23) and (24), (Armon-Lotem et al., 2016). Another source of confusion is that in some languages adjectival passives do not allow the agent in a by-phrase (i.e., English), but in others, like Spanish, the adjectival passive, as in (25), can express the agent in a by-phrase. (23) The girl is being covered by the boy. (Next or close to the boy) (24) The girl is being covered by the boy. (The boy is covering the girl.) (25) La ciudad está protegida por los ciudadanos.   the city protected the citizens be-estar by   NOM.F.SG PRES.SG PTCP.F.SG NOM. M.PL   subject/patient opp/agent    “The city is protected by the citizens.” (García-Pardo, 2017)

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Regarding truncated passives (passives without the by-phrase), a comprehension study of five-yearold native speakers of Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, German, Hebrew, Lithuanian and Polish (Armon-Lotem et al., 2016) found that normally developing children had more difficulty comprehending full passives than truncated passives, except for English- and Danish-speaking children who performed similarly with the two passives. Thus, there is a difference in comprehension between full and truncated passives and it varies per language.

10.2.4  Information structure Information structure is another factor important for passives. López-Beltrán et al. (2022) found that difficulty in comprehension of verbal passives is not necessarily because of its noncanonical word order, but because in other studies the passive was presented in isolation, and the preceding contextual information necessary was not included. The use of the passive to present information about a NP is felicitous in contexts where the passive is preceded by sentences that have already mentioned the NP such that the NP is given information, as in (26). Contrary to the sentence in (27) where the NP in the passive is new information.2 (26) A criminal planned to do something illegal. He was hiding in a dark street, hoping that nobody would discover him. Soon after the criminal was seen by a policeman in the dark of the night. (27) A policeman was patrolling the city streets at night. He heard a strange noise and decided to investigate it. Soon after, a criminal was seen by the policeman in the dark of the night.

10.2.6  First noun principle Another difficulty that speakers encounter with verbal passives is assigning the role of agent (or subject of the action) to the first animate NP in the sentence and subsequently adhering to this interpretation. This adherence to assigning the role of agent to the first NP they encounter in a sentence is known as the First Noun Principle (FNP) (VanPatten, 2004)––see Ferreira’s (2003) seminal study explaining the same phenomena for L1 English speakers.

10.2.7  Sociopragmatic factors Sociopragmatic aspects are also important in the use of passives. The register and the way the content is packed in grammatical constructions is established by societal norms linked to the content and the expected register. It takes time to learn the syntactic and sociopragmatic rules expected to express a certain content. Also important are the constructions offered in a language to communicate a message. Although passives are acquired relatively early, full command and use of verbal passives are achieved during the school-age years as the speakers develop discursive strategies and learn different genres in which to encode events using different voices (Jisa et al., 2002; Pierce, 1992; Tolchinsky & Rosado, 2005). In this way, producing passive clauses involves sociocultural communicative factors and the intention of the speaker in creating a text or a speech act. During this process, the speaker/ writer uses the language to pack information using grammatical constructions interconnected to communicate content and create meaning using a specific register. In languages that have competing constructions like the se-passives in Spanish, or an alternate word order that topicalizes the patient, like Hebrew’s subjectless constructions (e.g., Moxrim kan tapuxim, ‘Apples are sold here.’) acquisition and use of full verbal passives develop later, during the school-age years (Jisa et al., 2002; Tolchinsky & Rosado, 2005). In sum, the factors that affect the passive construction are not only morphological, syntactic, and semantic, but also sociopragmatic. In the next section theoretical approaches proposed to explain L1 and L2 acquisition and development of passives will be discussed. 127

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10.3  Theoretical analyses Theoretical analyses of the acquisition of L1 English verbal passives were based on purported children’s delays in the comprehension and production of verbal passives (Borer & Wexler, 1987; K. U. Deen, 2011). Although now we know that passives are acquired relatively early, the verbal passive still poses difficulties to normally developing children (K. Deen et al., 2018), to Specifically Language Impaired (SLI) children (van der Lely, 1996), and to people suffering from aphasic syndromes (Grodzinsky, 1990), most likely due to the complexity of the construction. One of the first hypotheses to explain the observed delay of L1 passives in English-speaking children was the A-chain deficit hypothesis (ACDH) (Borer & Wexler, 1987). According to the ACDH, passives are formed from an active underlying structure by moving the theme argument from the direct object position into subject position forming an argument chain (A-chain). This syntactic movement requires interlocutors to reassign semantic roles because the original underlying object is moved to subject position [SPEC, IP] where it keeps its thematic role of theme by being coindexed with the trace left as a result of the move from underlying object to subject position, see (28). (28) [Dinner]i was served ti

Borer and Wexler proposed the maturation of A-chain formation to explain the observed late acquisition of verbal passives in English-speaking children (Borer & Wexler, 1987; K. U. Deen, 2011). This hypothesis proposes that children are not able to form A-chains because the A-chain principle takes years to mature. However, as mentioned earlier, later studies revealed that very young children can produce the passive, see Crain et al. (2009). This new finding means that the ability to form A-chains remains constant (i.e., it does not mature). More importantly, it points out factors such as workingmemory capacity, frequency of the structure in the input, and others to explain the complexity of the passive construction. Indeed, one of the factors that contribute to the difficulty of L2 passives is that they are formed with transitive verbs. L2 learners of English with varied L1 backgrounds (i.e., Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, and others) passivize intransitive verbs even after reaching advancedproficiency levels (Oshita, 2001). This phenomenon is known as “overpassivization” or the ungrammatical passivization of intransitive verbs (see Chapter 7, this volume). It is important to remember that intransitive verbs are further divided into unergatives and unaccusative verbs (Burzio, 1986; Perlmutter, 1978) because overpassivization occurs mainly with unaccusative verbs. As stated above, unaccusative verbs have a transitive construction that can be passivized. Since unaccusative verbs also include non-alternating unaccusative verbs (i.e., verbs that cannot be passivized), the intricacies of the distinction between the two types of verbs are challenging for L2 learners. In this respect the Unaccusativity Hypothesis (Burzio, 1986; Perlmutter, 1978) defined the distinction between these verbs. Although the linguistic construction in which these verbs occur is similar at first sight, these verbs are syntactically different. Unergative verbs have one single external argument, a subject, see (29), whereas the single internal argument in unaccusative verbs originates in direct object position, then moves to subject position, checks nominative case there, and leaves a trace, see (30). (29) The boy [VP jumped] unergative (30) [The guesti [arrived ti]] unaccusative

Levin and Hovav (1995) added that the syntactic representation of a verb is determined by its meaning. L1 speakers presumably know how the multiple meanings of a verb are linked to their morphosyntactic behavior, but not surprisingly this is challenging for L2 learners. 128

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Explaining more on the L2 acquisition of unaccusative verbs (while elaborating on the restructuring of interlanguage grammar in L2 English, Japanese and Chinese), Oshita’s (2001) Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis proposes that L2 learners go through three developmental stages in the acquisition of L2 unaccusative verbs. In the first of these three stages L2 learners fail to “syntactically differentiate unaccusatives from unergatives” (p.287). In the second stage the learners overgeneralize the passive morphosyntax of the L2. According to Oshita at this stage both overpassivization and L2 regular passives occur in the language (p. 301). In the third stage, learners’ misanalysis of unaccusative verbs is revised and the interlanguage grammar reorganizes, expunging non-target phenomena. In this manner, Oshita explains, overpassivization of unaccusative verbs is part of a set of phenomena that occurs in L2 acquisition of intransitive verbs. The study of L2 passives has also contributed to the understanding of L2 acquisition theories such as the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011), the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1994, and others), the Valueless Features Hypothesis and the Interpretability Hypothesis (Kong, 2020). Different studies of the L2 passive have been conducted to test these hypotheses using different methodological approaches that will be discussed next.

10.4  Methodological approaches and relevant studies to our understanding of L2 passives Morphosyntactic and semantic aspects of L2 passives have been studied with a variety of behavioral and online measures. This section includes studies that investigated factors discussed above that contribute to the complexity of the L2 passive. Each study used several tasks to answer their research questions, but only the tasks concerning the target structure will be discussed.

10.4.1 Overpassivization The passive alternation in unaccusative verbs leads L2 learners to overgeneralize passive morphosyntax to non-alternating unaccusative verbs, a phenomenon that has been referred to as “passive unaccusative” (Montrul, 2005; Oshita, 2000, 2001). An important aspect of the study of L2 passive is to find out whether the learners understand that some unaccusative verbs cannot be passivized. Kong (2020) used an untimed acceptability judgment task (AJT)3 with a Likert scale ranging from –2 to +2 and a translation task (TT) to investigate whether 106 L1 Chinese college learners of English, including lower- to advanced-proficiency learners, could acquire L2 English passives. The control group consisted of ten L1 English speakers. L2 learners completed the AJT first and a week later the TT. Kong found that these L2 English learners acquired be- and get-passives but had difficulties with passivized unaccusative verbs even at advanced-proficiency levels. Testing the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007), Kong posits that these results are due to uninterpretable syntactic features not available in the L1 but selected in the L2. He adds that even without access to the uninterpretable features involved in the construction of the L2 passive, these L2 English learners use other resources determined by Universal Grammar (UG) to produce the L2 passive, which would explain the occurrence of overpassivization as part of the general development of L2 passives. Spanish L2 learners also overpassivized unaccusative verbs. Montrul (2005) tested 71 Englishspeaking college students, L2 learners of Spanish, with Spanish fluency ranging from low-intermediate to advanced proficiency; and 28 L1 Spanish speakers as a control group. She investigated Sorace’s (2000) proposed unergative–unaccusative continuum in terms of telicity and agentivity with prototypical unaccusative verbs at one pole and unergative prototypical verbs at the other. She argued that if this continuum was universal, then L2 learners at low proficiency level should struggle with the distinction between unergative and unaccusative verbs that are not clearly perceived as either unaccusa129

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tive or unergative. Montrul used an AJT with a one (totally unacceptable) to five (perfectly acceptable) scale with 110 sentences. Results showed that lower-proficiency groups overpassivized unaccusative verbs, but the advanced learners did not. It is important to note that some unergative verbs were passivized as well, but only those that were more “unaccusative-like” per Sorace’s proposed continuum. Izumi and Lakshmanan (1998) studied L1 Japanese-L2 English learners and found that Japanese learners at different proficiency levels were not aware that English passives could not be formed with intransitive verbs. The root of this problem was that Japanese can form passives with transitive and intransitive verbs (the latter known as adversative or indirect passives). These learners understood the difference after being instructed that the adversative passives could not be translated as passives in English. Kim and Kim’s (2013) study of English passives by L1 Korean-L2 English learners also found that learners had difficulties when reading English passives with verbs that cannot be passivized in Korean. In sum, development of L2 English and L2 Spanish passives involves a stage in which learners overpassivize unaccusative verbs, but this stage is overcome as proficiency increases.

10.4.2  Verbal versus adjectival passives To study whether advanced-proficiency L2 learners of Spanish could distinguish between verbal and adjectival Spanish passives Bruhn De Garavito and Valenzuela (2008) used an AJT with a one (totally unacceptable) to five (totally acceptable) scale that included verbal and adjectival passives with and without agents, (31), (32), (33) and (34) respectively; and verbal and adjectival passives with their canonical and the noncanonical past tense, (35) and (36), and (37) and (38) respectively. (31) In the consulate documents are handed in by the secretary. (son) (32) In the consulate documents are handed in during office hours. (son) (33) *The dinner is already prepared by a professional cook. (está) (34) The dinner is already prepared for the party. (está) (35) The book was written in England. (fue – preterite of ser) (36) The book was written in England. (#era – imperfect of ser) (37) Yesterday the dinner was served on the table. (estaba– imperfect of estar) (38) Yesterday the dinner was served on the table. (#estuvo – preterite of estar)

Results showed that L2 learners are not certain of the acceptability of verbal passives with or without agents (both sentences received an average rating of 3.25 and 3.00, respectively). The authors explained that this was expected because in Spanish the se-passive is preferred and taught as the preferred impersonal construction. However, they accepted both ungrammatical and grammatical adjectival passives. Regarding canonical verbal tense for each passive, learners accepted the verbal passive with the canonical past tense fue and did not accept it with the imperfect era. Their acceptance rate for adjectival passives with estaba (3.5), the canonical past tense, was higher than the acceptance rate for the adjectival with estuvo (3.0). Similarly, to study comprehension of L2 verbal and adjectival Spanish passives, Sánchez Walker and Montrul (2020) tested 33 Spanish heritage language (HL) learners and 31 English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish. The tasks consisted of a picture matching task (PMT) in which speakers had to choose which one out of two drawings presented on the screen was being described by the passive sentence they heard or read, and a GJT in aural and written modality as well, that verified knowledge of copulas and verbal passives with fue. The verbal passive with the copula ser in the imperfect tense era described an ongoing action, while the adjectival passive described a finished action with estar in the imperfect tense estaba. Accordingly, one drawing depicted an ongoing action, and the other a finished action. Participants completed the GJT and then the PMT. L2 and HL learners were 130

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more accurate with adjectival than with verbal passives. They predominantly chose the drawings that represented a finished action. They also found the full verbal passive with fue grammatical but were unable to distinguish adjectival from verbal passives with era and estaba in the PMT. This could be explained by the fact that the infrequent verbal passive in Spanish is typically used with the copula in the preterit tense fue, which are more frequent than passives with the copula in the imperfect tense era. The authors concluded that these learners had not acquired the semantic contrast of these two copulas in the imperfect tense in passive constructions. However, it is important to note that five HL learners showed comprehension of the verbal passive. These learners reported frequent Spanish use between the ages of six and ten, and three of them attended bilingual schools. These two studies have shown that English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish do not have a firm understanding of copulas in verbal and adjectival passives even at advanced-proficiency levels.

10.4.3  The first noun principle To study how L2 learners assign thematic roles of agent and patient in Spanish passives, Lee (2017) analyzed data from 59 English speakers enrolled in Spanish courses at the intermediate level and who had not traveled to Spanish-speaking countries. The main task was a multiple-choice task consisting of listening to 20 reversible passives in different contexts and 60 distracters in a PowerPoint presentation. Each context consisted of an active sentence introducing an NP as the subject followed by the passive sentence in which the same NP was now the patient, see (39) and (40). Learners then were asked to answer “Who did the admiring?” on a sheet of paper. The NPs varied in number, gender of agent and gender of patient, and coindexing of grammatical subjects: see for instance that in (39) the first NP is the same as the first NP in the following sentence. (39) Caroline goes out frequently with Thomas. Caroline is admired by Thomas. (40) Diane and Angela go out frequently with Ramón and Lucas. Ramón and Lucas are admired by Diane and Angela.

Even though Lee found that gender had an effect in assigning the NP as agent (with feminine NPs assigned as agents more than masculines), the NP’s number (singular or plural) did not affect assignment of the NP as agent nor did being coindexed. The main result is that these L2 learners preferred to assign the role of agent to the first NP of the passive sentence. He argues that the main obstacle in acquiring the verbal passive in Spanish is to disengage from the wrong alignment of the roles of agent and subject, not to acquire the function of ser in the passive, which has been said to be the last function of ser acquired by L2 learners (Briscoe, 1995; Geeslin, 2014; Guntermann, 1992). However, as indicated earlier, acquiring the functions of ser and estar has to be considered in L2 passive development. Similarly, investigating L2 learners’ adherence to the First Noun Principle (FNP), Lee and Doherty (2019) studied L2 learners’ processing of the passive before and after Processing Instruction (PI). Participants included 22 Spanish L2 learners enrolled in a college Intermediate Spanish course who have not studied the passive, and scored less than 70% in a pretest. Instructional material consisted of a PowerPoint presentation that included explicit information about the target structure and followed Lee and VanPatten (2003) for structured input activities. They explained active and passive sentences’ word order, and included information regarding passive morphological cues. The last part consisted of explicitly telling the students to focus on the morphological cues included in the participle (i.e., female, singular or masculine and plural, etc.) Structured input activities were presented in aural and written modes and each contained ten target passive sentences, ten target active sentences and ten truncated passives. The target structures used semantically reversible contexts and used proper names, see (41) and (42). 131

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Pablo y Marcos son abrazados por Graciela Pablo and Marcos are hugged NOM.M.PL PRES.3PL PTCP.M.PL

(42)

Graciela es abrazada por Pablo y Marcos Graciela is hugged NOM.F.SG PRES.3SG PTCP.F.SG

by

by

Graciela NOM. F.SG

Pablo y Marcos NOM. M.PL

The structured input was presented in four slides. In the first, participants read the sentence; in the second they saw two black-and-white drawings, one labeled A and the other, B; in the third they selected the drawing that matched the sentence they read; and in the fourth, they received feedback. For the testing, the feedback slide was not included, and eye movements were tracked. Only results of the written pre-tests and post-tests were discussed. Accuracy scores on pretest and postests show that L2 learners’ accuracy with active and passive sentences increased after PI. Regarding response time, L2 learners’ response time for passives remained longer than that for actives, although they processed verbal passives more quickly than before PI. The authors compared the effects of language experience (i.e., number of semesters studying Spanish) with the effects of PI in the interpretation of passives. They found that, although language experience helped in the interpretation of passives, participants who received PI outperformed participants who had more language experience. Other studies have also shown that, after PI, L1 English–Japanese L2, and L1 Turkish–English L2 learners move beyond their original canonical thematic role assignment (agent-subject, objecttheme) and comprehend Japanese and English passives more accurately (Benati, 2015; Uludag & VanPatten, 2012). These studies show that instruction helps learners overcome the FNP, along with language experience and proficiency. Let us now look at other factors involved in L2 passive construction.

10.4.4  Type of thematic verb Focusing on different types of transitive verbs in Korean, Kim and Kim (2013) investigated whether properties of Korean verbs affected processing of L2 English passives. Unlike English transitive verbs, not all Korean transitive verbs can be passivized. The authors tested two different types of Korean verbs, verbs that can be passivized in English and Korean, Type 1 (e.g., chase, love, ccoch-ki, salang-pat), and verbs that can be passivized in English but not in Korean, Type 2 (e.g., Ttalaka, ‘to follow’). Seventy-five high school L1 Korean–L2 English learners were divided into low-, intermediate-, and advanced-proficiency groups, based on scores from a cloze test and the iBT TOEFL.4 The verbs in this task had been normed in a previous task with Korean speakers, translating 16 English sentences with transitive Type 1 and Type 2 verbs into Korean. The translated sentences were evaluated for naturalness with a Likert scale ranging from one (it sounds bad) to five (it sounds okay). Eight Type 1 verbs considered more natural, and eight Type 2 verbs considered most unnatural were used to create an online self-pace moving window (SPMW) task. The SPMW task (in which dashes were replaced by words as participants pressed the spacebar) consisted of 56 English sentences in total, including 8 passive sentences with Type 1 verbs, 8 with Type 2 verbs, 16 active sentences: eight with Type 1 and 8 with Type 2 verbs, and 24 fillers. All sentences began with the phrase “A is the one who” followed by either the active “protects B” or the passive “is protected by B”. Each passive had nine regions and the focus was on regions seven to nine (R7 protected R8 by, R9 B), see (43). Counterbalanced comprehension yes/no questions were asked after each sentence. 132

The passive (43) Active and Passive sentences in Kim and Kim (2013)

Passive Active

R1

R2

R3

R4

R5

R6

R7

R8

R9

A A

is is

the the

one one

who who

is protected

protected B

by

B

After removing data from participants who scored low in the comprehension questions, recorded times from the SPRW task showed that lower-proficiency learners’ RTs of English passives with Type 2 verbs were longer than those with Type 1 verbs. However, a by-item analysis revealed that RTs of these two types of verbs did not differ. The authors explain that other factors could explain the discrepancy, for instance, the instrument’s eight items for each type of verb, or the difficulty of L1 verbs, since participants with low and intermediate proficiency took longer to read Type 1 verbs in active sentences. Still, results indicate that there might be a difference in L2 learners’ RTs of Type 1 and Type 2 verbs. This points to possible L1 effects at initial L2 state, which the authors consider supports the Full Transfer/Full Access hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1994). However, more data is needed to confirm possible L1 effects in the processing of thematic verbs of L2 passives.

10.4.5  Information structure As explained above, López-Beltrán et al. (2022) indicate that, although L2 processing studies have shown that passives take longer to process than active sentences, more evidence points out that processing of passives becomes less difficult if contextual information that licenses the use of passives is provided. Corpus studies have shown that English passives are preferred to present new information on already given NPs. To further investigate this, López-Beltrán et al. compared 16 L1 Spanish–L2 English learners’ to 20 L1 English speakers’ eye movements while they read active and passive sentences with preceding contexts such as in (44) and (45) below and their eye movements were recorded. Notice that in this study the indefinite article in the NP1 signaled new information and the definite article, given information. (44) A criminal planned to do something illegal. He was hiding in a dark street, hoping that nobody would discover him. New-Given: Soon after, a policeman saw the criminal in the dark of night or Given-New: Soon after the criminal was seen by a policeman in the dark of the night. (45) A policeman was patrolling the city streets at night. He heard a strange noise and decided to investigate it. Given-New: Soon after the policeman saw a criminal in the dark of the night. New-Given: Soon after, a criminal was seen by the policeman in the dark of the night.

Results show that all speakers’ difference in reading time for actives and passives was reduced in Given-New contexts, which the authors take as evidence that in the study of syntactic structures, information structure constraints are to be taken into consideration for a more accurate picture of the L2 passive construction. In addition, the authors argue that frequency of the structure in the language “modulates L2 speakers’ sensitivity to its information structure constraints.” To prove this point, they conducted a corpus study using WriCLE (Shin & Jung, 2021) in which they found that L2 learners of English produced a passive in contexts where the NP was in Given-Given and GivenNew patterns. Another way to create felicitous conditions for the passive is to manipulate the context through visual cues. Bayram et al. (2019) investigated the acquisition of Turkish and German passives by twenty-two 10–16-year-old Turkish heritage speakers (HS) in Germany. The HS were dominant in 133

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German. The authors focused on production of Turkish and German passives and on HS performance compared to that of monolingually raised speakers of Turkish and German. Using an elicited production task, participants answered questions by the researcher after watching a sequence of three or four drawings (e.g., 1. A big fish and a small fish swimming; 2. The small fish noticing the big fish; 3. The big fish about to capture the small fish; and 4. The big fish with the small fish inside its mouth). This task is based on Tomlin’s Fish Film (R. Tomlin, 1997; R. S. Tomlin, 1995) that visually manipulated the linguistic context with a sequence of visual cues that nearly unequivocally elicited either the passive or the active. The questions (e.g., What do you see in the picture? What is happening to the small fish in the third picture?) asked the participants to describe the picture. There were 14 picture sets arranged in a way that provided 28 opportunities for the participants to produce the passive. Results show that all HS produce the HL passive although not as often as the monolingually raised Turkish speakers. They also found that literacy in the HL was positively correlated with production of HL passives. In German, HS and monolingually raised German speakers did not vary significantly.

10.5  L2 passives in child L2 acquisition The apparent delay in the acquisition of L1 passives was the result of experimental designs that created instruments with non-felicitous contexts for target performance with the passive (Deen, 2011). However, many variables are involved in children’s linguistic development of the passive and need to be accounted for (Crain et al., 2009). In this respect, Marinis and Saddy (2013) conducted a parsing study of the passive with seven-year-old Turkish children who were learning English at school and from their environment. The study also included learners with SLI. The authors found that processing of passive clauses in English was affected by linguistic abilities (i.e., grammar and vocabulary) and non-linguistic abilities (i.e., working memory and non-verbal abilities) whereas processing of active sentences was not related to any of these factors. This study also showed that children process the morphosyntactic cues in the English passive -ed and by and are still not as accurate with passives as with actives. Rothman et al. (2016) also investigated L2 passives in childhood. Controlling for linguistic factors (i.e. only actional verbs and animated NP1 and NP2 were used) and non-linguistic factors that affect children’s production of passives (i.e., age at time of testing; NPs were familiar cartoon characters who could perform all the actions), they looked at the development of the English passive in L2 English–L1 Spanish children who lived in a Spanish-speaking country, but who were learning English in a Spanish-English 50/50 immersion school. Two groups of children, ages 6;0–7;0 and 9;0–10;00 at the beginning of the study and who had had the same amount of exposure to English, completed a picture forced-choice task three times (once a year). Both groups of children showed mastery of the passive after mastering the active. Results of this study also showed that the younger group took longer to achieve target-like performance in the comprehension of passives and were able to perform at ceiling with passives after performing at ceiling with the actives.

10.6  Other online processing studies Chang and Wang (2016) found that processing of L2 English passives by L1 Chinese speakers was affected by proficiency, with the most proficient learners able to process syntactic information and the intermediate-proficiency learners relying heavily on semantic information to process L2 English passives. Online processing of L2 passives has also contributed to accounts that try to explain syntactic representation. Priming studies of the passive inform us on the abstract syntactic representation of language structures in different populations. One of these findings indicate that children and L2 learners are more susceptible to priming (Messenger et al., 2011). Other interesting studies of the passive include natural language processing analysis of L2 Korean corpus to provide information on the 134

The passive

contribution of argument structure constructions (e.g., L2 passives) in L2 development (Chang & Wang, 2016). Numerous morphosyntactic and semantic factors related to unaccusativity of verbs, noun phrases, type of transitive verb and type of copula affect L2 passive production and comprehension in a variety of tasks. However, factors such as contextual information that affect semantic aspects of the NPs are also important. As with other L2 linguistic phenomena, a diverse combination of tasks contribute to further our understanding of L2 passive acquisition and development.

10.7  L2 passive in heritage language (HL) acquisition Heritage speakers are bilingual individuals who grow up speaking one language at home (i.e., with their family) and another language, the main societal language of the country where the individuals reside, outside the home environment (i.e., at school, library, city hall, and other contexts) (Montrul, 2016; Rothman, 2009; Valdés, 2005). Since the HL develops in a bilingual environment, HL acquisition studies focus on ascertaining the characteristics of the HL as it develops in a bilingual context. The study of the HL passive has focused on the development of the HL passive (Bayram et al., 2019) and on knowledge of the HL passive versus the L2 passive (Sánchez Walker & Montrul, 2020; Valenzuela et al., 2015). As described above, Bayram et al. (2019) investigated oral elicited production of verbal passives by Turkish HL speakers, and Sánchez Walker and Montrul (2020) investigated oral and written comprehension of adjectival and verbal passives by Spanish HL speakers. These authors found that heritage speakers’ performance with verbal passive benefits from instruction and HL use during the ages in which they attend elementary school in the main societal language. Valenzuela et al. (2015) replicated Brunh de Garavito and Velenzuela (2008), discussed above, and in the AJT found that HL learners, like the L2 learners, judged verbal passives with fue as acceptable, and verbal passives with era received the lowest acceptability rating. These findings point out that language experience during the early school years is crucial in shaping HL development. They also point out not only the differences but also the similarities between language development in early and late bilingual contexts.

10.8  Future directions and areas for further research Studies of L2 passives in L1–L2 typological similar languages show a set of difficulties at initial stages of acquisition (e.g., overpassivization) and another at later stages of acquisition (e.g., copula use in verbal and adjectival passives). However, when L1–L2 languages are not typological similar, yet another set of difficulties is revealed (e.g., morphosyntacic properties of transitive verbs in Japanese, Korean in L2 English studies). In this respect further research should focus on figuring out the development of mental representation of these structures in child and adult L2 learners, especially in languages that differ with respect to their mental representation of these structures. Research involving typologically different L1–L2 languages could be especially revealing regarding L1 effects, including how types of verbs affect acquisition and development of L2 passives and processing of thematic verbs. Studies investigating how information structure affects acquisition and development of L2 passives are needed in a variety of typologically different L1 and L2 combinations. Furthermore, studies of L2 passives’ felicitous contexts and modalities; pragmatic expectations according to L2 passive development; and communicative skills related to L2 passive development will provide helpful insights to address L2 passive use in later language development. Since passives involve syntactic and semantic properties and are affected by so many linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, more research questions exploring SLA hypotheses will further our 135

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knowledge of HL and L2 passives at different stages in early and late bilingual contexts, especially with typologically different languages. Finally, given the many factors that are involved in the acquisition and development of passive clauses, and the many difficulties learners face at different stages of development, I suggest a final area for further research concerning type of learners. Research of L2 passives includes mostly school and college-age L2 learners who are attending college or a school. Research of L2 passives could benefit greatly by investigating other populations such as heritage learners, native speakers and bilingual adults without college education, and especially learners with different memory capacity, and of older age (i.e., senior citizens).

Notes 1 But see (García-Pardo & Marín, 2022) for an account explaining that some passives with ser are adjectival. 2 In this study new and old information was distinguished using indefinite and definite articles, respectively, in the NP1. 3 The modality of the tasks was not indicated. 4 The Internet-based Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL®iBT)

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PART III

Morphosyntax and semantics of the nominal domain

11 PLURAL MARKING AND THE SEMANTICS OF PLURALITY Sea Hee Choi and Tania Ionin

11.1 Introduction Some entities (e.g., apples and pens) are countable, while others (e.g., mustard and oil) are not. The count/mass distinction is encoded in the morphosyntax of many languages, including English; plural marking is directly related to the count/mass distinction, in that it is possible with count nouns (apples/pens) but not with mass nouns (*mustards/oils). The grammatical count/mass distinction is related to the cognitive object/substance distinction, in that count nouns typically denote objects while mass nouns typically denote substances. However, the correspondence between the cognitive and grammatical distinctions is not direct, and there is much cross-linguistic variation in terms of which nouns are classified as singular vs. plural. For example, superordinate nouns like furniture/jewelry are mass in English despite denoting countable objects. The noun spinach is mass in English but count in French, while shoes is count in English but mass in Russian. Many nouns are known as flexible nouns, in that they have both count and mass forms within the same language: e.g., compare I found a stone (count) with This building is made out of stone (mass). In sum, the count/mass distinction involves both universal and language-specific aspects. (For more discussion, see Chierchia, 1998a, 2010, Barner & Snedeker, 2005, Bale & Barner, 2009, among others). Acquisition of the plural-marking system in a second language (L2) is directly related to the acquisition of the count/mass distinction in the L2. Learners have to classify each noun in their L2 as count or mass and determine how the count/mass distinction relates to plurality. In this process, learners may be constrained by first language (L1) transfer as well as by universal properties of the count/ mass distinction. The majority of L2 studies conducted in this area have examined the L2 acquisition of English plural marking by speakers of Generalized Classifier (GC) L1s, such as Korean (with some studies looking at GC languages as the L2). Given the many differences that exist between the plural-marking systems of GC languages vs. English, questions asked by these studies have included (i) how the relationship between the cognitive object/substance distinction and the linguistic count/ mass distinction is encoded in the learners’ L1 and L2, and how this affects their interpretation of nouns in the L2; and (ii) whether L2-English learners whose L1s lack obligatory plural marking can nevertheless develop target-like sensitivity to the singular/plural distinction in their L2. Given this chapter’s focus on the semantics (rather than the form) of plurality, we leave aside those studies that instead address the L2 acquisition of complex morphological systems of plural marking in languages such as German (Parodi et al., 2004; Wegener, 1994) and Arabic (Albirini & Benmamoun, 2014). DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-14

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This chapter is organized as follows. Section 11.2 provides an overview of how plural marking works in English vs. in GC languages. Section 11.3 briefly introduces the major SLA theories that are relevant for the study of plural marking, while Section 11.4 provides an overview of the most common data collection methods used in this area. Sections 11.5 and 11.6 provide overviews of studies that have focused on the interpretation of count and mass nouns, and on offline and online sensitivity to plural marking, respectively. Section 11.7 concludes the chapter with suggestions for further research.

11.2  Plurality and the count/mass distinction in linguistic theory 11.2.1  Distinction between plural-marking and GC languages In an influential proposal, Chierchia (1998b) categorized languages into three types based on the status of bare nominal arguments. Two of these types (represented by Romance languages and by Germanic and Slavic languages, respectively) correspond to languages with a fully grammaticized count/mass distinction. The differences between these two language types have to do with restrictions on bare (determiner-less) NPs as arguments and are not relevant for the purposes of this chapter. The third language type includes GC languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, Korean and Japanese, in which plural marking is not obligatory and nouns combine with classifiers. In plural-marking languages like English, the distinction between count and mass nouns is reflected in the morphosyntax: while count nouns can combine with the indefinite article, numerals, the word many and plural marking (1), mass nouns can occur in bare form, combine with much, and must combine with a measure noun in order to combine with a numeral: this holds both for mass nouns that denote substances, hence substance-mass nouns (2), and those that denote objects, hence object-mass nouns (3). (1) (2) (3)

a. b. a. b. a. b.

I bought a pen / pens / one pen / two pens / many pens / several pens. *I bought pen / much pen / an ounce of pen / a piece of pen. *I bought a mustard / mustards / one mustard / two mustards / many mustards / several mustards. I bought mustard / much mustard / five ounces of mustard. *I bought a jewelry / one jewelry / jewelrys / two jewelrys / many jewelrys / several jewelrys. I bought jewelry / much jewelry / five pieces of jewelry.

In contrast, in GC languages, all nouns can occur in bare form (with no determiners or plural marking), and bare nouns are compatible with both singular and plural interpretation, as illustrated for Korean in (4) (from Choi et al., 2018). In GC languages, nouns combine with a classifier prior to combining with a numeral. (4)

a. b.

Na-nun I-Top ‘I bought a book/books.’ Na-nun I-Top ‘I bought sugar.’

chak-ul book-Acc

sa-ss-ta buy-Past-Decl

sultang-ul sugar-Acc

sa-ss-ta buy-Past-Decl

Korean, Japanese and Mandarin do have plural marking (-tul, -tati, and -men, respectively), but it is optional in most contexts and has different properties than plural marking in English or other plural-marking languages, such as German or Russian. For example, the Korean -tul is obliga142

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tory with definites but optional with indefinites (Kim, 2005; Kwon & Zribi-Hertz, 2004), while the Mandarin -men is optional with [+human] nouns and not permitted with [–human] ones (Iljic, 1994; Li, 1999). In the Chierchia (1998b) classification system, GC languages lack a grammaticized count/mass distinction entirely. However, this view has since been challenged (for example, Kim, 2005, argues that the Korean -tul marks count nouns, while Cheng & Sybesma, 1999, propose that Mandarin encodes the count/mass distinction in its classifier system).

11.2.2  The semantics of plurality Many theoretical proposals have tried to account for how the pre-linguistic (cognitive) object/substance contrast is formalized in grammar (see, e.g., Bunt, 1985; Chierchia, 2010, 2015; Gillon, 1992; Jackendoff, 1991; Link, 1983; among many others). The semantic concepts that have been proposed to underlie the count/mass distinction include boundedness (Jackendoff, 1991; Langacker, 1999, 2008), individuation (Bloom, 1994; Gordon, 1985; among others), and atomicity (Chierchia, 1998a, 1998b, 2001, 2010, 2015). While there are some differences among these three concepts, there is also much overlap among them; we focus on the concept of atomicity for the purposes of this chapter, as it has played a central role in recent work on L2 acquisition discussed in later sections. An atomic NP denotes an entity which has clearly defined minimal parts, or atoms, while a nonatomic NP denotes an entity with no stable minimal parts. For example, the minimal part of chair is a single chair, but there is no minimal part of water (a drop of water is still water, as is half of that drop, and so on). Chierchia (2010, 2015) argues that, for many nouns, the minimal parts are vague or unstable. For example, the minimal part of coffee might be a cup of coffee in the context of a coffee-shop, a jar of coffee in the context of a supermarket, and so on; the minimal part of sugar might be a single grain of sugar, or (for the purposes of a recipe) a cup of sugar. The relationship between the semantic concept of atomicity and the morphosyntax of the count/mass distinction is not direct: while atomic NPs are often count (chair, pen, apple, etc.) and non-atomic NPs are often mass (water, mustard, sugar, blood, etc.), there are also exceptions, as noted earlier. In particular, superordinate nouns like furniture and jewelry are atomic (the minimal part of jewelry is a single piece of jewelry) but mass. Nouns that can potentially denote either a material/substance or a single object may be flexible within a language (a stone vs. stone as a material in English) or across languages. Substance-denoting, non-atomic nouns like water can be coerced into atomic interpretations and behave like count nouns (I bought a water meaning a bottle of water; and I ordered two coffees meaning two cups of coffee). The situation is even more complex with abstract nouns: for example, why is advice mass but thought count? To the extent that different thoughts can be distinguished, so can different pieces of advice; as with concrete nouns, there is cross-linguistic variation as to which abstract nouns are count vs. mass (e.g., advice is count in Russian). It is possible that the relationship between count/mass morphosyntax and atomicity is more direct in GC languages than in plural-marking languages. In particular, in the case of Korean, Kim (2005) proposed that -tul is compatible (albeit optional) with atomic nouns, both ones that are count in English and ones that are mass in English (5a-b), but largely incompatible with non-atomic ones (5c) in the absence of a special context that would coerce the noun into an atomic reading. (These claims were confirmed by Choi et al., 2018 in an experiment with native Korean speakers.) (5)

a. b. c.

chaek-tul book-Pl kaku-tul furniture-Pl #mwul-tul water-Pl

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11.3  SLA of plural marking: relevant theoretical accounts On the Bottleneck Hypothesis (proposed by Slabakova, 2008), functional morphology presents a major challenge, or ‘bottleneck’, of L2 acquisition. Even when learners have fully acquired the syntactic structure and the semantics, they may still continue to have difficulty with functional morphology. For example, a recent study (Jensen et al., 2020) found that L1 Norwegian L2 English learners performed much better on verbal morphosyntax than on verbal morphology. In the nominal domain, we may similarly find that learners have a full grasp of the semantics of atomicity, and yet not have a target-like mastery of plural marking. The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH, Lardiere, 2009) provides an account of the L2 acquisition of functional morphology in terms of features. Building on the Full Transfer/Full Access model (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996), the FRH argues that learners transfer feature bundles from their L1 to their L2. If the L1 and L2 differ in terms of which feature(s) are encoded by which functional elements, learners need to carry out feature selection and/or feature reassembly. For example, -men in Mandarin Chinese carries the [+human] feature; an L1 Chinese L2 English learner might initially assume that the English plural marker -s also carries this feature (thus restricting -s to [+human] nouns only), while an L1 English L2 Chinese learner would initially assume that -men does not (thus freely allowing -men with [–human] nouns). Depending on the direction, the learner needs to remove or add the [+human] feature. The Morphological Congruency Hypothesis (MCH: Jiang et al., 2011) is also a transfer-based hypothesis, which focuses on whether a given morpheme in the L2 is congruent with a morpheme in the L1; the L1 and L2 are said to be morphologically congruent when they both use a grammatical morpheme to mark a particular meaning (such as plural). The MCH predicts that automatic activation of incongruent L2 morphemes (i.e., ones with no L1 equivalent) should be difficult or impossible. The MCH is tested with online, timed tasks, in order to examine whether automatic activation is possible (Jiang et al., 2011, 2017). On the MCH, the plural markers in English, Mandarin and Korean would be considered incongruent and hence cause difficulty in online processing for any of these L1/ L2 combinations. As will be discussed in Section 11.6.2, the MCH has been tested in several recent studies.

11.4  Methodological tools in the study of plural marking in SLA Research on plural marking in SLA has largely relied on three different types of tasks, for studying interpretation, judgments and online processing, respectively. We discuss each in turn.

11.4.1  The quantity judgment task A series of studies (beginning with Barner & Snedeker, 2005) have used the quantity judgment task in order to investigate how native and non-native speakers of different languages interpret count and mass nouns. In this task, participants are presented with two pictures: in one picture, a character is in possession of two large objects (e.g., two big chairs; two big leaves of spinach; two big blobs of mustard); in the other picture, a character is in possession of six small objects of the same type (e.g., six small chairs; six small leaves of spinach; six small blobs of mustard). Participants are then asked, Who has more ___ ?, where the blank is filled by the relevant noun (chairs/spinach/mustard). If participants select the character with two big objects, this is a judgment by volume; if they select the character with six small objects, this is a judgment by number. Thus, this task provides information about how different nouns are interpreted, and to what extent interpretation is universal (e.g., are chairs always judged by number, and mustard by volume?) and to what extent it is influenced by language-specific morphosyntax. 144

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Across studies, this task has been used in a variety of languages, with adult native speakers, child L1 learners and adult L2 learners, as discussed in Section 11.5. In plural-marking languages such as English and French, count nouns are presented in this task in plural form and mass nouns are presented in singular form (flexible nouns like stone(s) may be presented in both, depending on the study). In GC languages such as Japanese, Korean and Mandarin, nouns are presented in bare singular form, though at least one study (Cheung et al., 2010) also included an experiment in which Mandarin nouns were accompanied by classifiers.

11.4.2  Grammaticality/acceptability judgment tasks Tasks that target participants’ intuitions about grammatical acceptability, variously known as Grammaticality Judgment Tasks (GJTs) or Acceptability Judgment Task (AJTs), are among the most commonly used behavioral data collection methods in L2 acquisition of morphosyntax (Spinner & Gass, 2019; Ionin, 2022). In this task format, participants are asked to judge each test sentence with regard to whether it sounds grammatical or acceptable, using either a binary (YES/NO, grammatical/ ungrammatical) scale, or a Likert scale with multiple points. Judgment tasks have been used to study learners’ intuitions about correct, incorrect or missing plural marking for many years (going as far back as Johnson & Newport, 1989, who tested plural morphology among many other morphosyntactic phenomena of English). More recent studies, reviewed in Sections 11.6.1 and 11.6.3, have also often relied on this methodology.

11.4.3  Online tasks A criticism of GJTs/AJTs is that they may target learners’ explicit and/or metalinguistic knowledge (see Ellis, 2005, and much subsequent literature on how to measure explicit vs. implicit knowledge). L2 learners have been found to perform better on untimed than on timed GJTs, and it has been argued that time pressure leads learners to rely more on their implicit knowledge (Ellis, 2005; Godfroid et al., 2015). In the domain of plural marking, if a learner successfully rejects sentences containing errors such as two book or furnitures in an untimed task, we do not know whether they are basing their response on an intuitive, implicit understanding that these forms are ungrammatical, or on an explicitly learned rule. Of the hypotheses discussed above, the MCH in particular makes predictions regarding learners’ automatic activation of L2 functional morphemes online, under time pressure. The MCH must therefore be tested using time-pressured psycholinguistic tasks, rather than traditional judgment tasks. The field of L2 acquisition has seen much growth in the use of psycholinguistic tasks such as self-paced reading, eye-tracking, and word monitoring. (See Felser, 2022; Jegerski, 2014; Keating & Jegerski, 2015; McDonough & Trofimovich, 2012; among others.) SLA studies that have examined learners’ online processing of plural marking have primarily used the self-paced reading task (SPRT) (but see Rusk et al., 2020, for an eye-tracking study of sensitivity to English plural marking with adolescent L1 Mandarin L2 English learners). In a SPRT, participants read each sentence one region at a time, advancing at their own pace. The SPRT has many applications; in SLA research, it is commonly used to study learners’ sensitivity to grammatical violations. As an illustration, consider the sample sentences in (6) (from Choi & Ionin, 2021, Experiment 2). The slashes indicate how the sentences were divided into regions (this experiment used word-by-word presentation, so there is only one word per region). (6)

a. b.

The / child / was / watching / many / boats / floating / on / the / sea. The / child / was / watching / many / boat / floating / on / the / sea.

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If a native English speaker reads (6b), with a missing plural marker on boat, they are expected to slow down either on the word boat (the critical region) or on the next word, floating (the post-critical region), relative to (6a), which does not contain an error. As long as native speakers reliably show such slowdowns, researchers can test whether learners also exhibit a slowdown. Under the MCH, the presence of a slowdown for errors with plural marking indicates that plural marking is integrated into the learner’s grammar and activated online; the absence of a slowdown indicates lack of automatic activation. A different online task was used by Jiang et al. (2017) to study sensitivity to (lack of) plural marking. In this task, participants were presented with picture-sentence pairs and had to quickly decide whether the picture matched the spatial configuration described by the sentence; the task additionally manipulated number. For example, the sentence The bike is above the tall basket was coupled with a picture of a bike above either one or two tall baskets. The spatial configuration was correct in both pictures; however, in the second case, there was a number mismatch between the singular form basket and the picture; this methodology examined whether the number mismatch would cause a slowdown in responses. Studies that use online tasks to study plural marking in L2 English are discussed in Section 11.6.2.

11.5  Interpretation of count vs. mass nouns by native and non-native speakers The quantity judgment task described in Section 11.4.1 has been used with native speakers of both plural-marking and GC languages, as well as with L2 English learners. In order to evaluate the findings with L2 learners, it is first important to know what native speaker performance is like on this task.

11.5.1  Interpretation of count and mass nouns by native speakers Barner and Snedeker (2005) used the quantity judgment task with both adult and child (four-year-old) native English speakers. In their first two experiments, they tested three categories of nouns: count (shoes, cups), object-mass (furniture, clothing), and substance-mass (ketchup, mustard). Object-mass and substance-mass nouns were always presented in singular form (Who has more mustard/furniture?) while count nouns were presented in plural form (Who has more shoes?). Both adult and child participants nearly always based their quantity judgments on number for count and object-mass nouns, and on volume for substance-mass nouns. In Experiment 3, Barner & Snedeker investigated flexible nouns such as string(s). They found that both adults and children used syntax to guide their quantity judgments, judging plural count nouns (Who has more strings?) by number and singular mass nouns (Who has more string?) by volume. The Barner and Snedeker (2005) findings for judgments of English nouns were replicated in several subsequent studies (Inagaki & Barner, 2009; Barner et al., 2009; MacDonald & Carroll, 2018). Inagaki and Barner (2009) also compared how native English speakers and native French speakers judge nouns like spinach, which are mass in English but count in French; English speakers judged such nouns primarily by volume, and French speakers, primarily by number, consistent with the language-specific morphosyntax. Turning to GC languages, Inagaki and Barner (2009) as well as Barner et al. (2009) also tested how Japanese native speakers interpret different types of Japanese nouns, presented in bare singular form (the labels “count” and “mass” below correspond to these nouns’ status in English, not in GC languages). On the one hand, Japanese speakers patterned with English speakers on count and object-mass nouns, judging both by number, and on substance-mass nouns, judging them by volume. In contrast, English and Japanese speakers behaved differently on nouns which are flexible in English: where English speakers based their judgments on the morphosyntax (judging string by 146

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volume but strings by number), Japanese speakers, presented with the corresponding bare noun in Japanese, judged it by volume about half the time and by number about half the time. Furthermore, Inagaki and Barner (2009) found that Japanese speakers patterned with French speakers on nouns like spinach, judging them primarily by number. The findings were similar for speakers of another GC language, Korean, tested by MacDonald and Carroll (2018): Korean speakers judged count and object-mass nouns by number, judged substance-mass nouns by volume, and patterned in between on nouns like string(s), which are flexible in English. Cheung et al. (2010) found the same results for speakers of yet another GC language, Mandarin Chinese (except that this study did not include object-mass nouns). In sum, quantity judgment task results cross-linguistically provide evidence of both universal and language-specific effects. There is universality in that nouns that unambiguously denote objects are judged by number (regardless of whether they are count or mass) while those that unambiguously denote substances are judged by volume. In contrast, for nouns that are flexible and that are compatible with both object and substance/material interpretations (e.g., are we talking about strings as individuated objects, or string as a substance?), the language-specific morphosyntax (whether a given noun is singular or plural in the language) plays a role.

11.5.2  Interpretation of count and mass nouns by adult L2 learners Inagaki (2014), the first study to use the quantity judgment task with L2 learners, tested L1 Japanese L2 English learners and compared their performance to that of the native English and native Japanese speakers tested by Inagaki and Barner (2009). On those noun categories on which English and Japanese native speakers performed in the same manner, L1 Japanese L2 English learners also exhibited the same behavior, judging count and object-mass nouns primarily by number, and substancemass nouns primarily by volume. The learners differed from native speakers of both languages with regard to their interpretation of flexible nouns like string(s). Native English speakers made a categorical distinction between the singular mass form of the noun (mostly judgments by volume) and the plural count form of the noun (all judgments by number). L1 Japanese L2 English learners made a distinction in the same direction, but a much smaller one: 29% judgments by number (71% by volume) for the singular form and 53% judgments by number for the plural form. No corresponding distinction is present in Japanese, where native speakers, tested on the bare singular form, gave judgments by number about half the time. The learners also differed from native English speakers on nouns like spinach (mass in English, count in French): while native English speakers mostly gave judgments by volume, L1 Japanese L2 English learners judged these nouns mostly by number, with similar response rates to native Japanese and native French speakers. MacDonald and Carroll (2018) conducted a similar study, testing L1 Korean L2 English learners on the quantity judgment task. The learners were tested in both their L1 and their L2 and were compared to native English speakers. The results were very similar to those obtained by Inagaki (2014): the learners judged count and object-mass nouns by number in both Korean and English, judged substance-mass nouns by volume in both Korean and English, and did not differ from native English speakers on these categories. On flexible nouns like string(s) there was once again variability. Native English speakers gave judgments by number to the plural count form and judgments by volume to the singular mass form, while L1 Korean L2 English learners tested in English gave judgments by number half the time and judgments by volume half the time, to both singular and plural forms. In Korean, where only the bare singular form was tested, the learners also gave judgments by number vs. by volume about half the time. Thus, the results are quite compatible with transfer from Korean. Together, the studies discussed above (Inagaki, 2014 and MacDonald & Carroll, 2018) suggest that L2 English learners from GC L1s rely primarily on lexical semantics rather than on morphosyn147

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tactic cues (namely, plural marking) for noun interpretation. Nouns like pencil and jewelry, which denote atomic, individuated entities, are interpreted as object-denoting across both plural-marking and GC languages, and do not present an interpretation challenge in the L2; the same holds for nouns like mustard, which denote non-atomic, non-individuated substances. In contrast, a challenge is presented by nouns which can potentially be interpreted as either atomic or non-atomic, such as string(s), stone(s), and spinach. Speakers of plural-marking languages use morphosyntactic cues (presence or absence of plural marking) to determine whether the noun is object-denoting or substance-denoting. Speakers of GC languages, tested on the bare singular form of the noun, allow both interpretations, and so do L2 English learners with a GC L1.

11.6  L2 learners’ sensitivity to plural marking and the count/mass distinction A number of studies (including Snape, 2008; Choi et al., 2018) have examined learners’ offline and/or online performance with plural marking and the count/mass distinction. While most studies have examined L2 English, there have also been studies of plural marking in GC languages, Korean and Mandarin.

11.6.1  Offline studies of the count/mass distinction and plural marking in L2 English Snape (2008) tested L1 Japanese and L1 Spanish L2 English learners on the count/mass distinction using a GJT. The test sentences contained quantifier + noun combinations, both licit ones (many tickets, much paper) and illicit ones (*much roses, *many money, *much car, *few sunshines). Successful performance required learners to correctly classify nouns as count vs. mass, to recognize that only count nouns combine with the plural marker -s, and to furthermore recognize that some quantifiers only occur with count nouns and others only with mass nouns. The results suggested an effect of the L1: at the intermediate level of proficiency, L1 Japanese L2 English learners performed less accurately than L1 Spanish L2 English learners, with especially low accuracy on mass nouns (the paper does not separate results by object-mass vs. substance-mass nouns). Both L1 groups did quite well at the advanced level of proficiency. More recently, Choi et al. (2018) tested L1 Korean and L1 Mandarin Chinese L2 English learners on English plural marking, with a focus on the semantics of atomicity. The study used a grammar task in which participants had to put the target noun (presented in parentheses) into the correct form, as shown by the examples in (7); atomic count nouns (7a), atomic object-mass nouns (7b) and non-atomic substance-mass nouns (7c) were tested (the task furthermore tested both concrete and abstract nouns in each category: the results were similar). The quantifiers, a lot of and more, did not provide any cues to plurality; the target form was plural for count nouns and singular for mass nouns. (7)

a. b. c.

Paul donated a lot of (new computer) for homeless children last year. Lauren bought a lot of (new furniture) from Kronheim’s for her new house. California farmers found more (underground water) in the southern area.

Choi et al. (2018) found very similar performance for the two L2 groups: both groups were fairly accurate at supplying -s with count nouns and at supplying the singular form with substance-mass nouns, while overusing -s with object-mass nouns (*furnitures). The performance of the Korean speakers was compatible with L1 transfer: as discussed in Section 11.2.1, the Korean plural marker -tul is indeed compatible with atomic nouns like computer and furniture but not non-atomic ones like water. However, L1 Chinese L2 English learners showed the same patterns of performance, even though the Chinese marker -men is not allowed with [-human] nouns at all. Choi et al. (2018) concluded that speakers of GC languages, which lack a fully grammaticized count/mass distinction, 148

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are sensitive to the semantic universal of atomicity, and therefore use the English plural marker with all atomic nouns. In a follow-up study, Tang et al., 2021 compared L1 Chinese and L1 French L2 English learners on the noun types from Choi et al. (2018) using an AJT. Both learner groups in Tang et al. (2021) accepted atomic object-mass nouns like furniture both with and without plural marking, while exhibiting much higher accuracy on count and non-atomic substance-mass nouns. However, the French speakers were also affected by lexical transfer from their L1: they were more accurate on atomic mass nouns in English that are also mass in French, compared to the ones that are count in French. In sum, the above studies show difficulties with atomic object-mass nouns in L2 English and provide evidence for the role of atomicity as a semantic universal, as well as for lexical transfer from a plural-marking L1. However, since these studies used untimed, offline tasks that were fairly explicit, it is not clear whether they succeeded in targeting learners’ underlying implicit knowledge. We next turn to online studies.

11.6.2  Online studies of plural marking in L2 English A series of studies by Jiang and colleagues tested the MCH by examining whether speakers of GC L1s show online sensitivity to English plural marking. Jiang (2007) used a SPRT with L1 Mandarin Chinese L2 English learners as well as English native speakers; the SPRT included both items testing verb subcategorization, and items testing plural marking. Only count nouns were tested, with a quantifier inside a partitive expression providing a cue to plurality (e.g., many of the debate(s)), so that the correct form was always the plural. Jiang (2007) found that while both participant groups slowed down for errors of verb subcategorization, the L1 Chinese L2 English learners, unlike the English native speakers, did not slow down for missing plural marking. This result is consistent with the MCH, since Chinese and English are incongruent with regard to plural marking. This effect of L1 transfer was further confirmed by Jiang et al. (2011), who replicated the Jiang (2007) study with L1 Japanese and L1 Russian L2 English learners. While the Russian speakers did slow down for missing plural marking, the Japanese speakers did not; since Russian is a plural-marking language like English while Japanese is a GC language like Chinese, this further supported the role of L1 transfer at the level of morphological (in)congruency. Jiang et al. (2017) used an online picture-based comprehension task, explained in Section 11.4.3, to test the MCH. Under the MCH, automatic online activation of number should lead to a slowdown in responses in this task in the case of a number mismatch. Jiang et al. (2017) found that both native English speakers and L1 Russian L2 English learners exhibited a slowdown for number mismatches, while L1 Chinese L2 English learners did not. This provided further support for Chinese speakers’ lack of sensitivity to the presence vs. absence of English plural marking. However, other studies have found results contrary to those of Jiang et al. (2011, 2017). Wen et al. (2010) tested L1 Chinese and L1 Japanese L2 English learners using a SPRT where the cue to plurality was a demonstrative rather than a partitive (e.g., these beautiful house(s)), and found sensitivity to missing plural marking on the part of the advanced (but not the intermediate) L2 groups. Song (2015) tested L1 Korean L2 English learners in a SPRT with both partitive cues to plurality (as in Jiang, 2007) and non-partitive ones (as in Wen et al., 2010). Song found that advanced L2ers slowed down for missing plural marking with both types of cues. Choi and Ionin (2021) used both an offline task (AJT) and an online task (SPRT) to examine online sensitivity to plural marking with L2 English learners from two GC L1s (Korean and Mandarin Chinese). Experiment 1 in Choi and Ionin (2021) was a partial replication of Choi et al. (2018) using a different methodology. The results converged with those of Choi and Ionin (2018) as both L1 Korean and L1 Chinese L2 English learners in Choi and Ionin (2021) were sensitive to incorrect plural marking on non-atomic mass nouns (*sunlights) but exhibited no such sensitivity for atomic mass 149

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nouns (*furnitures). The same patterns of (in)sensitivity were attested offline and online. Experiment 2 in Choi and Ionin (2021) tested count nouns and examined learners’ sensitivity to missing plural marking in the presence of a plural definite determiner (these boat(s)) vs. an indefinite determiner (many boat(s)). Korean requires plural marking for the expression of plurality with definites, whereas plural marking is always optional with indefinites. There is no corresponding distinction in Chinese. Consistent with L1 transfer, L1 Korean L2 English learners exhibited greater sensitivity to missing plural marking with definites than L1 Chinese L2 English learners, both offline and online. There was no corresponding difference between the groups for indefinites. (The fact that both learner groups slowed down for missing plural marking with indefinites (many boat) in the SPRT conflicted with the findings of Jiang, 2007, and was not consistent with the MCH.)

11.6.3  Offline studies of plural marking in the L2 acquisition of GC languages While most studies on the L2 acquisition of plural marking have been conducted on English, there has also been research on the L2 acquisition of plural marking in GC languages (Hwang & Lardiere, 2013; Su, 2019). Hwang and Lardiere (2013) examined how L1 English L2 Korean learners acquire the Korean plural marker -tul, which has both intrinsic and extrinsic uses. Intrinsic -tul is used on nouns, much as the English -s (but with differences in distribution, as discussed in Section 11.2.1), whereas extrinsic -tul is used on non-nominal elements, including adverbs and locatives, and results in a distributive interpretation. Hwang and Lardiere (2013) framed their study in terms of the FRH; they predicted that the learners would initially consider -tul to be equivalent to English -s, and would gradually reassemble the features on -tul. The features for the intrinsic -tul were predicted to be acquired earlier in development than those for the extrinsic -tul, since the extrinsic plural is infrequent in the input and not taught in the L2 Korean classroom. Hwang and Lardiere (2013) used several offline tasks to examine the different uses of -tul, including a written elicitation test, an AJT, a preference task, a truth value judgment task and a translation task. Overall, across task types, learner performance improved with increased proficiency; the properties of intrinsic -tul were acquired earlier than those of extrinsic -tul, as predicted. The findings were consistent with L1 transfer of features and also indicated that feature reassembly is possible with increased proficiency. Turning to the nominal system of Mandarin Chinese, Su (2019), also working within the FRH framework, examined how L1 Korean L2 Chinese learners reassemble the features relevant for Chinese plural marking. As discussed in Section 11.2.1, the nominal plural marker -men is optional with [+human] nouns in Chinese and disallowed with [–human] nouns. Su also discusses the plural marker -xie, which is used with demonstratives; unlike -men, -xie occurs with both [+human] and [–human] nouns and is obligatory for plural interpretation of a demonstrative. As already discussed, the Korean -tul is optionally used with both [+human] and [-human] nouns. While -tul is disallowed in the presence of a classifier with [-human] nouns, it is allowed with [+human] nouns even in the presence of a classifier. Su used a GJT with multiple conditions that tested the restrictions on both -men and -xie. The findings indicated that learners recognized that both -men and -xie mark the [+plural] feature, but that learners at lower proficiency levels failed to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical contexts for the plural morphemes. Advanced learners exhibited more target-like behavior, recognizing the role of the [+human] feature in the Chinese nominal system. Overall, the results were consistent with the FRH, showing that successful feature reassembly is possible.

11.7  Summary and future directions As discussed in this chapter, most studies on the semantics of plurality in the L2 have been conducted with L2 English learners from GC L1s (with some comparison groups from plural-marking L1s included in some of the studies). The semantic universal of atomicity/individuation has been found 150

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to play a role in L2 acquisition for these learner groups, as indicated both by the interpretation of atomic vs. non-atomic nouns in the quantity judgment task, and particular difficulties with atomic mass nouns (furniture) in both offline and online tasks. Integration of English plural marking into the L2 grammar has been found to be challenging, as indicated both by learners’ tendency to ignore morphosyntactic cues in interpretation, and lack of sensitivity to absence of the plural marker in the online tasks administered by Jiang and colleagues. At the same time, there is some indication that such integration is possible: the learners in Inagaki (2014) showed emergent sensitivity to singular vs. plural forms of flexible nouns in interpretation, while the learners in Wen et al. (2010), Song (2015), and Choi and Ionin (2021) showed some sensitivity to missing -s both online and offline. The few L2 studies that have been done with plural marking in GC languages used offline tasks. The learners were found to become more target-like on their judgments of -tul and -men with increasing proficiency, but it is not known how they would perform in time-pressured tasks. The overall findings are consistent with the Bottleneck Hypothesis, in that target acquisition of the plural marker has been found to be quite challenging, as well as with the FRH, in that both effects of L1 transfer of features and feature reassembly are attested. With regard to the MCH, some studies with learners from GC L1s have found a lack of online sensitivity to English plural marking, consistent with L1 transfer and morphological incongruency, while other studies have found the presence of such sensitivity. Differences among studies, such as learners’ proficiency levels and types of cue to plurality, may be behind the different results. With regard to future directions, it would be fruitful to use online psycholinguistic methods to study the L2 acquisition of plural marking in a variety of languages, not just English, in order to test the MCH and to examine learners’ implicit or automatized knowledge. While the L1s of the learners have varied across studies, English is the only plural-marking language that has been examined in depth with regard to the L2-acquisition of plural marking. Given that plural-marking languages (e.g., English vs. French vs. Russian) differ in which nouns are classified as count vs. mass, it would be quite interesting to study a variety of L1/L2 combinations and to examine lexical transfer in some detail (cf. Tang et al., 2021). It would also be fruitful to examine languages with morphologically complex plural-marking systems, such as German (Parodi et al., 2004; Wegener, 2011) and Arabic (Albirini & Benmamoun, 2014). Ideally, the morphology and semantics of plural marking would be examined within the same study. It would also be interesting to test both interpretation and online processing with the same groups of learners, in order to see whether interpretation of nouns as object- vs. substance-denoting correlates with sensitivity to plural marking (see also Choi, 2020 for more on this point). Finally, while this chapter has focused on plural marking, there is also much to be learned about how L2 learners of GC languages acquire classifiers, and how the L2 acquisition of classifiers relates to the count/mass distinction (see, e.g., Kong, 2012; Yao, 2017).

References Albirini, A., & Benmamoun, E. (2014). Concatenative and nonconcatenative plural formation in L1, L2, and heritage speakers of Arabic. The Modern Language Journal, 98(3), 854–871. Bale, A., & Barner, D. (2009). The interpretation of functional heads: Using comparatives to explore the mass/ count distinction. Journal of Semantics, 26, 217–252. Barner, D., Inagaki, S., & Li, P. (2009). Language, thought, and real nouns. Cognition, 111(3), 329–344. Barner, D., & Snedeker, J. (2005). Quantity judgments and individuation: Evidence that mass nouns count. Cognition, 97, 41–46. Bloom, P. (1994). Possible names: The role of syntax-semantics mappings in the acquisition of nominals. Lingua, 92(4), 297–329. Bunt, H. (1985). Mass terms and model theoretic semantics. Cambridge University Press. Cheng, L. L.-S., & Sybesma, R. (1999). Bare and not-so-bare nouns and the structure of NP. Linguistic Inquiry, 30, 509–542.

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Plural marking and semantics of plurality Kong, S. (2012). Adult English speakers’ acquisition of Chinese count-mass classifiers. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 40(2), 442–477. Kwon, S.-N., & Zribi-Hertz, A. (2004). Number from a syntactic perspective: Why plural marking looks ‘truer’ in French than in Korean. In O. Bonami & P. Cabredo Hofherr (Eds.), Empirical issues in formal syntax and semantics (pp. 133–158). Colloque de syntaxe et sémantique à Paris. http://www​.cssp​.cnrs​.fr​/eiss5​/index​_en​ .html . Langacker, R. W. (1999). Grammar and conceptualization. Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction. Oxford University Press. Lardiere, D. (2009). Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 25(2), 173–227. Li, Y.-H. A. (1999). Plurality in a classifier language. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 8, 75–99. Link, G. (1983). The logical analysis of plurals and mass terms: A lattice theoretical approach. In R. Bauerle, C. Schwarze, & A. von Stechow (Eds.), Meaning, use, and the interpretation of language (pp. 302–323). de Gruyter. MacDonald, D., & Carroll, S. (2018). Second-language processing of English mass-count nouns by nativespeakers of Korean. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 3(1), 46, 41–27. McDonough, K., & Trofimovich, P. (2012). How to use psycholinguistic methodologies for comprehension and production. In A. Mackey & S. M. Gass (Eds.), Research methods in second language acquisition: A practical guide (pp. 117–138). Wiley-Blackwell. Parodi, T., Schwarz, B., & Clahsen, H. (2004). On the L2 acquisition of the morphosyntax of German nominals. Linguistics, 42(3), 669–705. Rusk, B., Paradis, J., & Järvikivi, J. (2020). Comprehension of English plural-singular marking by Mandarin-L1, early L2-immersion learners. Applied Psycholinguistics, 41, 547–577. Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the Full Transfer/Full Access model. Second Language Research, 12, 40–72. Slabakova, R. (2008). Meaning in the second language. Mouton de Gruyter. Snape, N. (2008). Resetting the nominal mapping parameter: Definite article use and the count-mass distinction. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 63–79. Song, Y. (2015). L2 processing of plural inflection in English. Language Learning, 65(2), 233–267. Spinner, P., & Gass, S. M. (2019). Using judgments in second language acquisition research. CRC Press. Su, J. (2019). Reassembly of plural and human features in the L2 acquisition of Chinese by adult Korean speakers. Second Language Research, 35(4), 529–555. Tang, W., Fiorentino, R., & Gabriele, A. (2021). Examining transfer in the acquisition of the count/mass distinction in L2 English. Second Language Research, 39(1), 231–257. Wegener, H. (1994). Variation in the acquisition of German plural morphology by second language learners. In R. Tracy and E. Lattey (Eds.), How tolerant is universal grammar? (pp. 267–294). Max Niemeyer Verlag. Wen, Z., Miyao, M., Takeda, A., Chu, W., & Schwartz, B. (2010). Proficiency effects and distance effects in nonnative processing of English number agreement. In K. Franich, K. M. Iserman, & L. L. Keil (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Boston University conference on language development (pp. 445–456). Cascadilla Press. Yao, P. (2017). The on-line processing and anticipation building in native Mandarin speakers and late DutchMandarin learners. PhD dissertation, Queen Mary University of London.

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12 GENDER AND NUMBER AGREEMENT Vicky Chondrogianni

12.1 Introduction Grammatical morphology is one of the most notoriously difficult language areas for second language (L2) learners to acquire or fully master. Grammatical gender and number assignment and agreement have been documented as especially challenging for L2 learners to acquire or produce, modulated strongly by proficiency and first language (L1) background (Franceschina, 2005; Grüter et al., 2012). How these two nominal grammatical features are produced or comprehended by L2 speakers is of particular interest for theories of L2 acquisition and processing. This is because answers to this question can help us better understand whether L2 grammars are vulnerable at the lexical (e.g., gender assignment) or syntactic (e.g., gender agreement) level, whether this vulnerability is the result of impaired grammatical knowledge and representations, or a by-product of less efficient implementation of this knowledge in real time. The investigation of gender and number agreement can also contribute to a better understanding of the linguistic (e.g., transparency, congruency) and individual (e.g., proficiency, exposure) factors that modulate this vulnerability.

12.2  Gender and number agreement: theoretical analysis and SLA theories 12.2.1  Crosslinguistic perspectives Gender and number are morphophonological features marked on the noun and other syntactically agreeing nominal constituents, such as articles and adjectives, as in the Spanish example lasFEM.PL pelotasFEM.PL rojasFEM.PL (“the red balls”). Although both grammatical features may co-occur on nouns and other nominal elements, grammatical gender differs from number in that it is an inherent, arbitrary lexical property of the noun, whereas number is semantically and syntactically linked to event structure and referent attribution (Corbett, 1991, 2000; Fuchs et al., 2015). The learner needs to classify a noun as belonging to a particular gender class out of two or more gender classes (depending on the language), or assign gender to a given noun. There is great variation in the way gender and number are realised crosslinguistically on nominal elements. Languages may differ in the number of gender or number distinctions in their nominal systems (Corbett, 1991, 2000). Romance languages, such as French, Italian, and Spanish, have a twoway gender system in the form of masculine and feminine, German, and Greek a three-way gender system (masculine, feminine and neuter), whereas in Dutch, masculine and feminine have been col154

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lapsed under a single common gender versus the neuter. Most languages have a dual number distinction between singular and plural (e.g., English: one pet/three pets), although there are also languages that distinguish between singular, plural, and dual, or have a general number, meaning that a noun can be expressed without reference to number, giving rise to bare nouns, i.e., nouns not marked for plural, when another numeral is present as in liǎngNUMERAL zhīCL gǒuØ “two dogs” (Mandarin Chinese) (Corbett, 2000). Languages also differ in terms of how transparent morphophonological cues for gender and number are. Cue transparency refers to how reliably the morphophonological information of the noun ending can be used to classify nouns into gender classes and/or number categories. Cue transparency can differ within languages. For example, nouns ending in -o in Spanish tend to be masculine (elMASC sombreroMASC, “the hat”), whereas nouns ending in -a tend to be feminine (laFEM chaquetaFEM, “the jacket”), and this is assumed to be the canonical gender pattern as opposed to nouns ending in -e (laFEM claseFEM, “the class”), which are considered non-canonical (Eichler et al., 2012; White et al., 2004). In languages like Dutch, however, nouns carry no morphophonological marking, unless they are in the diminutive form, which means that Dutch provides few morphophonological cues for the learner to assign gender to a specific noun (Blom & Vasić, 2011). Crosslinguistic differences are also found in whether gender and number are marked on other nominal elements such as adjectives, and whether marking differs as a function of attributive and predicative position. For example, adjectives are marked for gender and number regardless of their syntactic position in Greek (toDET.NEUT kokinoADJ.NEUT haliNEUT (“the red carpet”); toNEUT haliNEUT ine kokinoNEUT (“the carpet is red”)), whereas in Dutch only attributive but not predicative adjectives are marked (deCOMMON langeCOMMON dagCOMMON (“the long day”) vs. deCOMMON dagCOMMON is langØ (“the day is long”)). From a generative grammar perspective, gender and number are phi-features that are interpretable on nouns and are checked against the uninterpretable features on other syntactically agreeing elements within the noun phrase through the syntactic operation of Agree (Carstens, 2005). The syntactic operation Agree copies the gender and number phi-features of one constituent on a dependent constituent. Agreement features can be copied from the agreement trigger, which is the constituent carrying the agreeing features, on the predicate in a syntactic configuration where the agreement target, which is the constituent that receives the agreement features, is external to the noun phrase, e.g., Italian LaFEM pelotaFEM è rosaFEM (“The ball is red”), or internal to the noun phrase (also referred to as concord), e.g., LaFEM rosaFEM pelotaFEM (“The red ball”). Despite their crosslinguistic variability, number is a more primary feature, as languages can have number without having gender but not vice versa (Harley & Ritter, 2002).

12.2.2  Gender and number agreement in SLA theories The variability that L2 learners display when producing or comprehending gender and number raises questions about whether it is a result of deficient representations and related syntactic operations (Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007), or a by-product of failure to access target-like grammatical specifications and implement them in real time during production and comprehension (Prévost & White, 2000; White, 2003). (See also Chapter 8 on adjectival placement for relevant accounts and studies.) Grammatical accounts of L2 acquisition examine whether L2 learners can acquire functional categories and their feature specification, such as [gender]/[±feminine], and [number]/[±plural], and related syntactic operations, such as Agree, when these are not available in the L2 learners’ L1, especially when L2 exposure occurs after late childhood. Two main theoretical proposals can be distinguished. According to the Non-representational deficit accounts, also known as syntax-beforemorphology accounts following White's (2003) classification, absence of or erroneous number and 155

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gender morphological marking on the noun and other agreeing nominal features does not indicate that L2 learners do not have knowledge of grammatical features or the syntactic operations that they trigger. Instead, errors at the morphophonological level indicate that L2 learners may not be able to access the target morphophonological spell-out of a particular form due to the automaticity of production or because the morphophonological gender or number features are underspecified, resorting to feature specification errors or to ‘default’ forms. According to the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (FTFAH) (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996), L2 learners will initially transfer the categorical and feature setting from their L1. During the course of L2 development, restructuring of the L2 interlanguage is possible, and L2 learners may be able to acquire target-like L2 feature specifications. Although this outcome is not guaranteed for all L2 speakers, their grammars will still be grammatically constrained by innate grammatical principles (Universal Grammar) (Chomsky & Smith, 2000). Similar assumptions about the course of L2 development are also made by the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997; Prévost & White, 2000). According to the MSIH, L2 learners’ grammatical representations contain the L2 feature specification even when that feature is not available in the L2 learners’ L1. During production, however, L2 learners may not be able to access the target feature specification and, as a result, they produce erroneous forms. Both theoretical accounts presuppose a Distributed Morphology (DM) account of feature specification, which assumes a dissociation between a category (e.g., NumP or GenP) and its feature specification (Halle & Marantz, 1993). These theories assume that L2 learners have knowledge of syntactic operations, such as Agree, despite variable production, and that age of L2 onset (AoO) does not adversely affect L2 learners’ ability to acquire features and relevant syntactic operations. Another underlying assumption is that any issues with morphophonological specification should surface during production but not comprehension. Representational Deficit accounts assume that erroneous morphological production indicates lack of availability of functional categories and target-like feature specification (also known as morphology-before-syntax accounts in White, 2003). According to the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFFH) (Franceschina, 2005; Hawkins & Chan, 1997) and the Interpretability Hypothesis (IH) (Tsimpli, 2003; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007), parametrized functional features and, specifically, uninterpretable features, cannot be acquired after late childhood unless they are instantiated in the L2 learner’s L1, whereas interpretable features remain intact. This suggests that uninterpretable features on nominal elements within the noun phrase (e.g., the determiner or the adjective) are not acquirable. Specifically for the FFFH, gender as an interpretable feature on the noun is acquirable; however, the unavailability of uninterpretable features on other nominal elements entails that syntactic operations associated with gender, such as feature checking and Agree, will break down (Franceschina, 2005). Conversely, according to the IH, although the lexical specification of gender is an uninterpretable feature and carries an arbitrary or no feature specification (see also Carstens, 2010, for similar arguments), it remains active in syntax for syntactic relationships such as Agree to be established (Tsimpli, 2003, pp. 178–179). This implies that feature checking is possible for the IH, but feature specification is not target-like. Both representational deficit accounts reviewed here assume a symmetrical performance between production and comprehension. Modular psycholinguistic models of production and comprehension (e.g., Levelt et al., 1999) assume that these processes follow distinct stages; conceptualisation of a message is followed by lexical and morphophonological encoding before the utterance is articulated (these stages are reversed during comprehension, with perception being the first stage). In these models, gender and number are diacritic features specified at the lemma level of the mental lexicon during lexical encoding. Gender is an intrinsic feature of lexical items, whereas number is an extrinsic feature that derives from the conceptual level and specifies the number of entities in an event. Each gender or number value (e.g., masculine/feminine/neuter; singular/plural) is represented by a different node shared by all noun lemmas that have this gender or number (Carroll, 1989; Schriefers & Jescheniak, 1999). 156

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Both features trigger agreement between nouns and other dependent constituents, whereby featural information is cascaded from the lexical specification of the noun lemma to these other constituents and morphophonologically encoded during production or accessed during comprehension (Franck et al., 2008). The difference at the level of encoding between the two features suggests that variability in gender production and comprehension may derive from erroneous specification or underspecification of the gender node within the lexicon (e.g., see McCarthy, 2008), whereas variability in number may result from conceptual encoding and/or feature specification during formulation (see Gardner et al. (2021) for a detailed account of how predictions of L2 acquisition and psycholinguistic theories intersect). Psycholinguistic accounts attribute the variability in L2 gender production and comprehension to L2 learners’ variability in lexical gender assignment, which, in turn, impacts processing syntactic gender agreement and predictive processing (Grüter et al., 2012; Hopp, 2016; Lemhöfer et al., 2014; Montrul et al., 2014). According to the Lexical Gender Learning Hypothesis (LGLH) initially proposed by Grüter and colleagues (2012) and further developed by Hopp and colleagues (Hopp, 2016; Hopp & Lemmerth, 2018; Lemmerth & Hopp, 2019), native-like production and processing of gender agreement is contingent upon L2 learners’ target-like gender assignment. Lexical access of the gender node or lemma and the triggering of the syntactic agreement relations need to be rapid and efficient in real time during speech production and comprehension (Franck et al., 2008). If L2 learners access the wrong lemma or node specification, this triggers erroneous feature specification (assignment). This, in turn, impacts how rapidly and efficiently L2 learners process and predict agreement across syntactically related nominal elements. Evidence for this account has been provided in a series of eye-tracking studies by Hopp, Grüter, and colleagues (see §5).

12.3  Methodological approaches to gender and number agreement in SLA Studies within the SLA literature have used a variety of behavioural and neuroscientific methods in isolation or in combination to gather evidence about the nature of L2 learners’ grammatical representations and the source (representational vs. processing) of L2 learners’ vulnerability with gender and number assignment and agreement. These methods provide different pieces of information about a) L2 learner’s underlying knowledge of L2 gender and number, and b) whether L2 learners can implement knowledge about these features in real time to accurately produce utterances with noun phrases marked for gender and number, to correctly predict upcoming information or to identify grammatical violations related to gender or number agreement mismatches across the noun phrase. Behavioural and neuroscientific studies have examined a) the role of transparency or canonicity of morphophonological cues in gender and number acquisition within and across languages and how they affect differential acquisition timings and patterns, b) the nature of ‘default’ forms in production and comprehension, c) how linguistic factors such as transparency, defaultness, congruency, and structural distance between agreeing elements affect children’s and adults’ ability to produce and comprehend related structures in real time, and d) how individual differences factors such as proficiency, AoO, and degree of exposure to the L2 modulate production and processing. Studies differ as to whether they investigate gender and number together or separately, or whether they examine agreement errors as a function of the distance between the agreement trigger (usually between the determiner and the noun in noun phrases) and the agreement target (for example, between the adjectives or other agreeing nominal elements and the noun). Naturalistic and experimental (elicited) production studies are perhaps the two most widely used methods with sequential bilingual children (Marinis et al., 2017; Unsworth et al., 2014) and adults (Franceschina, 2005; White et al., 2004). Elicitation of gender or number assignment and agreement is usually triggered using picture prompts and involves naming the target noun and any accompanying agreeing syntactic elements (e.g., adjectives). 157

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Comprehension studies differ in how much explicit and implicit knowledge they require from L2 learners to implement during listening or reading. Grammaticality Judgment Tasks (GJTs), where L2 speakers are asked to judge the grammaticality of sentences containing morphosyntactic violations of gender and number, have been extensively used in the L2 gender and number literature (see Caffarra et al., 2015, for a review), and require conscious reflection on the grammaticality of a particular structure. Picture-identification tasks are comprehension tasks administered in an oral or a written modality with the help of picture prompts. These tasks have been used in languages that allow for nominal ellipsis, such as Spanish, a syntactic construction where the noun can be dropped if the referent has already been introduced in the visual or verbal context (Montrul et al., 2008; White et al., 2004). In this paradigm, the learner looks at an array of pictures with objects of the same colour, and she is presented with a linguistic prompt, such as Ponlas ahí cerca de la.FEM roja.FEM “Put them there by the red (one)”. To successfully identify the referent of the dropped noun, the learner has to use the gender or number cues on the determiner and the adjective. Online comprehension studies have used (self-paced) listening and reading paradigms to elicit L2 learners’ behavioural or neuroscientific responses to grammatical violations in real time and as the sentence unfolds, and, most specifically, mismatches between the head noun and other nominal elements, such as determiner and adjectives, within local (internal agreement) or non-local (external agreement) syntactic contexts. Given their finegrained temporal resolution, they are considered to tap into L2 learner’s implicit knowledge about the target structures. In behavioural self-paced listening or reading paradigms, sensitivity to grammatical violations induced by gender or number mismatches is indicated by elevated reaction or reading times (RTs) measured in milliseconds to the ungrammatical versus the grammatical condition in both children (Blom & Vasić, 2011; Vasic et al., 2012) and adults (Foote, 2011; Sagarra & Herschensohn, 2010). Neuroscientific paradigms involve measuring event-related potentials (ERPs), i.e., brain responses as captured by voltage changes in the electroencephalograph at the scalp, while being presented with different types of linguistic stimuli, elicited by gender or number mismatches between the noun and other agreeing nominal elements. ERPs provide high temporal resolution with millisecond precision. Different ERP components have been related to distinct linguistic processes. Most relevant for the processing of gender and number violations are the P600 and the N400. The P600 has been associated with morphosyntactic processing, a positive wave between ~500–700ms after stimulus onset, induced by morphosyntactic violations related to gender and number agreement in monolingual speakers (Molinaro et al., 2015, for a review), whereas N400 is a negative wave between ~300–500ms after stimulus onset which has been linked to the semantic integration and lexical access (Kutas & Federmeier, 2000). L2 speakers’ sensitivity to grammatical violations has also been examined in comprehension studies (GJT and online) investigating number and gender attraction (Roberts, 2013; Sagarra & Herschensohn, 2010). In these studies, the gender and/or number specification of two adjacent noun phrases, as in the Spanish example elMASC libroMASC en laFEM mesaFEM (“the book on the table”) is manipulated to be the same or different, while the main noun, e.g. el libro (“the book”), may be linearly or structurally distant from other agreeing constituents (e.g., a verb or an adjective). For example, in the sentence El libro en la mesa está excelentemente escritoMASC/escritos MASC.PL/escrita FEM/ escritasFEM.PL (“the book on the table was excellently written”) the adjective escrit-o/os/a/as (“written”) agrees in gender and/or number either with the main noun el libro (“the book”) or with the adjunct within the noun phrase, en la mesa (“on the table”), or with neither. Participants are asked to judge the grammaticality of the utterance or to respond to a segmented utterance in real time. Attraction effects, where the gender or number specification of the adjunct noun interferes with that of the main noun, are expected to occur on the gender of the predicative adjective or the number of the verb, leading to elongated reaction times or increased accuracy. Finally, eye-tracking studies have investigated whether L2 learners can use gender or number information on nominal elements to predict upcoming information. These studies have primarily 158

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used the Visual World paradigm (VWP) (but see Keating, 2009, for eye-tracking with reading), where participants are presented with a picture array displaying nouns that correspond to different or same genders as the target one. In the study by Lew-Williams and Fernald (2010) participants saw two objects on a computer screen corresponding to nouns of either the same (la pelota – la galleta ‘theFEM ball – theFEM cookie’) or different gender (la pelota – el zapato ‘theFEM ball – theMASC shoe’) while listening to a sentence asking them to identify one of them (¿Dónde está la pelota? ‘Where is theFEM ball’). Children’s and adults’ rate and speed of fixations to the target and the distractor are measured from the onset of the determiner or the adjective and before.

12.4  Psycholinguistic and (bilingual) child language acquisition studies on gender and number agreement1 12.4.1  Production of gender and number agreement Crosslinguistic research with monolingual and simultaneous bilingual children has shown that transparent gender (e.g., Greek and Russian) and number systems (e.g., English, Dutch or German) are acquired earlier and faster than opaque gender (e.g., Dutch or Norwegian) (Eichler et al., 2012; Kupisch et al., 2021; Lemmerth & Hopp, 2019; Marinis et al., 2017; Rodina & Westergaard, 2017; Unsworth et al., 2014) and number (e.g., Arabic, Hebrew or Welsh) (Abdalla et al., 2013; Chondrogianni & John, 2018; Schiff et al., 2011) systems. Studies with simultaneous bilingual children have also shown that gender marking in one of the languages of the bilingual child facilitates gender acquisition in the other, especially if the noun gender is the same across the two languages (what has also been coined as gender congruency) (Kupisch et al., 2021; Lemmerth & Hopp, 2019). Number is crosslinguistically one of the first features to be acquired in languages that encode number distinctions on nouns. Early production, however, does not entail that preschool children always produce the target form (Chondrogianni & John, 2018; Davies et al., 2017), or that they are fully aware of the semantic properties of number or of how number maps onto specific morphophonological forms (Davies et al., 2017). Whether the agreeing element is a determiner or an adjective also affects production accuracy, albeit more for gender than for number. More morphological errors are reported on adjectives than on determiners (Kaltsa et al., 2017; Unsworth et al., 2014; White et al., 2004), especially when the agreement target is in predicative rather than in attributive position, and the target noun belongs to an opaque gender system (Blom & Vasić, 2011; Unsworth et al., 2014). When children are not able to produce the target gender or number form, they resort to ‘default’ forms. Default forms can refer to the most frequent morphophonological forms in the paradigm, to forms that are not marked for any gender or number features, or to a combination of the two (Tsimpli & Hulk, 2013). Default forms differ crosslinguistically as they are specific to the gender or number paradigm to be acquired. For example, the masculine gender form is considered the default form in Italian and in Spanish (Montrul et al., 2014), whereas the neuter gender form is considered the default in Greek (Marinis et al., 2017); singular is considered the unmarked default form in languages that have a singular-plural distinction (Sagarra & Herschensohn, 2010). Default forms tend to elicit higher production accuracy and emerge earlier in acquisition than marked forms/non-default forms. Whether monolingual and simultaneous bilingual child speakers of the same language resort to the same default forms is subject to debate (Kupisch et al., 2021).

12.4.2  Comprehension and real-time processing of gender and number agreement Studies using self-paced listening/reading or neuroscientific paradigms targeting gender and number mismatch violations have reported stronger grammaticality effects (and P600 effects for neuroscien159

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tific studies) for gender than number violations in native speakers. Syntactic mismatches between the noun and the adjective (agreement) induce stronger effects than mismatches between the article and the noun (e.g., gender assignment) (Anton-Mendez et al., 2002; Barber & Carreiras, 2005; Sagarra & Herschensohn, 2010). Number and gender attraction studies (see §12.3) have also shown that monolingual speakers display stronger grammaticality effects and take longer to respond in gender or number mismatch conditions compared to the match conditions. Reaction times are particularly elevated when the mismatch involves both number and gender mismatches between the noun and the predicative adjective (Anton-Mendez et al., 2002; Scontras et al., 2018). Studies involving grammatical violations also suggest that gender and number are processed differently by native speakers, with gender eliciting stronger violations than number (Sagarra & Herschensohn, 2010), which may be linked to the inherent lexical nature of gender. In studies using the VWP, monolingual and bilingual toddlers and adults have been shown to use gender cues on the determiner and direct their gaze to the right referent that matches the gender of the determiner (Grüter et al., 2012; Hopp, 2016; Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007, 2010). Similar results about the predictive use of number cues have also been reported in English-speaking monolingual children and adolescents (Rusk et al., 2020), suggesting that gender and number features can be used efficiently and fast during real-time comprehension in native speakers.

12.5  SLA studies on gender and number agreement 12.5.1  L2 production of gender and number agreement Although it is well documented that the availability of a gender or number feature in the L2 learner’s L1 facilitates gender or number production and comprehension in the L2 (Marinis et al., 2017; Prentza et al., 2017; Unsworth et al., 2014), error-prone number, and especially, gender production in L2 learners whose L1 has these two features, is also quite common. This suggests that the acquisition of the L2 gender morphophonological properties is not straightforward (see §12.2.2 on theoretical accounts). Morphophonological transparency and canonicity of gender within morphological paradigms and across languages modulate production accuracy and rate of acquisition in both child (Marinis et al., 2017; Prentza et al., 2017; Unsworth et al., 2014) and adult L2 learners (Alarcón, 2011; Montrul et al., 2008); nominal forms with transparent morphophonological gender or number marking elicit higher accuracy rates than less transparent morphophonological forms. Languages with less transparent gender morphophonology take longer for L2 children and adults to acquire compared to languages with more transparent gender morphophonology, and differences between L2 children and their monolingual or simultaneously bilingual peers may persist until later in development. To illustrate, in the study by Lemmerth and Hopp (2019), eight- to ten-year-old German-speaking L2 children differed in their production and processing of gender in German from both their monolingual and their simultaneous bilingual peers. Conversely, differences between L2 children learning a Romance language (more transparent gender than German) and their monolingual and simultaneous bilingual peers disappeared by the age of six (Eichler et al., 2012). Gender congruency between nouns of two gendered languages also modulates L2 naming speed and accuracy. In a series of studies, Russian-German L2 adults, but not L2 children, produced nouns that belonged to the same gender class (gender-congruent) in L1 Russian and L2 German faster compared to nouns belonging to different gender classes in the two languages (gender-incongruent) (Hopp & Lemmerth, 2018; Lemmerth & Hopp, 2019) (see also Sá-Leite et al. (2019) for a review). Research targeting number assignment and agreement in L2 learners’ production is not as extensive as research targeting gender production. Studies on number have primarily focused on L2 learners whose L1 does not have number specification, and primarily speakers of East Asian languages (Mandarin, Japanese, Taiwanese). These studies have reported that child and adult L2 learners exhibit 160

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variability in number agreement that may persist across advanced levels of proficiency and even after extended exposure to the L2 (Jia, 2003; Jia et al., 2002).

12.5.2  Comprehension and processing of gender and number in the L2 Transparency of the target gender and number systems modulates sensitivity to grammatical violations induced by gender mismatches in both L2 children (e.g., Greek vs. Dutch) (Blom & Vasić, 2011; Vasic et al., 2012) and L2 adults (e.g., French and Dutch vs. German) (Foucart & Frenck-Mestre, 2011; Lemhöfer et al., 2014; Sabourin & Stowe, 2008). Languages with weaker distributional cues to lexical gender are less likely to lead to native-like L2 processing profiles. The syntactic complexity of the noun phrase (e.g., mismatches between the determiner and the noun than between the adjective and the noun) and structural distance (attributive vs. predicative position) influence sensitivity to both gender (Keating, 2009) and number violations (Jiang, 2007; Jiang et al., 2011; Sagarra & Herschensohn, 2010). L2 learners’ ability to use gender and number predictively or to perceive grammatical violations induced by gender/number mismatches is also predicted by their knowledge of lexical gender or number (Lemhöfer et al., 2014; Rusk et al., 2020), their proficiency level and age of L2 onset, especially in speakers whose L1 does not contain these grammatical features (Grüter et al., 2012; Hopp, 2016; Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010; White et al., 2004). Lew-Williams and Fernald (2010) used the same VWP as in their previous study with monolingual Spanish-speaking children and adults (LewWilliams & Fernald, 2007) and reported that L2 Spanish learners with L1 English (a language without grammatical gender) could not use the gender information on the article to predict the upcoming noun, contrary to the monolingual Spanish controls. In contrast, Grüter and colleagues (2012) used the same eye-tracking paradigm as in Lew-Williams and Fernald (2010) and found that highly proficient L1 English–L2 Spanish learners, but not intermediate L2 learners, could use gender information on the determiner to predict the upcoming noun. Importantly, L2 learners’ predictive processing was modulated by L2 learners’ gender attribution, even when it was not target-like. Corroborating findings were reported in Hopp (2016) with late L2 learners of German with L1 English. In this study, L2 learners’ ability to predict the gender of the upcoming noun in an eye-tracking task was contingent upon their knowledge of L2 gender, with their predictive ability in the eye-tracking task improving after participants were trained on gender assignment. These findings are consistent with the Lexical Gender Learning Hypothesis (Grüter et al., 2012). Importantly, in the same study by Hopp (2016), when gender attribution became less reliable by introducing article-noun combinations with nontarget-like gender assignment in the training part of the experiment, even native speakers became less sensitive to gender cues for predictive agreement processing in the eye-tracking experiment. A similar relationship between number attribution and noun knowledge was reported by Rusk et al. (2020). In their VWP eye-tracking study on number with L1 Mandarin – L2 English adolescents, participants’ ability to make use of the plural marker was contingent upon their vocabulary knowledge. These studies indicate that acquisition of phi-features and their predictive use are possible, though not necessarily native-like, even when not present in the learners’ L1. Even when gender is available in both the L1 and the L2, gender congruency (or overlap) between the L1 and the L2 noun gender facilitates L2 gender comprehension (Hopp & Lemmerth, 2018; Lemmerth & Hopp, 2019; Sá-Leite et al., 2019). In a seminal study with L2 Dutch learners with English, Romance (Spanish, French) and German as their L1, Sabourin and colleagues (Sabourin et al., 2006) demonstrated that L2 speakers’ accuracy on Dutch gender depended not only on the availability of a gender feature in the L1 (e.g., English speakers had lower accuracy than German and Romance language speakers) but also on gender congruency/overlap between the L1 and the L2 gendered nouns. In this study, the L1 German learners exhibited higher accuracy than the L1 Romance learners, and both groups outperformed the L1 English speakers. This differential performance was attributed to the typologically induced overlap between neuter nouns in Dutch and 161

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German and between common nouns in Dutch and masculine/feminine nouns in German, an overlap that does not exist between Dutch and Romance, although both are gendered languages. Sensitivity to grammatical violations as a function of the availability of a particular feature in the learners’ L1, their proficiency and AoO to the L2 has also been shown in neuroscientific and behavioural studies targeting number attraction. A series of neuroscientific studies using ERPs has shown that gender and number violations are mainly associated with N400 effects in L2 learners at initial proficiency levels (although see Gabriele et al., 2021 for no N400 effects in beginners), whereas highly proficient learners exhibit P600 effects for number and gender violations within and across the nominal elements similarly to monolingual speakers (Alemán Bañón et al., 2018; Gabriele et al., 2021; Osterhout et al., 2006, 2008). L2 learners’ sensitivity to gender and number violations has been attributed to the availability of the features in the L2 learners’ L1 regardless of structural distance, with stronger sensitivity being reported for number (available in the L2 learners’ L1) than for gender (not available in the L1). Interestingly, however, more effortful processing and weaker grammaticality effects for gender have also been reported in gender and number attraction studies with L2 adults whose L1 has neither gender nor number (e.g. Chinese) or has both (e.g., German) (Dowens et al., 2011; Hopp, 2010; Sagarra & Herschensohn, 2010). This renders the argument regarding facilitatory L1 effects for number but not for gender rather weak and calls for a different explanation of the asymmetrical processing between the two nominal features (see also Roberts, 2013).

12.6  Future directions and areas for further research Research conducted within the last decade on gender and number agreement has provided invaluable information about how gender and number agreement are not only produced, but, importantly, how they are comprehended in real time, and what linguistic factors modulate online production and comprehension. This has allowed us to better understand not only whether features not available in the L2 learner’s L1 can be acquired (as presented in §12.2.2) but, importantly, under which linguistic conditions production and processing are facilitated or hindered, and how this is affected by the learners’ L2 exposure, AoO and proficiency. The current review highlighted various gaps in existing research in this area. First, although increasing in number, the studies investigating incremental processing and prediction of gender in different groups of L2 learners remain quite few and usually involve Spanish as the L2 with English as the L1, with the only exception the studies conducted by Hopp and colleagues on Russian and German speakers, involving two gendered languages. Given the typological differences in the manifestation of gender, more studies are needed with both gendered and other language combinations and with different groups of L2 learners of different proficiency and AoO to better disentangle how structural complexity, congruency and L1 modulate gender comprehension and prediction. Related to this, very few studies have investigated gender production and comprehension or gender assignment and gender agreement within the same groups of L2 learners. Given the importance of understanding how L2 learners assign L2 gender before they can use it predictively, it is paramount that future research not only incorporates both aspects in their design but also investigates how agreement is modulated by assignment (even if not native-like). The current review also revealed that studies investigating number comprehension in isolation or in conjunction with gender are currently not enough to help us understand how nominal number agreement is comprehended and why it is processed differently from gender, if at all. Is this difference an effect of the presence of number in the L1 or is it because gender agreement entails both a lexical component (gender assignment) and a syntactic component (gender agreement), whereas number only involves syntactic agreement (see also Gabriele et al., 2021; Roberts, 2013)? Current research is restricted to Romance vs. English/German language pairs or it is using neuroscientific methods that require very specialised experimental equipment, rendering testing these questions harder to implement. 162

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Finally, it is important that grammatical theoretical accounts are better integrated with psycholinguistic accounts of production and comprehension, so that the relationship between representation of categories, features and syntactic operations receives a psychological basis and can be more efficiently empirically tested (see Gardner et al., 2021 for a first attempt towards this).

Note 1 For comprehensive reviews of these issues in heritage speakers, see Montrul (2015) and Polinsky (2018).

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Linguistic Approaches To Bilingualism, 3, 1–36. https://doi​.org​ /doi​.org​/10​.1075​/lab​.16033​.kal Keating, G. D. (2009). Sensitivity to violations of gender agreement in native and nonnative Spanish: An eye‐ movement investigation. Language Learning, 59(3), 503–535. Kupisch, T., Mitrofanova, N., & Westergaard, M. (2021). Phonological vs. natural gender cues in the acquisition of German by simultaneous and sequential bilinguals (German–Russian). Journal of Child Language, 1–23. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0305000921000039 Kutas, M., & Federmeier, K. D. (2000). Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(12), 463–470. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/S1364​-6613(00)01560-6 Lemhöfer, K., Schriefers, H., & Indefrey, P. (2014). Idiosyncratic grammars: Syntactic processing in second language comprehension uses subjective feature representations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 26(7), 1428–1444. https://doi​.org​/10​.1162​/jocn​_a​_00609 Lemmerth, N., & Hopp, H. (2019). Gender processing in simultaneous and successive bilingual children: Crosslinguistic lexical and syntactic influences. Language Acquisition, 26(1), 21–45. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​ /10489223​.2017​.1391815 Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(1), 1–75. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0140525X99001776

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Gender and number agreement Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science, 18(3), 193–198. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/j​.1467​-9280​ .2007​.01871.x Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2010). Real-time processing of gender-marked articles by native and non-native Spanish speakers. Journal of Memory and Language, 63(4), 447–464. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.jml​.2010​.07​.003 Marinis, T., Chondrogianni, V., Vasić, N., Weerman, F., & Blom, E. (2017). The impact of transparency and morpho-phonological cues in the acquisition of grammatical gender in sequential bilingual children and children with specific language impairment (pp. 153–180). https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/sibil​.52​.08mar McCarthy, C. (2008). Morphological variability in the comprehension of agreement: An argument for representation over computation. Second Language Research, 24(4), 459–486. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0267658308095737 Molinaro, N., Barber, H. A., Caffarra, S., & Carreiras, M. (2015). On the left anterior negativity (LAN): The case of morphosyntactic agreement: A reply to Tanner et al. Cortex, 66, 156–159. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.cortex​ .2014​.06​.009 Montrul, S. (2015). The acquisition of heritage languages. Cambridge University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​ /CBO9781139030502 Montrul, S., Davidson, J., De la Fuente, I., & Foote, R. (2014). Early language experience facilitates the processing of gender agreement in Spanish heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17(1), 118–138. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S1366728913000114 Montrul, S., Foote, R., & Perpiñán, S. (2008). Gender agreement in adult second language learners and Spanish heritage speakers: The effects of age and context of acquisition. Language Learning, 58(3), 503–553. https:// doi​.org​/10​.1111​/j​.1467​-9922​.2008​.00449.x Osterhout, L., McLaughlin, J., Pitkänen, I., Frenck-Mestre, C., & Molinaro, N. (2006). Novice learners, longitudinal designs, and event-related potentials: A means for exploring the neurocognition of second language processing. Language Learning, 56, 199–230. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/j​.1467​-9922​.2006​.00361.x Osterhout, L., Poliakov, A., Inoue, K., McLaughlin, J., Valentine, G., Pitkanen, I., Frenck-Mestre, C., & Hirschensohn, J. (2008). Second-language learning and changes in the brain. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 21(6), 509–521. https://​doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.jneuroling​.2008​.01​.001 Polinsky, M. (2018). Morphology and Morphosyntax. In M. Polinsky (Ed.), Heritage languages and their speakers (pp. 164–221). Cambridge University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/9781107252349​.006 Prentza, A., Kaltsa, M., Tsimpli, I. M., & Papadopoulou, D. (2017). The acquisition of Greek gender by bilingual children: The effects of lexical knowledge, oral input, literacy and bi/monolingual schooling. International Journal of Bilingualism, 136700691773306. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/1367006917733066 Prévost, P., & White, L. (2000). Missing surface inflection or impairment in second language acquisition? Evidence from tense and agreement. Second Language Research, 16(2), 103–133. https://doi​.org​/10​.1191​ /026765800677556046 Roberts, L. (2013). Processing of gender and number agreement in late Spanish bilinguals: A commentary on Sagarra and Herschensohn. International Journal of Bilingualism, 17(5), 628–633. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​ /1367006911435693 Rodina, Y., & Westergaard, M. (2017). Grammatical gender in bilingual Norwegian–Russian acquisition: The role of input and transparency. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(1), 197–214. https://doi​.org​/10​ .1017​/S1366728915000668 Rusk, B. V, Paradis, J., & Järvikivi, J. (2020). Comprehension of English plural-singular marking by Mandarin-L1, early L2-immersion learners. Applied Psycholinguistics, 41(3), 547–577. https://doi​.org​/10​ .1017​/S0142716420000089 Sá-Leite, A. R., Fraga, I., & Comesaña, M. (2019). Grammatical gender processing in bilinguals: An analytic review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(4), 1148–1173. https://doi​.org​/10​.3758​/s13423​-019​-01596-8 Sabourin, L., & Stowe, L. A. (2008). Second language processing: When are first and second languages processed similarly? Second Language Research, 24(3), 397–430. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0267658308090186 Sabourin, L., Stowe, L. A., & de Haan, G. J. (2006). Transfer effects in learning a second language grammatical gender system. Second Language Research, 22(1), 1–29. https://doi​.org​/10​.1191​/0267658306sr259oa Sagarra, N., & Herschensohn, J. (2010). The role of proficiency and working memory in gender and number agreement processing in L1 and L2 Spanish. Lingua, 120(8), 2022–2039. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.lingua​ .2010​.02​.004 Schiff, R., Ravid, D., & Levy-Shimon, S. (2011). Children’s command of plural and possessive marking on Hebrew nouns: A comparison of obligatory versus optional inflections*. Journal of Child Language, 38(2), 433–454. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0305000909990547 Schriefers, H., & Jescheniak, J. D. (1999). Representation and processing of grammatical gender in language production: A review. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 28, 575–600.

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Vicky Chondrogianni Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the full transfer/full access model. Second Language Research, 12(1), 40–72. Scontras, G., Polinsky, M., & Fuchs, Z. (2018). In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 3(1). https://doi​.org​/10​.5334​/gjgl​.164 Tsimpli, I. M. (2003). Acquisition of gender in Greek as a second language. In A. Anastasiadis-Symeonidis, A. Ralli, & D. Cheila Markopoulou (Eds.), Gender (pp. 168–189). Patakis. Tsimpli, I. M., & Dimitrakopoulou, M. (2007). The interpretability hypothesis: Evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 23(2), 215–242. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​ /0267658307076546 Tsimpli, I. M., & Hulk, A. (2013). Grammatical gender and the notion of default: Insights from language acquisition. Lingua, 137, 128–144. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.lingua​.2013​.09​.001 Unsworth, S., Argyri, F., Cornips, L., Hulk, A., Sorace, A., & Tsimpli, I.-M. (2014). The role of age of onset and input in early child bilingualism in Greek and Dutch. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35(4), 765–805. https://doi​ .org​/10​.1017​/S0142716412000574 Vasic, N., Chondrogianni, V., Marinis, T., & Blom, E. (2012). Processing of gender in Turkish-Dutch and Turkish-Greek child L2 learners. In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung, & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) 36 (pp. 646–659). Cascadilla Press. White, L. (2003). Universal grammar and second language acquisition. Cambridge University Press. White, L., Valenzuela, E., Kozlowska-MacGregor, M., & Leung, Y.-K. I. (2004). Gender and number agreement in nonnative Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25(1), 105–133. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0142716404001067

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13 ADJECTIVE PLACEMENT Tiffany Judy

13.1  Adjective placement Adjectives modify nouns and may appear in two positions: before (Adj-N) or after the modified noun (N-Adj). Crosslinguistically, languages fall into two broad categories according to these positions. Given that much second language acquisition (SLA) research on adjectives has focused on language pairings that include English and a Romance language, English and Spanish will be used to exemplify the crosslinguistic distribution of adjective placement with the recognition that microvariation exists within these broad categories. First, languages like English are largely limited to prenominal adjectives and languages like Spanish allow both positions with the postnominal position serving as the default. Although most Spanish adjectives appear postnominally, their full distribution depends both on intended meaning and adjective type: relational (classifying) adjectives, which generally do not permit comparative or superlative forms, obligatorily appear postnominally (1). (1)

Beni tiene un auto eléctrico / *un eléctrico auto. Beni has a car electric /  a electric car “Beni has an electric car.”

Intensional adjectives modify the temporal, modal or aspectual interpretation of the noun. These nouns generally do not allow degree (e.g., muy ‘very’) modification and obligatorily appear prenominally (2). (2)

El presunto secuestrador huyó / *El secuestrador presunto the alleged kidnapper fled / the kidnapper alleged “The alleged kidnapper fled.”

Qualifying adjectives, which are generally gradable and can form predicates after copular verbs, can appear in both positions representing interpretive differences (3–4): (3)

Leila es una amiga vieja. Leila is a friend old “Leila is an elderly friend.”

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-16

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Tiffany Judy (4)

Leila es una vieja amiga. Leila is a old friend “Leila is a long-time friend.”

Finally, the phonological weight of those qualifying adjectives that can appear prenominally and postnominally as compared to that of the noun can influence word order (File-Muriel, 2006) (5–6):

(5)

un chef extraordinario / ?un a chef extraordinary a ‘an extraordinary chef’

extraordinario chef extraordinary chef

(6)

un otorrinolaringólogo extraordinario / un extraordinario otorrinolaringólogo a otorhinolaryngologist extraordinary a   extraordinary otorhinolaryngologist ‘an extraordinary otorhinolaryngologist’

Specifically, when the adjective is weightier than the noun, it more often and more naturally appears postnominally, as in (5), whereas both adjectival positions are available when the noun is equally or more weighty, as in (6). Nevertheless, syntactic and semantic considerations outweigh phonological ones given that neither intensional adjectives nor those with a restrictive interpretation appear in postnominal or prenominal position, respectively, regardless of phonological weight (Fábregas, 2017; Prado, 1980; Terker, 1985). Generally adjective type and interpretation do not affect adjective position in languages like English, where the default position is prenominal (7)–(11): (7) Beni has an electric car / *a car electric. (8) The alleged kidnapper fled / *the kidnapper alleged. (9) Leila is an old friend / *a friend old. (10) an extraordinary chef / *a chef extraordinary (11) an extraordinary otorhinolaryngologist / *an otorhinolaryngologist extraordinary

13.2  Theoretical analyses 13.2.1 Syntax Minimally, syntactic analyses of adjectives must explain distribution and ordering when more than one adjective is present.1 Broadly speaking, researchers have considered two approaches to account for the observable facts, with the main difference between them being the number of base-generated positions for adjectives. Approaches postulating one base-generated position (prenominal) for adjectives (Bernstein, 1993; Cinque, 1994, 2010; Valois, 1991) may have the advantage of a more parsimonious structure, but they depend on N(oun)-movement to obtain postnominal adjectives. Further, to obtain the differences in restrictiveness described in the following section, Bernstein proposes different adjunction sites with restrictive adjectives adjoining to NP and non-restrictive adjectives adjoining to NumP, as in (11): 168

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(11) 

DP Spec

D’ D

NumP

la

AdjP

NumP

the

Adj’

Num’

Adj

Num

WMP

única persona [µgen] only person

WM WM t[µgen]

NP AdjP

NP

Adj’

N’

Adj

N’

única

N

unique t

When the noun raises from head position to Spec, NumP surpassing the adjective, the default postnominal adjective word order results and a restrictive interpretation obtains; conversely, when it raises to the WM position, a non-restrictive interpretation obtains. Finally, Bernstein treats intensional adjectives, as in (2), as heads that project to AdjP and obligatorily select an overt NP. Although N-movement easily explains differences between languages like English and Spanish, these proposals are not without problems. A concern with Bernstein’s proposal raised by Ticio (2010, p. 149) is that “it is not clear how the two different adjunction sites proposed for adjectives within nominal expressions will explain the different interpretations (namely, restrictive/non-restrictive) that the nominal expressions exhibit”. Similarly, Lamarche (1991) noted that N-movement cannot account for crosslinguistic differences where multiple adjectives are present in the DP. Other approaches capture adjectival distribution by postulating plural base-generated positions (Demonte, 1999b, 2008; Duffield, 1999; Ticio, 2010). In these proposals, adjectival interpretation “strongly correlate[s] with [its] syntactic position” (Demonte, 2008, p. 99). Ticio’s account takes a strong view of Demonte’s claim, proposing that prenominal adjectives merge as specifiers of NP while postnominal adjectives merge as adjuncts (p. 123). Further, she argues that obligatorily postnominal relational adjectives behave as PP arguments and therefore merge in this argument position. Allowing the semantic properties of the adjective to determine where it enters the nominal structure eliminates the necessity for N-movement and provides an explanation for different word orders (of Spanish, minimally). Ticio substantiates her proposal via ellipsis2 and partial cliticization data.3 Nonetheless, while accounts proposing more than one base-generated position for adjectives have the advantage of not requiring syntactic operations to achieve surface word order, they require specific stipulations regarding the type of and location that adjectives can enter a derivation, relying heavily on semantic properties of adjectives themselves. It is not clear how these accounts explain the fact that some adjectives can appear both prenominally and postnominally, though, in line with cartographic approaches that postulate hierarchical functional projections (Scott, 2002; Laenzlinger, 2005), Cinque argues that there is some sort of semantic difference, regardless. 169

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As Fábregas (2017, p. 12) explains, much debate exists regarding ordering restrictions. Generally, the approaches can be thought of as forming an adjective-ordering continuum from more to less fixed. Cinque’s (2010) unified base approach, also known as the ‘roll-up’ account, constitutes the most fixed of the three approaches described here, while the intersective > nonintersective approach popularized by Kamp and Partee (1995) and Demonte (1999a, b) constitutes intermediary ground, and Sánchez’s free ordering approach allows for the most flexible adjective ordering. Cinque’s unified base approach posits that adjectives are ordered in the same hierarchical fashion across languages with ‘direct’ modifiers merging lower than ‘indirect’ modifiers. Direct adjectives are those “with the readings individual-level, nonrestrictive, modal, nonintersective, absolute, specificity-inducing, evaluative, and NP dependent” (Cinque, 2010, p. 22), while the latter are reduced relative clauses. One clear advantage of the unified base approach is that it provides one unified structure for all languages, while explaining the so-called mirrorimage order of English and Spanish, for example. Nonetheless, it cannot capture the relative freedom of adjective order in both prenominal and postnominal positions given its fixed hierarchical ordering. The intermediary intersective > non-intersective approach (Demonte, 1999a, b; Kamp & Partee, 1995) also proposes a hierarchical organization of adjectives according to intersectivity. Intersective adjectives, such as color adjectives, are organized closer to the noun than non-intersective adjectives, such as intensional adjectives, and adjectives whose interpretation depends on context (e.g. a big ant differs from a big house). Although similar to the unified base approach in that it divides adjectives into two general categories, it does allow for more flexible word order, better capturing the Spanish data (minimally. Lastly, the free ordering approach (Sánchez, 1996, 2020) demonstrates that postnominal adjective ordering is less fixed than previous approaches allow. Importantly, each account relies on N-movement, with the unified base approach and the free ordering approach allowing for the N to raise more than once, carrying adjectives with it (‘roll-up’ in Cinque’s terminology, apilamiento ‘piling up’ in Sánchez’ terminology and ‘snowball movement’ in Shlonksy (2004)).

13.2.2 Semantics Adjectives can restrict the entities denoted by the DP to which they belong. In languages like English where adjectives are largely prenominal, the adjectival position has no bearing on the restrictive/nonrestrictive interpretation of the noun (12).4 The availability of both interpretations in the same linear order is logical given that all languages have the same capacity for expression. (12) my playful cat a. b.

Restrictive: I have more than one cat, but refer to the one that is playful Non-restrictive: I have one cat, and it is playful

Though there exist two broad categories of semantic proposals describing interpretation for languages where the default position is postnominal, the fact remains that, for these languages, adjective position does bear on interpretation as in (13) and (14). (13) mi gata jugetona my cat playful a. b.

Restrictive: I have more than one cat, but refer to the one that is playful Non-restrictive: I have one cat, and it is playful

170

Adjective placement (14) mi jugetona gata my playful cat a. b.

Restrictive: not available Non-restrictive: I have one cat, and it is playful

The difference between the approaches, which have been coined complementary approaches (e.g. Alexiadou, 2001; Bernstein, 1993; Demonte, 2008; Kim, 1997;5 Ticio, 2010) and postnominal ambiguity approaches (e.g. Cinque, 2010; Fábregás, 2017), is which interpretations are available. As the terms imply, complementary approaches posit that for alternating adjectives, each position corresponds to one interpretation: prenominal adjectives are non-restrictive while postnominal adjectives are restrictive. Postnominal ambiguity approaches differ in that postnominal adjectives are said to allow restrictive and non-restrictive readings (13). Empirical evidence from native speaker groups of SLA studies supports the postnominal ambiguity approach (see Anderson, 2007, 2008; Judy, 2021; Judy et al., 2008; Pettibone et al., 2021).

13.2.3  Adjective placement in second language acquisition Adjective placement has lent itself to the exploration of different questions pertaining to SLA, third language acquisition, heritage speakers and bilingualism, perhaps because it involves syntax, semantics, and morphology. Of course, the syntactic theory assumed and the research questions posed by SLA researchers determine the focus and design of SLA experiments. A persisting question in SLA regards the oft-observable differences in outcome, particularly in terms of productive ability, between L1 and L2 acquisition. Framed in terms of functional features, adjective placement—which has been claimed to be a product of N-movement due to the presence of strong functional features in Romance languages, among others—has provided solid grounds for testing hypotheses such as the Minimal Trees Hypothesis (Vainikka & Young-Sholten, 1994), the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (Hawkins & Chan, 1997), the Local Impairment Hypothesis (Beck, 1998; Eubank, 1993/1994), hypotheses that isolate the L2er’s difficulty with uninterpretable features only (Franceschina, 2001; Hawkins & Hattori, 2006; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007; Tsimpli & Mastropavlou, 2008) as well as their counterpart Full Transfer/Full Access (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996). While the specifics of non-convergence hypotheses differ, a common denominator is their focus on representational differences among the grammars of L1 and L2 acquisition. In contrast, the Full Transfer/Full Access model claims that L2ers transfer their L1 grammar entirely and maintain access to Universal Grammar. As is described in Section 13.5, results from L2 studies examining L2ers’ ability to acquire functional features not instantiated in their L1 largely demonstrate that it is possible in post-pubescent learners, supporting the Full Transfer/Full Access model (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996).

13.3  Methods used to examine adjective placement in SLA 13.3.1  Syntactic tasks Two main types of tasks examining the syntax of adjective placement have been utilized in SLA studies: production tasks and grammaticality judgment (correction) tasks. Several early studies employed production tasks, both oral (Bruhn de Garavito & White, 2002; Granfeldt, 2000; Parodi et al., 2004) and written (Gess & Herschensohn, 2001). Alotaibi and Alotaibi (2017) also employed a written task in which participants ordered prenominal adjectives. Example (15) provides the instructions and a sample token from Gess and Herschensohn’s (p. 116) written sentence completion task: 171

Tiffany Judy (15) Sentence Completion Task Please write out complete sentences using as the base the sentence beginning that is already provided (e.g. “Jean boit…” in the first group). Then complete the sentences by choosing an item and a descriptor (e.g. “drinks” and “temperatures” in the first group) from the two rows provided in bold. Choose one word from each row (in the order given), and use each item only once. Finally, you will need to add any necessary changes such as agreement, articles, etc. Here’s an example in English: John is drinking an icy coke. In this first group of sentences put together the information in the two rows (temperature, drinks) to tell what Jean chooses to accompany his food. Temperature: froid, chaud, tiède, frais, chambré Drinks: bière, chocolat, café, eau, vin Jean boit…

Another common syntactic task is the grammaticality judgment task (Androutsopoulou et al., 2008; Judy, 2021; Judy et al., 2008; Pettibone et al., 2021; Rothman et al., 2009). For example, Androutsopoulou et al. (2008, pp. 6–7) examined prenominal adjectives in L1 French/L2 Spanish learners; tokens were divided across grammatical prenominal evaluative adjectives (16), grammatical prenominal non-evaluative high adjectives (17) and ungrammatical prenominal non-evaluative low adjectives (18). For both grammatical prenominal conditions, some tokens were grammatical in French and some were ungrammatical. All tokens in the last condition were ungrammatical in both languages. Participants rated the sentences from one to four, where one meant “totally unacceptable” and four meant “totally acceptable” (p. 7). (16)

Hay una ligera diferencia entre estas dos mesas. there is a slight difference between these two tables “There’s a slight difference between these two tables.”

(17)

Sólo te quiero hacer una simple pregunta. only you (I) want make a simple question “I only want to ask you a simple question.”

(18)

Encontramos una redonda mesa muy antigua en el sótano. (we) found a round table very old in   the basement “We found a very old round table in the basement.”

Some studies employing a grammaticality judgment task also instructed participants to correct tokens they deemed ungrammatical to better ascertain if participants had converged on the property in question, and were not rating the token as ungrammatical/unacceptable for extraneous reasons (Judy, 2021; Judy et al., 2008; Rothman et al., 2009).

13.3.2  Semantic tasks A wider variety of tasks examining L2ers’ convergence on adjectival interpretation have been employed. For example, work by Anderson (2001, 2007a, 2008) and later, Pettibone et al. (2021), 172

Adjective placement

employed an acceptability task. To test L1 English/L2 French learners’ knowledge of intersectivity as a product of adjective position, Anderson (2008) employed a two-part acceptability judgment task where participants first read a context strongly favoring either an intersective or non-intersective interpretation in the participants’ L1 and then were asked to judge tokens in French as either “fine”, “odd”, or “cannot decide” (19): (19) Non-intersective context

Madame Blin is getting quite old. Before she dies, she’d like her grandchildren to have some of her favorite possessions. There is a painting of her when she was young, a rug she bought on a vacation to North Africa, and an imitation diamond—worth only about 100F (= $15)—that she wore in the many community theater productions she took part in. She gives the painting and rug to her grandchildren, but the piece of jewelry (= bijou) has so much sentimental value that she decides to keep (= garder) it until her death. a.

Madame Blin va garder son cher bijou jusqu’à sa mort. (Task 1) “Mrs. Blin is going to keep her beloved jewel until her death.”

b.

%Madame Blin va garder son bijou cher jusqu’à sa mort. (Task 2) “Mrs. Blin is going to keep her jewel beloved until her death.”

Although the adjectives tested by Anderson appear to all be of the ‘meaning-changing’ type, those employed in the acceptability judgment task of Pettibone et al. (2021) are strictly postnominal and, therefore, these tokens are more akin to the grammaticality judgment tasks described above as interpretation is not tapped. Like work by Anderson, the semantic interpretation tasks of Guijarro-Fuentes et al. (2009), Judy (2021) and Rothman et al. (2009) examined L2ers’ knowledge of ‘meaning-changing’ adjectives, which are generally taught to learners, such as pobre ‘pitiful vs. penniless’. Participants were asked to read short tokens and select the correct interpretation from two choices (20): (20)

a. b.

Su vecino es un pobre hombre. Their neighbor is a poor man “Their neighbor is a pitiful man.” The man is unfortunate. #The man is not wealthy.

The semantic interpretation task in Rothman et al. (2010) manipulated the restrictive vs. non-restrictive nature of alternating qualifying adjectives as opposed to ‘meaning-changing’ adjectives (21): (21)

a. b.

Los valientes incas resistieron a los conquistadores. The brave Incans resisted to the conquerors “The brave Incans resisted the conquerors.”

#Only the brave Incans (i.e., not the cowardly ones) resisted the conquerors. The Incans, who are all brave, resisted the conquerors.

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Tiffany Judy

Finally, the context-based collocation tasks of (Guijarro-Fuentes et al., 2009; Judy, 2021; Judy et al., 2008; Rothman et al., 2010) tapped knowledge of restrictive vs. non-restrictive readings of noun phrases (NPs) according to adjective placement. In this sense, this task is similar to the acceptability tasks employed by Anderson; nonetheless, they differ in that the context-based collocation tasks require participants to place the adjective in one of two blanks according to the context (22): (22) Restrictive context (postnominal) Algunos padres son más involucrados en la vida de sus hijos que otros. Los _____________ padres _____________ juegan con sus hijos por la noche antes de que se duerman. (cariñosos) “Some parents are more involved in the lives of their children than others. The ____________ parents ______________ play with their kids at night before bedtime.” (affectionate)

The preference task of Pettibone et al. (2021) had the same aim as the context-based collocation tasks of previous studies, but offered both options (prenominal and postnominal) instead of requiring participants to fill in a blank.

13.4  Studies from other populations Before examining adjective placement research in SLA, it merits mention that this property has been examined in other populations as well, namely in child bilinguals, adult heritage speakers, and third language learners (L3ers). Relevant child bilingual and heritage speaker studies examine adjective placement in a Romance language, whereas the L3 studies examine adjective placement in English. By and large, the child bilingual studies reported crosslinguistic influence from the dominant language. Interesting findings from this body of research include the fact that the English–Spanish bilinguals of Cuza and Pérez-Tattam (2016) sometimes produced accurate gender agreement with incorrect adjective placement in the same NP, pointing to influence from English. García Sánchez (2015) found similar results among German–Spanish bilinguals, but that sociolinguistic factors, such as home language, proficiency level in Spanish of the German-speaking caretaker, and language used by the Spanish-speaking caretaker affected bilingual production, with a positive correlation between accuracy and more exposure to Spanish. In a similar population, Lleó et al. (2013) reported correction of crosslinguistic influence from German via creation and implementation of targeted teaching materials. Finally, Rizzi et al. (2013) reported the curious finding of more ungrammatical prenominal adjectives in bilingual corpora data in French and Italian than in German or Spanish, regardless of the language pairing or dominance of the two languages spoken by the bilingual child. This led the authors to claim that there is no evidence of “cross-linguistic influence in adjective placement in Romance or German” (p. 144), contrary to the aforementioned studies. Data from adult heritage speakers is mixed. On one hand, both Camacho (2018) and Judy (2018) report knowledge of restrictive vs. non-restrictive adjective interpretation in English–Spanish and Polish–Spanish heritage speakers, respectively. Nonetheless, the heritage speakers of Judy (2018) accepted statistically significantly more postnominal intensional adjectives, which are ungrammatical in both Polish and Spanish. Similarly, while the German–Italian heritage speakers of Kupisch (2014) produced virtually no errors in naturalistic speech, the German-dominant bilinguals chose the incorrect postnominal adjective placement statistically significantly more often than the Italiandominant speakers in the acceptability task. Both results can be explained by overcorrection, as opposed to crosslinguistic influence. Finally, L3 studies broaden the language pairings under consideration. Fallah and Jabbari (2018) tested current L3 models in a scalar grammaticality judgment task and an element rearrangement 174

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task in three participant groups: L1 Mazandarani/L2 Persian/L3 English speakers dominant in Mazandarani, L1 Mazandarani/L2 Persian/L3 English speakers dominant in Persian and L1 Persian/ L2 Mazandarani/L3 English speakers dominant in Persian. The authors reported that the dominant language serves as the main source of transfer, ruling out the L3 models examined therein, and in line with models of piecemeal transfer (Slabakova, 2017; Westergaard et al., 2017; Westergaard, 2021). Similarly, Ghezlou et al. (2018) tested current L3 models in L1 Azeri/L2 Persian/L3 English learners and L1 Persian/L2 English learners. Both adjective placement and ordering were examined via a grammaticality judgment task. The authors reported that Persian affected adjective placement, but none of the L3 models could explain the ordering results.

13.5  Critical review of SLA studies As with the studies described above, most SLA studies on adjective placement include a Romance language, with four known exceptions: Stringer (2013), Endo, Shibuya and Hirakawa (2016), Hirakawa, Shibuya and Endo (2019) and Alotaibi and Alotaibi (2017). The first of these studies examined English adjective order in L1 Arabic, Korean and Chinese speakers, respectively, via an audio/ visual forced-choice preference task. Stringer reported a positive correlation between accuracy and proficiency, no L1 transfer effects, and that learners do better on the universal property of gradable > non-gradable adjectives than on distinctions beyond this hierarchy. Using an audio/visual preference task, Endo and colleagues examined the effects of explicit instruction, study abroad (2016; see also Hirakawa et al., 2019) and input flooding (Hirakawa et al., 2019) on native Japanese speakers’ ability to converge on adjective-ordering restrictions in English. Results from elementary to intermediate proficiency participants revealed that explicit instruction was the most helpful intervention for the learners, but that differences between the learner and native speaker groups remained. Alotaibi and Alotaibi (2017) examined L1 Arabic/L2 English learners’ ability to correctly order multiple adjectives in English. Arabic, like Romance languages, has both prenominal and postnominal adjectives. Similar to the Japanese learners, Alotaibi and Alotaibi report that the L1 Arabic speakers do not converge on English prenominal adjective ordering, but that accuracy positively correlates with proficiency. Earlier studies on adjective placement were framed both by the dominant syntactic theory of the time, Principles and Parameters, (Chomsky, 1981, 1986; Chomsky & Lasnik, 1993) and the question of what explains the observable differences between L1 and L2 acquisition. Generally speaking, languages were said to differ in terms of functional categories, features, and associated feature strengths. The DP Hypothesis (Abney, 1987) and subsequent, more fine-grained analyses (Bernstein, 1993; Carstens, 1991; Picallo, 1991; Ritter, 1993 among others) outlined the parallel nature of NPs and sentences. The DP Hypothesis claimed that determiners (not nouns) constitute the head of the functional projection Determiner Phrase (DP), while subsequent works proposed additional functional categories between the DP and the NP. Relevant to adjective position in Romance languages, specifically, are Number Phrase (NumP) and Word Marker Phrase (WMP), where number and gender functional features are checked, valued and deleted, respectively. With this understanding of DP syntax, early studies (Androutsopoulou et al., 2008; Anderson, 2001; Bruhn de Garavito & White, 2002; Gess & Herschensohn, 2001; Granfeldt, 2000; Parodi et al., 2004) examined gender and number agreement in L2 acquisition, partly as a proxy for convergence on adjective placement, asking whether post-pubescent learners could acquire functional categories and their associated features and features strengths in the L2. These studies tested predictions of various accounts claiming representational differences between L1 and L2 acquisition (Beck, 1998; Eubank, 1993/1994; Franceschina, 2001; Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Hawkins & Hattori, 2006; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007; Tsimpli & Mastropavlou, 2008; Vainikka & Young-Sholten, 1994). For example, Bruhn de Garavito and White (2002, p. 164) made specific reference to proposals that claim that “learners are restricted to L1 categories, features or feature values” (à la Hawkins & Chan, 1997) and that “IL [interlanguage] 175

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representations reflect properties of neither the L1 nor the L2, nor natural language in general, and are permanently impaired” (à la Beck, 1998; Eubank, 1993/1994). While some agreement errors between nouns and their determiners and adjectives and a very low percentage of ungrammatical adjective order were produced by the L1 French/L2 Spanish learners examined therein, Bruhn de Garavito and White took the whole of the oral production data as indicative of L2ers’ continued ability to acquire new functional features. Similar findings were obtained for the L1 English/L2 French learners of Gess and Herschensohn (2001) via a written sentence production task. Parodi et al. (2004) provided further evidence of Full Transfer/Full Access in that the L1 Korean and L1 Turkish learners performed better on adjective placement during informal spoken interviews than the L1 Romance learners of L2 German purportedly because Korean, Turkish and German all have prenominal adjectives, while Romance languages have both prenominal and postnominal adjectives. Two rounds of interviews were conducted approximately 18-24 months apart, allowing the authors to examine development over time: data revealed a positive correlation between experience/proficiency and accurate adjective placement in that the first round of interviews with L1 Romance speakers contained more postnominal adjectives than the second round. Despite the fact that a number of earlier studies pointed to L2ers’ ability to converge on syntactic properties not instantiated in their L1s, they relied heavily on production data (in most cases oral), which is not necessarily representative of a speaker’s implicit linguistic knowledge of rules and constraints. Studies by Anderson (2001, 2007a, 2008) proposed that examining syntax alone provided less reliable insight into the underlying grammar of L2ers than examining related syntax–semantic knowledge, where interpretation serves as a proxy for syntactic knowledge. Anderson’s basic claim is that examples of agreement and word order are abundantly available in the input as well as explicitly taught to L2ers of French (2007b). Therefore, even where we see supposed convergence on L2 values, the L2ers may simply be relying on explicit learning to produce the correct nominal agreement as well as the correct word order. Anderson argued that the interpretive differences resulting from adjective position constitute a poverty-of-the-stimulus phenomenon since interpretation is neither inducible from the surface-level word order nor from textbook explanations.6 As such, the examination of interpretive differences was offered as a more accurate way of testing underlying syntax. Subsequent L2 studies have largely incorporated tasks tapping both syntactic and syntax–semantic knowledge within the nominal domain (Anderson, 2008; Judy, 2021; Judy et al., 2008; Pettibone et al., 2021; Rothman et al., 2009, 2010). For example, Judy et al. (2008) examined intermediate and advanced L1 English/L2 Spanish learners’ knowledge of grammatical gender and adjective placement across two tasks, one syntactic and one semantic. As in previous studies that demonstrated imperfect performance on gender agreement (e.g. Bruhn de Garavito & White, 2002; Gess & Herschenson, 2001) or number agreement (Parodi et al., 2004), some L2ers of Judy et al. accepted more noun-adjective and determinernoun sequences with gender mismatches than the control group. Furthermore, some individual L2ers accepted ungrammatical adjective placement in cases where adjectives are obligatorily prenominal or obligatorily postnominal. Still, the inclusion of a context-based collocation task allowed the researchers to explore beyond surface-level grammar. Results from the semantic task showed that L2ers can converge on native-like interpretations, especially at the advanced proficiency level, demonstrating the ability to acquire new functional features and a developmental process. Similar results were found in Rothman et al. (2010) who also argued that knowledge of the restrictive/non-restrictive interpretive differences associated with adjective placement are not inducible from the input alone, nor are they taught to classroom learners of Spanish (see also Anderson, 2007b). In line with the findings of Parodi et al. (2004) and Androutsopoulou et al. (2008), which found transfer effects, GuijarroFuentes et al. (2009) and Rothman et al. (2009) also reported earlier convergence on interpretive constraints based on adjective position for the L1 Italian L2ers tested therein as compared to the L1 Germanic L2ers. 176

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Along with Stringer (2013) and Alotaibi and Alotaibi (2017), Pettibone et al. (2021) is the only other known study to examine the ordering of two-adjective sequences. The authors claim that twoadjective sequences in Spanish “are rare in the input, not typically taught explicitly, and have a different word order that cannot be [partially] derived from the L1 subgrammar”, in this case English (p. 1). The experimental methodology included two tasks, one which examined the syntax of two-adjective sequences and the other examining the restrictive/non-restrictive interpretive differences in a task modeled after Rothman et al. (2010). The results of each task produced important findings. First, the authors report that both the control and experimental groups prefer adjectives in postnominal position despite tokens that strongly favor a restrictive interpretation. These results are in line with previous SLA studies (Anderson, 2007, 2008; Judy, 2021; Judy et al., 2008) and provide evidence for the postnominal ambiguity approaches (see for example Cinque, 2010; Fábregás, 2017) and against the complementary approaches (see for example Bernstein, 1993; Demonte, 2008). Second, and differently from Alotaibi and Alotaibi (2017), both the control and experimental groups preferred the ‘mirror-image’ order or two-adjective sequences (as compared to the English word order of the same two-adjective sequences). This latter result led the authors to conclude that it is possible for learners to converge on a grammar that differs from their L1. The second study is Judy (2021) which examined adjective placement and interpretation in L1 Polish classroom learners of Spanish. While the methodological design is based on a combination of the tasks employed in Judy et al. (2008) and Guijarro-Fuentes et al. (2009) and previous studies have examined microvariation in L1 French/L2 Spanish learners (Androutsopoulou et al., 2008; Bruhn de Garavito & White, 2002; Scarano, 2005), the inclusion of Polish learners of Spanish allows for analysis of subtle differences between two typologically dissimilar languages. As with Androutsopoulou et al. (2008), Judy (2021) took into account adjective placement differences according to adjective type between the L1 and L2 of the participants. Specifically, intensional, classifying and qualifying adjectives were examined separately. As in Judy (2018), the results revealed native-like interpretations for the two semantic tasks, but a statistically significantly difference between the control and experimental groups on the syntactic task. Judy attributed this finding to pedagogical instruction (Anderson, 2007b since Polish speakers are explicitly taught that adjectives are largely postnominal in Spanish. Furthermore, intensional adjectives are prenominal in both Polish and Spanish, so L1 transfer cannot be the source of their acceptance of ungrammatical postnominal intensional adjectives in Spanish (Judy, 2018; Kupisch, 2014). Thus, while largely limited to the examination of adjective placement in Romance languages, the existent body of research on adjectives has demonstrated via syntactic and semantic knowledge that L2ers can acquire properties not instantiated in the L1. Finally, some studies point to effects of explicit instruction as well as offer data that help clarify current syntactic and semantic accounts of adjectives crosslinguistically.

13.6  Future research Future research on adjective placement in SLA can contribute to the substantial foundation laid by the aforementioned syntactic and semantic analyses, as well as the explanatory depth and breadth of our knowledge of SLA in this domain. Future experimental research may also help to tease apart competing syntactic and semantic analyses as described in Pettibone et al. (2021). Despite the fact that, by and large, SLA studies come to the same conclusion regardless of task type or language pairing, several methodological components may be improved in future studies. For example, Pettibone et al. (2021) point out that most previous experimental designs and analyses take the complementary approach (e.g. Judy, 2021; Rothman et al., 2010) where alternating qualifying adjectives are assumed to have distinct readings: prenominal are non-restrictive, whereas postnominal are restrictive. Nonetheless, data from these studies, and that of Pettibone et al., demonstrates that postnominal adjectives allow both restrictive and non-restrictive interpretations. Future research should also apply more rigorous 177

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standards in terms of task design. For example, careful consideration of instructions is necessary: in Gess and Herschensohn’s sentence completion task (14), the instructions explicitly state that participants should complete the sentence by “Choos[ing] one word from each row (in the order given),” which precludes a reliable analysis of adjective placement since participants are instructed to use the order provided. The participants of Anderson (2008) read contexts in their L1, but were asked to judge target sentences in L2 French; the presence of prenominal adjectives in the English context may have affected their evaluation of prenominal and postnominal adjectives in French. Greater care is also needed in the creation and distribution of tokens: at least one token from the grammaticality judgment task in Androutsopoulou et al. (2008) contained both a prenominal and a postnominal adjective (17) obscuring the purpose of the token. The tokens in the semantic interpretation task of Guijarro-Fuentes et al. (2009), Judy (2021) and Rothman et al. (2009) were not counterbalanced across different versions of the task; therefore, participants only saw each alternating adjective in one position. Examining their interpretation in both positions would provide more robust knowledge of participants’ grammar. Furthermore, the adjectives examined in the semantic interpretation tasks were of the ‘meaningchanging’ type, which are sometimes explicitly taught to classroom learners. Rothman et al. (2010) provided an improved methodological design in both respects as it focused exclusively on non-meaning-changing adjectives and used minimal pairs across the two experimental tasks. Other variables that remain to be examined in SLA research include the effect of syllabic weight (File-Muriel, 2006), lexical frequency (Kanwit & Terán, 2020) and register (Centeno-Pulido, 2012; File-Muriel, 2006; Hoff, 2014). Ideally, these improvements and incorporated variables would be applied to psycholinguistic measures (Pablos et al., 2019) to better understand L2ers’ processing of adjective placement as well as in studies with varied language pairings (Alotaibi & Alotaibi, 2017; Granfeldt, 2000; Judy, 2021). Doing so will allow researchers to determine with greater certainty what factors affect L2ers’ capacity to converge on adjective placement. Near-replication studies that include different proficiency levels, language pairings or improved methodologies—including twoadjective sequences (Alotaibi & Alotaibi, 2017; Pettibone et al., 2021), will also shed light on previous studies, supporting or negating their findings.

Notes 1 Alexiadou et al. (2007), Ticio (2010) and Fábregas (2017) provide detailed overviews of other features distinguishing syntactic proposals, including whether adjectives are heads or phrases, and whether adjectives are reduced relative clauses. Dixon (2004) addresses the debate on adjectives as a universal category. 2 Only postnominal adjectives allow NP ellipsis and partial cliticization in Spanish (select examples from Ticio (2010, p. 143 and p. 145) follow): (43) a. *Ayer vi a la verdadera terrorista y a la supuesta [e] yesterday (I)saw to the true terrorist and to the alleged [e] ‘Yesterday, I saw the true terrorist and the alleged one’ b. Ayer vi aquella casa azul y esta [e] verde yesterday (I)saw that house blue and this [e] green ‘Yesterday, I saw that blue house and this green one’ 3

 (46) a. Compramos los libros rojos y tú compraste los libros azules (we)bought the books red and you bought the books blue ‘We bought the red books and you bought the blue books’ b. Compramos los libros rojos y tú los compraste e azules (we)bought the books red and you CL bought e blue ‘We bought the red books and you bought the blue ones’ c. Compramos los verdaderos manuscritos y tú compraste los supuestos manuscritos (we)bought the true manuscripts and you bought the alleged manuscripts ‘We bought the true manuscripts and you bought alleged manuscripts’ d. *Compramos los verdaderos manuscritos y tú los compraste supuestos e

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we-bought the true manuscripts and you CL bought alleged e ‘We bought the true manuscripts and you bought alleged ones’

4 Still, it does affect other interpretations: ‘the present researchers’ vs. ‘the researchers present’ (Cinque, 2010, p. 18). 5 Kim (1997) applies to Korean and Japanese, both of which allow for both adjective positions. 6 Except for the ‘meaning-changing’ adjectives such as prenominal pobre ‘pitiful’ and postnominal pobre ‘penniless’, the restrictive/non-restrictive interpretations of adjectives are not taught in L2 classrooms to the best of our knowledge.

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An assessment of some current proposals. Second Language Research, 17, 213–147. García Sánchez, I. (2015). Orden de palabras alemán en el español de bilingües simultáneos en estructuras nombre+adjetivo. In A. M. Fernández Ammann, A. Kropp, & J. Múller-Lancé (Eds.), Herkunftsbedingte Mehrsprachigkeit im Unterricht der romanischen Sprachen (pp. 43–68). Frank & Timme. Gess, R., & Herschensohn, J. (2001). Shifting the DP parameter: A study of Anglophone French L2ers. In J. Camps & C. R. Wiltshire (Eds.), Romance syntax, semantics and L2 acquisition (pp. 105–120). Benjamins. Ghezlou, M., Koosha, M., & Lofti, A. R. (2018). Cross-linguistic Influence in the L3 acquisition of English adjective Properties by Azeri-Persian bilinguals. International Journal of Instruction, 12(1), 1299–1318. Granfeldt, J. (2000). The acquisition of the determiner phrase in bilingual and second language French. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3, 263–280. Guijarro-Fuentes, P., Judy, T., & Rothman, J. (2009). On transfer, proficiency and cross-individual/aggregate SLA differences: Examining adjectival semantics in L2 Spanish. In A. G. Bennati (Ed.), Issues in L2 proficiency (pp. 233–253). Continuum. Hawkins, R., & Chan, C. (1997). The partial accessibility of Universal Grammar in second language acquisition: The failed functional features hypothesis. Second Language Research, 13, 187–226. Hawkins, R., & Hattori, H. (2006). Interpretation of English multiple wh -questions by Japanese speakers: A missing uninterpretable feature account. Second Language Research, 22, 269–301. Hirakawa, M., Shibuya, M., & Endo, M. (2019). Explicit instruction, input flood or study abroad: Which helps Japanese learners of English acquire adjective ordering? Language Teaching Research, 23(2), 158–178. Hoff, M. (2014). Adjective placement in three modes of Spanish: The role of syllabic weight in novels, presidential speeches, and spontaneous speech. Indiana University Linguistics Club Working Paper. 14. https:// www​.indiana​.edu/ Judy, T. (2018). The syntax-semantics of adjectival distribution in adult Polish-Spanish childhood bilinguals. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(2), 367–394. Judy, T. (2021). Effects of adjective type on position and interpretation in L1 Polish classroom learners of Spanish. Languages, 6(3), 153. Judy, T., Guijarro-Fuentes, P., & Rothman, J. (2008). Adult accessibility to L2 representational features: Evidence from the Spanish DP. In M. Bowles, R. Foote, S. Perpiñán, & R. Bhatt (Eds.), Selected proceedings of second language research forum 2007 (pp. 1–21). Cascadilla Press. Kamp, H., & Partee, B. (1995). Prototype theory and compositionality. Cognition, 57, 129–191. Kanwit, M., & Terán, V. (2020). Ideas buenas o buenas ideas: Phonological, semantic and frequency effects on variable adjective ordering in Rioplatense Spanish. Languages, 5, 65. Kim, Y.-K. (1997). Agreement phrases in DP. 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Adjective placement Lamarche, J. (1991). Problems for N-movement to Num. Probus, 3, 215–236. Lleó, C., Ulloa Saceda, M., & García Sánchez, I. (2013). Promoting the weak language of German-Spanish bilingual children living in Germany. In K. Bührig & B. Meyer (Eds.), Transfering linguistic know-how into practice: Perspectivas y resultados—Perspektiven und Ergebrisse—Perspectives and results (pp. 95–116). Benjamins. Pablos, L., Parafita Couto, M. C., Boutonnet, B., de Jong, A., Perquin, M., de Haan, A., & Schiller, N. (2019). Adjective-noun order in Papiamento-Dutch code-switching. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 9(4–5), 710–735. Parodi, T., Schwartz, B., & Clahsen, H. (2004). On the L2 acquisition of the morphosyntax of German nominals. Linguistics, 4, 669–705. Pettibone, E., Pérez-Leroux, A. T., & Klassen, G. (2021). Old grammars new (?) scope: Adjective Placement in native and non-native Spanish. Languages, 6, 22. https://doi​.org​/10​.3390​/languages6010022 Picallo, M. C. (1991). Nominals and nominalization in Catalan. Probus, 3, 279–316. Prado, M. (1980). The semantics of adjective position in Spanish. Selecta, 9, 1–8. Ritter, E. (1993). Where is gender? Linguistic Inquiry, 24, 795–803. Rizzi, S., Arnaus Gil, L., Repetto, V., Geveler, J., & Müller, N. (2013). Adjective placement in bilingual RomanceGerman and Romance-Romance children. Studia Linguistica, 67(1), 123–147. Rothman, J., Guijarro-Fuentes, P., Iverson, M., & Judy, T. (2009). Noun-raising and adjectival interpretative reflexes in the L2 Spanish of Germanic and Italian learners. In J. Chandlee, M. Franchini, S. Lord & G.-M. Rheiner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Boston University Conference on language development (pp. 444–455). Cascadilla Press. Rothman, J., Judy, T., Guijarro-Fuentes, P., & Pires, A. (2010). On the (un)ambiguity of adjectival interpretation in L2 Spanish: Informing debates on the mental representation of L2 syntax. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32, 47–77. Sánchez, L. (1996). Syntactic structures in nominals: A comparative study of Southern Quechua and Spanish [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Southern California. Sánchez, L. (2020). Adjetivos atributivos postnominales y estructuras predicativas. Cuadernos de la ALFAL, 12(2), 535–551. Scarano, A. (2005). Agettivi qualificativi nel parlato italiano, francese, portoghese e spagnolo (corpus C-ORALROM). Frequenze e strutture. Copenhagen Studies in Language, 31, 281–294. Schwartz, B., & Sprouse, R. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the Full Transfer/Full Access model. Second Language Research, 12, 40–72. Scott, G.-J. (2002). Stacked adjectival modification and the structure of nominal phrases. In G. Cinque (Ed.), Functional structure in IP and DP (pp. 91–120). Oxford University Press. Shlonsky, U. (2004). The form of Semitic noun phrases. Lingua, 114(12), 1465–1526. Slabakova, R. (2017). The scalpel model of third language acquisition. International Journal of Bilingualism, 21(6), 651–665. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/1367006916655413 Stringer, D. (2013). Modifying the teaching of modifiers: A lesson from Universal Grammar. In M. Whong, K.-H. Gil, & H. Marsden (Eds.), Universal Grammar and the second language classroom (pp. 77–100). Springer. Terker, A. (1985). On Spanish adjective position. Hispania, 68, 502–509. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/342445 Ticio, E. M. (2010). Locality domains in the Spanish DP: Studies in natural language and linguistic theory. Springer. Tsimpli, I. M., & Dimitrakopoulou, M. (2007). The interpretability hypothesis: Evidence from Wh-Interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 23, 215–242. Tsimpli, I. M., & Mastropavlou, M. (2008). Feature interpretability in L2 acquisition and SLI: Greek clitics and determiners. In J. Liceras, H. Zobl, & H. Goodluck (Eds.), The role of formal features in second language acquisition (pp. 142–183). Lawrence Erlbaum. Vainikka, A., & Young-Scholten, M. (1994). Direct access to X-bar theory: Evidence from Korean and Turkish adults learning German. In T. Hoekstra & B. D. Schwartz (Eds.), Language acquisition studies in Generative Grammar: Papers in honor of Kenneth Wexler from the 1991 GLOW Workshops (pp. 265–316). Benjamins. Valois, D. (1991). The internal syntax of DP [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of California, Los Angeles. Westergaard, M., Mitrofanova, N., Mykhaylyk, R., & Rodina, Y. (2017). Crosslinguistic influence in the acquisition of a third language: The Linguistic Proximity Model. International Journal of Bilingualism, 21(6), 666–682. Westergaard, M. (2021). Microvariation in Multilingual Situations: The Importance of Property-by-Property Acquisition. Second Language Research, 37(3), 379–407. DOI: 10.1177/0267658319884116

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14 ARTICLES (In)definiteness Jacee Cho

14.1 Introduction The English articles the and a encode the definiteness distinction. The concept of definiteness includes a number of semantic components, such as familiarity, uniqueness, and presupposition of existence, resulting in different views of definiteness in the semantic literature. In L2 article acquisition studies, definiteness is often operationally defined by unique identifiability (Hawkins, 1978, 1991); that is, a noun phrase (NP) is definite if its referent is uniquely identifiable to both the speaker and the hearer. Definiteness can be established in a number of different ways. For instance, a referent can be uniquely identifiable via previous mention, as in (1) (from Hawkins, 1991, p. 407) or via mutual knowledge, as in (2) (from Lyons, 1999, p. 7). (1) I met a professor yesterday. The professor was drunk. (2) I’ve just been to a wedding. The bride wore blue.

In (1), the NP professor is introduced with the indefinite article a. On the second mention of the NP, the definite article the is used because the referent is uniquely identifiable to both speaker and hearer via previous discourse. In (2), mention of a wedding licenses immediate reference to the bride since there is usually one unique bride at a wedding. In contrast to the definite article, the indefinite article a can pick out one referent from a set, but it cannot be used with a unique referent. This makes a student felicitous in (3) but infelicitous in (4) (from Hawkins, 1991, pp. 418–419). (3) I met some students. A student came to see me after class as well. (4) I met a student. #A student came to see me after class as well.

The article uses described thus far are for non-generic NPs. It must be noted that an NP can be non-generic or generic regardless of its definiteness status. This chapter concerns article use in non-generic contexts only. For articles in generic environments, see Kupisch and Snape (this volume).

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14.2  Theoretical approaches to L2 acquisition of English articles 14.2.1  Discourse features: specific referent (SR) and hearer knowledge (HK) By considering earlier semantic and pragmatic theories of English articles (Christophersen, 1939; Hawkins, 1978), Bickerton (1981) proposed that the use of English articles is determined by the semantic functions of NPs in discourse, which can be categorized based on two binary features: existence in the world, or Specific Reference (±SR); and Hearer Knowledge (±HK). In Bickerton’s framework, specificity is largely equated with de re readings, and lack of specificity is associated with de dicto readings, that is, whether a specific referent exists in the actual world (+SR) versus when there is no specific referent in the actual world (−SR). The two notions of Specific Reference and Hearer Knowledge in combination yield the following four types of NPs.

• Type 1 NPs with [−SR, +HK] are generic NPs that can take the definite, indefinite, or zero article (The/A dog is a friendly animal; Dogs are friendly animals).

• Type 2 NPs with [+SR, +HK] are conventionally or contextually unique referents that require the definite article (I met the President of Korea; I bought a car and a bicycle, and the bicycle was more expensive than the car). • Type 3 NPs with [+SR, −HK] are discourse-new referents (i.e., first-mention in discourse) that require the indefinite or zero article (I bought a car; Bobby spilled milk). • Type 4 NPs with [−SR, −HK] take the indefinite or zero article; these are NPs following copular verbs (John is a student. He became a professor) or NPs in non-veridical contexts (I want to buy a car; He doesn’t read books; If I had a dog, I would name it Bingo).

Whereas traditional research had focused on the accuracy of article use in contexts where articles are obligatory, Bickerton’s framework laid a groundwork for understanding the relationship between L2 learners’ article use and semantic context. Studies examining L2 article acquisition employing Bickerton’s framework are discussed in Section 14.4.1.

14.2.2  The role of semantic universals: the Article Choice Parameter and the Fluctuation Hypothesis Taking into account the L2-English learners’ error patterns reported in the literature, as well as crosslinguistic analyses of article systems within generative linguistics, Ionin (2003) and Ionin et al. (2004) proposed the Fluctuation Hypothesis, which highlights the role of the semantics of specificity in the L2 acquisition of definiteness. It is important to note that Ionin et al.’s (2004) definition of specificity is different from Bickerton’s (1981) definition of specific reference discussed in Section 14.2.1. Whereas Bickerton (1981) defines specific versus nonspecific reference in terms of the (non) existence of the referent in the world, Ionin et al. (2004) defines specificity as noteworthiness (i.e., the speaker’s intent to refer to a unique individual) following Fodor and Sag’s (1982) view of referentiality for indefinites and the analysis of referential use of this-indefinites in English discussed in Prince (1981). According to Ionin et al. (2004), definiteness and specificity are the two semantic universals underlying article choice crosslinguistically. This parametric variation, the Article Choice Parameter, has two settings. In one type of language, the use of articles is based on specificity (e.g., Samoan); in the other types of languages, articles are used to encode definiteness (e.g., English, Spanish). This linguistic situation presents difficulties for learners whose native languages lack articles (e.g., Korean, Russian). Building on the Article Choice Parameter, purportedly a semantic universal, Ionin et al. (2004) proposed the Fluctuation Hypothesis, which predicts that L2 learners with no-article L1s fluctuate between the two settings of the Article Choice Parameter in the process of article acquisition 183

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until the input leads them to set this parameter to the appropriate value for the target language. Unlike earlier frameworks on articles and article acquisition, such as Bickerton’s (1981), the Fluctuation Hypothesis makes concrete predictions for the pattern of errors in L2 article acquisition by speakers whose L1 has no articles. That is, L2-English learners are predicted to make errors by overusing the in indefinite specific contexts and a in definite nonspecific contexts. As discussed in Section 14.4.2, Ionin et al. (2004) and subsequent studies tested the role of semantic universals beyond L1 influence in the L2 acquisition of English articles (Sarko, 2009; Tryzna, 2009).

14.2.3  The syntactic misanalysis account Building on the argument that determiners (e.g., demonstratives) behave syntactically like adjectives in languages without articles (Lyons, 1999; Zlatić, 1997), Trenkic (2007, 2008) proposed the syntactic misanalysis account for L2 article errors. According to this account, L2 speakers whose L1 lacks articles misanalyze articles as adjectives. Adjectives carry lexical, or referential, meanings that provide information about the properties of the entities based on which entities can be identified (e.g., a blue mug vs. a red mug), what Trenkic (2008) calls “objective identifiability.” If L2 learners equate articles with adjectives, they will see no reason to use an article if there is a single blue cup on the table just as there is no reason to use an adjective to describe the only mug on the table because the mug is identifiable to both the speaker and the hearer. In this situation, L2 learners are predicted to omit the and say “*Pass me mug.” A referent can also be objectively identifiable if its name or attributes are familiar (thus identifiable) to the speaker, in which case using the definite article would be inappropriate if the context is indefinite. For example, an L2 speaker might misuse the in “The friend of mine came to see me yesterday” because the speaker knows their friend’s name (thus, identifiable). As discussed in Section 14.4, the predictions of the syntactic misanalysis and the role of objective identifiability are supported by data from L2-English learners whose L1 is Serbian (Trenkic, 2007) and Mandarin Chinese (Trenkic, 2008) L2-English learners.

14.2.4  The role of the L1 in L2 article acquisition: lexical transfer, feature reassembly, and morphological congruency Although some studies have provided varying degrees of evidence for the Fluctuation Hypothesis (Hawkins et al., 2006), numerous studies have reported that many instances of L2 learners’ error patterns in the comprehension or production of English articles cannot be fully explained by the Fluctuation Hypothesis. For instance, Robertson (2000) reported that L1-Chinese L2-English learners overused the demonstratives this and that in contexts where the should be used. Similarly, Kim and Lakshmanan (2009) suggested that L1-Korean L2-English learners use the definite article in contexts where the Korean demonstrative ku ‘that’ is used. An alternative approach to theorizing L2 article acquisition beyond the parametric approach is the effect of L1 knowledge. There are different types of L1 transfer-based theory of L2 article acquisition. In this chapter, I consider three recent theoretical proposals addressing the role of the L1 in the acquisition of L2 articles. The first type of L1-based approach examines the possibility of lexical transfer from the semantics of L1 morphosyntactic elements that are functionally similar to articles, such as demonstratives (e.g., that) for the definite article and numerals (e.g., one) for the indefinite article (Ionin et al., 2012; Ionin et al., 2022; Zhang, 2021). Building on Lardiere’s (2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, the second type of L1-based approach to L2 article acquisition makes predictions based on feature combinations for L2 articles versus feature combinations for demonstratives in the learner’s L1 (Cho, 2017). Under this approach, L2 learners initially transfer the feature bundle for their L1 demonstrative onto the semantics of the definite article, which can predict L2 article-error patterns. Reassembling the L1 feature set for 184

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demonstratives into the L2 feature set for articles is argued to be the main learning task, rather than setting the Article Choice Parameter to the target value. Finally, L1 influence is also considered in processing research on L2 articles. One prominent proposal on L1 influence in the processing of L2-specific morphosyntactic elements is the Morphological Congruency Hypothesis (MCH) (Jiang et al., 2011). Since most L2 article acquisition studies have examined L2 article acquisition by speakers whose L1 lacks articles, the MCH is particularly relevant in understanding L2 article use and comprehension with L2 learners from article-less L1s. In a nutshell, the MCH claims that L2 learners cannot develop fully automatized knowledge of L2 morphosyntactic elements that have no equivalent in their L1. This hypothesis postulates that learnability issues involved in acquiring and using L2-specific functional morphology are directly associated with difficulty in automatically activating grammaticalized L2 meanings during L2 use when the same meaning is not grammaticalized in the L1. For instance, definiteness is grammaticalized in English via articles but not in Korean. Therefore, L1-Korean L2-English learners are expected to have difficulty activating the meaning of definiteness during online comprehension of English articles, which leads to non-targetlike processing of articles. L2 article processing studies that have tested the MCH are discussed in Section 14.4 (Cho, 2022; Ionin et al., 2021; Trenkic et al., 2014).

14.3  Methodological approaches to studying L2 acquisition of articles 14.3.1  Elicited production tasks Generative SLA research employs experimental methods to study a linguistic phenomenon in a maximally controlled environment. To study the production of articles, elicited production tasks, such as forced-choice and elicited imitation tasks, are used more frequently than collections of naturalistic utterances. Although naturalistic utterances are more authentic, language production in naturalistic contexts is influenced by various factors beyond those under investigation. For example, some contexts for article use may be infrequent in production data. For the above-mentioned reasons, a forced-choice task was used in Ionin et al. (2004) to test the Fluctuation Hypothesis by presenting each target sentence missing an article in a dialogue. Participants were asked to choose between a, the, and the zero article, as in (5). (5) Conversation between two police officers

• Police Officer Clark: I haven’t seen you in a long time. You must be very busy. • Police Office Smith: Yes. Did you hear about Miss Sarah Andrews, a famous lawyer who was mur-

dered several weeks ago? We are trying to find (a, the, __) murderer of Miss Andrews; his name is Roger Williams, and he is a well-known criminal.

An elicited imitation task was used in Chrabaszcz and Jiang (2014). In the task, participants saw a picture on the computer screen and a context sentence below the picture (e.g., a picture of a map of Missouri and Illinois showing the Mississippi River between the two states with the context sentence Missouri and Illinois share a border written below the picture). Participants then heard the target sentence, which either correctly or incorrectly described the picture (e.g., The border lies along the Amazon / Mississippi River). The target sentence was also either grammatical or ungrammatical due to article omission (e.g., *The border lies along ø Amazon River). Participants were then asked to evaluate the target sentence by saying “I agree/disagree that…” based on the provided context and then to repeat the target sentence they heard (e.g., I disagree that the border lies along…). Participants were told that they may change the sentence if they do not remember the sentence verbatim. The logic 185

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underlying this type of imitation task is that participants are expected to autocorrect ungrammatical sentences by supplying missing articles if they have the targetlike knowledge of articles.

14.3.2  Judgment tasks: acceptability judgment tasks There are two main types of acceptability judgment tasks (AJTs). The first type of AJT traditionally used in experimental syntax measures grammatical knowledge by asking participants to judge the grammaticality, or grammatical acceptability, of sentences using a binary scale (e.g., Yes/No or Grammatical/Ungrammatical) or a Likert scale (e.g., from 1 to 4, with 1 being unacceptable and 4 being acceptable). This type of AJT can address issues related to article omission. Examples of the first type of AJT from Ionin and Montrul (2010) are in (6a-b); participants were asked to evaluate the acceptability of the second sentence by choosing Yes or No. (6) a.  Mary has a cat. The cat is named Steve.     b.  Louis has a kitten. *Kitten is named Sheila.

The second type of AJT, often referred to as contextualized AJT, assesses L2 speakers’ comprehension of article semantics. This type of AJT targets issues associated with article misuse rather than article omission. In this type of AJT, sentences appear in context (in the form of a story, a picture and its description, etc.). The test sentences are grammatical by themselves, but they may be acceptable or unacceptable in a given context. For example, in Cho (2017), participants rated the acceptability of the second (target) sentence in the context of the first sentence on a four-point Likert scale. Examples from Cho (2017) are in (7). (7) a.  Jackie made a cake for the party. She served the cake with coffee and tea.      b. Kevin ordered a cake from the grocery store. #He went to pick up a cake but it was not ready.

14.3.3  Online processing tasks: online reading/ reaction time and eye-tracking methods An increasing number of generative SLA studies on article acquisition have begun to employ online tasks, such as a self-paced reading task (SPRT) (Cho, 2022; Ionin et al., 2022) or eye-tracking (Ahn, 2021; Trenkic et al., 2014) to investigate real-time processing of L2 articles. The SPRT examines online sensitivity to syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic anomalies during sentence processing. In SPR research, online sensitivity is operationalized as slower reading times (RTs) at or after the point of violation (referred to as the Critical Region, or CR) in ungrammatical/ unacceptable sentences relative to counterpart grammatical/acceptable sentences. In an SPR experiment, sentences are segmented by word or phrase and RTs for each segment (region) are measured in milliseconds. For instance, using the definite article to refer to a previously mentioned referent is more appropriate than using the indefinite article, as in John bought a book. He // gave // the book (vs. #a book) // to his // brother. Thus, RTs for a book will be slower than for the book in the second sentence if L2 learners are sensitive to article misuse. In the SPRT, each (or every other) target sentence is followed by a simple Yes/No comprehension question, which performs two functions: (i) to distract participants and (ii) to identify outliers under the assumption that poor performance on relatively simple comprehension questions indicate lack of attention in general during the experiment session. Although online tasks are gaining popularity in L2 acquisition, some researchers have raised a serious concern about the extent to which processing data gathered from L2 speakers under real-time pressure accurately reflect underlying L2 representations and whether online tasks are appropriate for L2 learners with 186

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low proficiency (see Gass, 2001). Moreover, recent studies on L2 article acquisition have reported variable performance between online and offline tasks (Cho, 2022; Ionin et al., 2021), which raises interesting questions about the nature of L2 knowledge and development. At the same time, variable performance across different types of tasks underscores that a claim about L2 knowledge based on data from only one type of task should be considered with caution. The visual world paradigm (VWP) eye-tracking methodology was employed in Trenkic et al.’s (2014) study examining the real-time processing of L2-English articles by L1-Chinese L2-English speakers. In the experiment, participants heard auditory stimuli describing what was going to happen, like The pirate will put the cube into the / a can, and participants had to click on the location of the described object (the cube). Trenkic et al. manipulated the article type, definite or indefinite (the can or a can), and the object affordances in the picture (one open can vs. two open cans). The definite NP (the can) matches the picture with one open can, whereas the indefinite NP (a can) matches the picture with two open cans. Trenkic et al. predicted that if L2 speakers can process articles in a targetlike manner, then in hearing the can they will be faster in resolving reference in the picture with only one potential referent (one open can) than in the picture with two potential referents (two open cans). Similarly, in hearing a can, L2 speakers would more quickly resolve reference in the scene with two open cans than the scene with only one open can.

14.4  Recent studies on L2 acquisition of articles 14.4.1  Earlier work on L2 article acquisition within Bickerton’s (1981) framework Employing Bickerton’s (1981) framework for the noun-classification system discussed in Section 14.2.1, a number of studies examined the sequence of article acquisition and L2 learners’ use of articles in the four different types of semantic contexts (Huebner, 1983; Master, 1995; Parrish, 1987). These studies showed that L2 learners overuse the zero article and underuse the definite article, suggesting that the definite article is acquired later than the indefinite article. In particular, the most persistent error type even in advanced-level learners was omission of the definite article for culturally unique referents (e.g., the Congress, the Capitol). These findings indicate the interplay of semantic, discourse, and pragmatic (i.e., cultural) factors in article acquisition.

14.4.2  Studies testing the Article Choice Parameter and the Fluctuation Hypothesis As discussed in Section 14.2.2, Ionin et al. (2004) proposed the Article Choice Parameter, according to which articles crosslinguistically encode either definiteness or specificity. Ionin et al. also hypothesized that L2 learners would have access to semantic universals and, therefore, that they would fluctuate between the two semantic options (i.e., definiteness and specificity) available to them via UG in their L2 article choice (the Fluctuation Hypothesis). The Fluctuation Hypothesis predicts that L2-English speakers overuse the in [+definite, −specific] contexts and overuse a in [−definite, +specific] contexts, as illustrated in Table 14.1 (from Ionin et al., 2004, p. 19). These predictions were tested in Ionin et al. (2004) by comparing L1-Korean and L1-Russian speakers’ article-error patterns in L2-English. Participants completed a written forced-choice elicitaTable 14.1  Predictions for article choice in L2 English

+specific −specific

+definite (target: the)

−indefinite (target: a)

correct use of the overuse of a

overuse of the correct use of a

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tion task and a written production task, as well as the Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency. Group results on the forced-choice elicitation task largely supported the Fluctuation Hypothesis, in that learners overused articles in precisely the predicted learning conditions, as illustrated in Table 14.1. However, the individual results presented a more complex picture in which a number of individual participants did not exhibit the expected pattern. In addition, the written production results revealed that learners overused the with specific indefinites but did not overuse a with nonspecific definites. As Ionin et al. (2004) discuss, however, there were arguably few contexts that allowed for nonspecific definites in the production data, making the production error patterns somewhat tentative and inconclusive. Nevertheless, Ionin et al. (2004) showed that L1-Korean and L1-Russian speakers’ L2-English article use can be attributed to semantic universals beyond L1-transfer. Ionin et al. (2008) investigated the interplay between three sources of knowledge—L1-transfer, L2-input, and UG—in the acquisition of English articles by comparing L2-English learners from an L1 with articles (Spanish) versus no articles (Russian). Data collected using a fill-in-the-blank-format elicitation task showed that there were both definiteness and specificity effects on L1-Russian speakers’ English article use across all proficiency levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced), suggesting fluctuation. As for the L1-Spanish speakers, there was a definiteness effect, but no specificity effect, which indicates positive L1 transfer. Ionin et al. (2008) argued that L2-English speakers whose L1 has articles make use of their L1 article semantics, whereas L2-English speakers whose L1 lacks articles rely on semantic universals and L2 input to acquire English articles. To address the issue of the extent to which L1 interplays with fluctuation, numerous studies have compared the L2 acquisition of English articles by adult L2-English learners with different L1 backgrounds, including L1s with articles (Hawkins et al., 2006; Sarko, 2009). For instance, Hawkins et al. (2006) examined L2-English speakers from an L1 with articles (Greek) versus without articles (Japanese) using a written forced-choice elicitation task similar to the one used in Ionin et al. (2004). The Greek speaker group performed like native English speaker controls, suggesting positive L1 transfer. The Japanese speaker participants as a group showed fluctuation patterns similar to the Korean and Russian groups in Ionin et al.’s (2004) study. However, there was a large variability among the Japanese speaker participants. Problematizing the construction-specific Article Choice Parameter approach, Hawkins et al. (2006) argued that the variable patterns in the Japanesespeaking L2-English learners can be better explained by feature-based accounts within the minimalist approach. Hawkins et al.’s alternative proposal is that L2 speakers have access to the feature inventory of Universal Grammar rather than construction-specific parameters and that L2 speakers may have nontargetlike feature combinations. Assembling particular features (e.g., definite, specific, singular) can be influenced by the learner’s L1. Tryzna (2009) challenged the Article Choice Parameter and the Fluctuation Hypothesis based on a field study that revealed that Samoan articles le and se do not encode the specificity distinction proposed by Lyons (1999) and Ionin et al. (2004). Rather, the use of se is restricted to nonspecific indefinite contexts, whereas le can be used in nonspecific definite as well as specific definite and specific indefinite contexts. By proposing the reduced Article Choice Parameter based on the fieldstudy results, Tryzna tested L2-English learners with article-less L1s, Polish and Mandarin Chinese. Tryzna observed fluctuation only in a subset of the L1-Chinese speaker participants with an advanced L2-English proficiency level. More important, variability rather than fluctuation was found among L1-Polish speakers with intermediate and advanced levels of L2-Enlish proficiency. Arguing against the Fluctuation Hypothesis, Tryzna (2009) claimed that L2 English article use by article-less L1 speakers can be better characterized as optionality across all contexts. Tryzna also added that L2 learners acquire the quantificational use of the indefinite article before its referential use. Problematizing the notion of specificity as noteworthiness that underlies the Fluctuation Hypothesis, Trenkic (2007, 2008) argues that L2 article choice can be better predicted by the effect of objective identifiability of referents than by specificity because articles are misanalyzed as adjec188

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tives by speakers whose L1 lacks articles. In a partial replication of Ionin et al. (2004), Trenkic (2008) tested L1-Mandarin Chinese speakers living in the United Kingdom. To test the claim that L2 speakers’ article choices are influenced by objective identifiability rather than by specificity, Trenkic (2008) added the explicitly stated knowledge values [±ESK], an object identifying factor, to Ionin et al.’s (2004) four context types based on [±definite] and [±specific] specifications, which resulted in six combinations. The results were similar to those of Ionin et al. (2004) in that L1-Mandarin L2-English speakers overused the in [−definite, +specific] contexts and overused a in [+definite, − specific] contexts. However, a closer look at L2 speakers’ article choice patterns in [±ESK] contexts revealed that L2 speakers overuse the in contexts where the speaker explicitly stated their familiarity with the referent ([+ESK]) and overused a in contexts where the speaker denied knowing the referent under discussion ([−ESK]). Based on these patterns, Trenkic (2008) concluded that article choice in L2 speakers with an article-less L1 is more influenced by referent identifiability than by specificity.

14.4.3  Differential acquisition difficulty across different types of definites In this subsection, I turn to another important dimension in L2 article research, namely, differential difficulty in different types of article use. To the best of my knowledge, studies to date have focused only on different levels of difficulty in the use of the definite article (Chrabaszcz & Jiang, 2014; García Mayo, 2008; Liu & Gleason, 2002). One of the first studies to systematically examine the question of article difficulty was Liu and Gleason (2002). By modifying Hawkins’s (1978) categorization of different types of non-generic uses of the, Liu and Gleason (2002) defined four categories of the use, summarized in Table 14.2. Using a cloze test containing 60 sentences with missing articles where participants were asked to supply appropriate articles, Liu and Gleason tested ESL learners with different L1 backgrounds. Results from the cloze test showed that ESL learners were most accurate with the situational use of the and least accurate with the cultural the. ESL learners’ performance improved with proficiency; in addition, the learners’ L1 did not have an effect. Based on these findings, Liu and Gleason concluded that all ESL learners, regardless of their L1, go through the same developmental patterns determined by the hierarchy of difficulty (situational–structural and textual–cultural). Liu and Gleason’s (2002) findings were replicated in subsequent studies testing different L1 groups, such as Chinese and Malay (Wong & Quek, 2007) and Spanish (García Mayo, 2008).

Table 14.2  Nongeneric uses of the (from Chrabaszcz & Jiang, 2014, p. 355; based on Liu & Gleason, 2002) Type of the use

Definition

Example

Cultural

the is used with a noun that is a unique and wellknown referent in a speech community the is used when the referent of a first-mention noun can be sensed directly or indirectly as unique by the interlocutors, or the referent is known by the members of the local community the is used anaphorically, with a noun that has been previously referred to or mentioned

The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean in the world. While driving in their car to work, the husband asks his wife, “Could you open the window please?” Fendi bought a car on Monday. On Wednesday, he crashed the car. The blue car across the road is very suspicious.

Situational

Textual Structural

the is used with a first-mention noun that has a modifier

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Building on Liu and Gleason (2002), Chrabaszcz and Jiang (2014) further investigated the hierarchy of article difficulty using a different methodology. They examined the interaction between the arguably universal hierarchy of article difficulty identified by Liu and Gleason (2002) and L1 influence. Using an elicited imitation task (described in Section 14.3.1), Chrabaszcz and Jiang compared speakers whose L1 has articles (Spanish) and does not have articles (Russian). Results from the elicited imitation task yielded two main findings. First, L1-Spanish speakers overall performed better than L1-Russian speakers, suggesting positive L1 transfer. Second, L1-Spanish speakers’ patterns closely reflected the hierarchy of article difficulty (cultural use being most difficult and situational use being least difficult) reported in Liu and Gleason (2002). However L1-Russian speakers’ patterns were somewhat different. The cultural and situational uses seemed to present the same level of difficulty for L1-Russian speakers. Based on these findings, Chrabaszcz and Jiang (2014) concluded that different non-generic definite contexts do not present the same level of difficulty for all L2 English speakers as previously claimed; that is, the hierarchy of article difficulty interacts with L1 influence.

14.4.4  Studies on the role of L1 influence with article-less L1s Chrabaszcz and Jiang’s (2014) study discussed in the previous section highlighted the role of the L1 in differential difficulty in acquiring different uses of articles. However, the exact nature of L1 influence was not identified. To better understand the extent to which L1 plays out in L2 article acquisition, three different approaches to L1 influence in L2 article acquisition have been proposed: lexical transfer, feature reassembly, and the MCH, as discussed in section 14.2.4. To investigate the issue of lexical transfer from the semantics of morphosyntactic elements that are closely related to articles, such as demonstratives in L2 article acquisition, Ionin et al. (2012) examined L1-Korean speakers’ production and comprehension of English articles. Korean lacks articles but has demonstratives, in particular the demonstrative ku ‘that,’ which is functionally similar to the English definite article. Because Korean lacks articles, English the is often translated as ku in Korean, which can trigger mismapping of ku onto the. Ionin et al. (2012) predicted that L1-Korean speakers would misinterpret definite NPs as demonstrative NPs. They tested the prediction using a forced-choice written elicited production task and a picture-based comprehension task. The findings indicated that L1-Korean speakers could differentiate between the and that but not to the extent that native English speakers do. Whereas the low-proficiency group performed similarly in both production and comprehension tasks, showing target deviant patterns, the advanced group performed in a nativelike way in the production tasks but not in the comprehension task. As for the advanced learners’ differential performance between the tasks (i.e., more nativelike in the production task than in the comprehension task), Ionin et al. considered the possibility of task effects. That is, the forced-choice elicited production task is explicit, whereas the picture-based comprehension task is implicit. The advanced learners’ performance observed in Ionin et al (2012) conforms to general findings reported in the literature (see Ellis, 2005). For discussion of the reverse pattern, that is, better performance in implicit than explicit tasks, see Cho (2022), Ionin et al. (2021), and Orfitelli and Polinsky (2017). Ionin et al. (2022) further investigated the issue of L1 lexical transfer by comparing L1-Korean and L1-Chinese speakers’ performance in online (self-paced reading) and offline (judgment) tasks. In the first experiment, Ionin et al. tested native speakers of Chinese and Korean to provide empirical data for the semantic analysis of demonstratives and numerals in those languages. The second experiment tested L1-Chinese and L1-Korean speakers’ online processing and offline judgments of L2-English articles. To make specific predictions about L1 lexical transfer, four types of contexts for article use were created based on the two semantic features, anaphoricity and referentiality. Definitions and examples of the four different types of contexts used in their study are given in Table 14.3 (from Ionin et al., 2022, p. 135). 190

Articles: (In)definiteness Table 14.3  Definitions of the terms used in Ionin et al. (2022) Term

Definition

Example

Anaphoric definite

uniqueness in the discourse established by prior mention uniqueness in the discourse established by relationship to another entity in the context no uniqueness; a particular entity is asserted to exist in the actual world no uniqueness; no entity is asserted to exist in the actual world

I read a book. I liked the book. I read a book. I’d like to meet the author. I read a book.

Bridging definite (non-anaphoric) Referential indefinite Non-referential indefinite

I want to read a book (any book).

Contrary to findings from Ionin et al. (2012), Ionin et al.’s (2022) data from the SPRT and AJT indicated that neither L1-Chinese nor L1-Korean speakers’ article acquisition is influenced by lexical transfer from demonstratives or numerals in their L1. Ionin et al. (2022) considered two possible reasons for the absence of L1 transfer. The first was that demonstratives and numerals are not the same category as articles, in that English articles are obligatory whereas demonstratives and numerals in Chinese and Korean are optional. Due to this difference, L2 learners may not map English articles onto demonstratives or numerals in their L1. The second possible reason is that optional elements in the L1 are not subject to transfer. Building on Ionin et al.’s (2012) study on L1 lexical transfer, Zhang (2021) further examined the role of L1 lexical transfer in semantics–pragmatics mappings. Using Ionin et al.’s (2012) test items, Zhang (2021) tested L1-Chinese L2-English learners (Experiment 1, test items in English) and native speakers of Chinese (Experiment 2, test items translated into Chinese). The Experiment 2 results showed that the Chinese demonstrative na ‘that’ behaves like the English definite article the and that Chinese has no equivalent for the English demonstrative that. The results for Experiment 1 indicated that advanced-level L2 English speakers did not differentiate between the and that regardless of context (i.e., discourse constraints). Near-native L2-English speakers performed at a targetlike level with the but not with that. Based on these findings, Zhang (2021) concluded that the semantics–pragmatics interface can be acquired at nativelike levels if there is positive L1 transfer triggered by a full overlap between L1 and L2 realizations (mapping between Chinese na and English the). L2 speakers’ nontargetlike performance with that is due to lack of an equivalent in Chinese (i.e., no positive transfer). Similar to the lexical transfer approach, the feature reassembly approach assumes that L2 learners initially equate L2 articles with L1 morphosyntactic elements based on functional similarities, for instance, the definite article the with L1 demonstratives, such as ku ‘that’ (in Korean) or na-tai ‘that’ (in Chinese) and the indefinite article a with numerals like yi-ding ‘one’ in Chinese. In the initial mapping step, L2 learners map the formal features associated with the L1 element onto the L2 element. As for articles, Cho (2017) argued that the features that the Korean demonstrative ku ‘that’ carries are [+anaphoric, +definite] whereas the English definite article the encodes [±anaphoric, +definite]. The prediction was that L1-Korean L2-English learners would be more accurate in their article use in anaphoric contexts than in non-anaphoric contexts (i.e., underuse of the in non-anaphoric definite contexts) because they would transfer the feature bundle for ku onto the. Using a contextualized AJT, Cho (2017) tested L1-Korean speakers’ comprehension of English articles in different types of anaphoric and non-anaphoric definite contexts. The judgments of the intermediate group confirmed the prediction. As for advanced learners, their judgments did not correlate with anaphoricity, suggesting the absence of L1 transfer. However, they still differed from the native control group in their performance on definite and indefinite NPs in bridging definite contexts. Cho concluded that advanced learners have overcome L1 influence and have successfully reassembled the feature bundle by adding [−anaphoric]. That is, they have learned that the may appear either in anaphoric or in non-anaphoric contexts. 191

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14.4.5  Studies testing the role of L1 influence online Trenkic et al.’s (2014) VWP eye-tracking study (described in Section 14.3.3) examined the real-time processing of L2-English articles by L1-Chinese speakers with intermediate proficiency in English. L2 speakers showed similar reference resolution patterns as native speakers although they were slower than native speakers. Trenkic et al. (2014) did not formulate their predictions specifically within the MCH; however, their findings provide evidence against the MCH. Ionin et al. (2021) used an SPRT and a grammaticality judgment task (GJT) to examine whether L1-Chinese speakers can integrate grammatical knowledge of the English indefinite article. In examining online processing, Ionin et al. formulated a prediction from the MCH that L1-Chinese speakers would not show online sensitivity to article omission or inappropriate use of articles. Participants read pairs of related sentences in referential contexts, as in (8), versus non-referential contexts, as in (9). (8) Mary felt lonely last week. So // she // finally // got // a // cat // from // a // shelter. *So // she // finally // got // – // cat // from // a // shelter. #So // she // finally // got // the // cat // from // a // shelter. (9) Mary felt lonely last week. So // she // may // get // a // cat // from // a // shelter. *So // she // may // get // – // cat // from // a // shelter. #So // she // may // get // the // cat // from // a // shelter.

The analysis revealed that L2 learners showed targetlike online sensitivity to omission or inappropriate use of articles but showed divergent performance in the GJT. The findings disconfirmed the prediction of the MCH that L2 learners from article-less L1s do not process L2 articles in a nativelike way. Cho (2022) carried out a similar study on L1-Korean speakers’ online processing (SPRT) and offline judgments (AJT) of English articles by making predictions from the MCH. In both the SPRT and the AJT, participants read pairs of sentences in two different types of definite contexts (anaphoric and bridging), as in (10–11), and an indefinite context, as in (12). (10)  Sam bought a monitor and a keyboard. He broke the/#a keyboard and became really upset. (11)  Sam sat in front of the computer.  He broke the/# a keyboard and became really upset. (12)  Sam works at a computer store.  He broke #the/a keyboard and became really upset.

The findings of Cho (2022) are similar to those of Ionin et al. (2021) in that L1-Korean speakers showed targetlike online sensitivity to article misuse (contrary to the prediction from the MCH). In sum, the above-mentioned studies on L2 article processing showed that it is possible for speakers with article-less L1s, Chinese and Korean, to process L2-English articles in a nativelike way despite the potential negative L1 influence predicted by the MCH.

14.5  Future directions Although extensive research on L2 article acquisition has been carried out over several decades, there is still a range of areas in need of further investigation. Previous L2 article acquisition studies clearly indicate that L1 influence is an important factor in L2 article acquisition. However, 192

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these studies have produced conflicting findings about what is transferred from L1 knowledge in L2 articles. Moreover, L2 article acquisition studies thus far predominantly focus on language combinations among English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. To better understand the nature of crosslinguistic influence on the acquisition of L2 articles, it is necessary to compare additional language pairings. Another fruitful area to address the issue of crosslinguistic influence is third or more language (L3/Ln) acquisition of articles where more than two languages interact with each other in the process of article acquisition in the L3 or Ln. L3/Ln acquisition of articles can provide insightful information about the extent to which semantic universals and prior language knowledge interplay in article acquisition. A review of recent L2 studies points to the need for more research on how L2 articles are processed in real time. Only a handful of L2 article processing studies have employed behavioral measures, such as reading/reaction times and eye-tracking (see Section 14.3.3). Future studies might consider employing neurophysiological measures such as event-related brain potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Finally, it is important to continue investigating the recurring questions in L2 article research: (i) What is the trajectory of L2 article development? (ii) What is the underlying source of the differential performance and differential development across different article uses?

Bibliography Ahn, H. (2021). From interlanguage grammar to target grammar in L2 processing of definiteness as uniqueness. Second Language Research, 37(1), 91–119. Bickerton, D. (1981). Roots of language. Karoma. Cho, J. (2017). The acquisition of different types of definite noun phrases in L2-English. International Journal of Bilingualism, 21(3), 367–382. Cho, J. (2022). Online processing and offline judgments of English articles. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 12(3), 280–309. Chrabaszcz, A., & Jiang, N. (2014). The role of native language in the use of the English nongeneric definite article by L2 learners: A cross-linguistic comparison. Second Language Research, 30(3), 351–379. Christophersen, P. (1939). The articles: A study of their theory and use in English. Munksgaard. Ellis, R. (2005). Measuring implicit and explicit knowledge of a second language: A psychometric study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27(2), 141–172. Fodor, J., & Sag, I. (1982). Referential and quantificational indefinites. Linguistics and Philosophy, 5, 335–398. García Mayo, M. P. (2008). The acquisition of four nongeneric uses of the article the by Spanish EFL learners. System, 36(4), 550–565. García Mayo, M. (2009). Article choice in L2 English by Spanish speakers: Evidence for full transfer. In M. García Mayo & R. Hawkins (Eds.), Second language acquisition of articles: Empirical findings and theoretical implications (pp. 13–36). John Benjamins. Gass, S. (2001). Sentence matching: A re-examination. Second Language Research, 17(4), 421–441. Hawkins, J. (1978). Definiteness and indefiniteness. Humanities Press. Hawkins, J. A. (1991). On (in) definite articles: implicatures and (un) grammaticality prediction. Journal of Linguistics, 27(2), 405–442. Hawkins, R., Al-Eid, S., Almahboob, I., Athanasopoulos, P., Chaengchenkit, R., Hu, J., Rezai, M., Jaensch, C., Jeon, Y., Jigan, A., Leung, Y. I., Matsunaga, K., Ortega, M., Sarko, G., Snape, N., & Velasco-Zárate, K. (2006). Accounting for English article interpretation by L2 speakers. EUROSLA Yearbook, 6(1), 7–25. Huebner, T. (1983). A longitudinal analysis of the acquisition of English. Karoma. Ionin, T. (2003). Article semantics in second language acquisition (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Ionin, T. (2006). This is definitely specific: Specificity and definiteness in article systems. Natural Language Semantics, 14(2), 175–234. Ionin, T., Baek, S., Kim, E., Ko, H., & Wexler, K. (2012). That’s not so different from the: Definite and demonstrative descriptions in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 28(1), 69–101. https://doi​ .org​/10​.1177​/0267658311432200 Ionin, T., Choi, S. H., & Liu, Q. (2021). Knowledge of indefinite articles in L2-English: Online vs. offline performance. Second Language Research, 37(1), 121–160.

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Jacee Cho Ionin, T., Choi, S. H., & Liu, Q. (2022). What transfers (or doesn’t) in the second language acquisition of English articles by learners from article-less native languages?. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 12(2), 133–162. Ionin, T., Ko, H., & Wexler, K. (2004). Article semantics in L2 acquisition: The role of specificity. Language Acquisition, 12(1), 3–69. Ionin, T., & Montrul, S. (2010). The role of L1-transfer in the interpretation of articles with definite plurals in L2-English. Language Learning, 60(4), 877–925. Ionin, T., Zubizarreta, M. L., & Bautista Maldonado, S. (2008). Sources of linguistic knowledge in the second language acquisition of English articles. Lingua, 118, 554–576. Jiang, N., Novokshanova, E., Masuda, K., & Wang, X. (2011). Morphological congruency and the acquisition of L2 morphemes. Language Learning, 61(3), 940–967. Kim, L. K., & Lakshmanan, U. (2009). The processing role of the Article Choice Parameter. In M. García Mayo & R. Hawkins (Eds.), Second language acquisition of articles: Empirical findings and theoretical implications (pp. 87–114). John Benjamins. Lardiere, D. (2009). Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 25, 173–227. Liu, D., & Gleason, J. (2002). Acquisition of the article the by nonnative speakers of English: An analysis of four nongeneric uses. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24(1), 1–26. Lyons, C. (1999). Definiteness. Cambridge University Press. Master, P. (1995). Consciousness raising and article pedagogy. In D. Belcher & G. Braine (Eds.), Academic writing in a second language: Essays on research and pedagogy (pp. 183–204). Ablex. Orfitelli, R., & Polinsky, M. (2017). When performance masquerades as comprehension: Grammaticality judgments in non-native speakers. In M. Kopotev, O. Lyashevskaya, & A. Mustajoki (Eds.), Quantitative approaches to the Russian language (pp. 197–214). Routledge. Parrish, B. (1987). A new look at methodologies in the study of article acquisition for learners of ESL. Language Learning, 37, 361–383. Prince, E. (1981). On the inferencing of indefinite-this NPs. In A. K. Joshi, B. L. Webber, & I. A. Sag (Eds.), Elements of discourse understanding (pp. 231–250). Cambridge University Press. Robertson, D. (2000). Variability in the use of the English article system by Chinese learners of English. Second Language Research, 16(2), 135–172. Sarko, G. (2009). L2 English article production by Arabic and French speakers. In M. García Mayo & R. Hawkins (Eds.), Second language acquisition of articles: Empirical findings and theoretical implications (pp. 37–66). John Benjamins. Trenkic, D. (2007). Variability in L2 article production: Beyond the representational deficit vs. processing constraints debate. Second Language Research, 23(3), 289–327. Trenkic, D. (2008). The representation of English articles in second language grammars: Determiners or adjectives? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11(1), 1–18. Trenkic, D., Mirkovic, J., & Altmann, G. (2014). Real-time grammar processing by native and non-native speakers: Constructions unique to the second language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17(2), 237–257. Tryzna, M. (2009). Questioning the validity of the Article Choice Parameter and the Fluctuation Hypothesis. In M. García Mayo & R. Hawkins (Eds.), Second language acquisition of articles: Empirical findings and theoretical implications (pp. 67–86). John Benjamins. Wong, B., & Quek, S. (2007). Acquisition of the English definite article by Chinese and Malay ESL learners. Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, 4(2), 210–234. Zhang, L. (2021). The influence of first language at the semantics–pragmatic interface: Evidence from definite and demonstrative determiners in L2 English. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 11(3), 368–388. Zlatič, L. (1997). The structure of the Serbian noun phrase. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.

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15 ARTICLES Genericity Tanja Kupisch and Neal Snape

15.1 Introduction In this chapter we discuss how early and late bilinguals (L2ers) acquire genericity, and in particular generic noun phrases (NPs). Genericity has been dealt with extensively in semantic theory (e.g., Cohen, 2001; Krifka et al., 1995; Pelletier & Asher, 1997). Generic statements, such as Cats purr, abstract away from specific entities (specific cats) and make statements about kinds (cats in general). This is why they have been analyzed as kind-referring (Carlson, 1977; Dayal, 1999) or generically quantified statements (Krifka et al., 1995). They capture ‘essential’ properties, they are timeless and context-free. Generic meaning can be expressed by NPs. However, as shown in (1), the morphological shape of these NPs can vary. Moreover, the same NP-types, bare, definite and indefinite, can also express non-generic meanings, as illustrated in (2). This means that morphology is not a reliable indicator of genericity. Tense, aspect or adverbs (e.g., generally) can provide additional cues. (1) a. b. c. d.

Cats purr. The cat is a carnivore. Generally, the Swedish eat a lot of crayfish. A Swiss cheese can cost a lot.

(Generic) (Generic) (Generic) (Generic)

(2) a. b. c. d.

Cats have invaded my garden. The cat is purring. The Swedish joined us later. I bought a Swiss cheese at the airport.

(Existential) (Specific) (Specific) (Specific)

In some cases, there are no cues in the respective sentences themselves; only the wider pragmatic context is disambiguating. For example, since most Romance languages do not allow bare subject NPs, sentences like (3a) are ambiguous in Italian (cf. English (1a)). Since German does not have morphology to mark progressive aspect, (3b) is ambiguous, unlike English (2b). (3) a. It.

I the

gatti cats

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-18

fanno le fusa. purr

(Generic/Specific)

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Tanja Kupisch and Neal Snape b. Ge. Die Katze the cat

schnurrt. sleeps a lot

(Generic/Specific)

As already shown in (1), there are different ways of marking NPs as generic. Sometimes, these are interchangeable, but sometimes not all variants are possible, as there are subtle meaning differences. In (4a) and (4b), the elephant and elephants refer to all elephants, whereas in (4c) an elephant cannot refer to the entire species of elephant. The subject NP in (4a) refers to the unique taxonomic entity/ species of elephant; the subject NP in (4b) refers to the kind whose members have the property of being elephants. (4a) and (4b) are classified as expressing NP-level genericity, because genericity is a feature of the NP within these sentences. (4c) is ungrammatical: the subject NP appearing with the kind predicate be common must refer to a kind, not an individual elephant, because a single elephant cannot be common (see Ionin et al., 2011). (4) a.   b.   c.

The elephant is common in Africa and Asia. Elephants are common in Africa and Asia. *An elephant is common in Africa and Asia.

Another particularity of generic statements is that they do not become false as a result of the existence of counterexamples. For example, Cats purr in (5a) is understood as quantifying over nearly all instances of cats despite the existence of counterexamples, (5b) is accepted even though less than half of ducks (adult healthy females) lay eggs, and (5c) is judged true even though very few (1% of all) mosquitos carry the virus (Carlson, 1977, p. 40; Cohen, 2001; Leslie, 2008; Pelletier & Asher, 1997). Thus, genericity is not straightforwardly linked to statistical regularities, and it is sensitive to whether the predicated property is striking. (5) a.   b.   c.

Cats purr. Ducks lay eggs. Mosquitos carry the West Nile virus.

The acquisition of the generic and non-generic distinction thus goes beyond morpho-syntactic cues like articles, tense and aspect, requiring also pragmatic cues and world knowledge. Despite their complex form-to-meaning mapping, generics appear relatively early in L1 acquisition. Bilingual learners face additional challenges because the linguistic form–meaning mapping often differs across languages. Our chapter summarizes a number of studies on the acquisition (and instruction) of generic NPs, with the goal of identifying recurrent patterns. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different methodologies and point to directions for future research. We focus on subject NPs because object NPs are largely unexplored so far. Our review includes studies on early and late bilinguals, children and adults. We will use the term “early bilingual” for simultaneous and sequential bilinguals who have grown up using two languages during their childhood; ‘L2’ will be used exclusively with reference to late bilinguals, who grew up speaking only one language at home and acquired subsequent languages at school or later.

15.2  Generic noun phrases across languages Generics are a universal property, but the morpho-syntactic and pragmatic means to mark genericity vary within and across languages, which makes them an ideal testbed for cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in early and late bilinguals. One crucial difference is that some languages have no articles, in some languages articles are (quasi) obligatory, and in others, bare nouns (BNs) coexist with article

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noun combinations. As illustrated in (6), Germanic and Romance languages like French and Italian generally allow generic readings with definite and indefinite singular NPs. (6) a.  b.  c.  d.

En. Ge. Fr. It.

A/the Eine/die Un/le Un/il

cat Katze chat gatto

purrs. schnurrt. ronronne. fa le fusa.

With generic plural subjects, these two families differ in that Romance languages generally require definite articles, and bare NPs are ungrammatical (7c–d). In contrast, Germanic languages allow bare NPs and definite plural NPs to varying degrees for expressing generic readings (see (7a–b)). (7) a.  b.  c.  d.

En. Ge. (Die) Fr. (*Les) It. (*I)

Cats Katzen chats gatti

purr. schnurren. ronronnes. fanno le fusa.

Turkish is a language without a fully grammaticalized article system. Singular nouns (8a) or plural nouns (8b) can express genericity, but plural nouns are ambiguous with the indefinite specific reading. This means that both (8a) and (8b) may refer to cats in general but (8b) can also be used in a description of a specific cat that purrs. If verbal aspect is changed, using –(I) yor instead of the aorist aspect, as in (8c, d), the reading becomes specific. In other words, the tense/aspect/modality of the predicate primarily determines whether a subject NP has a definite or generic reading.

(8)

 

a. b. c.

 

d.

Tu.

Kedi-ler mırla-r. cat- pl purr-aor ‘Cats (generally) purr.’ Kedi mırla-r cat purr-aor. ‘A cat (generally) purrs./A (specific) cat purrs.’ Kedi mırl-(ı)yor. cat purr-prog ‘The cat is purring.’ Kedi-ler mırl-(ı)yor.  cat-pl purr- prog ‘The cats purr.’

(generic) (generic, indefinite specific) (specific/definite) (specific/definite)

In Japanese, there are no articles but there are some bound plural-denoting morphemes, such as -tachi and -ra, which are restricted in use. Bare NPs can have non-specific or specific interpretations depending on whether the nominative marker ga or the topic marker wa is used; there is no definite/ indefinite distinction (Kuroda, 1972). In (9a), a Japanese speaker upon encountering ‘a dog running’ would use the nominative marker ga, which has a non-specific meaning. However, (9b) is more likely to have a specific interpretation when the topic marker wa marks the subject and the referent dog(s) has been established within a context by the speaker and hearer.

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Tanja Kupisch and Neal Snape (9)

a.

Jap.

b.

Inu-ga hassi-te iru. dog-nom run-PROG ‘A dog/Dogs is/are running.’ Inu-wa hassi-te iru. dog-top run-PROG ‘The dog/The dogs is/are running.’

(non-specific) (specific) (from Kuroda, 1972, p. 161)

The example in (10), without the progressive morpheme -te iru, shows that the topic marked subject inu (dog) can represent a generic interpretation. (10)

Jap.

Inu-wa dog-top ‘Dogs run.’

hasiru. run

(generic) (from Kuroda, 1972, p. 169)

15.3  Methodological approaches to the study of generics In this section we feature six methods that have been used in the study of generics. We begin with controlled tasks, moving towards less controlled tasks, which are more likely to tap into implicit knowledge.

15.3.1  GJTs and AJTs and forced-choice tasks In grammaticality judgement tasks (GJTs) and acceptability judgement tasks (AJTs) stimulus sentences are presented to participants, who are invited to rate them as grammatical/acceptable or not, as in (11a, b). Methodological choices vary with respect to the way in which the stimuli are presented (oral vs. written, online vs. in class, with or without context), whether or not responses are timed, and in the instructions given to participants (e.g., Can you imagine someone in your environment producing such a sentence? vs. Is this grammatical or ungrammatical?). Sometimes, participants are invited to provide corrections if they think a sentence is ungrammatical or unacceptable. The advantage of asking for corrections is that the researcher can verify whether the sentence was judged as ungrammatical for the intended reason. Another option is to use a scale based on the naturalness of sentences from one (unnatural) to three (natural) in (12). This method could potentially capture that (12b) is not entirely “okay”, but not quite as bad as (12a). (11) Are the following sentences grammatical? Please circle your answer. a. Elephant lives in Africa and in Asia. b. The elephant lives in Africa and in Asia. (12) a. Elephant lives in Africa and in Asia. b. The elephant lives in Africa and in Asia.

Yes / No Yes / No 1 (natural) 2 (okay) 3 (unnatural) 1 (natural) 2 (okay) 3 (unnatural)

Contextualization can be important to ensure that the participants judge the sentence under the intended meaning. An example of how context can make a difference is provided in (13). While (13a) is a grammatical sentence, it is not acceptable in the given context, while (13b) is acceptable. However, a context sentence like (13)’ can turn (13a) into an acceptable sentence. In a task with contextualized sentences, participants should be instructed on not rating each sentence by itself, but within the context provided.

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Articles: Genericity (13) In yesterday’s biology lesson I learnt a lot about flowers. For example, …. a. the sunflowers are yellow. b. sunflowers are yellow. (13) ’ Lisa is asked to describe a painting with flowers and pay special attention to the colours. She starts by saying …

A forced-choice elicitation task is one way to force the L2 learner’s choice, hence the name. A recent example of this type of task was used in Snape (2018) to find out whether L2ers could correctly select the missing article in sentences provided in the task. The instructions should make it clear that participants can only choose one option. (14) a. You may be aware, ___ tulip is prevalent throughout many parts of the Netherlands. b. Kelly received a tulip in May. ___ tulip is beautiful. a    no article    don’t know    the

In (14a), the correct article choice is ‘the’ as the definite article combined with the kind predicate be prevalent creates a generic NP referring to all tulips in the Netherlands. In (14b), only the specific reading is possible, as it is second mention of tulip. Not all forced-choice elicitation tasks include the option of ‘don’t know’ (see Ionin et al., 2004) as this may become a default option for participants who really do not wish to choose one of the other three options available. Generally, AJTs/GJTs and forced-choice tasks may tap into explicit knowledge, which is why they are often combined with other tasks.

15.3.2  TVJTs and PMTs Truth Value Judgement Tasks (TVJTs) were originally created to test children’s L1 knowledge of constraints and whether or not children could access both meanings associated with ambiguous sentences (Crain & McKee, 1985). For example, there may be two (quasi) string-identical sentences, which differ only in the presence vs. absence of an article (e.g., 15a, c). TVJTs are the ideal instrument for investigating which semantic interpretation participants attribute to such sentences and whether the presence of the article makes a difference. In most TVJTs, test sentences like (15a-d) are accompanied by a picture showing unusual objects (e.g., Figure 15.1), and the participant’s task is

Figure 15.1  Example for a picture with unusual objects in a TVJT (from Kupisch, 2012).

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to judge whether the sentence accompanying the picture is true or false. Given the picture in Figure 15.1, the statements in (15a) and (15b) are false and true, respectively; (15c) and (15d) are true and false, respectively, regardless of the picture. (15) a. b. c. d.

The snowmen are white. The snowmen are red. Snowmen are white. Snowmen are red.

(F) (T) (T) (F)

Thus, based on the responses in the given picture context, we can assess whether participants interpret the sentence with reference to the picture (specific) or whether they discard the picture context as being irrelevant (generic). Note that the sentences above show an additional difference in ‘canonicity’. A statement which makes reference to the ‘normal’ state of the depicted object (white snowmen) can be called “canonical” (15a, c), while the non-normal state can be called “non-canonical” (15b, d). The first TVJT for testing generic readings we are aware of is Gelman and Raman’s (2003) study with English-speaking children. The children were shown anomalous characters and objects, e.g., pink clouds, and were then asked a question that reveals whether they pay attention to the determiner when interpreting the question, e.g., Are clouds pink vs. Are the clouds pink? Answering “yes” would indicate a specific interpretation, while answering “no” would indicate a generic interpretation, as clouds are (generally) not pink. The advantage of such a simple task is that the only thing that varies is the determiner (presence/absence, demonstrative/definite article/indefinite article, singular/plural). The disadvantage is that contextualization is done by means of a relatively prominent picture, which may create a specific bias (see Czypionka & Kupisch [2019]; Redolfi et al. [2021] for discussion). As an alternative to this experiment, Perez-Léroux et al. (2004) created contexts in which the structures become more natural. An example is provided in (16). (16) Zippy the zebra and Suzy the zebra are spotted [picture of spotted zebras]. The giraffe wonders why they look different. Now let me ask you some questions: a. b.

Are the zebras spotted? Are zebras spotted?

TVJTs of this type typically include control conditions (e.g., Do these zebras have stripes? with demonstrative pronouns) and distractors (e.g., Do you have a zebra at home?). Furthermore, the order of questions and canonicity can be varied to avoid priming effects. Another alternative includes measuring reaction times, the idea being that longer reaction times reveal ambiguities and/or ongoing language change (Czypionka & Kupisch, 2019). Picture-matching tasks (PMTs) originated in L1 acquisition research studies (see Gerken & Shady (1996) for an example with generic NPs). A PMT uses a picture or pictures accompanied by a grammatical sentence, like in a TVJT. Participants are instructed to read the sentence while considering what is in the picture and select the picture or pictures that match the sentence. For example, Snape (2018) presented the sentence You may be surprised to learn, the snow monkey is indigenous to mountainous areas of Japan in the context of four pictures: (a) a single dog; (b) a group of snow monkeys; (c) a single snow monkey; and (d) a group of dogs. Both pictures (b) and (c) match the sentence because the sentence is generic: both the bare plural and the definite article the with a singular noun combine with the kind predicate be indigenous. Learners might select only picture (c) to match the sentence if they believe that the sentence refers to a specific snow monkey, but since both pictures (b) and (c) can represent the entire species, these match the sentence. 200

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15.3.3  Elicited production and corpora In an elicited production task (EPT) the researcher sets up a context, typically consisting of verbal and nonverbal prompts, that makes it likely that participants will produce the target structure. Hollander et al. (2002) have developed such a task for the production of generic NPs for children and adults. The children were asked to give information to Zorg, an alien puppet, who does not know very much about things on Earth. The prompts included the three kinds of cues in (17): (17) a. generic (e.g., “What can you tell Zorg about dogs?”), b. all (e.g., “What can you tell Zorg about all dogs?”), c. some (e.g., “What can you tell Zorg about some dogs?”).

After the initial prompt, three additional questions for each item were asked to elicit as much information as possible, e.g., what Xs do (for animals and people), what Xs have, or what Xs wear. Elicitation is more demanding than yes–no answers because participants have to generate the properties on the basis of linguistic cues alone. Good performance thus requires sensitivity to the linguistic prompts and resisting the tendency to answer all questions in terms of either stereotypes (e.g., prototypical dogs) or salient exemplars (e.g., their own pet dog). Details of the procedure obviously need to be adapted for adults versus children. For example, children may be more cooperative when asked to give information to an alien rather than to an adult interviewer. A small number of studies have investigated generic NPs in corpora. However, as explained above, the linguistic encoding of generic NPs is diverse and overlaps with that of non-generic NPs. Therefore, automatic discrimination between the two is highly challenging, and it is often hard to decide whether a referring expression is generic or not. Targeted searches require annotated resources, but, to our knowledge, there is no large dataset to date in which genericity is annotated. All language-acquisition studies we are aware of are based on ‘hand-coding’, i.e., without any previously available annotations. Gelman and Tardif (1998) studied the usage of generic NPs in child-directed speech in contexts of eating, playing with toys, and book-reading. The analysis involved first identifying all generic NPs and then coding each of these for domain (animate, artifact, food). In order for an NP to be coded as generic, it had to meet all of the following criteria: appropriate form of the noun (bare plurals, or singular NPs with an indefinite article), appropriate form of the verb (present non-progressive tense), and absence of cues specifying a particular individual. Their dataset had fewer than 1% generic NPs. Vasquez-Carranza (2009) compared English and Spanish in child-directed adult speech and child speech, searching transcribed recordings for generic NPs while taking context into account. The number of generic nouns from the total of utterances is summarized in Table 15.1 (numbers are taken from the text). Interestingly, although English allows various NP-forms for generics, the adult English speakers in this study produced only bare NPs. Further, although Spanish is a language with very restrictive bare NP use, the adults produced a fair number of bare generic NPs in Spanish. Czypionka and Kupisch (2020) investigated how different NP-types (bare, indefinite, definite) are distributed over generic vs. existential and specific NPs. They filtered their corpus strategically in Table 15.1  Frequency of generics in corpus data (Vasquez-Carranza, 2009)

No. of utterances Generic NPs

Child-directed adult speech

Child speech (2–5 years)

Sp.

En.

Sp.

En.

4192 78 (1.86%)

2733 39 (1.43%)

12095 57 (0.47%)

21223 188 (0.89%)

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order to maximize the number of generic NPs, using a written online corpus, the DWDS (Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache), focussing on 20th-century fiction, functional, science, and newspaper texts. They preselected 28 noun types in four categories: (i) people, including professions (e.g., teacher), nationalities (Russian), religions (e.g., Muslim); (ii) mammals (e.g., elephant); (iii) plants (e.g., potato); and (iv) tools (e.g., bucket). A search for the first 200 instances of these 28 nouns yielded 5600 sentences, of which only subject NPs were annotated (16% of the original corpus). Taking context into account, these NPs were then coded for NP-type (bare, definite/indefinite, singular/plural) and semantic category (specific, generic, existential). This method substantially increased the proportion of generics (to 37.6%). By far, the most common forms for generics were bare NPs (84.3%), followed by definite singulars (7%), definite plurals (5.8%), and indefinite singulars (2.9%). In summary, the examples show that large corpora are needed to allow meaningful conclusions about generic NPs. At the same time, corpus data provide valuable information on the forms that are possible in naturalistic speech and how frequent these are, which is impossible to get in a controlled setting.

15.4  Acquisition studies on generics In what follows we summarize research on the generic NPs in early and late bilingual acquisition. We include findings on monolingual first-language acquisition because these can help us determine whether potential problems in multilingual learning are caused by language-internal factors or by transfer.

15.4.1  Monolingual and early bilingual child language acquisition Despite the absence of explicit markers and a complex form–meaning mapping, generics are acquired early (Leslie, 2008). Children start using generics by two years of age, i.e., earlier than explicit quantifiers. However, the contexts in which children and parents produce generics systematically differ from the contexts in which non-generics are produced (e.g., Gelman & Tardif, 1998; Pappas & Gelman, 1998). For example, generics are especially frequent in talk about animals. Therefore, experimental data is needed to see whether children can use generics beyond these specific contexts. Gelman and Raman (2003) provided experimental evidence that children systematically differentiate specific and generic readings based on the presence vs. absence of a definite article as early as 2;8. From four years of age, children treat generics as distinct from both indefinites (some) and universal quantifiers (all). A study by Pérez-Leroux et al. (2004) seems to present contradictory data. In Spanish, where definite plurals allow specific and generic interpretations, children aged 3–7 years and adults opted for a generic reading. However, English-speaking children (4–7 years) too tended to interpret both definite DPs and bare nouns generically, 70% and over 90% of the time, respectively. This study thus points to a generic bias in children. Overall, monolingual children are sensitive to linguistic features in decoding generic meaning, albeit with some discrepancies between studies, possibly due to methodological differences. Children even know that generalizations are not only about characteristic properties (cats having whiskers, purring) but also about striking but not necessarily prevalent properties (e.g., elk attacking people), and that generalizations allow for varying numbers of exceptions (e.g., not all cats purr). Thus, children do not only pay attention to linguistic properties, but also to the possibility that generalizations may not include all instances of a kind. Chambers et al. (2008) showed that 4-year-olds already understand that generalizations allow for exceptions and can extend properties to new instances of a novel kind when these are introduced with a generic nominal. Lazaridou-Chatzigoga et al. (2019) confirmed that 4- and 5-year-old English-speaking children can use cues to genericity to draw inferences about new instances of a novel kind. 202

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Research on genericity in bilingual children has focussed on investigating language pairs in which morphological cues to genericity differ in order to test predictions about cross-linguistic influence. Vasquez-Carranza (2009) presented data from an English–Spanish bilingual child (ages 2;3-5;6) who grew up in an English-speaking country. Spanish was the language of the mother, English the language of the father and the family language. In the 6000 English sentences, the child produced 34 generic NPs (0.6%), all bare, akin to the monolingual controls. In the 6783 Spanish utterances, there were 77 generic NPs (1.14%). These contained 17 definite and 60 bare NPs. Many of the bare generic NPs (n=31) were non-target-like; see (18) for examples (Vasquez-Carranza, 2009, p. 193). The author speculated that the child’s overuse of bare NPs in Spanish could be due to “attrited” Spanish input (i.e., his mother’s Spanish already shows CLI from English) reinforced by influence from English. (18) a. b.

no me gusta fideos ‘I don’t like noodles’ chapulines pican? ‘grasshoppers bite?’

(3;0.28) (3;6.10)

Serratrice et al. (2009) investigated the ability of 59 English–Italian children (in the UK and Italy) and 31 Spanish–Italian children (in Spain) to judge the grammaticality of plural NPs in specific and generic contexts in English and Italian. The test sentences differed in terms of presence/absence of the definite article and cues for genericity/specificity, as illustrated in (19). In the English examples, article absence/presence can lead to in/felicitous sentences, depending on whether there is a cue for the specific reading (here) or for the generic reading (in general). The Italian examples are ungrammatical without the article, regardless of the cue. (19) En. It.

a. b. c. d.

Here, *(the) strawberries are red. In general, (*the) strawberries are red . Qui *(le) fragole sono rosse. In genere, *(le) fragole sono rosse.

(specific) (generic) (specific) (generic)

The children were less accurate in English, arguably because a successful judgement in English requires both syntactic and semantic knowledge, while in Italian it can be made without taking semantics into account. While in English no significant differences existed between English– Italian bilinguals and monolinguals, knowledge of English affected the bilinguals’ judgements of Italian sentences. The English–Italian bilinguals were less accurate than the monolinguals and the Spanish–Italian bilinguals, although their judgements could be based on the presence/absence of the definite article alone. Language of the community and age also played a role in children’s accuracy. Kupisch and Pierantozzi (2010) carried out a TVJT with 22 German–Italian children (ages 6–10 years) in Northern Germany. The pictures in the TVJT were framed by a story about two children and their adventures during their vacation on a Caribbean Island. On each picture there were anomalous objects or characters (e.g., carrots growing on trees, pirates driving cars). The sentence type of major interest contained NPs with definite articles of the type Do the carrots grow on trees?—expected to get primarily specific readings in German, while being ambiguous between specific/generic readings in Italian. Italian influence should result in a higher tolerance of generic readings in German (compared to monolinguals); German influence should result in tolerating more specific readings in Italian (compared to monolinguals). This was indeed the case. Table 15.2 shows how often participants in each group interpreted DPs (e.g., the carrots) as specific.

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Tanja Kupisch and Neal Snape Table 15.2 Proportion of specific answers with definite plural NPs (from Kupisch & Pierantozzi, 2010)

German Italian

Monolingual adults

Monolingual children

Bilingual children

70% 22%

52% 20%

38% 28%

While the results for definite NPs in German indicate a generic bias in (monolingual and bilingual) children, mirroring Pérez-Leroux et al. (2004) for English, they also show that this bias was more pronounced in the bilingual groups. In Italian, conversely, the bilingual children were more inclined than monolinguals to interpret definite NPs as specific. Thus, while the bilinguals pursued different strategies in their two languages, reflecting those of monolinguals, they appeared to be influenced by their respective other language. Interestingly, the bilingual children in this study often commented on their perceived ambiguity of the sentences. They provided such comments around 20% of the time in both languages − more often than monolinguals. Examples are provided in (20).

(20) a.

Int:

Haben die Marienkäfer Sterne auf dem Rücken? have ladybirds stars on the back     ‘Do ladybirds have stars on their backs?’ Chi: Die da schon aber normalerweise nich. (Emilio, 6 years) Those there part but normally not ‘Those do, but normally they don’t.’ b. Inv: Le scimmie mangiano le banane? the monkeys eat the bananas ‘Do monkeys/ do the monkeys eat bananas/the bananas?’ Chi: Sì non in questo disegno ma in verità sì. (Dominique, 7 ys) yes not in this picture but in real yes ‘Yes, not in this picture but in reality they do.’

Hervé and Serratrice (2018) studied the longitudinal development of articles in a corpus of two French–English children in the UK (ages 2;4–3;7). There was a small number of instances of CLI in plural contexts, including generics, e.g., J’aime thé (‘I like tea’) instead of J’aime le thé (‘I like the tea.’). Like in experiments with older bilinguals, these instances were consistent with CLI from the Germanic language, i.e., English, to the Romance language, i.e., French, but not the reverse. In summary, all four bilingual studies summarized here compared the children’s performance in two languages. Despite different methods, all found CLI, except when the language pair was the same (Italian–Spanish). CLI tended to affect the minority language, which often happened to be the Romance language.

15.4.2  Plural generics in early and late bilinguals Similar to studies on bilingual child development, research on adult bilinguals has focussed on language combinations featuring different morphological markers for genericity in order to investigate CLI. Since many of these studies have compared heritage speakers (HSs) and late second language (L2ers) we discuss these together where appropriate.

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Montrul and Ionin (2010, 2012) compared adult Spanish HSs and proficiency-matched L2ers, focussing on sentences with definite plural NPs, e.g., Los elefantes tienen colmillos de marfil ‘Elephants have ivory tusks’ in an AJT and a TVJT. In the TVJT, the monolingual controls showed a strong preference for generic readings of the definite plural, while the L2ers and HSs chose the generic reading only about half of the time. In the AJT, monolinguals virtually rejected bare nouns (98.5%) in generic contexts. By contrast, the HSs and L2ers, while having a good overall knowledge of articles, accepted ungrammatical BNs about half of the time. A similar study was carried out in Italian (Kupisch, 2012), also comparing HSs and L2ers by means of a TVJT and AJT. This time, the control group were Italian–German bilinguals who grew up in Italy and were tested in their majority language (Italian). The results were strikingly similar to Montrul and Ionin’s (2012): Italian HSs accepted bare subject NPs and interpreted article+noun sequences predominantly as specific more than half of the time; the bilinguals with Italian as their majority language virtually always rejected bare plural NPs and interpreted definite plural NPs predominantly as generic. Barton (2016) translated the exact same AJT and TVJT into French and compared early French–German bilinguals who had grown up in Germany (French was the HL) with early French–German bilinguals who had grown up in France (French was the majority language). In this study, both groups corrected bare NPs more than 90% of the time. Overall, these results suggest that the generic reading of definite plural NPs in the Romance language and the obligatory use of articles in these contexts is particularly challenging for both late L2ers and HSs. Barton’s (2016) results suggest that learners of French might have an advantage over learners of other Romance languages. One possible explanation for this is that French is more restrictive in bare NP use than the other Romance languages so that learners simply have less evidence for this structure. A second possible explanation is that many of the speakers in Barton’s study attended a school preparing for a French high school degree, and might have had higher meta-linguistic awareness. Thirdly, French speakers might simply be more norm-oriented. These possibilities could be tested more systematically in future studies.

15.4.3  Singular generics in late bilinguals In L2 acquisition research, the property of genericity has been linked to Parameter Setting Approaches (Chomsky, 1981) and the discussions on semantic universals. Based on NP-semantics we can investigate learnability problems, because constructions which are (superficially) syntactically similar across languages can have different meanings. If the constructions look the same, the learner will not encounter any positive syntactic evidence that can help resetting the postulated parameters (e.g., Slabakova, 2006). Slabakova (2008) nevertheless has shown that L2ers are capable of acquiring complex phenomena at the syntax/semantics interface, including semantic features absent in their L1s. At the same time though, learners face difficulties acquiring L2 morphemes when the form-meaning mapping in the L2 is different from that in the learners’ L1. According to the Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2008), functional morphology is the bottleneck of L2 acquisition because functional morphology bundles phonological, semantic and syntactic features. Feature inventories are universal, but not all languages make use of all possible features, and languages differ in how they bundle features to form functional categories. Following Lardiere’s (2008) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, L1 learners select features for each item in their target language, but L2 learners have already acquired a system and have to select new features for the L2 or reassemble them. More recently, Ionin et al. (2011) have investigated the syntax/semantics interface and how L2ers acquire morphology and reassemble features with respect to English articles with generic interpretations. As pointed out in (4) above, English uses three different types of NPs to make generic statements, with subtle differences between them. Ionin et al. (2011) investigated adult speakers with Russian and Korean as their L1s, both languages without articles. The authors hypothesized that 205

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indefinite singular generics would be easier for learners to acquire than definite singular generics because learning about indefinite singular generics is part of learning about indefiniteness more generally (specifying a as having a [–definite] feature). However, definite singulars have an additional taxonomic reading, which requires selecting the [+taxonomic] feature for the, in addition to the [+definite] feature. While there is a great deal of evidence for indefinite a being related to genericity and specificity, there is less evidence that definite NPs can have generic readings with the additional [+taxonomic] feature, which may cause a delay in acquisition. Ionin et al. (2011) employed an AJT to test whether Russian and Korean adult L2ers of English could acquire the distinction between definite and indefinite singular generics. Two test categories with NP-level generics and sentence-level generics were created, as in (21) and (22). (21) a. b. c. d. e. (22)

a. b. c. d. e.

Test category: NP-level generic I have been studying biology today and I found out that many species are no longer alive. For example, I found out …. the dinosaur is extinct. 1 2 3 dinosaurs are extinct. 1 2 3 a dinosaur is extinct. 1 2 3 the dinosaurs are extinct. 1 2 3 dinosaur is extinct. 1 2 3

4 4 4 4 4

Test category: Sentence-level generic My brother has been in a bad mood lately. And no wonder—his apartment is so uncomfortable; it must be very depressing to live there. And he has a very dim and unpleasant overhead light. I told him he should buy a new lamp—something pleasant. For example, I know that … green lamps are very relaxing. 1 2 3 4 a green lamp is very relaxing. 1 2 3 4 the green lamp is very relaxing. 1 2 3 4 green lamp is very relaxing. 1 2 3 4 the green lamps are very relaxing. 1 2 3 4

Example (21) from Snape (2013) and (22) from Ionin et al. (2011) The AJT included control categories with anaphoric uses (second mention), because if learners could show that they had acquired articles, then they should not have difficulty with anaphoric the. However, if the semantic distinction between NP-level and sentence-level generics was difficult to acquire, one could predict a difference between L2ers and L1 English controls in acceptability judgements. The results indeed showed that the L2ers did not distinguish between the definite and indefinite singular for NP-level generics. Both Russian and Korean speakers tended to rate the definite singular low on the acceptability judgement scale of one (unacceptable) to four (acceptable), possibly due to the additional feature [+taxonomic] not yet successfully mapped onto the, but were better at rating the indefinite singular high for sentence-level generics. Despite the differences, Ionin et al. (2011) argue that the L2ers have acquired the NP-level and sentence-level distinction because of their accuracy with judging the indefinite singular and bare plurals as acceptable for sentence-level generics. For NP-level generics, the learners were far better at rating bare plurals as acceptable compared with the definite singular, as in (22a) above. The authors concluded by suggesting that the definite singular for NP-level generics has not yet been acquired. Part of the difficulty for L2ers who come from article-less L1s is that they have to acquire new morphology in the L2 (the and a) and then correctly map the semantic features [+definite] and [+taxonomic] to the definite singular. Snape (2013) replicated Ionin et al.’s (2011) study but included more test categories in the AJT and tested different adult L2 populations – Japanese and Spanish speakers. The reason for select206

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ing these two groups is because Japanese, like Russian and Korean, is an article-less language, but Spanish is a language with a fully grammaticalized article system. The result of the Japanese speakers mirrors that of the Russian and Korean speakers in Ionin et al. (2011) in that their performance on the task was almost identical. They could not distinguish between the definite singular, indefinite singular and bare NP as the subject of an NP-level generic, but their acceptance ratings of bare plurals was high. In contrast, the Spanish speakers performed much like the native speakers of English. The Spanish speakers’ successful performance on the AJT is likely due to L1 transfer since Spanish has definite singular NP-level generics, while Japanese speakers have to acquire new morphology and the mapping of semantics to that morphology.1 Together, both studies show that the degree of success depends on the particular feature specifications to be acquired, as predicted by the Bottleneck Hypothesis. Ultimately, input will hopefully lead to intake and successful L2 acquisition of generics, but input can be misleading or missing since NP-level generics of the type featured in Ionin et al. (2011) and Snape (2013) can cause confusion due to different form-function mappings across languages. This is especially challenging for those learners who receive limited input due to living in a non-Englishspeaking environment. One remedy for this is to offer instruction. Umeda et al. (2019) carried out an intervention study with Japanese L2ers of English to participate in a ten-week instruction session where the instruction exclusively focussed on NP-level and sentencelevel generics. Instruction was provided by a native speaker of Japanese and delivered in Japanese (with English examples). The instructor consulted with a native speaker of English and a teacher to get ideas on how instruction should be administered and what types of activities could be used in class. Before instruction commenced, the learners were randomly divided into two groups, one to receive instruction and the other to be a control group (no instruction given). Both groups were given a pre-test to complete in the form of an AJT. Instruction began soon after the pre-test, and after Week 3, a posttest was administered. Two additional post-tests were administered, one immediately after the ten-week instruction session had ended and the other one year later. The results of the control group showed very little change in their acceptance ratings for the definite singular in NP-level generic sentences across the pre- and post-tests. The findings from the instruction group revealed that after the first post-test there were higher ratings of the definite singular, but by the final post-test (one year later) the learners had receded back to pre-test acceptability ratings for the definite singular. Explicit instruction initially helped learners make a distinction between the definite singular, indefinite singular and bare NP; however, explicit knowledge was not retained and did not become internalized implicit knowledge.2

15.5  Summary and future directions Research on generic NPs and generic sentences in bilingual acquisition research, including early and late bilinguals, children and adults, has provided a fairly consistent picture, namely that this area is particularly susceptible to cross-linguistic interference. Explicit instruction on generics gives L2ers a better understanding of the concepts concerning genericity, but ultimately ongoing exposure and practice are required to be able to use and interpret NPs akin to monolingual native speakers. A multitude of studies have found evidence for CLI from the societal majority language to the heritage language in early bilinguals, and from the L1 to the L2 in late bilinguals. There seem to be no difficulties when the languages have the same properties, as shown by Serratrice et al. (2009) for early bilinguals and by Snape (2013) for late bilinguals. Interpreting data on the acquisition of genericity in bilingual populations can be challenging, however. One difficulty is to disentangle whether deviances from the adult or monolingual target are developmental, caused by CLI or transfer, or by ongoing changes in their input language. Another difficulty in interpreting bilingual data is that results for monolingual populations have provided contradictory results, possibly as a result of diverging methodologies. Future research is needed in order to compare monolinguals across languages using the same meth207

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odologies. Moreover, language-acquisition studies on the relatively understudied area of object NP generics could enhance our understanding of genericity because the form–function mapping differs from that in subject NP generics.

Notes 1 See Snape et al. (2013) for a study that used a forced-choice elicitation task and included subject and object generic NPs; Ionin and Montrul (2010), who have used a TVJT, comparing Korean and Spanish learners of English; and see the studies in 15.4.2 that have compared HSs and L2ers by means of AJTs and TVJTs, focussing on Romance–Germanic bilinguals. 2 See Snape et al. (2023) for a study that provided computer-based instruction to an L1 Japanese L2 English treatment group and a control group. The treatment group received instruction on NP-level and sentencelevel generics, and the findings show that there was great improvement in the participants’ explicit understanding of the two types of generic NPs.

References Barton, D. (2016). Generische Nominalphrasen bei deutsch-französischer Zweisprachigkeit: Zur Verwendung des Definitartikels bei erwachsenen Herkunftssprechern. PhD dissertation, Universität Hamburg. Bley-Vroman, R., & Joo, H.-R. (2001). The acquisition and interpretation of English locative constructions by native speakers of Korean. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 23(2), 207–219. Carlson, G. (1977). Reference to kinds in English. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Chambers, C. G., Graham, S. A., & Turner, J. N. (2008). When hearsay trumps evidence: How generics guide preschoolers’ inferences about novel kinds. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23, 749–766. Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding. Mouton de Gruyter. Cohen, A. (2001). Relative readings of many, often and generics. Natural Language Semantics, 9, 41–67. Crain, S., & McKee, C. (1985). The acquisition of structural restrictions on anaphora. In S. Berman, J.-W. Choe, & J. McDonough (Eds.), NELS 16 (pp. 94–110). GSLA, University of Massachusetts. Czypionka, A., & Kupisch, T. (2019). (The) polar bears are pink. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 22(3), 247–291. Czypionka, A., & Kupisch, T. (2020, June). How to measure genericity. Methodology workshop. NTNU, Trondheim. Dayal, V. (1999). Bare NP’s, reference to kinds, and incorporation. In T. Matthews & D. Strolovich (Eds.), Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 9 (pp. 34–51). Gelman, S., & Raman, L. (2003). Preschool children use linguistic form class and pragmatic cues to interpret generics. Child Development, 74(1), 308–325. Gelman, S., & Tardif, T. (1998). A cross-linguistic comparison of generic noun phrases in English and Mandarin. Cognition, 66(3), 215–148. Gerken, L. A., & Shady, M. E. (1996). The picture selection task. In D. McDaniel, C. McKee, & H. Smith Cairns (Eds.), Methods for assessing children’s syntax. MIT Press. Hervé, C., & Serratrice, L. (2018). The development of determiners in the context of French–English bilingualism: A study of cross-linguistic influence. Journal of Child Language, 45(3), 767–787. Hollander, M. A., Gelman, S., & Star, J. (2002). Children's interpretation of generic noun phrases. Developmental Psychology, 38, 883–889. Ionin, T., Ko, H., & Wexler, K. (2004). Article semantics in L2-acquisition: The role of specificity. Language Acquisition, 12(1), 3–69. Ionin, T., & Montrul, S. (2010). The role of L1-transfer in the interpretation of articles with definite plurals in L2-English. Language Learning, 60, 877–925. Ionin, T., Montrul, S., Kim, J. H., & Philippov, V. (2011). Genericity distinctions and the interpretation of determiners in L2 acquisition. Language Acquisition, 18, 242–280. Krifka, M., Pelletier, F. J., Carlson, G. N., ter Meulen, A., Link, G., & Chierchia, G. (1995). Genericity: An introduction. In G. Carlson & F. Pelletier (Eds.), The generic book (pp. 1–125). University of Chicago Press. Kupisch, T. (2012). Specific and generic subjects in the Italian of German–Italian simultaneous bilinguals and L2 learners. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(4), 736–756. Kupisch, T., & Pierantozzi, C. (2010). Interpreting definite plural subjects: A comparison of German and Italian monolingual and bilingual children. In K. Franich, K. Iserman, & L. Keil (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Boston University conference on language development (pp. 245–254). Cascadilla Press.

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Articles: Genericity Kuroda, S.-Y. (1972). The categorical and the thetic judgment. Foundations of Language, 9, 153–185. Lardiere, D. (2008). Feature-assembly in second language acquisition. In J. M. Liceras, H. Zobl, & H. Goodluck (Eds.), The role of formal features in second language acquisition, second language research acquisition series: Theoretical and methodological issues (pp. 106–140). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, D., Katsos, N., & Stockall, L. (2019). Generalizing about striking properties: Do glippets love to play with fire? Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1971. Leslie, S. J. (2008). Generics: Cognition and acquisition. Philosophical Review, 117(1), 1–47. Montrul, S., & Ionin, T. (2010). Transfer effects in the interpretation of definite articles by Spanish heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13(4), 449–473. Montrul, S., & Ionin, T. (2012). Dominant language transfer in Spanish heritage speakers and second language learners in the interpretation of definite articles. Modern Language Journal, 96(1), 70–94. Pappas, A., & Gelman, S. A. (1998). Generic noun phrases in mother–child conversations. Journal of Child Language, 25, 19–33. Pelletier, F., & Asher, N. (1997). Generics and defaults. In J. van Benthem & A. ter Meulen (Eds.), Handbook of logic and language (pp. 1125–1179). MIT Press. Pérez-Leroux, A., Munn, A., Schmitt, C., & DeIrish, M. (2004). Learning definite determiners: Genericity and definiteness in English and Spanish. In A. Brugos, L. Micciulla, & C. E. Smith (Eds.), Proceedings supplement of the 28th BUCLD. http://www​.bu​.edu​/bucld​/proceedings​/supplement​/vol28/ Redolfi, M., Soares, S., Czypionka, A., & Kupisch, T. (2021). Experimental evidence for the interpretation of definite plural articles as markers of genericity – How Italian can help. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 6(1), 16. https://doi​.org​/10​.5334​/gjgl​.1165 Serratrice, L., Sorace, A., Filiaci, F., & Baldo, M. (2009). Bilingual children’s sensitivity to specificity and genericity: Evidence from metalinguistic awareness. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(2), 239–257. Slabakova, R. (2006). A semantic parameter with a syntactic trigger in the L2 acquisition of Italian. In R. Slabakova, S. Montrul, & P. Prévost (Eds.), Inquiries in linguistic development: Studies in honor of Lydia White (pp. 69–87). John Benjamins. Slabakova, R. (2008). Meaning in the second language. Mouton de Gruyter. Snape, N. (2013). Japanese and Spanish adult learners of English: L2 acquisition of generic reference. Studies in Language Sciences: Journal of the Japanese Society for Language Sciences, 12, 70–94. Snape, N. (2018). Definite generic vs. definite unique in L2 acquisition. JESLA, 2, 83–95. Snape, N., García Mayo, M. del P., & Gürel, A. (2013). L1 transfer in article selection for generic reference by Spanish, Turkish and Japanese L2 learners. International Journal of English Studies, 13, 1–28. Snape, N., Zhao, H., & Wang, M. (2023). The instructed learning of form–function mappings of L2 English generic NPs. Paper presented at the 23rd European Second Language Associaiton conference, Birmingham, UK. Umeda, M., Snape, N., Yusa, N., & Wiltshier, J. (2019). The long-term effect of explicit instruction on learners’ knowledge on English articles. Language Teaching Research, 23, 179–199. Vasquez-Carranza, L. M. (2009). Evidence of crosslinguistic influence. Revista de Artes y Letras, 13(2), 185–198.

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16 THE MORPHOSYNTAX OF CASE Ayşe Gürel

16.1 Introduction Case is a complex linguistic phenomenon that takes on grammatical functions that go beyond morphosyntax. In many languages, case marking indicates grammatical relations between subject and object, and also identifies semantic notions such as agency, animacy, and definiteness/specificity (Butt, 2009, p. 27). Among its diverse grammatical functions, only morphosyntactic aspects of case will be discussed in this chapter. For the relationship between case and semantics, see Chapter 17 (this volume). The notion of case has always had a central place in different theoretical perspectives, (see contributions in Malchukov & Spencer, 2009a). Within generative linguistics, case is treated under Case Theory not only as a morphological element but also as a grammatical notion that motivates certain syntactic operations (Bobaljik & Wurmbrand, 2009). Abstract Case (C is conventionally in upper case) is considered distinct from morphological case. The analysis of the relationship between abstract Case and morphological case has changed since its first presentation in the Government and Binding (GB) framework (Chomsky, 1981). In some languages, case is overtly realized by means of morphemes (e.g., Finnish), while in others it has little (e.g., English) or no overt realization (e.g., Vietnamese). Nevertheless, syntactically, abstract Case is assumed to be assigned/checked in a uniform way, whether morphologically realized or not (Chomsky, 1986). In the generative second language acquisition (SLA) literature, the acquisition of case and related syntactic reflexes has been studied in reference to variability in the use of inflectional morphemes—a commonly observed phenomenon among late second language (L2) learners (Lardiere, 1998a; White, 2003). Since the late 1990s, much attention has been paid to the question of whether morphology is dissociated from syntax in adult L2 acquisition (e.g., Lardiere, 1998b). In this context, this chapter provides an overview of theoretical issues regarding the morphosyntax of case and discusses relevant L2 acquisition research. Due to space limitations, the discussion is confined to studies of adults. Interested readers are referred to crosslinguistic work on case in child L1 acquisition (e.g., Eisenbeiss et al., 2009; Stephany & Voeikova, 2009), and child and adult heritage language acquisition/maintenance (e.g., Felser & Arslan, 2019; Kim et al., 2018; Montrul et al., 2012; Polinsky, 2006). The rest of this chapter first presents typological characteristics of case followed by a discussion of the role attributed to case in generative theory. The subsequent section will explain how generative SLA work has drawn on linguistic theory to formulate hypotheses regarding the L2 acquisition of morphosyntax. Next, methodological issues are presented to set the background for the critical appraisal of L2 studies on case. The chapter concludes with a summary and suggestions for future work. 210

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-19

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16.2  Case as a central morphosyntactic element in linguistic theory 16.2.1  Morphological case Morphological case is defined as “a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads” (Blake, 2001, p. 1). Case is a typical inflection for nouns and marks the grammatical functions as well as semantic role of a noun in a sentence (Spencer, 2003, p. 218). Case marking shows the relationship between a noun and a verb at the clause level or between a noun and a preposition, postposition or another noun at the phrase level (Blake, 2001, p. 1). The Turkish example in (1) illustrates the above-mentioned points. The accusative case suffix –(y)I marked on the noun, elmalar (apples) indicates that elmalar is the direct object of the verb, verdi (gave). The accusative suffix also indicates that elmaları is specific because, in Turkish, specific direct objects are marked by an accusative case suffix (see also Chapter 17 this volume).

(1)

Mehmet adam-a elma-lar-ı Mehmet.NOM man-DAT apple-PL-ACC ‘Mehmet gave the apples to the man.’

ver-di give-PAST.3SG (Blake, 2001, p. 1)

The dative case suffix –(y)A, marked on the noun adam (man) signals the indirect object. The subject NP, Mehmet, does not have an overt suffix, and is hence marked as nominative. The cases here are determined by the verb, vermek (to give). At the phrase level, cases can also be governed by prepositions or postpositions. For example, in the Turkish phrase yağmur-dan dolayı (rain-ABL because of, “because of the rain”), the postposition dolayı as the head of the phrase governs the ablative on the NP that serves as the complement (Blake, 2001, p. 2). There are crosslinguistic differences in the morphological manifestation of case, one of which is the number of distinctive markers of the case system (Blake, 2001; Spencer, 2009). For example, while Modern Greek has a three-case system (i.e., nominative, accusative and genitive),1 German has four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), and Turkish has six (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, ablative) (Kornfilt, 1997). There are also languages with many more than six cases (see Comrie & Polinsky, 1998, for a discussion of some Nakh-Dagestanian languages with around fifty different cases). Another typological variation pertains to the morpho-phonological shape of cases. As Example 1 illustrates, in agglutinative languages such as Turkish, the boundary between the stem and case suffixes is clearly separable except for phonology-based allomorphy (Blake, 2001), as shown in Table 16.1. In contrast, in fusional languages, case marking is inseparable from the stem. In Greek, for example, case is fused with number. See Table 16.2 with examples from Ralli (2000, pp. 203–204). In some languages—German, for instance—case marking appears on nouns, adjectives, and determiners, as shown in Table 16.3 (Blake, 2001, p. 102). Some languages case-mark verb forms, particularly if they are non-finite or nominalized (Spencer, 2009, p. 189). In Turkish, for instance, subordinate clauses with a nominal function are marked for case (Kornfilt, 1997, p. 406):

(2)

Hasan Ali’ye Ayşe’nin yarış-ı Hasan Ali-DAT Ayşe-GEN race-ACC ‘Hasan told Ali that Ayşe won the race.’

kazan-dığı-nı win-NOM.3SG-ACC

211

söyle-di tell-PAST

Ayşe Gürel Table 16.1  Case inflection in Turkish Nominative

ev

‘house’

Accusative Genitive Dative Locative Ablative

ev-i ev-in ev-e ev-de ev-den

kuş

‘bird’

kuş-u kuş-un kuş-a kuş-ta kuş-tan

Table 16.2  Case inflection in Modern Greek

Nominative Genitive Accusative

Singular

Plural

kipos kipu kipo(n)

kipi kipon kipus

Table 16.3  Case inflection in German Nominative

der liebe Mann

Accusative Genitive Dative

den lieben Mann des lieben Mannes dem lieben Mann(e)

‘the dear man’

There are also languages such as English with no overt case marking on nouns, but only on pronouns. Nevertheless, in Modern English, the overt marking of case is confined to accusative case in the pronoun system, making the nominative and accusative distinction clear. Yet English has case syncretism (i.e., two case forms have the same morphological realization) (Haegeman, 1994). Some languages use distinct forms for each case affix (e.g., Turkish), whereas others display case syncretism (e.g., Latin) (Blake, 2001). Although case syncretism is systematic in some languages, in others, it is treated as accidental homophony (Baerman, 2009, p. 220). Another crosslinguistic variation is that, in some languages, adpositions (prepositions and postpositions) mark the relation of dependent nouns to their heads. For example, in Japanese, instead of case affixes, postpositions carry this function (Blake, 2001, p. 9):

(3)

Sensei ga Tasaku ni hon teacher SUBJ Tasaku IO book ‘The teacher gave Tasaku a book.’

o DO

yat-ta give-PAST

In (3), the subject, the indirect object, and the direct object are marked by distinct postpositions, namely ga, ni and o, respectively. Adpositions are analytic case markers, as opposed to synthetic case markers like the suffixes of Turkish and Latin (Blake, 2001, p. 9). The above examples are from languages that are traditionally classified as having a nominativeaccusative case system. The other common morphological case system is ergative-absolutive. In 212

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the nominative-accusative system, the subject of transitives and intransitives are assigned the same case (i.e., nominative case), but the object of transitives is assigned accusative case. In ergativeabsolutive languages, however, the subject of a transitive verb is assigned ergative case, whereas the direct object of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive verb are assigned absolutive case. It is important to note that this traditional typology of case systems as nominative-accusative versus ergative-absolutive is not always straightforward; not all languages labelled as ergative pattern in the same way (Butt, 2006; Polinsky, 2016).

16.2.2  Morphological case-word order interaction In languages with no or limited case manifestation, word order is observed to be an alternative to case marking for distinguishing subjects from objects. English is one such language. It has also been suggested that languages that morphologically mark the subject–object distinction on NPs/ DPs tend to have a basic subject–object–verb (SOV) order (e.g., Turkish) and that those without this distinction tend to have subject–verb–object (SVO) order (e.g., English) (Blake, 2001, pp. 14–15). Crucially, crosslinguistic data reveals a correlation between overt case marking on NPs/ DPs for distinguishing subjects from objects and flexible word order (Blake, 2001, pp. 14–15). For example, unlike English (a strict SVO language), Turkish (which has a canonical SOV order) exhibits free word order. Constituents can occur pre-verbally or post-verbally (Erguvanlı, 1984; Öztürk, 2008). Nevertheless, there are case-dependent constraints in scrambled sentences. As illustrated in (4), accusative case on the direct object is obligatory when the object is referential and specific (definite or indefinite). Accusative-marked objects can freely move to a preverbal or postverbal position (Erguvanlı, 1984, pp. 21–22): (4)

a. b. c. d.

Murat kitap oku-yor Murat book read-PROG ‘Murat is reading a book.’ (Murat is book-reading.) *Kitap Murat oku-yor book Murat read-PROG Murat kitab-ı oku-yor Murat book-ACC read-PROG ‘Murat is reading the book.’ Kitab-ı Murat oku-yor Book-ACC Murat read-PROG ‘Murat is reading the book.’

(direct object: non-referential)

(direct object: referential/specific)

It has been suggested that morphological case might make it easier to parse a language with free word order. This may be why free word order is found in languages with overt morphological case more often than in others (Neeleman & Weerman, 2009, p. 277).

16.2.3  Syntactic case Morphological case is often distinguished from syntactic case (also termed as structural case), which is assumed to express core syntactic relations such as subject and object (Malchukov & Spencer, 2009b, p. 656). Syntactic cases traditionally include nominative, accusative, ergative, genitive, and dative, and they encode purely syntactic functions. For example, depending on the basis of the position of a nominal in the clause structure, the nominative is assigned for the subject, and accusative for the direct object (Blake, 2001, p. 31, 200, 205). 213

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16.2.4  Case in generative linguistics In the generative tradition (Chomsky, 1981, 1995, 2001, 2008), morphological case as an inflectional category is typically distinguished from what is referred to as abstract Case (for a historical overview, see Bobaljik & Wurmbrand, 2009; Markman, 2010). The role of abstract Case is formulated under the Case Filter, which proposes that every phonetically realized NP/DP must be assigned abstract Case (Chomsky, 1981, 1986). The exact mechanisms underlying structural Case assignment and associated syntactic phenomena have been revised over the years, and a detailed presentation of this four decade-long theoretical debate is beyond the scope of this chapter. Several fundamental assumptions are briefly discussed here, however, to provide a background for the SLA approaches discussed.

16.2.4.1  The basic principles of Case Theory The Case Filter and ensuing proposals formulated under Case Theory in the GB framework ensure that all overt NPs/DPs occupy syntactic positions where Case is assigned; and certain elements are designated as Case assigners. For example, the two structural cases, accusative and nominative, are typically assigned, respectively, to objects by verbs under government, and to subjects by the head of the finite Inflectional Phrase (IP) under the Specifier-Head agreement. In the Minimalist Program (MP), first a unified agreement-based Case checking mechanism was proposed for the assignment of nominative and accusative under the Specifier-Head relation within the agreement phrases, AGRsP and AGRoP. It was later suggested that the nominative and accusative should be checked by Tense Phrase (TP) and the v (little v) head, respectively (Chomsky, 1995). In these Minimalist conceptualizations, Case was no longer perceived as something an NP/DP inherently lacks and therefore needs to acquire to pass the Case Filter; it was considered an uninterpretable feature that comes with an NP/DP and that needs to be ‘checked off’ (Markman, 2010, p. 850). In subsequent work (Chomsky, 2001, 2004), the operation Agree was proposed as a feature-checking mechanism. It was assumed that some features (uninterpretable features such as Case feature of NPs/DPs and the phi-features of T and v) enter the derivation unvalued and receive their value during the derivation, while others (interpretable features such as phi-features on NPs/DPs and Tense feature of T) come with inherently specified feature values (Citko, 2014, p. 14). If an unvalued/uninterpretable feature (referred to as the ‘probe’) searching for the same features (referred to as ‘goal’) in a syntactic domain finds a matching goal, the value of the goal is copied onto the probe and deleted/ checked off. The checking mechanism leads to Case assignment in the sense that the subject NP/ DP that carries phi-features becomes visible to the probe and thus forms a suitable goal for T. More recent theoretical formulations are at odds with the proposal that unifies Case assignment and feature matching under a single mechanism Agree. Drawing on the earlier work of Marantz (1991), linguists have developed the Dependent Case Theory, which posits that morphologically marked cases result from a relation between two NPs in a syntactic domain, not from a relation between a head and an NP. The question of whether dependent case is the only modality of case assignment in grammar (Levin & Preminger, 2015) or whether it coexists with case assignment by functional heads (Baker, 2015) is still being debated (Bárány & Sheehan, 2021). Summarizing, generative work on Case has been developing since the 1980s. The theoretical evolution of Case Theory is visible in generative approaches to SLA, as discussed next.

16.3  Generative approaches to L2 acquisition of inflectional morphology Since the late 1990s, generative SLA research has followed developments in theoretical linguistics (Rothman & Slabakova, 2018). Particularly with the advent of the Minimalist Program (MP, Chomsky, 1995), several proposals have been put forward to account for variability/optionality in the 214

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suppliance of L2 functional morphology. One such proposal, the Representational Deficit Hypothesis (RDH), suggests that the absence of functional morphology (e.g., tense) in the interlanguage grammar implies a deficit in abstract syntactic/functional categories or features/feature strength (Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Tsimpli & Roussou, 1991). One view developed in this approach is known as the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Mastropavlou, 2007), which predicts—with reference to (un)interpretable features specified in the MP—that interpretable features are accessible to L2 learners, but uninterpretable features remain difficult, particularly if they are not instantiated in the L1. The RDH contrasts with other approaches that suggest that variable use of morphology does not count as counterevidence for the presence of fully projected syntactic representations in the L2 grammar. One such view is the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH), which considers variability a surface problem confined to the overt realization of inflectional morphemes (Lardiere, 1998a, b; Prévost & White, 2000). Variability is assumed to result from difficulty in matching feature specifications of abstract syntactic nodes with surface morphological forms (White, 2003; see also Slabakova, 2016, Chapter 7). This mapping problem was elaborated in the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) (Lardiere, 2008, 2009). Drawing on the MP, the FRH posits that formal features (i.e., phonological, syntactic, and semantic features) that are bundled together on lexical items in a particular way in the L1 may need to be reassembled into new formal configurations in the L2. Learners are likely to find it challenging to reassemble new feature matrices of functional categories and to figure out their precise morpho-phonological realizations in the L2 (Lardiere, 2009, p. 175). Subsequent generative research has addressed persistent problems in the endstate L2 grammar in the Interface Hypothesis (IH), which, following the MP, predicts that grammatical phenomena at the interface of different grammatical domains will pose more problems for L2 learners than structures governed by a single grammatical module. Anticipated problems are linked to processing difficulty associated with the real-time integration of information from multiple grammatical domains (Sorace, 2011). The IH also anticipates more problems in the acquisition of grammar–external properties (e.g., syntax–discourse/pragmatics) than grammar-internal ones (e.g., syntax–semantics; syntax–morphology) (Sorace & Serratrice, 2009). In the grammar–internal interfaces, the syntax–semantics interface is assumed to pose no significant difficulties, but the syntax–morphology interface is predicted to remain largely problematic for adult L2 learners. More recently, Slabakova (2019) has proposed another modular view under the Bottleneck Hypothesis, which states that inflectional morphology hosted in functional categories constitutes the bottleneck in L2 acquisition. The assumption here is that, since narrow syntax and semantic computations are universal components, accessing complex structures in these modules will not pose problems for learners as long as all the grammatical features are acquired. This view predicts that the knowledge of syntax and semantics is superior to that of morphology (Slabakova, 2019, p. 338). In sum, generative approaches to SLA follow proposals in generative linguistic theory in formulating their hypotheses about the L2 acquisition of morphosyntax. Much SLA research has been designed to test these hypotheses. Before moving on to discuss them, it will be useful to address some of the methodological issues in this context.

16.4  Methodological approaches to the study of case L2 research essentially aims to describe and account for how L2 learners acquire, process, and use an additional language (Ionin, 2013). Issues such as crosslinguistic transfer, accessibility of universal principles and constraints have occupied the research agenda over the years (Rothman & Slabakova, 2018). Like other grammatical notions, the acquisition of case has been studied to address these issues and ultimately identify whether or not adult L2 acquisition of case can ever be native-like, and if not, whether this is due to a deficiency in performance or competence. For generative linguists, uncovering abstract linguistic competence has always been of prime importance, as it is essential to ascertain 215

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whether the L2 grammar, like the native grammar, is Universal Grammar (UG)-constrained. Tasks involving production (oral or written), comprehension, and grammaticality judgment have been commonly used in the generative tradition, even though they might also be affected by performance factors (Lakshmanan & Selinker, 2001; Montrul, 2015, Chapter 6, Chapter 17, this volume). In the last two decades, we have seen a shift from these traditional L2 methods to online psycholinguistic techniques, as it has become important for researchers to establish whether or not what looks like a deficit in the abstract grammatical representation (i.e., competence) could be due to processing failure (i.e., performance) (Juffs, 2004). Word-level and sentence-level processing data allows researchers to determine whether L2 learners can carry out native-like linguistic computations during encoding and decoding (Clahsen & Felser, 2018). To test L2 processing of morphologically complex words, researchers have generally used simple or primed lexical decision tasks that involve visual or auditory stimuli, where participants are required to make a (real word/nonword) decision as quickly and accurately as possible (Jacob, 2018). A typical masked priming experiment testing the processing of case compares reaction times (RTs) to the target noun in different prime conditions (e.g., morphologically related, orthographically related, and unrelated prime). Prime duration is kept short (40–60 ms) to constrain participants’ conscious perception of the relationship between the prime and the target. When the target is preceded by a morphologically related prime as opposed to other prime conditions, RTs to the target noun should be shorter if the morphologically complex prime (i.e., a case-marked noun) is decomposed into individual morphemes. Such decomposition signals unconscious linguistic computation. In the cross-modal priming paradigm, prime (typically an auditory stimulus) and target (visual stimulus) are presented in different modalities and, unlike in masked priming, participants are consciously aware of the prime while making a yes/no decision on the target (Jacob, 2018). To investigate sentence-level morphosyntactic processing, self-paced reading/listening paradigms are commonly used. Here, participants’ RTs are measured while they are reading/listening to a stimulus being presented word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase. Mean RTs for each segment reveal information about incremental processing and the part of the stimulus that is easier or more difficult to process. Moment-by-moment reading comprehension processes are also investigated via an eye-tracking tool that identifies participants’ (in)sensitivity to (un)grammaticalities via shorter/longer fixation times at different points during visual processing. Participants’ eye movements are recorded while they are gazing at a visual scene and simultaneously listening to auditory input. Known as the visual world paradigm, this technique is used extensively to obtain information on real-time integration of linguistic information and information drawn from a visual setting (Roberts, 2012). Another psycholinguistic measure involves event-related brain potentials (ERPs), collected via an electrode cap on the participant’s scalp while they are processing a stimulus. The recordings of brain waves that reflect the neural activity are time-locked to a particular event (e.g., the onset of a visually or auditorily presented item). Two well-established ERP components are the N400 and the P600, which are generally associated with the online integration of conceptual/semantic information and syntactic information, respectively. The P600, for example, is typically elicited during the processing of word order or agreement violations involving case and number (Steinhauer, 2014, p. 398). In sum, the number of online L2 studies has rapidly increased over the years as it has become crucial to uncover the mental processes underlying L2 acquisition and to fully understand whether nonnative L2 outcomes in different grammar domains are related to parsing difficulty. Although the methods noted above are not specific to the study of case, they are directly relevant to the studies summarized below.

16.5  Studies on L2 acquisition of case The literature on the L2 acquisition of case is vast. Due to space limitations, the discussion here is confined to the most current studies from case-morphology-rich languages, which are relatively less studied as an L2. 216

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16.5.1  Offline studies In an L2 Turkish study, Coşkun Kunduz (2018) investigated the production of nominal and verbal morphology in the essays of 46 L1 English participants with intermediate or advanced Turkish. Overall, accuracy was high in case use (i.e., 67.4% to 93.7%). A difficulty hierarchy ranging from the most to the least accurate use (i.e., locative > ablative > dative > genitive > accusative) found in the data implies that variability in case use is not an across-the-board phenomenon. Written data revealing omission errors in case suffixes but substitution in verbal suffixes did not provide a clear support for either the MSIH or FRH. Persistent problems with the accusative have also been documented in Antonova-Ünlü and Wei (2020), who compared L1 English and L1 Russian participants with advanced L2 Turkish. Written narratives of both groups displayed similar high rates of accusative case omission. Results were accounted for based on the IH on the grounds that the Turkish accusative case is a property at the interface of morphosyntax and pragmatics. L2 studies on case in Korean, another agglutinative language, are also revealing in this context. Korean has nominative, accusative and genitive cases (O’Grady, 1991). Ahn (2015) tested knowledge of the nominative and accusative in intermediate-level learners (n = 70) with different L1s (English, Chinese, and Japanese). All groups performed more accurately in written production than in oral production. Across the tasks, the lowest accuracy was in the L1 Chinese group, and the highest was in the L1 Japanese group. In the same study, a group of L1 English learners of Korean with beginner and intermediate-level proficiency (n = 25) were given a grammaticality judgment task (GJT). The L2 group performed significantly lower than native Korean speakers in both nominative and accusative contexts. The findings were linked to L1–L2 differences in surface case morphology. In another L2 Korean study, Chae (2018) used a spoken corpus to examine knowledge of semantic and discourse-pragmatic features (e.g., subject/object-hood, animacy, definiteness, newness) that regulate the distribution of case morphemes and zero-marking in nominative and accusative contexts (see also Chapter 17, this volume, for a relevant discussion). Results from L1 English and L1 Japanese speakers with advanced Korean revealed native-like performance in the sense that overt case marking was more frequent in discourse-new and contrastive-focus DPs. The L1 Japanese group still performed better than the L1 English group, signaling L1 effects in the attainment of case-markable subjects and objects in L2 Korean. Findings were accounted for by the FRH. Finnish is another relatively understudied agglutinative language, with 15 cases (Pereltsvaig, 2012). In Finnish, depending on the physical properties of an element’s location, there is a split between state-in, motion-to and motion-from, yielding a six-way locative case system. Bellucci and Dal Pozzo (2016) examined the use of four of these locative case markers by L1 Italian participants (n = 23) with lower-intermediate proficiency in L2 Finnish. The tested locative cases marked the internal/external and the stative/directional distinction: inessive ‘in’ (internal-stative), allative (motion to an external location), illative ‘to/into’ (motion to an internal location), and adessive ‘at/near’ (stativity in an external location). Italian, however, has only locative prepositions. The results of a translation task revealed that internal cases were more readily available to L2 learners than external cases. The findings were accounted for using the Subset Principle, suggesting that inner cases are easier to learn than outer cases. L2 data on case is also available in Russian, a fusional language with six cases (nominative, locative, accusative, genitive, instrumental, dative), two numbers, and different sets of inflections that vary depending on gender, animacy, and stem type. Cherepovskaia et al. (2022) examined the developmental trajectory of this complex case system with 192 Catalan–Spanish bilinguals with Russian proficiency that ranged from beginner to advanced. The data, elicited via a story-writing task, revealed a proficiency-based increase in accuracy. The overall acquisition order (i.e., locative 217

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> accusative > genitive > instrumental > dative, in order of increasing difficulty) was attributed to: how essential a case is for successful communication and how complex it is semantically and morphologically. Another line of L2 research on case investigates the interaction of case with associated syntactic phenomena. A potential morphology–syntax dissociation in L2 acquisition was first raised by Lardiere (1998a) in her longitudinal study of a Chinese speaker who showed very low suppliance of Tense morphology in L2 English despite perfect distribution of nominative and accusative pronominal cases. Based on the Minimalist case-feature checking assumption, the learner’s accurate use of nominative subject pronouns in finite past contexts and accusative pronouns in non-nominative contexts was taken to evince a fully projected TP, despite the low rate of Tense morpheme production (see also White, 2003 for similar findings in L2 English data from an L1 Turkish speaker). Similar issues were also examined in L2 Turkish from the perspective of case morphology-word order interaction. Because accusative case-marked specific NPs can freely scramble in Turkish (see Examples 4c and 4d), two earlier studies involving L1 English–L2 Turkish learners reported variable use of case suffixes despite intact knowledge of case-dependent word order restrictions in scrambled sentences (Gürel, 2000; Haznedar, 2006). Following these, Papadopolou et al. (2011) examined L2 Turkish data from L1 Greek speakers via different tasks (cloze test, sentence–picture matching, and an online GJT). Although the results revealed proficiency-dependent differences among beginner and low- and high-intermediate level learners, overall, substantial problems were observed in the use of case morphemes. Despite some indication that accusative case-marked OSV (grammatical) sentences and ungrammatical OSV sentences were treated differently by L2 learners, the results still failed to reveal strong evidence for learner’ sensitivity to the case-word order interaction across three tasks, unlike what was reported by Gürel (2000) and Haznedar (2006).

16.5.2  Online studies Online L2 studies focusing on case have used a variety of psycholinguistic paradigms such as lexical decision, eye-tracking, and ERPs. In a visual lexical decision study on L2 Turkish, Uygun and Gürel (2018), using a masked priming experiment, examined L1-based differences in the processing of nominal inflection (ablative, locative, plural) in native speakers of Turkish (n = 47), L1 English (n = 44), and L1 Russian participants (n = 39). L2 learners’ Turkish proficiency ranged from upper-intermediate to advanced. The items included morphologically related Denizde-DENİZ, ‘seaLOC-SEA’ (in the sea); identity: deniz-DENİZ, ‘sea-SEA’, and unrelated: oğul-DENİZ, ‘son-SEA’ prime-target pairs. RT analyses of three prime conditions revealed morphological decomposition in both native speakers and L2 groups, suggesting that native-like computations are also possible for late L2 learners. In an unprimed visual lexical decision experiment, Vainio et al. (2014) compared the processing of L2 Finnish nouns in L1 Russian (n = 17), L1 Chinese (n = 17) groups, and native speakers of Finnish (n = 22). The items included simple (zero-inflected) nouns in the nominative singular (pöytä, ‘table’), transparently inflected singular forms carrying partitive case (pöytä+ä), and semi-transparently inflected genitive-marked singular nouns (pöydä+n), which involve consonant alteration in the stem. Like native speakers, L1 Russian participants took longer to recognize morphologically complex words than they did simple forms, suggesting that they employ a morpheme-based access route (i.e., decomposition). The absence of decomposition in the L1 Chinese group was attributed to L1 transfer from Chinese, an analytic language. In an L2 Russian study, Gor et al. (2019) conducted a cross-modal morphosyntactic priming experiment to test L1 English participants with advanced and superior L2 Russian proficiency (n = 62) and native speakers of Russian (n = 33) (Experiment 1). The target nouns were preceded by primes (i.e., adjectives in the oblique case with an ambiguous inflection). The critical conditions 218

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included feminine singular nouns inflected in three cases: the nominative/citation form (sobak-a, ‘dog’); the genitive, a high surface frequency form (sobak-i,‘of the dog’); and the instrumental, a low surface frequency form (sobak-oj, ‘by the dog’). Unlike traditional morphological priming studies, the inflectional manipulation was on target words rather than on primes. Participants heard spoken primes, followed by visually presented forms for which they had to make a word/nonword decision. For both the superior-proficiency group and the native speakers, the fastest responses were found in the nominative and the slowest in the instrumental condition. RT differences between cases were attributed to the functional load and the type frequency of morphemes. L2 learners with slightly lower proficiency also showed an advantage for the nominative, but they processed the genitive and instrumental in a similar way. Proficiency-based gradual approximation to native-like processing patterns was also found in Gor et al.’s (2017) auditory lexical decision experiment with L1 English learners of L2 Russian. In an ERP study, Aydın et al. (2016) examined the processing of case and agreement in L2 Turkish learners with different L1s (Albanian, Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Portuguese, and Russian) and native speakers of Turkish (n = 14). The L2 participants had low-intermediate (n =14) and high-intermediate (n = 14) proficiency. In Turkish, genitive case-marked subjects appear in non-finite complement clauses (see Example 2). The experimental items with finite and non-finite clauses were manipulated so that the presence of either genitive or nominative case-marked embedded subjects created case violations. ERP data was collected during a GJT to assess the knowledge of subject-case and subject-verb agreement violations. Unlike Turkish, none of the L1s allowed genitive subjects in subordinate clauses. In finite clauses, an N400 effect was found in native speakers, but, in L2 participants, a delayed P600 effect was observed. In non-finite clauses, while a left inferior frontal negativity was detected for native speakers, a P600 component was elicited in the L2 group in all time windows. The findings were interpreted as nonnative-like processing patterns that persisted due to structural differences between L1 and L2. Finally, in a sentence-level processing study that examined case-word order interaction in L2 Korean, Frenck-Mestre et al. (2019) compared L1 French (n = 21) and L1 Kazakh speakers of L2 Korean (n = 16) to native speakers of Korean (n = 18). In Korean, case particles permit scrambling of the verb’s arguments. Eye-movement data was collected via a forced-choice visual world paradigm to examine whether L2 learners could reliably use case particles (i.e., accusative and dative) as morphological cues to interpret canonical (SOV) and scrambled (OSV) sentences. Participants heard an utterance while viewing two scenes, one of which correctly illustrated the utterance. The results revealed case morpheme-based preferential looks at the correct image in both word orders only in native speakers. L1 Kazakh participants were more native-like than L1 French participants, who had more difficulty with scrambled word order. The findings implied that L2 learners can achieve nativelike case-based predictive processing as long as there is an L1–L2 overlap.

16.6 Summary Case as a morphosyntactic phenomenon lies at the heart of generative linguistics and has been reanalyzed over the years. Shaped by linguistic theories, generative SLA has generated a number of hypotheses for L2 acquisition of morphosyntax. These hypotheses have been tested in a variety of studies that explored L2 learners’ grammatical representation based on their use of functional morphology, case being one of them. The focus of L2 studies has now shifted from representation to real-time processing of morphosyntactic elements. The studies reviewed here suggest that ultimate attainment of the L2 case paradigm is not a simple all-or-nothing issue; rather, it is largely morpheme-specific, as suggested by the accuracy order found in multiple studies. Furthermore, convergence to native norms, either in the representation or the processing of case, increases as a function of L2 proficiency. Yet this development is much faster in L2 learners whose L1 offers a rich case paradigm, suggesting 219

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that L1 morphology sensitizes learners to the target case system and associated syntactic phenomena. Nonetheless, depending on inherent characteristics (morpho-phonological/syntactic), and functional load/frequency, certain case morphemes may still pose persistent difficulty even for high proficiency L2 learners whose L1 is case-morphology-rich. The task type/modality also seems to affect L2 learners’ performance, as they are generally better in written production than in oral tasks. Likewise, online measures at the word and sentence level seem to differ in terms of how well they capture the morpheme-based parsing route in L2 learners. As for the morphology-syntax dissociation, available data reveals no conclusive results on whether nonnative-like case morpheme production also entails problems in the acquisition of case-driven syntactic phenomena (e.g., word-order constraints). Thus, although the studies reviewed here generally point to the L1–L2 proximity in morphological typology as the primary factor in native-like attainment of case, the facilitative role of L1 influence seems to vary across individual case morphemes.

16.7  Directions for further research Broad typological variation in case systems make it difficult to compare crosslinguistic data on the acquisition of case. SLA research should nevertheless continue to gather data from a variety of relatively less explored languages (both nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive languages) with large case inventories to uncover intricacies regarding the acquisition of case, both as a morphological and syntactic phenomenon. Languages with rich case systems will enable researchers to look more closely at the acquisition trajectory of both structural and inherent cases and investigate the complex interplay among morpho-phonological, -orthographic, -syntactic, and -semantic features in the acquisition hierarchy. Future studies on case should concentrate more on the relationship between processing and grammatical representation. Processing data from case-morphology-rich languages is crucial in that respect because research needs to shed further light on how differences in the linguistic manifestation of case affect its acquisition and processing in the L2. This will also help researchers identify why the facilitative role the L1 plays in the acquisition of a case paradigm of a typologically similar L2 is largely selective and morpheme-specific. On a final note, new, more refined SLA theories are needed to address both the representational and computational components of L2 morphosyntax. Such theories should be capable of accounting for the developmental trajectory of inflectional morphemes and the differential processing cost associated with them. As a complex morphosyntactic phenomenon, Case has great potential for leading the formulation of such fine-grained hypotheses.

Note 1 Greek also has a vocative case (Ralli, 2000) but because it is functionally different, it is not typically considered a case (Blake, 2001, p. 156).

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17 SEMANTICALLY BASED CASE Silvina Montrul

17.1 Case Case is a grammatical device that marks the function of nouns and their semantic role in a sentence (Blake, 1994). In many languages, the subject noun phrase (NP) of an active transitive sentence is typically an agent and receives nominative case; the object is a theme or patient and receives accusative case; and the indirect object is a goal and receives dative case. In English, nominative case is assigned to the subject NP by the tense phrase (TP), and accusative case is assigned to the direct object NP by the verb in the verb phrase (VP). In more morphologically rich languages (see Gürel, this volume), NPs are marked with overt case morphology. These languages have additional cases, like ergative, genitive, instrumental, conative, ablative, etc., which can also occur with specific semantic roles (agent, experiencer, theme) and sometimes alternate with nominative and accusative case based on semantic notions such as animacy, perfectivity or definiteness. This chapter discusses the acquisition of some of these semantically based case alternations, also called non-structural case, with subjects and objects. We focus on two main instances of non-structural, semantically based case: the first instance is the case of ergative and dative experiencers, as examples of Differential Subject Marking (DSM); the second instance is the morphologically overt case of semantically atypical direct objects, called Differential Object Marking (DOM). We also present two main theoretical treatments of semantically based cases. Although semantically based cases are not difficult to acquire for L1 children, they do pose significant challenges for L2 and L3 learners and heritage language speakers.

17.2  Non-structural case Generative theory divides case into two types, structural and non-structural, which differ in their behavior and manner of licensing (Chomsky, 1981). Structural case is syntactic (see Gürel, this volume). For example, nominative and accusative cases are structural cases licensed by T or V, are often morphologically unmarked (i.e., phonologically null), and are independent of the thematic role of the NPs. In contrast, non-structural case is semantically based and determined by semantic or pragmatic features of the NP, the predicate, or the discourse context. In this chapter we discuss two instances of non-structural or semantically based case: Differential Subject Marking (DSM) and Differential Object Marking (DOM).

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DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-20

Semantically based case

17.2.1  Differential subject Marking To explain semantically based case in more detail, an important distinction in case systems is in order. Languages are broadly divided into those that present a nominative-accusative pattern and those that present an ergative-absolutive pattern. Nominative-accusative languages (Spanish, English, Russian, Greek, and German, among others) generally mark subjects of transitive and intransitive verbs with nominative case and objects with accusative case. Ergative-absolutive languages (Greenlandic, Dyirbal, and Basque, Hindi/Urdu among others) single out subjects of transitive verbs, as in ni in the Basque example in (1), marking them overtly with ergative case (-k). Subjects of intransitive (unaccusative) predicates, as in the Basque example (2), and objects (liburua in (1)) are grouped together and marked with absolutive case (which is typically null or ø) (see Butt, 2006). (1)

Ni-k liburu-a-ø erosi-du-t I-erg book-det-abs buy aux​.abs​.3sg​-erg​​.1sg ‘I have bought the book.’

(2)

Ni- ø eseri I-abs sit ‘I have sat.’

naiz. aux​.abs​.​1sg

Because only subjects that are semantically different or atypical are marked with ergative case and others are not, ergative case has been considered an instance of DSM (Woolford, 2006). However, the status of ergative case as structural, morphological, or as semantic case is still debated (Polinsky, 2016). For example, in Hindi/Urdu, ergative case and other cases are treated as semantically based case because they are predictably associated with specific semantic roles. Table 17.1, adapted from Butt (2006, p. 127), gives examples of cases in Hindi/Urdu. Hindi/Urdu is a split ergative language, behaving as an ergative language in certain contexts and as a nominative-accusative language in others (Bittner & Hale, 1996; Dixon, 1979). The split in Hindi/Urdu ergativity is conditioned by the perfective vs. non-perfective aspect distinction and verb transitivity. Only subjects of finite transitive verbs with perfective morphology are marked with ergative case, as in (3), which shows the ergative marker –ne on the subject Ram. Because the verb in (4) is imperfective, the subject carries nominative case. Similarly, example (5) has an intransitive verb, so the subject takes nominative case (zero).

Table 17.1  Distribution of case markers, thematic roles, and their syntactic distribution in Hindi/Urdu Morphology

Case

Thematic role

Grammatical Relation

zero ne ko se k-

Nominative Ergative Accusative dative Instrumental Genitive

Agent, theme Agent Theme Experiencer/goal Instrument Possessor

me/par/tak

Locative

Location

Subject/object Subject Object subject/indirect object Subject/oblique/adjunct Subject (infinitives) Specifiers/possessives Oblique/adjunct

225

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Ram-ne gaaRii Ram.msg-erg car.fsg.nom ‘Ram has driven a car.’

calaa-yii drive-perf.fsg

hai. be.pres.3sg

(4)

Ram gaaRii Ram.msg.nom car.fsg.nom ‘Ram drives a car.’

calaa-taa drive-impf.msg

hai. be.pres.3sg

(5)

Siitaa bahut haNs-ii. Sita.msg a lot laugh-perf.fsg ‘Sita laughed a lot.’

Dative subjects are another example of DSM (Woolford, 2006). The subjects of some psychological predicates, which happen to be experiencers, are marked with dative case in some languages (e.g., Hindi, Spanish, Italian). Example (6) illustrates the piacere class in Italian and example (7) shows that in Spanish dative experiencers must be doubled by a dative clitic (le). (6)

A Francesco piace Maria. dat Francesco likes Maria ‘Francesco likes Maria.’

(7)

A Francisco le gusta Maria. dat Francisco dat​.​cl likes Maria ‘Francesco likes Maria.’

Subjects that are less prominent in the thematic role hierarchy in (8) are marked: experiencers are lower in prominence than agents. (8) Thematic Hierarchy (Bresnan & Kanerva, 1989) agent> beneficiary> recipient/experiencer>instrument>theme/patient>locative The mirror image of DSM is DOM (Differential Object Marking), where morphological marking of objects is associated with features at the higher end of the Definiteness/Animacy Hierarchy.

17.2.2  Differential Object Marking Differential Object Marking (DOM) is found in Turkish, Finnish, Hebrew, Spanish, Romanian, Hindi, Mongolian, Guaraní, and Amharic, among other languages (Bossong, 1991). Many other languages (such as English, German, Japanese, and French) do not have DOM. Languages that exhibit DOM split objects into two types: those that are morphologically unmarked and those that are morphologically marked. The overt morphological marking of some direct objects represents syntactic, semantic or pragmatic prominence, triggered by semantic or discourse factors such as animacy, referentiality, 226

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topicality, the affectedness of the object, and, to a lesser extent, the lexical semantics of the verb (von Heusinger & Gáspár, 2008). Different factors trigger DOM in different languages. For example, in Turkish all definite object NPs (names, pronouns, definite descriptions, and demonstrative NPs) are obligatorily marked with accusative case –(y)I irrespective of animacy (Enç, 1991), as shown in (9a). Direct objects may appear bare (as in (9c)) or with the accusative case marker –(y)I, as in (9a,b,d), depending on the specificity/definiteness of the noun. So, definiteness and specificity determine DOM in Turkish.

(9)

a.

Zeynep Ali-yi / o-nu / adam-ı / o masa-yı / gör-dü. Zeynep Ali- DOM s/he/it- DOM man- DOM that table-acc see-past ‘Zeynep saw Ali/her-him-it/ the man/ that table.’

b.

(Ben) öğrenci-yi gör-dü-m (definite) I student- DOM see-past-1sg ‘I saw the student.’

c.

(Ben) bir öğrenci I a student ‘I saw a student.’

d.

(Ben) bir öğrenci-yi gör-dü-m (indef; specific) I a student- DOM see-past-1sg ‘I saw a certain student.’

gör-dü-m (indefinite; nonspec) see-past-1sg

Hindi/Urdu is like Turkish because definiteness/specificity, more than animacy, is the main factor that triggers –ko marking with direct objects.

(10) a.

Ila-ne ciRiyaa-ko uthay-aa. Ila-erg bird- DOM carry-perf ‘Ila carried the bird.’

b.

Ila-ne ciRiyaa uthay-aa. Ila-erg bird carry-perf ‘Ila carried a bird.’

c.

Ila-ne haar-ko uthay-aa. Ila-erg necklace-DOM carry-perf ‘Ila carried the necklace.’

d.

Ila-ne haar uthay-aa. Ila-erg necklace carry-perf ‘Ila carried a necklace.’

In Spanish and Romanian, animacy and specificity determine DOM by the preposition “a” in Spanish (11) and “pe” in Romanian (12), although animacy outranks specificity in Spanish. 227

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Juan vió a María en el cine. Juan saw DOM Maria in the movies. ‘Juan saw María at the movies.’

(12)

Îl vizitam cl​.acc​.3s​g.m visit.​impf​.​1sg ‘I was visiting Ion.’

pe dom

Ion Ion

Korean is another language that differentiates among more vs. less prominent objects, but unlike the languages discussed above, Korean drops nominative and accusative case markers when the arguments are prominent in discourse. Case drop (a form of DOM) is most common in informal/colloquial language and results in subtle differences in pragmatics and information structure. For example, the accusative case (–lul/–ul) on objects can be absent or present, as in (13).

(13)

a. b.

Mina-ka Mina-nom ‘Mina is eating bread.’ Mina-ka Mina- nom ‘Mina is eating bread.’

cikum now

ppang-ul bread-acc

mek-e eat-decl

cikum now

ppang-Ø bread-Ø

mek-e eat-decl

The object ppang-ul ‘bread-acc’ in (13a) with the accusative case –ul is semantically equivalent to its case-less counterpart ppang-Ø in (13b). (Adding a demonstrative would make the definite reading unambiguous). However, the two objects may differ in contextual meaning and pragmatic functions, such as focus. Objects that are inanimate, indefinite and used in non-contrastive focus are marked less often with overt case than human, definite objects in contrastive focus contexts.

17.3  Syntactic analyses Syntactic analyses of DSM and DOM have been proposed within the frameworks of Optimality Theory (OT) (Smolensky & Prince, 1993) and generative theory. In the OT account (Aissen, 1999, 2003), prominence scales related to animacy, definiteness, and case are ranked and used with harmonic alignment to model the ideal features of subjects and objects (Silverstein, 1976) coupled with constraint conjunctions to obtain the desired output. For example, the constraint that produces the pattern where only third person subjects are marked ergative in a given language is a conjunction of a constraint against third person subjects and a constraint against lacking morphological Case: (14) *subject/third & *zero Case

This constraint penalizes a third person subject that lacks overt Case morphology. To capture different subject marking patterns crosslinguistically, Aissen (1999) varies the ranking of such constraints above and below an opposing constraint that penalizes having overt morphological Case: *structure(Case). In generative theory, Woolford (2006) argues that DSM (Differential Subject Marking) effects involving Case do not constitute a unified phenomenon. They come in diverse types, 228

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requiring different kinds of theoretical accounts. Some of the DSM effects result from changes in argument structure, others the syntax, or the spell-out of case in PF (phonological form) and follow from independently motivated principles and constraints that hold at these grammatical levels, and they are not restricted to subjects. That is why there are no special principles or constraints that specifically target subjects and produce DSM effects. Aissen’s (2003) OT account of DOM assumes that highly prominent direct objects that resemble subjects in terms of animacy, specificity, and definiteness are likely to be overtly case-marked. Prominence is assessed by animacy and definiteness hierarchies shown in (15) in which unmarked objects are assumed to have features low on the hierarchies (i.e., inanimate and indefinite/non-specific). (15)  a.  Animacy hierarchy: Human > Animate > Inanimate      b. Definiteness hierarchy: Personal Pronoun > Proper noun > Definite NP > Indefinite specific NP > Non-specific NP (Aissen, 2003, p. 437)

By contrast, syntactic accounts of DOM within generative grammar (Hill & Mardale, 2019; Lidz, 2006; López, 2012) capture the prominence of marked objects in the syntax. Case-marked objects are associated with a relatively high phrase structural position, where they check specificity or accusative case, and unmarked ones with a lower one (Woolford, 1999). Hence, overtly marked objects are structurally more complex than unmarked objects because marked objects involve movement and overt realization of morphology. López (2012) provides a syntactic analysis of Spanish, Hindi, Romanian, and other languages that attempts to capture the syntax, morphology, and semantics of DOM. He proposes three positions for objects in Spanish in the clause structure, as shown in (16): the lowest in the VP (P1) is for unmarked objects (typically non-specific); the next one up, above the IO (indirect object) (P2), is for direct objects marked for DOM. These objects may or may not be specific. The highest position above the external argument (P3) is for left dislocated objects. So, the critical positions for marked and unmarked objects are P2 and P1. (16) 

vP P3

v’ v’

EA V

αP α’

P2 α

α’ α’

IO α

VP V

P1

When the marked object moves to the second higher position (P2 [Spec α]), a vocabulary insertion rule inserts the DOM marker (a in Spanish, pe in Romanian and –ko in Hindi, etc.). The spell-out of these lexical items can be influenced by features of the nominal phrases, the external argument, the event structure of the predicate, or the verb itself. 229

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17.4  L1 acquisition of semantically based case We saw that ergativity and dative experiencer subjects are two examples of DSM. Because ergative languages are less common crosslinguistically than nominative-accusative languages, and because ergativity is a marked feature of some subjects in some languages, ergative marking is potentially challenging to acquire. However, most L1 acquisition studies of ergativity in West Greenlandic, K’iche’ Maya, Hindi, and Inuktitut, among other languages, show that children mark ergativity with almost 100% accuracy before age 3;0 (Butt, 2006; Bavin & Stoll, 2013). Two languages where ergative marking takes longer to be mastered are Basque (Ezeizabarrena & Larrañaga, 1996), because the ergative marker is identical to the absolutive plural marker, and Samoan (Ochs, 1985), where ergativity is only used in formal registers, which are not the main input to children. Studies of dative experiencer subjects in different languages such as Spanish (Soler, 2011), Tamil (Bai, 2004), and Icelandic (Nowenstein et al., 2020), also report very few case-substitution errors before age 3;0 and adult-like performance after that. As with DSM, the L1 acquisition of DOM is remarkably unproblematic. Rodríguez-Mondoñedo (2008) analyzed the spontaneous production of four Spanish children (ages 0;9–2;11) to test Aissen’s (2003) OT proposal. Aissen’s analysis predicts that the child will entertain several competing hypotheses before homing on the system of DOM, leading to many errors. Rodríguez-Mondoñedo found that the children showed an accuracy rate of 98.38% with DOM before age 3;0. He concluded that Spanish-speaking children acquire the semantic constraints on DOM very early because object splits are universal, and all the child must learn is how to mark the two positions for objects. RodríguezMondoñedo’s explanation was supported by corpora-based studies of other languages (Romanian, Hebrew, Croatian, Russian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Persian, and Turkish; Mardale & Montrul, 2020), which found early emergence of DOM marking by age 1;5–1;10 and target, adult-like, production of DOM before age 3;0.

17.5  Semantically based case in L2/L3 and heritage language acquisition Even if semantically based case is relatively unproblematic in L1 acquisition, this type of case marking presents significant challenges in L2, L3, and heritage language acquisition. DSM and DOM are vulnerable to crosslinguistic transfer and to non-native ultimate attainment. Before discussing specific studies, we briefly cover the main theoretical accounts and the methods that have been applied to research on this area.

17.5.1  Theoretical proposals Among theoretical models of transfer in L2 acquisition, the Full Transfer/Full Access Model (FT/FA) (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996) has received the most empirical support. The FT/FA postulates that the initial state of L2 acquisition is the entirety of the L1 grammar, except for phonological matrices of morphemes (Full Transfer). At intermediate and advanced levels of development, when the L1 can no longer accommodate and parse the L2 input, the interlanguage grammar restructures, guided by Universal Grammar (Full Access). Although L1 influence can persist beyond the initial state it can be eventually overcome in many cases. The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) (Lardiere, 2009) assumes the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis and incorporates the tenets of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1994). For Lardiere (2009) L2 learners must acquire, reassemble, or reconfigure abstract formal features into lexical items in the target language from the way they are represented and bundled in their L1. For example, Spanish DOM bundles two features in the lexical item “a” [+ animate, + specific] whereas Turkish –(y)I bundles only one [+specific]. Therefore, L1-Turkish L2-Spanish learners need to realize that only [+animate, +specific] direct objects are marked with “a” in Spanish. Even if the same 230

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subset of relevant features has been selected by the L1–L2 pair in question, learners must figure out how to reconfigure them into new specific lexical items in the target language. The FRH assumes that learners will look for morpholexical correspondences in the L2 to those in the L1. In L3 acquisition all previously acquired languages can transfer to varying degrees, or at different times. In the past decade, several theoretical models have been advanced to tease apart these possibilities. An influential model is the Typological Primacy Model (Rothman, 2011), according to which the language that the learners identify as typologically similar to the L3 is the main source of full transfer at the initial state. In contrast, the Linguistic Proximity Model (Westergaard et al., 2017) focuses on abstract structural similarities between languages which may or may not coincide with language typology. For example, although Hindi and Spanish are not typologically related, they share DSM and DOM, whereas Spanish and French, which are typologically related, do not share these properties. In Westergaard et al.’s model, transfer occurs property-by-property, rather than wholesale (cf. Rothman, 2011; Schwartz & Sprouse, 2021). The Interface Hypothesis (IH) (Sorace, 2011) downplays the role of transfer and prioritizes processing instead. The IH is based on a modular grammatical architecture consisting of internal interfaces (syntax, morphology, phonology, and semantics/pragmatics) and grammar-external domains (the conceptual–intentional and the articulatory–perceptual systems) (White, 2011). The external interface of syntax–discourse/pragmatics regulates contextual appropriateness, which involves increased processing resources. External interfaces have been observed to be more unstable than internal interfaces. This instability has made the external interface one of the primary loci of protracted indeterminacy in bilingual acquisition and residual optionality in L2 acquisition. Some studies of DOM in bilingual and L2 grammars have found support for the IH. In Romanian, DOM is syntactically optional with common NPs, irrespective of definiteness, and constrained by discourse pragmatic factors. Avram and Tomescu (2020) found that Hungarian–Romanian bilingual children showed delayed acquisition of DOM with descriptive NPs compared to names and pronouns, which are obligatorily marked, confirming the validity of the IH.

17.5.2 Methods Semantically based case is easy to observe in spontaneous speech and elicited production, so many studies of L1 and bilingual acquisition have relied on oral and written production tasks. Studies that manipulate specific variables, such as the type of predicate, the type of NP, or the definiteness and specificity of the NP have used auditory and written grammaticality/acceptability judgment tasks, and comprehension-based picture-sentence matching tasks. Studies that investigate contextual factors, such as Chung’s (2015, 2018) studies of case drop in Korean, have used elicited comprehension and production with contextual support. More recently studies of eye-tracking (Arechabaleta, 2019; Jegerski, 2018), as well as self-paced moving window reading tasks, have added novel empirical evidence from online processing to understand the development and multilingual acquisition of DSM and DOM.

17.6  Studies of Differential Subject Marking and Differential Object Marking 17.6.1  Differential Subject Marking in adult learners As we have seen, the acquisition of ergative-marked subjects is relatively unproblematic in L1 acquisition. However, ergative marking is an area of difficulty in adult L2 acquisition and very vulnerable to erosion or incomplete acquisition in heritage speakers. Rodríguez-Ordóñez (2016) investigated acquisition or ergative marking in L1 Spanish L2 Basque learners of intermediate and advanced proficiency using an oral narrative task, an elicited production task with different types of verbs, and a written acceptability judgment task that compared the use of the nominal inflection –k depending on auxiliary (izan “be” and edun “have”) and verbal agreement. Rodríguez-Ordóñez found that that 231

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case marking with the subjects of unergative verbs are harder to learn due to the inherent variability found in these verbs. Yet, the L2 speakers showed abstract syntactic knowledge of Basque ergativity because they correctly demonstrated the optionality of auxiliary selection with different verbs. The high rate of morphological variability found with ergative marking suggested problems at the surface morphological level. Ranjan (2016) tested knowledge of ergative case marking in intermediate and advanced L1 English L2 Hindi learners. Participants completed oral production, acceptability judgment and selfpaced reading tasks. According to the results, the intermediate L2 Hindi learners acquired ergative case marking –ne with perfective aspect first but used it inconsistently. They were less sensitive to the transitivity requirement and overgeneralized –ne marking to subjects of intransitive verbs. The advanced proficiency learners were more accurate with ergative marking than the intermediate level learners, suggesting that the syntactic and morphological aspects of ergativity are acquirable. Because the L2 learners were sensitive to syntactic and morphological constraints on ergativity in the grammaticality judgment task and in the self-paced reading task, like Rodríguez-Ordóñez (2015), Ranjan also concluded that L2 learners can acquire the abstract syntactic grammar of ergativity but they struggle with the surface morphology. In studies conducted within the Processability Theory framework (Pienemann, 1998), focusing on the development of spoken language longitudinally, Baten and Verbeke (2015) also found that L1 Dutch L2 learners of Hindi have difficulty with ergative marking in oral production, displaying significant omission. In Hindi as a heritage language, Montrul et al. (2012) examined knowledge of case and agreement in oral narratives and grammaticality judgments. Both ergative case marking (–ne) and DOM (–ko) were investigated in this study. The Hindi heritage speakers produced and accepted ungrammatical sentences with omission of –ne and –ko, while the baseline Hindi-speaking group hardly omitted case markers in production or accepted ungrammatical sentences with omission in the judgment task. In a related follow-up study, Montrul et al. (2019) examined DSM and DOM in bilingual speakers of Hindi in India, and in L2 learners of Hindi and Hindi heritage speakers in the US. The L2 learners and the heritage speakers accepted/produced more omission errors with ergative –ne, accusative –ko, and dative experiencer –ko than with indirect object –ko. There were also very few overgeneralization errors of –ne and –ko; in the case of –ne most overgeneralization errors were produced by the L2 learners. Crucially, the L2 learners and the heritage speakers did not omit case markers indiscriminately; variability was systematically constrained by the semantic complexity of features involved, as predicted by the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis. Muāgututiʻa (2018) investigated the extent to which ergativity was still retained in the grammar of Samoan heritage speakers. In four experiments, Muāgututiʻa investigated the production and grammaticality judgments of ergative features in declaratives, wh-questions, and relative clauses in monolingually raised Samoan and in heritage and L2 speakers of Samoan. The findings confirmed that ergativity is indeed fragile in heritage speakers. However, results of an instructed intervention showed that heritage speakers were able to recover the abstract syntactic pattern of ergativity, while L2 speakers were only able to acquire construction-specific features. There are a few studies on the L2 acquisition of semantically based case with dative subjects, most notably in Spanish (Gómez Soler, 2011; González, 2022; Montrul, 1998, 2016; Pascual y Cabo, 2020), Russian (Savchenko, 2010), and Icelandic (Garðarsdóttir & Þorvaldsdóttir, 2020). All these studies indicate that learning to mark dative case with experiencers takes time and is often replaced by nominative case or omitted at earlier stages of acquisition. Despite high verb frequency, L2 learners of Spanish have difficulty with the dative experiencer subjects of the verb gustar “like”, frequently omitting the preposition “a” and the obligatory dative clitic (see (7)). Advanced learners acquire the fact that the dative clitic is obligatory in Spanish, but still omit the dative preposition. Several studies have examined different properties of gustar-type verbs in Spanish as a heritage language (De Prada Pérez & Pascual y Cabo, 2011; Montrul & Bowles, 2010; Toribio & Nye, 2006), such as the potential 232

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omission of the preposition “a” preceding the experiencer, invariable agreement between the verb and the theme, omission of the dative clitic, and the use of a nominative-accusative case pattern as in English. Pascual y Cabo (2020) found that first- and second-generation Cuban speakers in the United States exhibited some of these innovations, whereas monolingual native speakers from Cuba did not. Studies of L2 Icelandic (Garðarsdóttir & Þorvaldsdóttir, 2020) and L2 Russian (Savchenko, 2010) provide more evidence that L2 learners tend to omit semantically based case and it takes them a long time to acquire and master this type of case.

17.6.2  Differential Object Marking in adult learners Compared to how easily DOM appears to be acquired by monolingual children, as with DSM, the acquisition of DOM is quite difficult in adult L2/L3 acquisition and in heritage language speakers of DOM languages. Studies of L2 and L3 acquisition of DOM indicate that the properties of the L1 play a significant role in the eventual acquisition of DOM in the L2. The level of difficulty of acquisition is related to whether the L1 and the L2 are DOM or non-DOM languages, and if they are DOM languages, what type of DOM system they have. For example, DOM is very difficult for learners whose native language (L1) is a non-DOM language (English, French, Greek) and whose L2 marks DOM (Spanish, Turkish, Persian). Several studies of L1 English L2 Spanish learners have shown that these learners generally omit DOM with animate and specific objects (Guijarro-Fuentes, 2012; Guijarro-Fuentes & Marinis, 2007; Montrul & Bowles, 2010; Montrul & Gürel, 2015). Farley and McCollam (2004) and Di Biase and Hinger (2015) found that, when the English L1 Spanish L2 learners marked DOM, they relied on animacy as the main feature for marking, but not specificity. Guijarro-Fuentes (2012) tested low to advanced proficiency L1 English L2 Spanish learners. He administered a written completion task and a contextualized written acceptability judgment task, manipulating the animacy and humanness of the subject and the aspectual properties of the verbs. Although there was some development among the L2 learners in the two tasks, the advanced speakers obtained only 55.8% accuracy on sentences with animate, specific directs objects (cf. native speakers’ 93%) in the acceptability judgment task; their highest score (68.2%) was on sentences with inanimate specific objects, which are unmarked as in English. These findings show that Spanish DOM is a very likely candidate for fossilization in advanced interlanguages, especially if the native language of the learner does not have DOM. Papadopoulou et al. (2011) investigated the acquisition of case marking and word order, including accusative case (DOM), by L1 Greek L2 Turkish learners. Greek has a rich case system (nominative, accusative genitive, dative) and marks NPs with case inflections or prepositions (dative, locative). However, there is no DOM or case marking regulated by semantic and pragmatic features. Results of a cloze test, a sentence-picture matching task and an online grammaticality judgment task indicated that all learners, but especially the low and intermediate proficiency groups compared to the advanced ones, had significant problems with morphological case in Turkish, and with DOM in particular: accuracy with specific direct objects reached 21% for the beginners, 39% for the intermediate, and 49% for the advanced learners. When the L1 and the L2 have DOM, acquisition is easier. Montrul (2019) investigated the acquisition of DOM in L1 Romanian L2 Spanish learners, a case of two DOM languages in contact. Native speakers of Spanish and L1 Romanian L2 Spanish learners with intermediate to advanced proficiency completed a written production, a written comprehension, and a bimodal acceptability judgment task. The L1 Romanian L2 Spanish learners were very successful at acquiring the feature specification and distribution of DOM in Spanish, showing virtually native-like performance in all tasks: there were no differences between the Romanian speakers and the Spanish native speakers. Therefore, it is possible to acquire DOM at native levels, especially when the L1 of the learner instantiates DOM in a similar 233

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way. However, López Otero (2020) found that Romanian speakers in Spain showed indeterminate judgments with DOM conditions that are grammatical in Romanian but ungrammatical in Spanish, such as unmarked definite DPs (*Miguel ha abrazado la cantante. “Miguel hugged the singer”), suggesting L1 influence. There are studies of speakers of a DOM language acquiring another DOM language with different semantic parameters. Montrul and Gürel (2015) examined the acquisition of DOM by L1 Turkish L2 Spanish learners. While Spanish DOM carries the features [+animate, + specific], Turkish DOM instantiates the feature [+specific] only: Turkish speakers must add a feature to their DOM representation. Native speakers of Spanish and learners completed a written production, a written comprehension, and a bimodal acceptability judgment task. The L1 Turkish L2 Spanish learners were quite successful at acquiring the feature specification and distribution of Spanish DOM even at low levels of proficiency, suggesting that adding the feature [+animate] to their representation of DOM was not particularly problematic. Bohnacker and Mohammadi (2013) investigated the L2 acquisition of DOM in Persian by L1 Balochi speakers. Balochi is a northwestern Iranian language closely related to Persian but different from it in several aspects of syntax and morphology. Balochi, like Persian, exhibits DOM with all animate, specific direct objects. However, Balochi is an ergative language and DOM only applies to objects of predicates in the present tense (split ergativity). Bohnacker and Mohammadi (2013) examined the written production of Balochi–Persian bilingual children attending Persian-speaking schools and monolingual Persian-speaking children. The Persian monolingual children were adult-like in their production of DOM with different types of objects. Yet, the Balochi-speaking children showed morphological variability and many errors with DOM at earlier stages of development compared to the older children, who were more adult-like. This difficulty could also be due to DOM in Balochi being regulated by ergativity as well, which is a major difference between Persian and Balochi. In studies of L3 acquisition, L1 Spanish speakers have been shown to transfer DOM when acquiring languages that do not have DOM, such as Brazilian Portuguese (Cabrelli et al., 2020; Montrul et al., 2011), Catalan (Perpiñán, 2018), and Italian (Gallardo & Montrul, 2023). Montrul et al. (2011) tested knowledge of object expression and clitics in Brazilian Portuguese by L1 Spanish and L1 English learners who also knew English or Spanish as their L2. Both L1 Spanish and L1 English learners produced 10% DOM-objects marked with the preposition “a” in Brazilian Portuguese in an oral production task although Brazilian Portuguese is not a DOM language. Cabrelli et al. (2020) tested L1 Spanish L2 English, L1 English L2 Spanish, and early English–Spanish bilinguals’ acceptance of sentences with and without DOM in Brazilian Portuguese as L3. All participants were in the initial stages of acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese and were required to demonstrate target knowledge of DOM in Spanish to be included in the study. In the written grammaticality judgment task, the L3 groups demonstrated robust transfer from Spanish. In the animate object conditions, the L3 groups showed a higher acceptance of ungrammatical sentences with DOM (∗A gente ouve a Pedrinho “People hear DOM Pedrinho”). and a lower acceptance of the grammatical counterpart without DOM (A gente ouve a Pedrinho “People hear Pedrinho”) than the Brazilian Portuguese controls, who rejected ungrammatical sentences with DOM across the board. Taken together, these studies show that for speakers of non-DOM languages, acquiring and mastering DOM in an L2 is very difficult, but once speakers acquire DOM they may assume that it exists in other languages as well. Similar transfer effects have been observed in bilinguals exposed to a DOM language since birth. DOM in the Basque of the Basque Country is perceived as a transfer phenomenon from Spanish and a stigmatized foreign form. Rodríguez-Ordóñez (2017) found that adult L2 learners of Basque in Spain (whose native and dominant language is Spanish) produced DOM in Basque more than balanced bilinguals, while speakers of Basque in France (Navarre) do not show evidence of emergence DOM (French does not have DOM). Austin (2020) found that two- and three-yearold Basque-monolingual and bilingual children produce DOM about 43% and 33% of the time. 234

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Basque–Spanish bilingual children used DOM at the same age in Basque and in Spanish, and earlier than monolingual Basque children. Compared to adults, DOM rates were higher in the children’s speech. When the bilingual situation involves a majority language that has no DOM and a minority language that marks DOM, the data from bilingualism and multilingualism with both children and adults in different languages suggest that DOM is very vulnerable to omission and eradication, subject to fossilization, incomplete acquisition, and attrition in the minority language. DOM omission has been well documented in Spanish as a heritage language in contact with English (Arechabaleta, 2020; Montrul & Sánchez-Walker, 2013; Montrul, 2004; Montrul & Bowles, 2009), with French (Grosjean & Py, 1991), with Dutch (Irizarri van Suchtelen, 2016) and with German (Pomino et al., 2018). It has also been found in Hindi (Montrul et al., 2012, 2019; Bhatia & Montrul, 2020), Korean (Chung, 2015, 2018) and Romanian in the United States (Montrul & Bateman, 2020a, b; Montrul et al., 2015), and in Romanian as a heritage language in Italy (Cohal, 2014). Research on early bilingualism, with both child and adult Spanish heritage speakers, has shown that DOM is not acquired by age three and not fully mastered later (Ticio, 2015). As for adults, Montrul (2004) and Montrul and Bowles (2009) found significant omission rates of obligatory DOM by adult heritage speakers of Spanish in the United States in an oral narrative task (up to 50%). Montrul and Sánchez-Walker (2013) confirmed widespread erosion of DOM with animate, specific direct objects in oral production data in child and adult Spanish heritage speakers and in first-generation Mexican immigrants. Irizarri van Suchtelen (2016) tested knowledge of DOM in Chilean speakers in the Netherlands with Spanish as heritage language and Dutch (a non-DOM language) as the majority language. The study also included Chilean speakers in the homeland. The participants’ speech was recorded through oral interviews and oral elicitation tasks. Overall, the rates of omission of DOM on specific human direct objects were similar to those of previous studies on heritage Spanish in contact with English. Irizarri van Suchtelen (2016) also confirmed that simultaneous bilingual heritage speakers omitted DOM more than sequential bilingual heritage speakers, consistent with age of onset of bilingualism effects (Montrul, 2008). Turning to Korean, Chung (2015) elicited judgments and production of morphological marking on direct objects from L1 speakers (adults and children) and English-dominant adult L2 and heritage learners. Overall, the results indicated that five-year-old L1 Korean children showed sensitivity to the semantic and pragmatic factors of focus, animacy, and definiteness, which determine DOM and case drop in Korean, like adult native speakers in Korea. Chung (2018) investigated adult L2 and heritage language learners’ sensitivity to and knowledge of focus, animacy, and definiteness in their judgment (written task) and production (oral task) of DOM. Assuming the Interface Hypothesis, Chung hypothesized that integrating multiple levels of information would pose problems for L2 and HL learners, and focus in particular was predicted to be the most difficult to integrate because it requires sensitivity to information structure and contextual information. Native speakers provided the highest number of case-marked objects with human, definite objects in contrastive focus contexts and the lowest in inanimate indefinite objects in non-contrastive focus contexts, as in other L1 studies (Chung, 2015). Heritage language learners differed from monolingually raised baseline speakers on their case marking of definite and indefinite objects only, while L2 learners showed variable judgments with all three factors. While native and heritage language speakers exhibited similar patterns of judgments, the L2 learners exhibited chance performance with no distinct pattern.

17.7  Future directions Because DSM and DOM occur in morphologically complex languages of different language families, research on the acquisition of semantically based case has contributed to documenting and signifi235

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cantly expanding research on the acquisition of languages other than English, including less commonly studied languages, such as Hindi, Samoan, Persian, Romanian, and Korean, among many others. Interestingly, despite the diversity of languages investigated and the differences between the participants tested (adults and children of different L1 and L2s), there are strikingly common threads. Compared to L1 acquisition, the acquisition of semantically based case presents significant challenges for L2 and L3 learners as well as for heritage speakers. The influence of previously acquired languages (the L1 in L2 acquisition, the L1 or/and L2 in L3 acquisition, and the dominant majority language in heritage language speakers) contributes to the patterns of omission or overgeneralization found at earlier stages of acquisition. Overall, the studies discussed found support for the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis, the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis in L2 acquisition and the Typological Proximity and the Linguistic Proximity models of L3 acquisition. In languages where the distribution of DOM is also subject to discourse–pragmatic effects, the Interface Hypothesis has been supported as well. There are at least two questions that deserve future attention. The first one is the reasons for why very young monolingual children acquiring morphologically complex languages home in on the semantic and pragmatic factors that determine DSM and DOM in their language very early and very fast compared to L2 and bilingual learners. What properties of the input to children guide their rapid acquisition, and what processing and learning strategies do children use to parse the input? Perhaps the speech to young children includes many more psych verbs (or a few but frequent ones), transitive perfective sentences, and animate and specific objects than the speech and writing samples adult L2 and L3 learners are exposed to. Once we have answers to these basic questions, we can then ask the same about L2, L3, and bilingual acquisition, although we have seen that in these cases previously acquired linguistic knowledge is a powerful and deterministic factor in how these learners may process the input they are exposed to. The other question is related to language processing and types of learning. Most of the studies on DSM and DOM conducted to date have used behavioral methods that show discrepancies between the acquisition of the syntax and morphology underlying semantically based cases. These findings suggest that while the acquisition of morphology and syntax–semantics go together in L1 acquisition, they can be dissociated in additional language acquisition. Future language processing studies could potentially shed light on how L1 children and L2, L3, and bilingual learners process the morphology of semantically based case and the extent to which their processing is related to the context of acquisition, namely in a formal environment, as in many L2 and L3 learners, or naturalistically, as in the case of heritage speakers. Finally, the two available intervention studies (Montrul & Bowles, 2010; Muāgututiʻa, 2018) suggest that semantically based systems are recoverable in heritage language acquisition to a greater extent than in L2 acquisition, an intriguing finding deserving further scrutiny.

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Silvina Montrul Hill, V., & Mardale, A. (2019). The internal structure of a differentially marked DP in Romanian. Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, 21(1), pp 73–93. Irizarri van Suchtelen, P. (2016). Spanish as a heritage language in the Netherlands. A cognitive linguistic exploration. LOT. Jegerski, J. (2018). The processing of the object marker a by heritage Spanish speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism, 22(6), 585–602. Lardiere, D. (2009). Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 25(2), 173–227. Lidz, J. (2006). The grammar of accusative case in Kannada. Language, 82(1), 10–32. López, L. (2012). Indefinite objects: Scrambling, choice functions, and differential marking (Vol. 63). MIT Press. López Otero, J. C. (2020). On the acceptability of the Spanish DOM among Romanian-Spanish bilinguals. In. A. Mardale and S. Montrul (Eds.), The Acquisition of Differential Object Marking, (pp. 161-182). Amsterrdam: John Benjamins. Mardale, A., & Montrul, S. (2020). Differential object marking and its acquisition in different languages and contexts. In A. Mardale and S. Montrul (eds.), The acquisition of differential object marking (pp. 1–20). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Montrul, S. (1998). The L2 acquisition of dative experiencer subjects. Second Language Research, 14(1), 27–61. Montrul, S. (2004). Subject and object expression in Spanish heritage speakers: A case of morpho-syntactic convergence. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7, 1–18. Montrul, S. (2008). Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism: Reexamining the age factor. John Benjamins. Montrul, S. (2016). Losing your case? Dative experiencers in Mexican Spanish and heritage speakers in the United States. In D. Pascual y Cabo (Ed.), Advances in Spanish as a heritage language (pp. 126). John Benjamins. Montrul, S. (2019). The acquisition of differential object marking in Spanish by Romanian speakers. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics, 32(1), 185–219. Montrul, S., & Bateman, N. (2020a). Differential object marking in Romanian as a heritage language. In A. Mardale & S. Montrul (Eds.), The acquisition of differential object marking (pp. 261–282). John Benjamins. Montrul, S., & Bateman, N. (2020b). Vulnerability and stability of Differential Object Marking in Romanian heritage speakers. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 5(1), 119. Montrul, S., Bhatia, A., Bhatt, R., & Puri, V. (2019). Case marking in Hindi as the weaker language. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 461. Montrul, S., Bhatt, R. M., & Bhatia, A. (2012). Erosion of case and agreement in Hindi heritage speakers. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2(2), 141–176. Montrul, S., Bhatt, R., & Girju, R. (2015). Differential object marking in Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian as heritage languages. Language, 91(3), 564–610. Montrul, S., & Bowles, M. (2009). Back to basics: Differential Object Marking under incomplete acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(3), 363–383. Montrul, S., & Bowles, M. (2010). Is grammar instruction beneficial for heritage language learners? Dative case marking in Spanish. Heritage Language Journal, 7(1), 47–73. Montrul, S., Dias, R., & Santos, H. (2011). Clitics and object expression in the L3 acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese: Structural similarity matters for transfer. Second Language Research, 27(1), 21–58. Montrul, S., & Gürel, A. (2015). The acquisition of differential object marking in Spanish by Turkish speakers. In T. Judy and S. Perpiñán (eds.), The acquisition of Spanish by speakers of less commonly studies languages (pp. 281–308). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Montrul, S., & Sánchez-Walker, N. (2013). Differential object marking in child and adult Spanish heritage speakers. Language Acquisition, 20(2), 109–132. Muāgututiʻa, G. T. (2018). Recovering ergativity in heritage Samoan [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Nowenstein, I., Sigurjónsdóttir, S., Yang, C., Ingason, A., & Wallenberg, J. (2020). The meaning of case: Morphosyntactic bootstrapping and Icelandic datives. Proceedings of the 44th Boston University Conference on Language Development, ed. Megan M. Brown and Alexandra Kohut, 402-415. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Ochs, E. (1985). Variation and error: A sociolinguistic approach to language acquisition in Samoa. In D. I. Slobin (Ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Volume 1: The data (pp. 783–838). Lawrence Erlbaum.

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PART IV

Morphosyntax and semantics of the verbal domain

18 FINITENESS AND NEGATION Christine Dimroth

18.1  Introduction and description of the linguistic phenomenon Finiteness, i.e., the presence of a finite verb form in a finite syntactic position, is a central property of clauses. The formal characteristics of finiteness differ from language to language, but the relation between a nonfinite verb phrase describing some situation and a finite clause expressing a statement or a question, for example, is a central grammatical phenomenon that has been described and explained from different theoretical perspectives and intensively studied by first and second language researchers. At the beginning of (second) language acquisition, finiteness is typically not expressed in target-like ways. This can either be interpreted as evidence for the absence of this functional category and thus for some initially nonfinite learner grammar, or it could mean that the category is present, while its formal markings still need to be acquired. Both interpretations have been proposed in the literature. The acquisition of finiteness has accordingly been described as entailing a fundamental restructuring of L2 knowledge, indicative of a transition from a lexical to a grammatical system, or as the addition of rather superficial features to an otherwise target-like learner grammar. A particular focus has been on the relation between inflectional morphology and syntax, on the function of particular verb types for the expression of finiteness, and on factors influencing these relations (e.g., a learner’s proficiency, age, and L1). Acquisition researchers have often investigated the development of finiteness in relation to the acquisition of negation. Negated sentences turned out to be particularly suitable to study the dynamic interplay between semantics and syntax in developing learner grammars. This chapter focuses on the second language acquisition of finiteness and negation in well-analyzed languages, in particular English, French, Italian, German, and Dutch. These languages show interesting typological differences, and there is SLA work studying the relevant questions from different theoretical perspectives and in different learner populations.

18.1.1 Finiteness Every clause contains exactly one finite verb and often also one or more nonfinite verb(s). The finite verb agrees with the subject in person and number and carries tense and mood information.1 In some languages (cf. the present tense examples in Table 1), finite and nonfinite verb forms can be easily distinguished on the basis of formal correlates. In German, infinitives like sag-en (‘say/tell’) in (1a)

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-22

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are marked by an infinitival suffix and show up in clause-final position (the VP is head final). Finite verb forms like the 1st person singular in (1b) carry one out of four different agreement suffixes. The French examples in (2) equally show a formal distinction between the infinitive in (2a) and the finite form in (2b). In spoken French, however, only plural verb forms are overtly marked for person. In the corresponding English translations in (3), the verb tell has the same form in a finite (3b) and a nonfinite (3a) context. English infinitives do not have an overt marking and the six finite person/ number combinations are covered with only two verb forms in the present tense (the stem tell and the 3rd singular form tell-s) and only one in the past (told).2 French and English exhibit an SVO clause structure, i.e., in declarative clauses like the ones in (2) and (3), finite verbs and nonfinite verbs (if present) are placed between subject and object, with the finite verb preceding the nonfinite one. This is different for German, where finite verbs are placed in second position in main clauses and the preceding constituent does not need to be the subject.3 Like Dutch, German is therefore considered a verb second (V2) language (see Bohnacker, this volume), even though “finiteness second language” would describe the situation more exactly, as nonfinite verbs are placed in clause-final position, following the object as in (1a). Concerning basic clause structure, French thus patterns with English and other SVO languages and differs from German and other V2 languages. A comparison of the (a) and (b) version of the sentences in the three languages reveals yet another difference. In German and French, all types of finite verbs appear in the same position. Whereas the nonfinite lexical verbs in the examples under (a) follow the adverbial immer/toujours (‘always’), the finite auxiliary verbs under (a), and the finite lexical verbs under (b) precede the adverbial. The formal intricacies of different models aside, standard syntactic approaches assume that the position of finite lexical verbs is derived from the position of the corresponding nonfinite verbs. Given that the finite verbs move to a ‘higher’ syntactic position (e.g., an IP or CP layer in a tree representation), this movement operation is referred to as ‘verb raising’ (see White, this volume). In the English examples under (3), the lexical verb tell remains in the same position even though it is nonfinite in (3a) and finite in (3b). Concerning verb raising, French thus patterns with German and is different from English. Verb raising has been found to systematically correlate with the richness of finite morphology. In order to grasp the rather abstract notion of finiteness, it is important to distinguish this functional category from the lexical meaning of the verbs that can carry it. The meaning of lexical verbs is closely related to their valency, i.e., to the number and type of arguments required to depict a particular state of affairs, some action, process, or state. For example, it is virtually impossible to mentally represent the meaning of the verb eat without imagining somebody eating and something that is eaten. Lexical verbs are thus central for assigning semantic roles like agent or patient and for organizing a sentence’s argument structure. This property is independent of their finiteness status. Finiteness operates on a different layer. It can be seen as a purely formal morpho-syntactic operation or as the reflex of a functional operation that links the nonfinite description of some state of affairs (e.g., Mary eating apples) to a particular situation (e.g., yesterday at ten) about which a claim is made. Under the latter perspective, finiteness expresses the illocutionary function of assertion (Klein, 2006). Whereas Mary eating apples is a lexical description of a state of affairs, Yesterday at ten Mary was eating apples is a statement with a truth value. Hearers knowing the situation talked about can judge whether the statement is true or false. In this view, finiteness thus contributes an independent functional layer that turns a verb-containing descriptive content into a finite statement. The structure is maximally transparent with analytical constructions where the tasks of describing a situation and expressing finiteness are mapped onto two different verbs, like the nonfinite lexical verb form eating and the finite auxiliary was. Whenever there is only one verb available (e.g., as in Mary ate apples), this synthetic form accomplishes both functions, contributing meaning and argument structure and carrying finiteness features. 244

Finiteness and negation

18.1.2 Negation Negation is a semantic operation reverting the truth value of a clause that can be expressed by a variety of means; see Horn (2010) for an overview. The type of negation that is most informative with respect to the acquisition of finiteness is sentence negation,4 expressed by a particle (e.g., English not) that has semantic scope over the predicate. Depending on the language, negation particles can have fixed positions in a clause (like directly post-verbal pas in colloquial French5 or proclitic non in Italian), or be rather mobile (like German nicht and Dutch niet). Like the adverbials in the examples in Table 18.1, negation is a diagnostic context for the position of verbs in a clause (Becker, 2005). Beginning learners typically produce short utterances with verbs that are not reliably marked for finiteness.6 Studying the relative order of the negator and the verb in negative utterances can help to understand the syntactic structure of the clause. Table 18.2 shows structural properties of negated clauses from some well-analyzed languages that were in the focus of SLA work on the topic. These languages have an interesting common feature: negaTable 18.1  Finiteness: typological differences Languages

Examples

German (& Dutch)

(1a) Ich werde     immer die Wahrheit sagen. I   will.1sg always  the truth tell.i​ nf ​ (1b) Ich sage   immer   die Wahrheit. I   tell.1sg always the truth (2a) Je vais     toujours dire  la vérité. I   will.1sg always   tell.​i​nf the truth (2b) Je dis   toujours la vérité. I tell.1sg always   the truth (3a)  I will always tell the truth. (3b) I always tell the truth.

French

English

clause structure

finite verb

XVOV raising (“verbsecond”) SVO

raising

SVO

no raising

Table 18.2  Negation. Typological differences Languages

Examples

German (& Dutch)

(4a) Paul hat    nicht die Wahrheit gesagt. Paul have.3sg not   the  truth     tell.​pa​rt (4b) Paul sagt    nicht die Wahrheit. Paul tell.3sg   not  the truth (5a) Paul (n’) a pas  dit     la vérité. Paul    have.3sg not tell.​pa​rt the truth (5b) Paul (ne) dit  pas  la vérité. Paul   tell.3sg not the truth (6a) Paolo non ha   detto   la veritá. Paul  not have.3sg tell.​pa​rt the truth (6b) Paolo non dice  la veritá. Paul    not    tell.3sg the truth (7a) Paul has not told the truth. (7b) Paul does not tell the truth.

French

Italian

English

245

clause structure

finite verb

position of negation

XVOV

raising

post-finite with all types of verbs

SVO

raising

post-finite with all types of verbs

SVO

no raising across negation

pre-verbal

SVO

no raising pre-verbal plus across do-support negation

Christine Dimroth

tion invariably precedes nonfinite verbs, i.e., those verbs that typically express the lexical properties of the predicate to be negated (see the (a) versions of the examples Table 18.2). However, there are telling typological differences concerning the relative order of negation and finite verbs. Negation is strictly post-finite in German, Dutch, and French, i.e., finite lexical verbs raise over negation, yielding a surface ordering in which the scope of negation over the lexical verb is not depicted in an iconic way. The semantic relation is often reconstructed by the assumption that a trace of the lexical verb is left in the scope domain following negation. The situation is different in Italian, where clausal negation is expressed by means of the proclitic particle non that precedes the entire verbal complex. English resembles Italian in that all lexical verbs appear to the right of negation. However, a finite auxiliary verb is obligatorily inserted (“do-support”) and the resulting structure resembles analytic constructions in German (4a) and French (5a) with a nonthematic7 finite verb preceding and a lexical verb following negation. Negation is thus particularly informative for the acquisition of finiteness in languages like German, Dutch, and French where nonfinite verb forms are morphologically different from (most) finite forms and negation represents a dividing line between the target positions for finite and nonfinite verbs.

18.2  Theoretical approaches Generative as well as functional and usage-based approaches to SLA have considered finiteness and negation an interesting and challenging topic of investigation. These approaches predict different pathways and intermediate knowledge states concerning the acquisition of finiteness. Predictions for early child vs. adult L2 learners also differ in most approaches, depending on the theories’ assumptions about the age factor (categorical and language-specific differences vs. gradual changes of domain-general and external factors). Hypotheses about the acquisition of finiteness are derived from more general assumptions about language acquisition and the nature of the human language faculty. The following summary must necessarily remain superficial. In particular, the theoretical approaches are in fact less uniform than they are presented here. Generative approaches assume that syntactic and morphological finiteness are inextricably linked in the grammars of native speakers. This link goes back to innate properties of UG guiding the L1 acquisition of syntax within the narrow tracks of possible grammars. According to this approach, nonfinite verbs move into designated syntactic positions (sometimes via invisible intermediate steps) in order for formal and functional properties of finiteness to be assigned. Due to this ineluctable link between finite syntax and morphology the approach predicts that finite verb forms will necessarily show up in finite positions in learners whose acquisition is determined by the relevant UG principles. Proponents of the approach agree that L1 learners and early L2 learners up to the age of three to four fall into this group (Meisel, 1997; Rothweiler, 2006, Tracy & Thoma, 2009; Wojtecka et al., 2013). There is, however, no agreement concerning access to UG in older children and adults. Researchers supporting a “full access” approach (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996; Lardiere, 1998; Prévost & White, 2000) assume that the acquisition of finiteness in older learners is constrained by the same syntactic principles proposed for young children. This means that L2 grammars contain functional categories associated with finiteness even though the morphological realization of verb forms often does not correspond to the target language. Verbs in raised syntactic positions are thus qualified as finite even if finite morphology is lacking or erroneous. Other researchers (Clahsen & Muysken, 1986; Meisel, 1997) conclude from their studies that access to UG principles is mediated by age. They assume that there is a critical or at least a sensitive period for language acquisition early in life and that UG principles become unavailable after its closure (the exact age boundaries are a matter of discussion). Researchers assuming that access to UG is blocked for older learners would not predict the same principled relation between finite syntax and morphology for this group. According to this view, older learners will instead have to acquire the relevant morpho-syntactic rules with the help of unspecific 246

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(domain-general) learning mechanisms. The prediction is that the dissociation between finite syntax and morphology will lead to persistent syntactic variation. In this research tradition, the investigation of the acquisition of finiteness is thus informative for the question of whether older children and adult L2 learners still have access to UG. Functional and usage-based approaches do not share the premise that syntactic knowledge is built up with the help of innate guiding principles. Proponents would thus not assume an ineluctable link between finite syntax and morphology for any learner group (including L1 learners). These approaches assume that the acquisition of finiteness in first and second language learners can show nontrivial similarities, even though many other factors that change during the lifetime have an impact on language acquisition (e.g., the quantity of input, the presence and entrenchment of L1 knowledge, the strong social motivation of younger children, and so forth). Functional approaches see L2 acquisition as a process of (re-)construction of a linguistic system. Beginning learners rely on simple and typologically unmarked ways of expressing central communicative functions. Relatively stable interlanguage systems are referred to as ‘Learner Varieties’ (Klein & Perdue, 1997). The core idea is that learner varieties are “self-standing, independent systems showing their own regularities (…) on the structural, semantic and informational level” (Perdue, 2006, p. 859). Learner varieties are thus shaped by prototypical organizational principles that go beyond narrow syntax. Learners focus on communicatively relevant properties and try to express functional relations as transparently as possible. With respect to finiteness, one would predict that initially only lexical properties of verbs (their meaning and valency) are expressed. Utterances would thus consist of reference to a topic (e.g., some person and/or timespan) to which the nonfinite description of some situation is linked without formal marking. Negation is seen as a scope-bearing operator modifying the way in which the nonfinite predicate is linked to the topic. As L2 learners prefer transparent form–function mappings, one would predict that negation precedes these lexical verbs and that the two core functions, carrying finiteness features and expressing the lexical content of the verb, are kept apart even in more advanced varieties. There is, however, no principled reason to believe that finite syntax and morphology must necessarily go hand in hand. In addition, first and second language learners could show similar developmental trajectories, whereas the speed and the final outcome of acquisition will typically differ. Usage-based theories see the human capacity for statistical learning as the central driving force of language acquisition. The point of departure is the observation that learners are highly sensitive to the frequency with which specific cues appear in particular contexts in their environment (Wulff & Ellis, 2018). Researchers rely on construction grammar principles proposing that target linguistic knowledge involves meaningful schemas or constructions. For second language learners, there is thus no challenge of learning abstract syntactic rules or organizational principles as proposed by the other approaches. The acquisition of grammatical constructions proceeds in an item-based way and depends primarily on the frequency and the salience of cues in the input and on the reliability of the relevant form–function associations (Ellis, 2008; MacWhinney, 1997). While memorization and imitation play a crucial role in the beginning of language acquisition, usage-based approaches assume that productive knowledge and more abstract representations emerge when learners have stored a stock of ready-made chunks from the input and begin to discover more general patterns behind the surface forms. Crucially, generalizations only happen under restricted conditions and in a piecemeal fashion. Eskildsen (2012) describes how negative constructions in L2 English become more and more abstract. Whereas factors like frequency and salience influence first and second language learners, the input processing mechanisms of the latter are fine-tuned to the requirements of their L1 (‘Learned Attention’, Ellis, 2008). As a consequence, particular target language cues might go unnoticed in L2 acquisition. 247

Christine Dimroth Table 18.3  Core theoretical assumptions and hypothesis Approach

Core assumptions w.r.t. L2

Predictions for the acquisition of finiteness

Generative

Access to universal grammar (UG) only available to young children

Generative

Access to universal grammar (UG) independently of age

Functional

Learners construct varieties allowing a transparent expression of communicative functions and linguistic functions Frequency, salience and reliability of input cues guide imitative learning and piecemeal generalizations

Finiteness as a functional category is present in young children, but not in adult learners, leading to categorical differences in acquisition Finiteness as a functional category is present in in all learners. Observable differences in acquisition concern superficial properties only. Child and adult learners start from nonfinite grammars with a lexical organization. Lexical and grammatical precursors have a pioneering role for the acquisition of finiteness. Child and adult learners reproduce the distribution of input forms. Developmental paths can differ for individual verbs. L2 learners’ input processing mechanisms are shaped by L1.

Usage-based

Table 18.3 summarizes the core assumptions of the three approaches and their predictions concerning the acquisition of finiteness and negation.

18.3  Methodological approaches to the study of finiteness and negation in SLA Empirical studies on the acquisition of finiteness and negation have mainly relied on spoken production data, either from longitudinal corpora (e.g., the databases of the ESF project (Perdue, 1993) or the ZISA project (Clahsen et al., 1983)), or from cross-sectional data collections involving targeted elicitation tools (e.g., the video clips of the “Finite Story” that are designed to elicit clauses containing negation or other adverbials and particles indicative of verb syntax (Dimroth, 2018) or picture series (Verhagen, 2011; Wojtecka et al., 2013)). Spoken language data require transcription and annotation and thus involve some interpretation from the side of the researcher. Broad phonetic transcriptions were originally used for ambiguous verb forms in the French data from the ESF project, in order to avoid over-interpretation (Perdue, 1990, p. 988; cf. example (8)). Other researchers did not share these concerns and rendered similar forms with target orthography plus the corresponding glosses as in example (9) from the same corpus. (8) (9)

la fille ‘the girl c’est pas ‘it is not

[vole] steal manger bon good eat.​i​nf

le pain the loaf’ (Perdue, 1990) à la cuisine in the kitchen’ (Prévost & White, 2000)

Recent studies used more controlled elicitation techniques like sentence completion tasks (Blom & de Korte, 2011; Julien et al., 2015), or experimental methods like sentence matching (Verhagen, 2011) and sentence imitation (Schimke & Dimroth, 2017; Verhagen, 2011).8 The latter techniques allow researchers to compare learners’ reactions to grammatical and ungrammatical stimuli in which relevant features were manipulated, while tapping into more implicit grammatical knowledge than 248

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judgement tasks. In a sentence imitation task, learners are asked to repeat stimulus sentences that are too long to be holistically stored in short-term memory. Learners will recall the content of the sentences, but have to reconstruct their form relying on their learner grammars. Cases in which learners change relevant structural properties of the stimulus sentence (e.g., the place of verb and negation) are particularly telling. Depending on their proficiency, learners can sometimes correct deviant stimuli in the direction of the target language (as in (10)), or change target-like stimulus sentences in accordance with the current state of their learner grammar (as in (11)). Both examples are from child L2 learners of German investigated by Schimke and Dimroth (2017). (10)

stimulus: response:

(11)

stimulus:

*Der Koch The chef de koch the chef

nicht not hat has.3sg

Der Kranke The sick person Response: der kranke The sick person

hat have.3sg nich not

bleibt stay.3sg nicht not

nicht not bleib stay

in dem neuen Haus in the new house hause house

gearbeitet. work.part arbeit work

in einem großen Krankenhaus. in a big hospital große krankenhaus big hospital

The above-mentioned transcription problems remain, of course, but contexts can be chosen such that inflection is less ambiguous.

18.4  Relevant L1 studies The L1 acquisition of finiteness has often been used as a blueprint for L2 data. Researchers agree that child learners of many languages go through a phase in which they show variation between finite and nonfinite main verbs, i.e., many of their utterances deviate from adult language in that they are not overtly marked for finiteness. This stage has been called ‘Optional Infinitive Stage’ (Wexler, 1994), ‘Root Infinitive Stage’ (Rizzi, 1994), or ‘Lexical Stage’ (Jordens, 2013). Despite their different theoretical orientation, authors agree that there is a strong relation between finite morphology and syntax as soon as finiteness gets marked. Finite verbs are raised over negation in raising languages, whereas nonfinite forms remain in nonfinite positions. Even though researchers were often impressed by the observation that children make relatively few agreement errors, morphological diversity and productivity as reflected in the production of analogies and overgeneralizations increase only slowly. In German, for example, the first so-called ‘Mini-paradigms’ (morphological contrasts attested within individual verb lemmas) develop only five–seven months after the use of the first verb (Bittner, 2003). There is, however, some disagreement concerning the interpretation of these findings: do they indicate rather superficial surface differences between early child grammars and adult grammars, or are there qualitative differences in the functional category system? Proponents of superficial differences (e.g., Poeppel & Wexler, 1993) assume that children might have difficulties with the realization of morphology, but target-like syntactic representations are already in place in the earliest observable stage of grammatical development. Structure-building approaches, on the other hand, assume that early child grammars are still lacking the functional category of finiteness (e.g., Jordens, 2013). Assumptions about L1 learners’ knowledge at the initial state have an important impact on the conceptualization of what is left to be learned. A similar debate was mirrored in L2 studies with the additional question of whether a target-like functional category system (if it is assumed to be missing at the outset) can be acquired at all. 249

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18.5  Results of SLA studies on the acquisition of finiteness and negation Concerning the first stages of L2 acquisition, research was mainly driven by the key question of whether early learner grammars are nonfinite or only look nonfinite at the surface. Among those who assume that the early lack of finiteness is more than a surface phenomenon and that the acquisition of finiteness thus represents a real learning task, there is, again, little agreement on the conceptualization of this task and, relatedly, on the relevance of particular questions and observations. If one conceives of the learning task as the acquisition of an abstract formal system, learners have to find out whether finite verbs in their L2 raise over negation or not, i.e., they have to adapt to L2 feature strength. Most researchers agree that young child L2 learners resemble L1 learners in that the acquisition of finite verb morphology goes hand in hand with a distinction between finite and nonfinite positions (Meisel, 2009; Schulz & Schwarze, 2017). In older children and adults, on the other hand, the acquisition of finiteness is not only a slower process, it is often described as significantly less consistent, i.e., continuously showing unmotivated variation. The most radical position holds that older L2 learners are simply unable to build up native-like functional categories, with the consequence that verb raising “will always be divorced from any potential relationship with overt morphology” (Beck, 1998, p. 321). It is claimed that adult learners can, to a certain degree, acquire the relevant surface forms, but they have to rely on domain-general learning strategies that are not suitable for the acquisition of more abstract syntactic dependencies. Despite target-like tendencies, the resulting amount of variation is considered so high that researchers see “fundamental differences” between children and adults (Clahsen & Muysken, 1986; Meisel, 1997). The evidence on which these claims are based is, however, not uncontroversial. On the basis of very similar data, others have suggested that the amount of variation in young children and adults is rather similar and that deviations from the default pattern (finite verbs raising across negation, nonfinite verbs staying in situ) constitute a minority of the total number of utterances in children and adults (Verhagen & Schimke, 2009). The following paragraphs summarize relevant studies and present examples from L2 speech production. Finiteness and negation were mainly studied in data from untutored second language learners as there is no influence of any particular syllabus. Based on longitudinal production data from verb raising languages like French and German, the general observation is that learners start out with verbs that are not regularly inflected for tense or subject-verb agreement. Next to infinitives, stem forms or non-agreeing finite forms are also attested. Unanalyzed forms of negative particles (see also holistic don’t for English: Cancino et al. (1978) and Stauble (1978)) are placed in a pre-verbal position (cf. examples (12) – (14)). (12) (13) (14)

ich I *yo* In I I

nicht sprechen deutsch gut not speak.​i​nf German well [nepa] parle bien le français no speak well French *prove* (...) but er no speak english try…

(Becker, 2005) (Perdue et al., 2002) (Perdue et al., 2002)

Klein and Perdue (1997) see a “nonfinite utterance organization” as the defining criterion of what they call the ‘Basic Variety’ in untutored adult second language acquisition. Despite the lack of functional categories, this type of interlanguage shows a certain degree of systematicity with word order being determined by argument structure and information structure instead of hierarchical syntax. Structure-building approaches like Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1996) equally assume that learners start out with a lexical system in which the functional categories governing both subject–verb agreement and verb raising are not yet available. 250

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Jordens and Dimroth (2006) placed negation in a row with other so-called ‘illocutionary phrases’ attested in a position between topical elements (e.g., the subject pronouns in (12)–(14)) and the description of some state of affairs (e.g., speaking a particular language). Distributional analysis revealed that the same position can also be taken by affirmative elements (e.g., temporal/additive particles like again and also) or unanalyzed modal/aspectual markers. What these devices have in common is a lexical specification of the way in which the state of affairs described in the nonfinite predicate applies to the utterance topic. The devices were thus considered “proto-functional elements with pragmatic properties of finiteness” (Jordens & Dimroth, 2006, p. 184). Pre-verbal negation (neg-V) allows for transparent scope marking with the negation operator preceding its domain of application, i.e., the semantic content that is meant to be negated (see Becker (2005), but also observations from Clahsen (1988) discussed in Parodi (2000)). The neg-V surface word order can thus be seen as a typologically unmarked or natural order. The latter point is particularly obvious when initial learners with ‘V-neg’ in their L1 prefer the more iconic ordering ‘neg-V’ in their L2 even if they do not have much evidence for the relevant order in the target language (cf. Dimroth (2018) on L2 learners of Polish with L1 German).9 Results on rapid acquisition without cumbersome processes of syntactic reorganization in target languages with strictly pre-verbal negation (e.g., Italian) seem to confirm this point (Bernini, 2000). Other researchers reject the idea of early nonfinite learner grammars all together. Prévost and White (2000) closely examined the rare finite verb forms that learners produced in the initial phases of acquisition. In data from untutored adult learners of French and German, they observed that learners did not treat nonfinite and finite verb forms alike. Whereas nonfinite verbs occurred in positions reserved for finite verbs (e.g., preceding negation), finite forms almost never appeared in nonfinite positions. This observation led to the conclusion that nonfinite main verbs in raised positions lack surface inflection, while their syntactic representation is target-like (‘missing surface inflection hypothesis’).10 In order to assess whether knowledge about finiteness and verb raising is present even at a time when learners mainly produce nonfinite default forms, measures of productivity are crucial, as the association of particular verbs with finite morpho-syntax can still be rote learned. Productive grammatical knowledge would presuppose that individual verbs show up in finite and nonfinite form and syntactic position. Jordens (2013) proposed that this is initially not the case and that learners simply imitate the position of verbs that they predominantly encountered in the input. In data from adult L2 learners of Dutch, he found that non-agentive (change of) state verbs are typically used in finite form from early on (see example (15)), but the same verbs do not show up in nonfinite form during the relevant stage.

(15)

ik I

woont live.3sg

in casablanca. in Casablanca

(from Jordens, 2013)

From early on, some lexical verbs were thus always finite, whereas others were always nonfinite. Due to the complementary distribution of verbs in these two categories, this was not interpreted as indicative of productive knowledge about finiteness. At a more advanced stage, a similar distribution was observed with nonthematic verbs in Parodi (2000), one of the first studies focusing on the special behavior of modals, auxiliaries, and copula verbs.11 In the data of adult learners of L2 German with Romance L1s, she found post-verbal negation with nonthematic verbs at stages at which lexical verbs were most often used in nonfinite forms and positions: cf. example (16). Building on this observation, subsequent studies attributed a pioneering role to nonthematic verbs (auxiliaries, in particular) and saw them as paving the way towards a target-like mastery 251

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of finiteness and negation in a variety of languages (Becker, 2005; Dimroth, 2008; Giuliano & Véronique, 2011; Jordens, 2013;12 Verhagen, 2011). Finite auxiliary verbs were seen as an ideal intermediate step in that grammatical finiteness and lexical verb meaning are kept apart. At the same time, an additional functional layer is added to the learner grammar without, however, forcing the learner to give up the earlier transparent expression of negation. In verb raising languages like German or French, negation is then still preceding the lexical predicate in its scope (cf. examples (17) and (18)). This is particularly obvious when learners insert seemingly superfluous auxiliaries into their utterances. Researchers from different theoretical backgrounds have studied such ‘dummy auxiliaries’ in L2 Dutch (see example 19) and German (Blom et al., 2003; van de Craats & van Hout, 2010). While dummy auxiliaries allow learners to avoid verb movement and morphological complexity, they help at the same time to establish a functional layer for syntactic finiteness (Blom & de Korte, 2011).

(16) (17) (18) (19)

wollen want.3pl die familie ‘the family parce que because nu now

nix not is is.3sg [tu] la journée all the day is is.3sg

arbeit work (from Parodi, 2000) nich gekomm von Spanie not come.part from Spain (Parodi, 2000) [Ze] pas [mõZi] I have.1sg not eaten’ (Giuliano & Véronique, 2011) niet slaapt not sleep.2/3sg (van de Craats & van Hout, 2010)

Based on these observations, verb placement was claimed to be determined by ‘lightness’, rather than by finiteness, at early stages of acquisition. Schimke and Dimroth (2017) present evidence from a sentence imitation task (see examples (10) and (11) in Section 18.3) confirming that even rapidly learning child L2 learners of German (6–11-year-olds) do not acquire placement preferences for finite lexical and finite nonthematic verbs simultaneously. If these children changed the stimulus sentences instead of simply repeating them, they tended to move finite auxiliaries into a finite position, turning an ungrammatical stimulus into a grammatical response as in example (10). At the same time, however, they moved finite lexical verbs into a non-finite position, turning a grammatical stimulus into an ungrammatical response as in example (11). The study shows that knowledge of auxiliary placement can be present before the spontaneous production of the corresponding structures, and that nonthematic verbs play a precursory role for adults and children. Taken together, these studies support the suggestion that knowledge about finiteness and verb placement is gradually built up in second language acquisition and that early negative utterances with their transparent ordering of nonthematic carriers of finiteness preceding, and lexical verbs following the negation operator, play a leading role. That this type of grammar was barely found in spontaneous production data from young children might be due to their rapid acquisition of inflectional morphology. Some authors see the main reason for age effects in differences concerning sensitivity to inflectional morphology (cf. Schwartz, 2004).13 It is important to realize, however, that even in a well-studied area like the acquisition of finiteness and negation it is not easy to decide between competing acquisition theories. Hypotheses like those summarized in Section 18.2 have certainly contributed to theory-driven analyses of learner data and have informed the struggle for the right interpretation of the findings. Ultimately, however, the problems to unambiguously classify surface forms in spontaneous production data as either finite or nonfinite (see Section 18.3), the competing requirements for attesting productive knowledge, plus the manifold factors influencing the linguistic behavior of children and adults make a principled dis252

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tinction between categorical (“fundamental”) differences on the one hand and continuously shifted preferences on the other hand very difficult. As a consequence, newer studies tend to abandon these kinds of all-or-nothing questions situated in the realm of narrow syntax and begin to broaden the perspective.

18.6  Future directions This broader perspective can affect different dimensions of L2 studies, namely (i) the linguistic phenomena that are examined, (ii) the type of L2 knowledge and skills and – relatedly – the methods, and (iii) the languages under investigation. With respect to the linguistic phenomena, Sanchez and Austin (2020, p. 269) promote a “shift of focus from functional features to the interface of syntax and other language components.” Broadening the range of investigated phenomena also means including more advanced learner populations. Learners showing target-like finite morphology and syntax in simple clauses might still be working on the interaction of finiteness and/or negation with other aspects of linguistic structure, e.g., information structure and contrast marking in discourse (Turco et al., 2015), affirmative and negative answer particles (Zhang & Vanek, 2021), verb-related features like mood, tense, and aspect (Wen & Schwartz, 2014), and focus particles (Vann, 2022). Concerning the dimension of L2 knowledge, researchers are increasingly interested in L2 processing instead of relying on production data alone. Accordingly, studies employ additional methods like self-paced listening/reading (Wen & Schwartz, 2014), production and comprehension experiments with reaction-time measurements (Zhang & Vanek, 2021) or eye tracking (Mitsugi, 2022). Finally, languages other than English or other Germanic languages (Jackson, 2020) are increasingly taken into account. For example, Benazzo et al. (2023) compare the acquisition of Germanic languages to finiteness in L2 Italian and find subtle differences that are potentially caused by its highly transparent morphology. Quite a few of the studies cited above do justice to more than one of these dimensions. For example, Turco et al. (2015) investigate the expression of focused polarity markers through contrastive intonation in L2 learners of Italian in an experimental elicitation task. Wen and Schwartz (2014) use a self-paced reading task to study the L2 acquisition of Mandarin Chinese. While there is no morphological marking of a category like finiteness, the expression of negation interacts with the use of aspectual particles. Mitsugi (2022) uses the visual-world paradigm (eye tracking) to examine whether negative polarity items help L2 learners of Japanese to predict properties of the clause-final verb. Broadening the perspective along the lines sketched above seems to be a promising avenue for a better understanding of the way negation and finiteness relate to each other and to neighboring phenomena.

Notes 1 The acquisition of tense and mood is largely neglected in the current chapter. See Shirai (this volume) and Dudley (this volume) for an overview. 2 Note that other languages, Russian and Polish for example, have different morphological markings for all six cells of a person/number agreement paradigm plus a distinct marking for the infinitive. Yet other languages, Mandarin Chinese for example, do not have morphological finiteness marking at all. Concerning the overt marking of finiteness and the transparency of form–function associations, languages can thus be ordered on a continuum. 3 The word order of (1a) could thus be changed to Immer werde ich die Wahrheit sagen (“Always will I tell the truth”) or Die Wahrheit werde ich immer sagen (“The truth will I always tell”). 4 Constituent negation and in particular word-internal negation (un-happy) are not directly related to (the acquisition of) finiteness and are therefore disregarded here. But see, for example, the L2 work on scrambling by Unsworth (2005). 5 The standard form “ne V pas” is mainly reserved to written varieties of French.

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Christine Dimroth 6 Negation also occurs in very early verbless utterances. See Becker (2005) and Perdue et al. (2002) for careful analyses of negation in such nominal utterances. 7 Other common terms are ‘light verbs’ or ‘functional verbs.’ 8 But see Hauser (2013) for a conversation analytical approach. 9 Rankin (2011) finds no transfer of lexical verb raising in L2 learners of English with L1 German or Dutch. He interprets the finding as evidence in favor of the assumption that core syntax (contrary to so-called interface phenomena) is altogether shielded from transfer. 10 Usage-based approaches assume that L2 learners’ use of nonfinite main verbs can best be explained through input properties. Verbs show up in a position in which they are frequently encountered in the input. Markers of finiteness like (clitic) auxiliaries and morphological markers, though frequent, are typically not very salient and can thus easily be missed (Ellis, 2008). 11 Parodi (2000) also integrated possessive have. See the discussion of state verbs above. 12 Jordens (2013) sees similar principles at work in L1 acquisition. 13 Applying the exact same criteria for productive agreement marking, Dimroth and Haberzettl (2012) found that six-seven year-old L2 learners of German with L1s Russian and Turkish could even outperform German L1 learners.

Bibliography Beck, M. (1998). L2 acquisition and obligatory head movement: English-speaking learners of German and the Local Impairment Hypothesis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 20, 311–348. Becker, A. (2005). The semantic knowledge base for the acquisition of negation and the acquisition of finiteness. In H. Hendriks (Ed.), The structure of learner varieties (pp. 263–314). De Gruyter Mouton. Benazzo, S., Dimroth, C., & Andorno, C. (2023). Back to the Basic Variety: Does it emerge only with specific learner profiles, environments and languages? In I. Repiso, C. Granget, & G. Fong (Eds.), Language, creoles, varieties. From emergence to transmission. (EuroSLA Studies) Berlin: Language Science Press. https://hal.science/hal-04187905. Bernini, G. (2000). Negative items and negation strategies in nonnative Italian. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22(3), 399–440. Bittner, D. (2003). The emergence of verb inflection in two German-speaking children. In D. Bittner, W. U. Dressler, & M. Kilani-Schoch (Eds.), Development of verb inflection in first language acquisition. A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 53–88). De Gruyter. Blom, E., & de Korte, S. (2011). Dummy auxiliaries in child and adult second language acquisition of Dutch. Lingua, 121(5), 906–919. Blom, E., van de Craats, I., & Verhagen, J. (Eds.). (2003). Dummy auxiliaries in first and second language acquisition. De Gruyter Mouton. Cancino, H., Rosansky, E., & Schumann, J. (1978). The acquisition of English negatives and interrogatives by native Spanish speakers. In E. Hatch (Ed.), Second language acquisition: A book of readings (pp. 207–230). Newbury House. Clahsen, H. (1988). Kritische Phasen der Grammatikentwicklung. Eine Untersuchung zum Negationserwerb bei Kindern und Erwachsenen. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 7, 3–31. Clahsen, H., Meisel, J., & Pienemann, M. (1983). Deutsch als Zweitsprache. Der Spracherwerb ausländischer Arbeiter. Narr. Clahsen, H., & Muysken, P. (1986). The availability of universal grammar to adult and child learners – A study of the acquisition of German word order. Interlanguage Studies Bulletin, 2(2), 93–119. Dimroth, C. (2008). Age effects on the process of L2 acquisition? Evidence from the acquisition of negation and finiteness in L2 German. Language Learning, 58, 117–150. Dimroth, C. (2018). Beyond statistical learning: Communication principles and language internal factors shape grammar in child and adult beginners learning Polish through controlled exposure. Language Learning, 68(4), 863–905. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/lang​.12294 Dimroth, C., & Haberzettl, S. (2012). The older the better, or more is more: Language acquisition in childhood. In M. Watorek et al. (Eds.), Comparative perspectives to language acquisition: A tribute to Clive Perdue (pp. 324–350). Multilingual Matters. Ellis, N. C. (2008). Usage-based and form-focused language acquisition: The associative learning of constructions, learned attention, and the limited L2 endstate. In P. Robinson & N. C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 372–405). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. Eskildsen, S. W. (2012). L2 negation. Constructions at work. Language Learning, 62(2), 335–372.

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19 TENSE AND TEMPORALITY Yasuhiro Shirai

This chapter discusses second language morphosyntax in the domain of tense and temporality. Temporality is defined here as the linguistic realization of concepts related to time, and therefore it is a broad category relating to both tense and aspect. Tense refers to a linguistic category that locates a situation in relation to some other time, such as present, future, and past, whereas aspect refers to a linguistic category that pertains to how a situation is viewed in terms of its inception, continuation, and completion (Comrie, 1976). Often discussed in second language acquisition (SLA) is lexical aspect, which concerns temporal semantics of verbal predicates (Vendler, 1957), and grammatical aspect, also called viewpoint aspect, which is a grammatical marking that denotes the aspectual value of the situation being described—whether it is ongoing, completed, etc. (Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994; Comrie, 1976; Smith, 1997). In SLA, the acquisition of tense as a grammatical category has been extensively pursued. This chapter first reviews studies on past tense form as a morphological category—the so-called past tense debate. However, the debate is not necessarily related to the acquisition of past tense as a temporal semantic category. Rather, this debate concerns the representation, processing, and acquisition of regular vs. irregular morphology—whether a single mechanism (such as connectionist neural networks) can handle both regular and irregular morphology or two separate mechanisms (rule-based and memory-based systems, known as the dual-mechanism model) are necessary. Section 19.1 reviews it. Section 19.2 focuses on the semantics of tense (and aspect) marking in SLA, focusing on the Aspect Hypothesis (AH), which focuses on the semantic bias in the grammatical markings of tense and aspect.

19.1  The past tense debate The issue of past tense morphology in English (and related issues) has been one of the most contentiously debated domains of inquiry in cognitive science. Rumelhart and McClelland (1986), based on a Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) model of learning the English past tense, claimed that the past-tense rule (i.e., add -ed to the verb stem) is unnecessary because their connectionist network that does not distinguish regular and irregular past tense succeeded in learning both regular and irregular past tense forms within a single system (i.e., a single PDP neural network) without incorporating a separate rule in the system.

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-23

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Symbolic modelers (e.g., Pinker & Prince, 1988), however, presented strong criticisms of Rumelhart and McClelland’s claims. Some points in their critique include: (1) the Rumelhart and McClelland (R–M) model’s performance is not human-like, producing many strange errors that children do not produce, (2) the network actually represents many symbols in their encoding of input in the network model, and (3) the way input is presented to the model (first irregular verbs only, then followed by regulars) is not realistic, among others. In response to such critiques, revised connectionist models (e.g., Plunkett & Marchman, 1993) addressed many of these points. This debate between symbolic modelers and connectionists over regular–irregular morphology is still in contention (e.g., Blything Ambridge, & Lieven 2018; Dye, Walenski, Prado, Mostofsky, & Ullman, 2013; Westermann & Jones, 2021). The regular-irregular issue in relation to single- vs. dual-mechanism model encompasses various linguistic domains (not necessarily restricted to past tense), such as the denominal problem (Harris, 1993; Kim, Pinker, Prince, & Prasada, 1991); frequency effects for irregulars, but not regulars (Prasada, Pinker, & Snyder, 1990); double dissociation in specific populations (Marchman, 1993); phonological similarity (neighborhood structure) and (over-)regularization (Prasada & Pinker, 1993); and differential brain activation in regular vs. irregular inflections (Jaeger et al., 1996). This section reviews how these issues were addressed in SLA.

19.1.1  Frequency effect for irregulars, but not for regulars? A straightforward prediction by the dual-mechanism model is that there are frequency effects for irregular morphology while there are none for regular morphology (Pinker & Prince, 1988). This naturally follows from the dual-route theory, which assumes that the memory-based system for irregulars is influenced by frequency, and that the rule-based system for regulars can be applied regardless of whether the word is a frequent one (such as walked) or a not-so-frequent one (e.g., procrastinated) because the regular past form is concatenated by rule. This prediction was tested by Prasada et al. (1990) with native speakers of English with somewhat unclear results. In a reaction time (RT) study, they found frequency effects for irregulars but not for regulars when participants were presented with a base form of an English verb and asked to provide the past tense form, as hypothesized. However, they also found, unexpectedly, anti-frequency effects in regulars; that is, native English speakers produced low frequency regular past forms faster than high frequency ones. Replicating and extending Prasada et al.’s (1990) study, Beck (1997) conducted a RT study with native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) of English who were shown verb stems on a computer screen one by one and were asked to produce their past tense forms orally. Her overall hypothesis was that frequency effect would be found only for irregulars (replicating Prasada et al., 1990) for NSs, but for both regulars and irregulars for NNSs. The prediction for NNSs is particularly interesting in that it is motivated by theoretical considerations (i.e., limited access to rule-based competence for adult NNSs) as well as past empirical research (i.e., input frequency as a predictor for adult L2, but not for child L1 for morpheme acquisition orders: Larsen-Freeman, 1976). That is, Beck hypothesized that NNSs are more driven by input frequency than NSs in their linguistic representations. The results, however, were inconclusive again. Beck ran six experiments (three each for NSs and NNSs of mixed L1s). Experiment 1 (NSs) essentially replicated Prasada et al. (1990), finding a frequency effect for irregulars and an anti-frequency effect (i.e., low frequency regulars were significantly faster than high frequency ones) for regulars. Beck argued this to be consistent with the dual-mechanism model because, if associative memory is strongly involved for regular inflection, anti-frequency effects should not be observed for regulars. However, for Experiment 2 (NNSs), Beck did not find the predicted frequency effect for irregular verbs. Furthermore, she found a marginally significant anti-frequency effect for regular verbs. This goes against her prediction that L2 learners 258

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would be more sensitive to input frequency than native speakers. Her interpretation for this finding was that L2 learners often practice irregular past forms as drills (e.g., come-came-come, go-wentgone, fly-flew-flown) and in such practices no frequency distinction is made, and therefore it is natural that they show no frequency effect. Beck (1997) is important in that it squarely addressed the anti-frequency effect for native English speakers found by Prasada et al. (1990). At the same time, it showed that the frequency and antifrequency effects in RT studies can be affected by many factors, including composition of stimulus set, nature of distractors, and, in the case of NNSs, their history of language learning. NSs do not have to produce a past tense form given a verb stem—they acquire them through the use of language (i.e., comprehension and production), while L2 learners, in particular tutored learners, usually go through such a practice at some point in their learning of verb paradigms. This then casts doubt on the validity of comparing native and non-native data on par. Furthermore, even for NSs, the task demand is very different between regular and irregular verbs. Adding -ed to create a past form for regulars can become a conscious strategy, which does not resemble real-life language processing (comprehension–production) and thus potentially contaminates the data. One has to retrieve the past form for irregulars from memory, based on the similarity of the sound and the meaning of the verb. This is clearly illustrated by Jaeger et al. (1996), which is a neuroimaging (PET) study involving the task of producing regular and irregular past in English for NSs. Since they blocked regular and irregular items separately, in the regular block the task was very easy—adding –ed constantly, which results in a quite different neural activation pattern than that of producing irregular past forms. In fact, the difference may have little to do with the difference in linguistic representations, but the nature of the task involved (Seidenberg & Hoeffner, 1998). Thus, the task of producing a past tense form from a stem needs to be interpreted with caution. Given the conflicting findings in frequency effects in previous studies, Babcock, Stowe, Maloof, Brovetto, and Ullman (2012) investigated what factors affect the outcome by trying more systematically to identify the factors that were not controlled for in earlier studies (e.g., Beck, 1997). They investigated regularity, length of residence, age of arrival, native language (Chinese vs. Spanish), and sex. Data from 70 NSs of American English, and 56 NNSs (28 Chinese and 28 Spanish speakers, who arrived in an English-speaking country after age 17 and had lived in the US for three years or longer at the time of testing) were analyzed, using mixed effects regression models. They conducted a RT study in which participants provide a past tense form in obligatory contexts, similar to the “wug” test (Berko, 1958: e.g., Fail: Every day I fail an exam. Just like every day, yesterday I ____ an exam.), and tested which factors are significantly associated with past tense frequency of the verb. They found that there was no significant effect of learners’ L1 and that the frequency effect was significantly greater for irregulars than regulars for NSs of English, while there was no significant difference for NNSs. They also found that NNSs showed significantly greater frequency effects than NSs on regulars, but not on irregulars. Babcock et al. (2012) suggested that irregular past tense forms are always stored, while regular past tense forms are either composed or stored, as a function of various factors. They concluded: “both sexes store regulars in L2, but only females in L1; greater lengths of residence lead to less dependence on storage, but only in females; higher adult ages of arrival lead to more reliance on storage” (p. 820). Babcock et al.’s (2012) contributions are unique in that frequency effects are not only related to factors such as regular vs. irregular or native/non-native, but also individual difference factors such as sex (males vs. female) and a learner’s proficiency. One of the criticisms of the regular–irregular debate, however, was that it largely centers only on English morphology, in which there is a clear demarcation between regular and irregular morphology. Other languages do not necessarily have such a morphological organization. In Russian, for example, there are practically no completely irregular verbs, and verbs can be considered more or less regular depending on their morphological complexity (Gor & Cook, 2010). In fact, the vast majority of the 259

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morphological paradigms in the world’s languages are not like that of English. Thus, the database needs to be expanded to other languages to address the issue of the single vs. dual mechanism in SLA. Bowden, Gelfand, Sanz, and Ullman (2010) investigated the regular and irregular Spanish present tense and imperfective past forms in a production study, in which they found different patterns of frequency effects for 17 NSs and 14 NNSs (mid-to-advanced L1 English learners of Spanish as a foreign language with one or two semesters (mean = 9.4 months) of immersion experience in Spanishspeaking countries). Bowden et al. used inflected-form frequency to measure frequency effects using RT experiments. In the present tense task, the NSs showed frequency effects for both regular (e.g., vender–vendo, ‘to sell – I sell’) and irregular (e.g., perder–pierdo, ‘to lose – I lose’) present tense forms of Class II/III verbs (whose infinitives end in -er/-ir), and for irregulars (e.g., pensar–pienso, ‘to think – I think’) of Class I (-ar verbs), but not for Class I (the default class) regulars (e.g., pescar–pesco, ‘to fish – I fish’). The NNSs, however, exhibited frequency effects on regular and irregular present tense forms in all cases, including for regulars from Class I, which contradicts the prediction of the dual-mechanism model. For the imperfective task, for the L1 group, Class II/III, but not Class I, inflected forms showed frequency effects, whereas among the L2 participants frequency effects were found in Class I as well as Class II/III verbs. Bowden et al. concluded that NS data are compatible with the dual-mechanism model, with only regular inflection (generally) free from frequency effect, while NNS data are not, in that they tend to show frequency effects not only for irregulars, but also for regulars. Gor and Cook (2010) argued that regularity for Russian morphology needs to be understood as a continuous property rather than as dichotomous. In Russian, even most irregular verbs use a regular set of inflections, and therefore, practically, there are no completely irregular verbs. Gor and Cook (2010) investigated the processing of regularly and irregularly inflected infinitives by collecting data in two experiments (‘real and nonce verb generation task’ and ‘lexical decision task with priming’) with highly proficient late L2 learners (N = 36), heritage learners (N = 24), and adult native speakers (N = 10) of Russian. In the verb generation task, the verbs were presented auditorily twice in infinitive forms, and participants were instructed to produce “first the first-person singular and then the second-person singular non-past-tense” (p. 103). Using accuracy as the dependent measure, they found effects of frequency for all five verb categories (three high frequency productive classes ranging in morphological complexity (-aj-, -i-, and -ova-) and three verb classes ranging in type frequency and productivity and of comparable complexity (-a-, -e-, and -i-), with more frequent verbs showing higher accuracy of generation for both NS and NNS groups. In the auditory lexical decision task, the matched primes were in the first-person singular non-pasttense, and the targets were the infinitives of the verb, while, in the unmatched condition, the same targets were used with the first-person singular of different verbs used as unmatched primes. Gor and Cook (2010) reported priming effects for all verb categories—regular (-aj-), semiregular (-i-), and irregular verbs. For both NNSs and NSs of Russian, the irregular verbs showed greater priming effects. They interpreted these findings as indicating the decomposition of the majority of the verbs (including some irregular verbs) they used. Gor and Cook (2010) attributed this high sensitivity to rule-based decomposition to the writing-based instruction that the L2 learners received, which prevents the formation of whole-word (i.e., memory-based) auditory representations. The researchers argued that their Russian data are not compatible with either single- or dual-mechanism models, but are compatible with the hybrid models (e.g., Albright & Hayes, 2003), which combine the properties of rules with input-driven factors (e.g., input frequency). In addition to using frequency effects for regulars and irregulars, researchers sought other measures to investigate the representation of regular and irregular morphology—sometimes concurrently with frequency effects—including more implicit measures such as masked priming (Silva & Clahsen, 2008), self-paced reading (Pliatsikas & Marinis, 2013) and brain imaging studies (Hahne, Mueller, & Clahsen, 2006). 260

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For example, Silva and Clahsen (2008) conducted masked priming experiments with German, Chinese, and Japanese learners of English residing in the UK (with native English controls). This is an improvement over earlier studies because masked priming can reduce the unknown effect of the ‘conscious strategy’ discussed above, since participants are shown the prime word so quickly that they do not realize it has been shown. Silva and Clahsen tested whether regular past tense morphology exhibits priming (Experiments 1 and 2). They found that, although the NSs showed “full priming” for regular past tense (for example, equivalent priming was obtained for walked–walk and walk–walk), the NNSs did not (i.e., regular past tense form did not prime their stems). There was no difference between the Chinese and German learners of English, suggesting that there was no L1 effect. Silva and Clahsen argued that the contrast between NS and NNS processing suggests that NNSs rely more on memory-based lexical storage and less on rule-based combinatorial processing of morphologically complex words than NSs. Unfortunately, irregulars were not examined, and therefore the study cannot fully address the dual-mechanism model because we cannot be sure if irregulars also have priming effects as a sign of decomposition.

19.1.2  Effect of neighborhood structure Prasada and Pinker (1993) hypothesized that irregular past tense is based on associative memory while regular past tense is concatenated by rule, and, therefore, the former is influenced by similarity to other irregular verbs while the latter is not. Indeed, in their experiments with native English speakers’ ratings of novel past tense forms, they found that the participants preferred irregular past forms similar to existing irregular past tense forms, but such an effect was not present for regular past tense forms. Murphy (2004) essentially replicated Prasada and Pinker’s study in an experiment with 20 NNSs of English (beginning level adult learners with mixed L1s), 20 native English-speaking children (mean age 8.9), and adult NSs (college students) all residing in the UK. Murphy used the same nonce verbs used in Prasada and Pinker (1993), which represent three different levels of similarity to prototypical regular and irregular verbs. Prototypical ones rhyme with real regular (e.g., brip) and irregular (e.g., spling) English verbs. Intermediate verbs shared some initial CCV_ and _VCC sequences with actual English regular and irregular verbs (e.g., ploab vs. preek), while distant ones did not have any of these similarities (e.g., smeelth vs. goav) Using a task similar to the “wug” test (Berko, 1958), Murphy (2004) found that both the native control group and the non-native learners basically followed Prasada and Pinker’s native participants in that they were more likely to suffix regular nonce verbs with regular –ed than irregular nonce verbs and that the likelihood of this –ed suffixation was influenced by similarity to the prototype in irregulars more than in regulars, which supports the dual-mechanism model both in L1 and L2 acquisition. However, Murphy also found that native children significantly differed from the other groups, producing fewer suffixed forms (mostly due to vowel-changed past tense) and that a similarity effect was found both for regular and irregulars, unlike in Prasada and Pinker’s study, which is not consistent with the dual-mechanism model. Extending this line of research to Greek, Agathopoulou and Papadopoulou (2009) investigated regular and irregular active past perfective verbs in adult NSs and NNSs of Greek with mixed L1s. A nonce-probe elicitation task showed that both NSs and NNSs generalized the regular affix -s, and more so in regular than in irregular perfective verb stems. Furthermore, the degree of similarity of the nonce verbs to real ones did not affect the affixation of regulars. Dissimilar irregulars were affixed less often than similar ones by the intermediate learners but neither the advanced NNSs nor the NSs showed this distinction. These findings support computation for regulars, as proposed by the dualmechanism model, both in NSs and NNSs, they argued. The findings from the two L2 studies appear to indicate that the dual-mechanism model applies to both L1 and L2. However, this interpretation should be taken with caution. Although both NSs and 261

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NNSs showed similar results, it does not follow that their performance is based on the same process, as discussed in the previous section on frequency effect, because L2 learners practice inflecting verbs, in particular irregular past tense forms, through conscious learning. Thus, similarity of results is quite possibly dependent on very different cognitive processes. Further, as Murphy (2004) noted, the regular–irregular dissociation in similarity effects can be produced by single-mechanism connectionist models as well (Hahn & Nakisa, 2000).

19.1.3  The denominal problem One area of the regular–irregular debate that is largely unexplored in SLA is the denominal problem. Kim et al.(1991) proposed that the grammaticality of the sentence “The batter flied/*flew out to center field” is due to the grammatical status of the verb flied, which is a denominal verb derived from a noun fly ball. However, functionalists (e.g., Harris, 1993) argued that it comes from semantics—to disavow an unintended meaning associated with the form (in this case, to avoid the image of a batter actually flying through the air). Neubauer and Clahsen (2009) addressed this issue in SLA by administering a grammaticality judgment test to advanced L1 Polish late learners of German (N = 34) studying at a university in Germany, and NSs of German (N = 26). The material was based on Marcus, Brinkmann, Clahsen, Wiese, and Pinker’s (1995) study, which extended Kim et al.’s (1991) study on English to German. By presenting the verb form in denominal condition vs. deverbal condition, the material tested whether the participant preferred regular (–t) or irregular (–n) past participle form. Marcus et al.’s prediction was that German NSs would prefer regular –t in the denominal condition, while in the verb root condition (i.e., deverbal condition), they would prefer irregular –n, which was what was found in Marcus et al.’s (1995) study with German NSs. Neubauer and Clahsen also found that German NSs preferred regular –t in the denominal condition, but irregular –n in the deverbal condition, both with a significant difference. In contrast, NNSs did not show significant preference for regular –t in denominal condition (p = .829), although they preferred irregular –n in the deverbal condition (p < .001), suggesting that “advanced L2 learners’ acceptability judgments are less affected by the morphological structure of an inflected word than native speakers’ acceptability judgments are” (p. 413). Although the denominal verbs are associated more with regular than with deverbal ones, it is not easy to determine whether this is due to grammatical status or meaning (Shirai, 1997a). Still, it is interesting that L2 learners are not as sensitive to this association as NSs of German. This should be further tested with L2 learners of English and other languages. So far, I have reviewed research on past tense marking in SLA that addressed the issue of a regular–irregular dissociation. L2 studies have most extensively addressed (1), the frequency effect, and to lesser degrees (2), the effect of neighborhood structure, as well as (3), the denominal problem. In the next section, I discuss the intersection of the regular–irregular debate and verb semantics in past tense acquisition: i.e., whether the regular–irregular dissociation is related to a semantic bias in (L1 and) L2 acquisition (see Shirai, 2019, for a more comprehensive review).

19.1.4  The past tense debate and the Aspect Hypothesis Since the 1970s, a number of studies in both L1 and L2 acquisition have observed associations between tense–aspect markers and the semantics of the verbs/predicates (i.e., lexical aspect, Vendler, 1957) to which these grammatical tense–aspect markers are attached. Specifically, perfective past markers are associated with punctual, telic (i.e., change-of-state) verbs, and general imperfective markers are associated with atelic verbs, and dynamic imperfective (i.e., progressive) aspect markers are associated with activity verbs (Andersen & Shirai, 1994). This semantic bias observed crosslinguistically has received a great deal of attention because it is related to important questions about the 262

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relationship between grammar and cognition (Weist, Wysocka, Witkowska-Stadnik, Buczowska, & Konieczna, 1984) and the biological endowment of language (Bickerton, 1981). So far, I have discussed the dissociation between regular and irregular morphology in L1/L2 acquisition and processing, focusing on the past tense as the target domain. As noted earlier, these studies are mostly unconcerned with the semantic bias observed in the acquisition of tense (and aspect) morphology. By testing and disconfirming Bickerton’s (1981) and Pinker’s (1984) hypotheses which predicted dissociation of regular and irregular morphology, Shirai (2010) concluded that there are no different patterns of acquisition between regular and irregular morphology in relation to semantic bias, with regard to child L1 acquisition of English past tense. Specifically, Shirai (2010) showed that both regular and irregular past tense forms are semantically biased and argued this does not support the dual-mechanism hypothesis. Here, I review evidence from L2 acquisition regarding this issue. Rohde (1996) analyzed six-month longitudinal data of six- and nine-year-old German boys acquiring English in California and found that the regular past was almost exclusively attached to achievement verbs. In contrast, the irregular past involved a greater variety of lexical aspect types, in particular stative verbs, which is predicted to be most unlikely to be inflected for the past tense by the AH (Andersen & Shirai, 1996). Housen (2002) specifically discussed the dual-mechanism model in the context of SLA. In his two-and-a-half-year longitudinal study of a Dutch child studying English in Belgium, he found that regular past –ed (and progressive –ing) were more strongly constrained by lexical aspect than was the irregular past, irregular state verbs showing an unexpectedly high ratio of past marking, which goes against the predicted semantic bias. Housen suggested that the dissociation between regular morphology (i.e., –ing and –ed) and irregular morphology (i.e., irregular past) can be accounted for by the dual-mechanism model, stating: one could speculate that conceptual–semantic notions (prototypes) such as stativity, durativity and telicity play a steering role in the process of morphological rule-learning, which mainly affects regular morphology like –ing, but not or less so in associative learning, which mainly affects irregular forms such as went, go. These irregular forms would be directly mapped onto a given conceptual scene and then stored as a specific form-meaning unit in lexical memory (Housen, 2002, p. 188) This hypothesis makes sense, since more transparent form–meaning relationships of regular inflections may facilitate the acquisition of form-meaning connections better than those of irregular ­inflections. In contrast, Rocca (2002) reported no regular–irregular dissociation in her six-month longitudinal production data from three Italian children acquiring English in the UK. She found that both irregular and regular past tense forms are strongly associated with telic verbs, this association relaxing over time to approximate the adult norm. Likewise, Chan, Fingerb, Costello, and Shirai (2012) found no regular–irregular dissociations in a study which analyzed longitudinal data from four adult immigrants (two Punjabi and two Italian speakers) acquiring English in the UK. With all four learners combined, they show similar distributions for both regular and irregular past tense forms inflected on achievement verbs. In sum, although Housen (2002) suggested that in L2 acquisition the dual-route theory might predict that regular past tense exhibits a stronger association with semantic prototype (telic verbs), there are findings that go against this prediction. In any event, it appears that it is in L2 acquisition, not in L1 acquisition (Shirai, 2010), that a regular–irregular verb dissociation might be observed, and even in L2 studies, it is not clear whether such dissociation is always observed. Further research is needed in this regard. 263

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19.2  The Aspect Hypothesis As briefly noted above, since the 1970s an interesting trend has been observed: children’s use of past tense marking is not applied evenly to all past tense contexts, but appears to be restricted according to its temporal semantics. Brown (1973) and Bloom, Lifter, and Hafitz (1980) in English, Bronckart and Sinclair (1973) in French, and Antinucci and Miller (1976) in Italian (and English) were early influential studies. These studies show that when children use past tense marking (English simple past, French passé composé, Italian passato prossimo) they are not applied to all types of verbs but selectively attached to instantaneous, change-of-state verbs that denote clear end-results. On the other hand, progressive marking is only attached to activity verbs, and it is not incorrectly attached to stative verbs (Brown, 1973). Thus, from the beginning this semantic bias was shown to have a crosslinguistic basis, which was further extended to other languages: Turkish (Aksu-Koç, 1988), Greek (Stephany, 1981), Japanese (Shirai, 1993), Chinese (Li & Bowerman, 1998), Russian (Stoll, 1998), Polish (Weist et al., 1984), African American English (Green & Roeper, 2007), and Korean (Ryu & Shirai, 2023). Such correlations have also been observed in SLA crosslinguistically mostly since the 1990s: Spanish (Andersen, 1991), English (Robison, 1995), French (Bardovi-Harlig & Bergström, 1996), Japanese (Shirai & Kurono, 1998), and Korean (Lee & Kim, 2007), among others. Shirai (1991) proposed the following descriptive generalizations, which are now called the AH (Andersen & Shirai, 1994; Shirai & Andersen, 1995): 1. Learners first use past marking (e.g., English) or perfective marking (Chinese, Spanish, etc.) on achievement and accomplishment verbs, eventually extending its use to activities and stative verbs. 2. In languages that encode the perfective/imperfective distinction, imperfective past appears later than perfective past, and imperfective past marking begins with stative verbs and activity verbs, then extending to accomplishment and achievement verbs. 3. In languages that have progressive aspect, progressive marking begins with activity verbs, then extends to accomplishment or achievement verbs. 4. Progressive markings are not incorrectly overextended to stative verbs. (Based on Andersen & Shirai, 1996, p. 533) In addition to first and second language acquisition, this research on semantic bias has been extended to other areas of language sciences: sentence processing in L1 (Yap et al., 2009) and in L2 (Zeng, Chen, & Shirai, 2021), Specific Language Impairment/Developmental Language Disorders (Leonard et al., 2007) and its intervention (Owen Van Horne, Curran, Larson, & Fey, 2018). More comprehensive reviews of the studies on the AH in SLA are available elsewhere (e.g., chapter by Salaberry and Comajoan-Colomé in this volume; Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan, 2020). Here, I highlight current issues.

19.2.1  The Default Past Tense Hypothesis and the Lexical Insensitivity Hypothesis One important hypothesis advanced in relation to the AH is the Default Past Tense Hypothesis (DPTH) (Salaberry, 1999). Salaberry and Ayoun (2005) state: the DPTH “predicts that during the first stages of L2 development, learners will attempt to mark past tense distinctions rather than aspectual distinctions, and in so doing will initially rely on a single marker of past tense, most typically the perfective form” (p. 20). Important empirical evidence for this hypothesis comes from Salaberry’s (1999) work on L2 Spanish, which shows that (1) learners’ use of perfective past (preterit) is spread across various lexical aspectual classes at the beginning stage, not just restricted to telic verbs, and 264

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that (2) association of past tense form with telicity increases as the learners’ proficiency increases, contra the AH. This deviation from the prediction of the AH observed in Salaberry (1999) appears to be the combination of three factors: (1) learners’ L1 (English), (2) the classroom situation, (3) task (Shirai, 1997b). First, the learners’ L1 (English) has a simple past tense marker, which is less aspectual compared with Spanish preterit (perfective past). Therefore, assuming L1 transfer, learners at the beginning stage will show a lesser degree of association with telicity, since perfective past is more strongly associated with telic verbs than is simple past. Second, learners in classroom settings tend to show more L1 transfer than those in naturalistic settings (Shirai, 1992). Finally, the task (film retell) allows learners to use their monitor in the sense that it is a past narrative, and they know they should tell it in past tense. Importantly, most of the studies Salaberry cites that are consistent with the DPTH come from L1 English learners learning Romance languages (e.g., Salaberry, 2002) in classroom settings. Bonilla (2013) reviewed task conditions in previous research on beginning learners’ L2 Spanish tense–aspect and concluded that the DPTH is supported particularly in tasks requiring an explicit focus on forms or in impersonal narratives, whereas beginning learners show prototypical associations of preterit marking with telic predicates in open-ended tasks or personal narratives, and stronger associations of imperfect marking with state verbs especially in personal narratives. This is consistent with Shirai’s (1997b) account above. In terms of the effect of proficiency (called the developmental prediction of the AH by Tong & Shirai, 2016), however, the deviation from the AH does not seem to be limited to L1 English learners learning Spanish. Tong and Shirai found that, in a study of the acquisition of L1 English college students learning Chinese in the US utilizing an acceptability judgment test, the 3rd year learners showed stronger association between perfective –le and telic verbs, and between progressive zai and activity verbs than the 2nd year learners, going against the developmental prediction of the AH. In an L2 corpus study involving both spoken and written data from Chinese learners of English in China (Zeng, Shirai, & Chen, 2023), it was found that the higher proficiency learners showed more frequent use of progressive with activity verbs than the lower proficiency learners, suggesting that as their proficiency advances, their sensitivity to lexical aspect increases, consistent with the DPTH. Tong and Shirai proposed the Lexical Insensitivity Hypothesis (LIH) since the phenomenon pertains not only to past tense marking but also to aspectual marking, and suggested future research should investigate under what conditions the AH or the LIH (and by extension the DPTH) is supported.

19.2.2  The Aspect Hypothesis and L1 effect The L1 effect has recently received attention, especially in the area of Japanese L2 acquisition of aspect. Nishi (2008, see also Nishi & Shirai, 2021), in investigating the acquisition of Japanese imperfective aspect marker -teiru by L1 English, Chinese, and Korean learners, has shown that L1 influence is much stronger than previously thought, suggesting that the pattern of acquisition that is consistent with the AH in Japanese may come from the fact that progressive is represented in all three languages. In their oral task, Sugaya and Shirai (2007) found that learners whose L1 has progressive marking find it easier to correctly use the progressive meaning of the imperfective -teiru than the resultative meaning. Rocca (2002), mentioned above, also found L1 effect in that her L1 Italian learners of English overused progressive marking to stative verbs, transferring the general imperfective past (imperfetto) from Italian, while L1 English learners underused imperfetto in Italian. Zeng, Shirai, and Chen (2021) found that such overuse of stative progressives in L2 English was more frequent in learners of L1 Spanish (which has the imperfective past similar to that of Italian) than in Chinese or German learners. (See also the chapter by Arche and Dóminguez, this volume, for the discussion of L1 transfer of tense-aspect marking from broader perspectives, not just the AH). 265

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Extending such findings, it may be possible to argue that results from previous L2 research that supported the AH can also be partially, or largely, attributable to L1 transfer (Shirai, 2009). Most of the L1s have corresponding past or perfective marking, for which the prototype is telic and punctual (Dahl, 1985), which may influence L2 learning of past or perfective marking. This prototypical association may facilitate early acquisition of past tense with telic verbs. Likewise, acquisition of progressive marking with activities may be facilitated because in most languages, progressive marks action in progress that is obtained when imperfective aspect marking is combined with activity verbs, but other meanings (such as habitual, futurate) are not always present (Bybee et al., 1994).

19.3  Conclusions and future directions This chapter reviewed studies on tense and temporality in SLA that have been conducted since the 1990s, focusing on the two major research domains: the past tense debate (or the regular–irregular debate) and the AH. Both have attracted much attention, and we now know much more about the morphological organization involving past tense marking and how verb semantics influences the development of tense and aspect marking. At the same time, there are still many issues that remain to be addressed. With regard to the past tense debate, generally speaking, findings are consistent with the predictions of the dual-mechanism model in its basic contention that regulars are rule-based while irregulars are memory-based and thus more sensitive to frequency. However, since task demands and the ways NSs and NNSs respond to such task demands are somewhat artificial, it is not easy to test the issue of dual- vs. single-mechanism models. The challenge for the future research is to include experimental tasks that are not affected by task demands and directly access our mental representation. With regard to the AH, we have amassed a great deal of empirical observations regarding the association between lexical aspect and tense–aspect markers in L1 and especially L2 acquisition. However, although descriptive data abound, the explanation for the correlation has not been extensively attempted, which should be the focus of future research in this area. For that purpose, future research should systematically investigate the effect of learners’ L1 by comparing multiple L1 groups acquiring the same language to tease out the effect of natural acquisitional processes from the effect of the native language. We should also investigate the effect of frequency (Andersen & Shirai, 1996; Murakami & Ellis, 2022), and the prototype formation (Shirai & Andersen, 1995) in response to the input.

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20 LEXICAL ASPECT M. Rafael Salaberry and Llorenç Comajoan-Colomé

20.1  Lexical aspect 20.1.1  Tense and aspect The linguistic representation of the physical notion of time is primarily conveyed through the notions of tense and aspect (see also chapters by Arche & Domínguez, Bardovi-Harlig, and Shirai, this volume). Tense specifies the location of a particular event with respect to the time of speech (i.e., present, past, and future). In contrast, the definition of aspect describes the “way of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation” (Comrie, 1976, p. 3). Overall, aspect represents a broader and more complex concept than the primarily deictic relationship defined by tense. Most theoretical analyses of aspect consider a componential approach predicated on the type of linguistic devices used to represent aspectual meanings and distinguish between lexical and inflectional means. Lexical means refer to the relevant semantic properties of a verbal predicate (e.g., dynamicity, telicity, durativity) that distinguish various types of aspectual events. These meanings and expressions comprise lexical aspect. In contrast, the aspectual meanings conveyed through the specific perspective or point of view of temporal eventualities (from the perspective of the speaker) are marked by inflectional morphology, and they reflect grammatical or viewpoint aspect. Following this distinction, Smith (1997) proposed a basic two-level system for the definition of aspect: situation type or inherent lexical aspect, which is restricted primarily to internal and external arguments of the verbal predicate, and viewpoint or grammatical aspect, which reflects the broadest level of contextual information needed to define aspect (see chapter by Arche & Domínguez, this volume). The distinction between lexical and viewpoint aspect has been described with a variety of labels that are, by and large, equivalent: e.g., situation aspect versus viewpoint aspect (cf. Smith, 1991/1997) and actionality versus aspect proper (cf. Bertinetto & Delfitto, 2000). In some cases, these distinctions use the same terms with the opposite meaning. For instance, Verkuyl (1993) classified verbal predicates into two subclasses that he labeled terminative and durative according to the compositional function of the verbs and their arguments (i.e., lexical aspect), whereas Bertinetto and Delfitto (2000) reserved the use of the labels terminative and non-terminative to the realm of viewpoint aspect (or grammatical aspect). In the remainder of this chapter, we use the terms lexical aspect and viewpoint aspect. We note, however, that the apparently categorical and well-circumscribed distinctions advanced by Smith (inter alia) contain a theoretical gap that becomes evident once we start using such a discrete componential view of aspect (i.e., situation and viewpoint aspect) with real samples of language data. Smith, for instance, grapples with 270

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the distinction between what she described as “basic situation types” and “derived situation types,” leading her to claim that “situation aspect also involves point of view” (p. 1). Smith’s acknowledgment of the lack of a clear boundary in a componential description of aspect is not an isolated phenomenon, given that other researchers arguing for a categorical distinction between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect (e.g., Depraetere, 1995; de Swart, 1998; Filip, 1999) also mention the “role played by the meaning of contextual factors” to “induce the shift” of lexical aspectual classes (Filip, 1999, p. 72). We expand on the analysis of this theoretical problem in the following sections.

20.1.2  Lexical aspect and viewpoint aspect The classification of verb types according to inherent semantic differences that has become the benchmark classification for studies in L2 acquisition was outlined by Vendler (1957), who divided them into four distinct categories: states, activities, accomplishments, and achievements (see Table 20.1). His classification was, however, not entirely new. The categorization of verb types according to temporality features dates back to the Greeks and Romans. Aristotle proposed a tripartite classification: verbs of energiai (to be, to think, to know), which were further sub-divided into verbs of ékhein and verbs of energein (equivalent to Vendler’s categories of states and activities, respectively), and verbs of kinesis (to sing, to build), which were essentially equivalent to telic events (i.e., Vendler’s classes of accomplishments and achievements). Doiz (1995, p. 49) noted that Vendler’s categories are based on “conclusions reached from what we consider prototypical instances of these verbs/predicates,” although “a situation may be conceived of as part of a non-prototypical setting.” In effect, Vendler pointed out that in some circumstances statives are felicitous with dynamic meanings (e.g., And then, suddenly I knew). To address this variability in the classification of verbal classes, Verkuyl (1972) argued that the range of elements that make up the definition of lexical aspect goes beyond the verbal predicate and associated object and subject to include adjuncts: lexical aspect is inherently compositional dependent on the semantic contribution of several factors such as external arguments (e.g., number/agency/animacy of the subject), internal arguments (cardinality of the object) as well as adverbial and prepositional adjuncts. Vendler's four lexical aspectual categories can be collapsed into a simpler classification system if we highlight the specific role of discrete semantic features such as dynamicity (only states are non-dynamic) and telicity (states and activities are atelic whereas accomplishments and achievements are telic). Chung and Timberlake (1985, p. 256), for instance, specifically highlighted the role played by the semantic notions of dynamicity and boundedness in the description of aspect: “Aspect characterizes the dynamicity or closure of an event with respect to a point or interval in time (the event frame).” More recently, the analysis of the L2 acquisition of aspect has isolated dynamicity as the crucial distinguishing factor of lexical aspect (Domínguez et al., 2013). There are, however, some semantic contrasts that appear to overlap across lexical and viewpoint aspect. For instance, given that telic predicates describe the boundedness of an eventuality and atelic ones describe temporal unboundedness, Bertinetto and Delfitto (2000) noted that the equivalent contrast in grammatical aspect would be defined as the terminative/non-terminative, respectively (see also Depraetere, 1995). Table 20.1  Semantic characteristics of aspectual categories (based on Andersen, 1991).

Punctual Telic Dynamic

State

Activity

Accomplishment

Achievement

– – –

– – +

– + +

+ + +

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In clear contrast with lexical aspect, viewpoint aspect is predicated on a subjective or personal description of temporality; that is, “aspectual categorization … [represents] the manner in which people, as producers and processors of texts, construe scenes, rather than as a reflection of the properties which situations have ‘in the world’” (Michaelis, 2004, p. 5; see Klein, 1994, p. 16 for a similar definition). In other words, beyond the lexical semantic effect of additional layers of given contextual information, it is assumed that aspectual meanings are very much dependent on the speakers’ (and listeners’) perspectives, and as such contingent on discourse and pragmatics.

20.1.3  A methodological challenge: the scope of lexical and grammatical aspect The theoretical distinction between lexical aspect and viewpoint aspect has been upheld by previous research; however, it is not easy to categorically circumscribe the scope of application of each one from a methodological point of view. First, the effect of the overall linguistic context beyond just the classification of verb types or inflectional means to mark aspect introduces an important factor that cannot be ignored. In essence, the question boils down to a decision about how to allocate the broadest levels of contextual information to one or the other component (i.e., lexical or viewpoint). For instance, should adverbial phrases be regarded as integral to the definition of lexical aspect? Or, alternatively, should they be considered as the determining factor that is associated with viewpoint aspect? And what is the impact of such theoretical choices in L2 acquisition? The Spanish sentences in (1)–(5) are contextually framed in different ways by the adverbial phrases specific to each example. The verbal predicate in (1) (i.e., correr en el parque ‘to run in the park’) represents an atelic predicate (i.e., activity) that is reaffirmed in (2) and (3) as such, given the positive compounding effect of the adverbial phrases that serve to expand on the basic meaning of the verb (e.g., Menéndez-Benito, 2002). In contrast, the addition of a different type of adverbial phrase (typically associated with a perfective viewpoint) to sentence (4) changes the inherent lexical aspectual category from an activity to a telic event repeated many times habitually; in other words, it presents the sentence from a perfective viewpoint. Finally, the resolution of conflicting information provided by two different adverbial phrases seems to favor the perfective option in (5). (1)

Lucas corría en el parque. Lucas run-IPFV in the park. ‘Lucas ran / was running / used to run in the park.’

(2)

Lucas siempre corría en el parque. Lucas always run-IPFV in the park. Lucas always ran / used to run / was running in the park.

(3)

Cuando era adolescente, Lucas siempre corría en el parque. When be-IPFV a teenager, Lucas always run-IPFV in the park. When he was a teenager, Lucas always ran / used to run in the park.

(4)

Por muchos años, Lucas corrió en el parque. For many years, Lucas run-PFV in the park. For many years, Lucas ran in the park.

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Lexical aspect (5)

[Desde que era adolescente], Lucas siempre corrió en el parque. Since be-IPFV a teenager, Lucas always run-PFV in the park. Since he was a teenager, Lucas always ran in the park.

The fact that a past imperfective form in Spanish is often linked to the tempo-aspectual context has spurred theoretical debates regarding the tense–aspect distinction. Thus, for some authors, Spanish imperfect is not an aspectual form, but a temporal one (see Funes & Poggio, 2021 for a review). In this sense, the translation of the sentences in (1)–(5) proves difficult without further reference to the context. Thus, it is difficult to ascertain in (1) if the speaker is referring to Lucas running in the park while he was texting a friend (corría, imperfective; was running) or to Lucas always running in the park because he liked the activity (habitual, corría, used to run). The analysis of the example sentences in (1)–(5) indicates that (Spanish) speakers rely on cues from the broader discourse (implicit or explicit) to decide whether prototypical interpretations apply in each case or whether a non-prototypical interpretation is more relevant. On the other hand, it is not clear whether the actional template of the verb (i.e., the lexical aspect) is modified in each instance or if it remains the same. The difficulty to define and circumscribe the scope of application of contextual lexical information beyond the verb phrase is inherently connected with a second challenge: The interactional effects of lexical and grammatical aspect. That is, how can we methodologically separate the aspectual meanings introduced by lexical information from the information provided by inflectional means? This problem was identified early on by Comrie (1976, p. 4), who noticed that “it is quite possible for the same speaker to refer to the same situation once with a perfective form [read], then with an imperfective [was reading], without in any way being self-contradictory,” as shown in example (6): (6)

John read that book yesterday; while he was reading it, the postman came.

What Comrie (1976) highlighted in this example is the fact that the telic event (i.e., ‘to read a book’) mentioned in the first clause is “detelicized” in the second clause with the use of inflectional morphology. In effect, speakers can subjectively modify the aspectual meaning of a sentence using verbal morphology, even when making reference to the same event, as in example (6). The debate regarding the interaction of lexical, viewpoint, and grammatical aspect is complex because it includes discussions regarding which semantic categories are overt or covert in different languages and how they manifest in different morphological systems (Filip, 2012). This analysis is reflected in the divergent scope of application of empirical studies on the acquisition of aspect. In the next section, we describe some of the solutions proposed from different theoretical perspectives and we address the theoretical consequences of the various ways to define and integrate aspect in L2 research, with a special focus on what has been described as lexical aspect.

20.2  Empirical studies of the effect of lexical aspect in L2 acquisition 20.2.1  The effect of lexical aspect on the emergence of L2 morphology The empirical study of the acquisition of aspect reflects, to some extent, the complex definition of aspect described in the previous section. Thus, research on the L2 acquisition of past morphology has focused, on the one hand, on the role of lexical aspect and, on the other hand, on how it interacts with other variables, such as discourse and contextual features (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan-Colomé, 2020; Comajoan, 2005, 2006, 2014; Rastelli, 2020; Salaberry, 2008; Salaberry & Comajoan, 2013). Andersen’s (1991, 2002) Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH) is the most well-known hypothesis in the L2 acquisition of past tempo-aspectual features. The LAH is based on the theoretical distinction of lexical aspectual categories proposed by Vendler and their effect on the developmental acquisition 273

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of L2 past morphology. Andersen’s (1991) core theoretical claim was based on three premises (see also Andersen & Shirai, 1994; Li & Shirai, 2000; Shirai & Andersen, 1995): Congruence Principle: learners select verbal morphology whose aspectual meaning is most congruent with the lexical aspect of the verbal predicate. Prototype Theory: learners acquire grammatical categories starting with the prototype of that category, later extending it to less prototypical cases. Distributional Bias Hypothesis: Prototypical and frequent uses of aspectual morphology in the input have an effect on the processing of aspectual information and the development of knowledge about aspect. The application of the Congruence Principle (the core principle of the LAH) entailed that past (perfective) marking emerges first in telic events (i.e., achievements and accomplishments), eventually extending its use to atelic events (activities) and states. Conversely, the imperfective past was expected to emerge beginning with statives, extending next to activities, and then to telic events (i.e., accomplishments and achievements). To integrate these ideas, Andersen proposed a sequence of eight stages as outlined in Table 20.2. A theoretical challenge of the LAH is that starting at stage 5 in the developmental sequence, lexical aspectual category cannot be the single determinant of the use of verbal morphology to mark aspectual meanings. That is, at that point in the developmental sequence verbs can be marked with the expected prototypical marker (e.g., state with imperfective), but they can also be marked with the non-prototypical form (e.g., state with perfective).

20.2.2  The effect of lexical aspect in the development of L2 morphology The issue of how L2 past morphology develops—as opposed to how it emerges—and its connection to the role played by lexical aspect continues to be the subject of theoretical and empirical debates in second language acquisition. Bardovi-Harlig and Comajoan-Colomé (2020) reviewed 36 studies published between 1999 and 2019 that investigated the LAH and concluded that the LAH accurately predicted the acquisition Table 20.2 Developmental route of acquisition of past tense and aspect morphology in Spanish (adapted from Andersen, 1991, p. 314). Present forms are in roman, preterite forms are in italics, and imperfect forms are in brackets. The dotted line represents the emergence (stage 2) and development of perfective morphology. The solid arrow represents the emergence (stage 3) and development of imperfective morphology. Reproduced with permission from John Benjamins Publishing Company. Stage

Aspectual category

1 2 3 4 5

State tiene tiene [tenía] [tenía] [tenía]

Activity juega juega juega [jugaba] [jugaba]

6

[tenía]

7

[tenía]

8

[tenía] tuvo

[jugaba] jugó [jugaba] jugó [jugaba] jugó

Telic event enseña enseña enseña enseñó enseñó [enseñaba] enseñó [enseñaba] enseñó [enseñaba] enseñó [enseñaba]

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Punctual event se parte se partió se partió se partió se partió se partió se partió [se partía] se partió [se partía]

Lexical aspect

of aspect in several languages and learning environments, despite some challenges. One of these challenges is connected to the claim that in the interlanguage of learners in specific learning environments (e.g., university classroom learners at US universities) lexical aspect may not have such an important effect as predicted by the LAH (e.g., Salaberry, 1999, 2003, 2018; Wiberg, 1996). Instead, it is claimed that the opposition of present and past tenses (irrespective of their use in different aspectual predicates), prompted by an inherent typological mismatch between the L1 and the L2, can account for the development of L2 past morphology. This idea is known as the Default Past Tense Hypothesis (DPTH) (Amenós-Pons et al., 2017; González & Diaubalick, 2019; González & Quintana Hernández, 2018; Martelle, 2011; NotarianniBurk, 2018; Terán, 2020; Tong & Shirai, 2016). Furthermore, research on the DPTH has documented that lexical aspect did influence the use of viewpoint aspectual morphology, but that it achieved its maximum influence at more advanced levels of proficiency in the L2 (as opposed to the beginning stages as argued by the LAH). Several studies have documented the protracted and increasing effect of lexical aspect up to, and including, advanced stages of L2 acquisition (Comajoan, 2005; Kihlstedt & Izquierdo, 2021; Labeau, 2005; McManus, 2013; Salaberry, 2011; Zeng et al., 2021). For instance, Salaberry (2011) showed an increase in the use of prototypical pairings; that is, lexical aspect/narrative grounding in association with grammatical aspect along with increased L2 proficiency in L2 Spanish learners (L1 English). Similarly, Kihlstedt and Izquierdo (2021, p. 15) demonstrated that L1 Spanish speakers with the highest level of proficiency in L2 French showed the strongest use of prototypical choices. Whereas earlier studies on the L2 acquisition of tense–aspect focused on Indo-European (mostly European) languages, later L2 research incorporated the analysis of non-Indo-European languages such as Japanese (Gabriele, 2009; Gabriele & Hughes, 2015; Nishi & Shirai, 2021; Shirai & Kurono, 1998), Korean (Lee & Kim, 2007), and Chinese (Jin & Hendriks, 2003; Tong & Shirai, 2016). Overall, the results from these studies show that lexical aspect does play a role and that the prototypical values of lexical aspect have an increasing effect on the development of aspectual knowledge. Tong and Shirai (2016), for instance, analyzed data on the use of perfective -le and progressive –zai among L1 English speakers learning L2 Mandarin Chinese. Their results showed that learners first use the perfective marker -le across all lexical aspectual classes, eventually making use of the progressive marker –zai as their proficiency in Mandarin increases. That is, it could be the case that L2 learners are progressively more sensitive to lexical aspect as their proficiency increases. In essence, the lexico-aspectual characteristics of verbal predicates represent a major influence on the L2 acquisition of morphology; and they may become central as learners become more proficient. However, more research is needed to have a definite picture of how L2 morphology develops according to different levels, since truly longitudinal studies are still scarce, the definition of proficiency “levels” in different studies is heterogeneous, and the impact of classroom instruction on learners’ interlanguage is not fully explored (Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan-Colomé, 2020, 2022; Comajoan, 2022; Salaberry, 2008; Salaberry et al., 2013).

20.2.3  The lack of effect of lexical aspect In contrast with the LAH reviewed so far, there are also scholars that have downplayed the effect of lexical aspect as a major factor in the acquisition of aspectual knowledge in the L2. In this section, we highlight two distinct hypotheses focusing on semantic and syntactic constraints, respectively, that have explicitly minimized the purported effect of lexical aspect. The Lexical Underspecification Hypothesis (LUH) explicitly claims that lexical aspect “cannot be held as the triggering factor” to learn aspect (Rastelli, 2009, p. 272). More specifically, GiacaloneRamat and Rastelli (2008, p. 242) proposed that beginning L2 learners will not be able to use information about the inherent semantic meanings of verbal predicates because they “are not aware of lexical properties of verbs in the sense of Vendler’s lexical classes.” In turn, these authors explicitly 275

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claim that L2 learners will have to reconstruct the actional meaning of verbal predicates (i.e., lexical aspectual categories) even in the case of frequently used verbs (see also Rastelli, 2009, 2021; Rastelli & Vernice, 2013). In practice, this means that learners (across many L1s) will use frequent basic verbs to stand for other more specific verbs because they do not yet understand the actional template of verbs in general. For instance, the frequent Italian atelic verb andare ‘go’ replaces several other more specific verbs of motion (e.g., the telic verb venire ‘come’). In essence, as learners start to use verbal predicates, these predicates are not fully specified for lexical aspect. The effect of lexical aspect on the acquisition of viewpoint aspectual knowledge is also less relevant when it is described as a strictly syntactic phenomenon. For instance, within the theoretical framework of Minimalism, lexical and grammatical aspect are located in different hierarchical positions within the clause structure. Lexical aspect is represented as a lower functional category AspP (aspectual phrase), closer to the VP (verb phrase) and carrying the semantic features [±telic]. In contrast, grammatical aspect is represented as a functional category (higher or outer AspP) that varies cross-linguistically (Giorgi & Pianesi, 1997; Tenny, 1994; Zagona, 1994). Accordingly, it is argued that Spanish and English differ parametrically in terms of the available features associated with the functional category of the higher AspP. Spanish has the features [+ perfective] and [+ imperfective] associated with preterite and imperfect tense morphology, respectively, whereas English only has the feature [+ perfective], usually associated with the Simple Past verb form. In line with the syntactic approach, several studies have shown that advanced English learners of L2 Spanish achieve native-like levels of knowledge of semantic entailments associated with the aspectual features of the L2 (e.g., Montrul & Slabakova, 2002, 2003; Rothman, 2008; Slabakova & Montrul, 2008). Within this theoretical framework, however, the effect of the broader discursive context is classified as part of pragmatic knowledge, and thus it is regarded as irrelevant to determine the acquisition of aspect. What is important for the purpose of this chapter is that, as we try to delimit the effects of lexical and viewpoint aspect, studies carried out within the theoretical framework of Minimalism also support a categorical distinction between lexical and viewpoint aspect, except that the rationale for such claim is attributed to a contrast between syntax and pragmatics instead of one between syntax and discourse.

20.2.4  Methodological factors in the L2 acquisition of tense-aspect Because the L2 acquisition of lexical aspect lies at the intersection of the lexicon, semantics, morphology, and discourse, there is variation in the research methodologies used across empirical studies. For instance, whereas meaning-oriented studies investigate all the devices used by L2 learners to express temporality (adverbials, chronological order, morphology, etc.), morphological studies focus on one such device, namely verbal morphology (see Bardovi-Harlig, 2000). Thus, researchers aiming to elucidate the emergence and development of interlanguage may be more interested in meaning-oriented approaches. In contrast, those researchers concerned with the acquisition of verbal marking may find approaches focusing exclusively on morphology to be more illuminating. Once a major approach has been chosen, researchers often focus on the qualitative or quantitative study of a specific independent variable that may account for the emergence and development of morphology, one such variable being lexical aspect (Comajoan, 2014; Rastelli, 2020; Salaberry, 2008). As lexical aspect is selected as the independent variable, several factors shape the methodological setup of a given study, among which we highlight the following five (see Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan-Colomé, 2020; Salaberry & Comajoan, 2013; and Rastelli, 2020 for discussion): a) Task design and task effects. The design of data elicitation tasks for the study of the acquisition of L2 morphology has been the most discussed issue in research in lexical aspect because task characteristics affect the production of specific verbal predicates, and consequently the analysis of 276

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b)

c)

d)

e)

data for a specific study (see Bardovi-Harlig, 2013; Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan-Colomé, 2020 for discussion). For instance, spontaneous conversations, elicited conversation, and extended monologic discourse provide different opportunities to elicit data on L2 tense–aspect (BardoviHarlig, 2013). Within- and across- analyses of use of verbal morphology. In analyzing data, it is important to keep in mind that results may vary depending on whether use of morphology is analyzed within a specific lexical aspect category or across a specific type of morphology. In other words, which one of the following two questions is the focus of the study? a) Within a specific lexical aspectual category (e.g., states), what proportion of them are marked by perfective morphology? or b) Across all uses of perfective morphology (e.g., simple past in English; preterite in Spanish), what proportion is used in states, activities, accomplishments, and achievements? Overall, the within-aspectual category analysis is preferred when focusing on the development of morphology and its interaction with lexical aspectual categories, since there is a bias toward some specific lexical aspectual categories, and an across-morphology analysis may distort the proportion of the morphological marking according to (biased) frequency in the input. Coding methodologies. As discussed in Section 20.1 of the chapter, definitions of lexical aspect may vary, and consequently their coding may be a central issue in data coding. Even though most of the studies have used the Vendlerian four-way distinction, some have used three categories (state, activity, event) (Salaberry, 2011) or even a two-way distinction (telic, atelic) (González, 2013). Lexical aspect and the comparative fallacy. As acknowledged by Rastelli (2020), most studies on the LAH assume that the lexical aspectual characteristics of predicates assumed by the researchers are the same as when produced by the learners, but this may not necessarily be so, because learners have not yet learned the aspectual characteristics of predicates. Studies within the concept-oriented approach and their focus on how learners express temporality in general may be a possible solution to the danger of the comparative fallacy in investigating the influence of lexical aspect on the acquisition of L2 morphology. Diversity in the L2 learner population. Earlier L2 studies on the role of lexical aspect studied both tutored (mostly in university settings) and untutored learners, and with time other populations have been added; namely, heritage learners as well as comparisons of L1, L2, and heritage learners (Martin et al., 2020; Mikhaylova, 2019; Montrul, 2018, among others). These studies show that, whereas tense is not affected in heritage learners, the aspectual distinction between perfective and imperfective (in Spanish) is; that is, heritage learners tend to use preterite (perfective) for imperfect (imperfective) forms (Montrul, 2018).

20.3  Reassessing the role of lexical aspect on L2 acquisition More than 30 years of contemporary L2 research have provided evidence that lexical aspect plays an important role on the acquisition of aspectual knowledge, with the caveat that other variables need to be considered as well, most particularly in how they interact with lexical aspect. In fact, the most recent analyses of findings across empirical studies (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan-Colomé, 2020; Salaberry, 2021) converge on the potential role and the distinct nature of prototypical versus non-prototypical selections as the most likely dimension of analysis, helping us to understand the effects of lexical aspect on the development of aspect in the L2. In this regard, understanding the details of the link between prototypical choices (highly correlated to lexical aspectual categories) and non-prototypical choices (with a weak correlation with lexical aspect) may be crucial to identifying the factors that account for the varied selection of aspectual markers throughout the developmental process. We identify this specific area of studies on lexical aspect as one of the most important ones for future research studies. 277

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The apparent (over)reliance on lexical aspectual meanings to mark aspect (across a variety of studies and hypotheses) suggests that speakers can achieve a high level of efficiency in processing lexical information with the use of prototypes (e.g., Li & Shirai, 2000; Salaberry, 2013; Shirai & Andersen, 1995; Wagner, 2009). The rationale for this developmental sequence (i.e., first prototypical and then non-prototypical) is that, as we contemplate the effect of additional layers of lexical information on the core verbal predicate (see examples (1)–(6)), speakers find ways to cope with such complexity by relying on specific prototypical components (e.g., adverbial phrases associated with specific viewpoint markers). Such efficiency would be hard to attain were verbal predicates to be judged in a piecemeal fashion, as speakers incorporate the multiple layers of information that would be required to create a composite picture of the definition of aspect. There are several arguments that substantiate this position. First, previous research has documented that native (and most non-native speakers) overwhelmingly select the intended prototypical morphology because the contextual conditions do not warrant the need to change what is a straightforward extension of lexical aspectual values. For instance, fill-in-the-blank tasks based on narrative texts that are used as baseline data in various studies (e.g., Salaberry, 2001; Montrul & Slabakova, 2003) confirmed that language users (native and non-native) tend to accept prototypical pairings in contexts purposefully created to obtain lexical and grammatical aspect matches (e.g., telic events are marked with perfective markers and atelic events are marked with the imperfective option). These basic tests show a gradual and constant increase in the accurate selection of prototypical pairings among L2 learners following a linear pattern in parallel with increased experience with the L2. Second, we also have indirect empirical evidence that supports the processing cost perspective outlined above, given that the usually decontextualized nature of aspect tests tends to bias the outcome of such analyses toward the prototypical choices. Consider, for instance, the claim that the use of the preterite (perfective form) in Spanish is dependent on the animacy of the subject as shown in (7a) and (7b). (7)

a.

Roberto corrió (Preterite) por la montaña. Roberto run-PFV through the mountain. Roberto ran through the mountain.

(7)

b.

*El río corrió (Preterite) por la montaña. The river run-PFV through the mountain. The river ran through the mountain.

Some empirical tests (e.g., Slabakova & Montrul, 2008) confirm that both Spanish native speakers and advanced L2 Spanish learners (but not intermediate learners) accept the viability of option (7a), but do not consider option (7b) acceptable. However, if we broaden the scope of lexical-contextual information explicitly provided (as in (8)), the interpretation of the given lexical aspectual class changes, and the sentence with the subject “the river” becomes not only acceptable, but, in fact, it is preferred over the one with the imperfective form (Salaberry & Martins, 2014). (8).

En cuanto la presa explotó, el río corrió (Preterite) por la montaña. As soon as the dam explode-PFV, the river run-PFV through the mountain. As soon as the dam exploded, the river ran through the mountain.

The re-classification of the lexical aspectual category is obtained with the addition of lexical information (i.e., the adverbial phrase En cuanto la presa explotó, ‘As soon as the dam exploded’). In 278

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essence, in the absence of the specification of even minimal additional contextual conditions, the reliance on prototypical lexical aspectual classes dominates the selection of aspectual markers among native speakers (as well as experienced L2 users). Third, the effect of the processing costs of non-prototypical choices is also evident in the case of sentences without the addition of any other lexical information. That is, some studies show that decontextualized sentences trigger a selection of a non-prototypical marker in the absence of any explicit linguistic information. In such cases, however, language users incorporate implicit information into their computation of what the aspectual marker should be. Coppieters (1987), for instance, found out that there was a significant divergence in the responses of L2 learners, compared to the choices from native speakers, in the selection of the perfective Passé composé (perfective, PC) and imperfective (IMP) forms in French. Most strikingly, in (9), Coppieters provided very little context for the respondents to make their choices other than the provided date to anchor the eventuality (i.e., the death of Victor Hugo). (9) En 1885, Victor Hugo {mourait / est mort}. In I885, Victor Hugo {die-IPFV / die-PFV}. In I885, Victor Hugo {died / died}.

The main reason for the discrepancy in results between native and non-native speakers is that the non-native speakers relied strictly on the explicit date reference (and thus selected the perfective form), whereas native speakers relied on an implicit narrative approach to recounting historical events, whereby those events are framed as part of the time period when Victor Hugo died (and thus preferred the imperfective form). The fact that native speakers had been culturally “trained” to visualize this event from this narrative perspective is not as relevant as the fact that they relied on implicit information that, effectively, made this sentence less decontextualized than it seems if we just focus on the explicit linguistic information in the prompt. Finally, and most importantly, the effect of prototypical combinations documented in L2 development studies outlined in Section 20.2.3 is corroborated by independent experimental evidence assessing cognitive processing times among native speakers of English (e.g., Madden & Zwaan, 2003; Piñango et al., 2006; Wagner, 2009), Dutch (Audring & Booij, 2016), Mandarin and Cantonese (Chu et al., 2006; Yap et al., 2006; Yap et al., 2009), as well as Japanese (Yano, 2018). In particular, there is a strong correlation of the perfective form with events and, concurrently, the imperfective form with activities and states. That is, perfective sentences are processed more quickly with telic events, whereas imperfective sentences are processed more quickly with atelic events. In essence, the compatibility of meanings associated with each level of aspectual marking (i.e., lexical and viewpoint) leads to faster cognitive processing times, including cases that tested longer pieces of discourse beyond the sentence level (e.g., Becker et al., 2013). In summary, unless the context really forces us to counteract conventional interpretations, there is a tendency to limit processing time and thus a predisposition to rely on prototypical selections. As we continue to add more layers of plausible contextual information to a linguistic description of an eventuality, it is more likely that even native speakers may disagree about the aspectual classification of a given verb occurring in that sentence. It is also apparent that the effect of processing constraints (e.g., faster reaction times to mark congruent markers of lexical and grammatical aspect) does not ultimately alter the distinct nature of each level of aspectual meanings. As argued by Yap et al. (2009, p. 593), “lexical aspect … behaves more like perceptual input in bottom-up processing, whereas grammatical aspect behaves more like symbols in top-down processing.” That is, top-down processing seems to be aligned with discourse-level conceptualizations, whereas bottom-up processing is associated with lexical and morphological classifications. 279

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20.4 Conclusion It is apparent from the analysis of empirical data that L2 learners make use of the inherent lexical meanings of verbal predicates throughout a protracted period, leading up to advanced levels of proficiency in the target language. It is also clear that, from a theoretical point of view, the effect of lexical aspect does not fade away because there is an integration of effects of both lexical aspect and viewpoint aspect. Whether this integration can be regarded as a continuum (e.g., Dessi-Schmid, 2019) or a simple interaction of effects (e.g., Smith, 1997) is yet to be determined. In both cases, however, we are led to conclude that there is no simple transition from lexical aspect to viewpoint aspect, but rather there is an integration of both dimensions in the processing of aspectual information. For instance, the strong reliance on some adverbial phrases as “trigger” phrases that are prototypical markers of perfective or imperfective aspect showcases an example of how such integration of effects is accomplished. The study of prototypical and non-prototypical combinations of verbal morphology and lexical aspect is promising and necessary because it will provide evidence of how prototypicality plays a role into different types of discourse genres and how learners put to use their cognitive and linguistic abilities as they learn a second language. Advances in methodology (e.g., design of elicitation tasks; more refined coding of lexical and discourse categories; eye-tracking studies) and SLA theoretical approaches (e.g., focusing on the interaction of semantics, syntax, morphology, and discourse) have provided us with the foundations for the collaboration among researchers in order to find not just one variable that can account for L2 acquisition, but rather how different factors contribute to the complex picture of L2 adult acquisition.

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GLSA. Michaelis, L. (2004). Type shifting in construction grammar: An integrated approach to aspectual coercion. Cognitive Linguistics, 15(1), 1–67. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/cogl​.2004​.001 Mikhaylova, A. (2019). What we know about the acquisition of Russian aspect as a first, second, and heritage language: State of the art. Heritage Language Journal, 16(2), 183–210. https://doi.org/10.46538/hlj.16.2.4 Montrul, S. (2018). Morphology, syntax, and semantics in Spanish as a heritage language. In K. Potowski (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of Spanish as a heritage language (pp. 145–163). Routledge. Montrul, S., & Slabakova, R. (2002). The L2 acquisition of morphosyntactic and semantic properties of the aspectual tenses Preterite and Imperfect. In A. T. Pérez-Leroux & J. Liceras (Eds.), The acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax: The L1/L2 connection (pp. 115–151). Kluwer. Montrul, S., & Slabakova, R. (2003). Competence similarities between native and near-native speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25(3), 351–398. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0272263103000159 Nishi, Y., & Shirai, Y. (2021). Verb learning and the acquisition of aspect: L1 transfer of verb semantics. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 11, 323–367. https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/lab​.18084​.nis Notarianni-Burk, G. (2018). The acquisition of tense and aspect by instructed adult learners of Italian [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of California, Davis. Piñango, M. M., Winnick, A., Ullah, R., & Zurif, E. (2006). Time-course of semantic composition: The case of aspectual coercion. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 35(3), 233–244. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10936-006-9013-z Rastelli, S. (2009). Lexical aspect too is learned: Data from Italian learner corpora. In A. Saxena & Å. Viberg (Eds.), Multilingualism, proceedings of the 23rd Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, (SCL23) (pp. 272– 283). Uppsala University. Rastelli, S. (2020). The acquisition of aspect in a second language. Cambridge University Press. https://doi​.org​ /10​.1017​/9781108903455 Rastelli, S. (2021). Initial L2 learners may ignore or disregard whether predicates are telic or atelic: Counterevidence to the aspect hypothesis. Lingue e linguaggio, 20(1), 81–110. Rastelli, S., & Vernice, M. (2013). Developing actional competence and the building blocks of telicity in L2 Italian. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 51(1), 55–75. https://doi. org/10.1515/iral-2013-0003 Rothman, J. (2008). Aspect selection in adult L2 Spanish and the Competing Systems Hypothesis: When pedagogical and linguistic rules conflict. Languages in Contrast, 8(1), 74–106. https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/lic​.8​.1​.05rot Salaberry, M. R. (1999). The development of past tense verbal morphology in classroom L2 Spanish. Applied Linguistics, 20, 151–178. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/20.2.151 Salaberry, M. R. (2001). The development of past tense morphology in L2 Spanish. John Benjamins. https://doi​ .org​/10​.1075​/sibil​.22 Salaberry, M. R. (2003). Tense aspect in verbal morphology. Hispania, 86(3), 559–573. https://www​.jstor​.org​/ stable​/20062909 Salaberry, M. R. (2008). Marking past tense in second language acquisition: A theoretical model. Continuum. Salaberry, M. R. (2011). Assessing the effect of lexical aspect and grounding on the acquisition of L2 Spanish past tense morphology among L1 English speaker. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(2), 184–202. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S1366728910000052 Salaberry, M. R. (2013). Contrasting Preterite and imperfect use among advanced L2 learners: Judgments of iterated eventualities in Spanish. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 51(3), 243–270. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/iral​-2013​-0011 Salaberry, M. R. (2018). Advanced conceptualizations of tense and aspect in L2 acquisition. In P. Malovrh & A. Benati (Eds.), The handbook of advanced proficiency in second language acquisition (pp. 361–380). WileyBlackwell. https://doi​.org​/10​.1002​/9781119261650​.ch19

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Lexical aspect Salaberry, M. R. (2021). Expanding the definition of aspect in L2 acquisition: Assessing advanced levels of competence to understand aspectual knowledge. Círculo de lingüística aplicada a la comunicación, 87, 7–16. https://doi​.org​/10​.5209​/clac​.76709 Salaberry, M. R., & Comajoan-Colomé, L. (Eds.). (2013). Research design and methodology in studies on L2 tense and aspect. De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/9781934078167 Salaberry, M. R., & Martins, C. (2014). Crosslinguistic transfer of core aspectual conceptualizations in Portuguese and Spanish. Theoretical and methodological factors. In P. Amaral & A. M. Carvalho (Eds.), PortugueseSpanish interfaces (pp. 335–355). John Benjamins. https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/ihll​.1​.17sal Shirai, Y., & Andersen, R. (1995). The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology: A prototype account. Language, 71(4), 743–762. https://doi.org/10.2307/415743 Shirai, Y., & Kurono, A. (1998). The acquisition of tense-aspect marking in Japanese as a second language. Language Learning, 48, 245–279. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/1467​-9922​.00041 Slabakova, R. (2002). Recent research on the acquisition of aspect: An embarrassment of riches? Second Language Research, 18(2), 172–188. https://doi​.org​/10​.1191​/0267658302sr202ra Slabakova, R., & Montrul, S. (2008). L2 acquisition at the grammar-discourse interface: Aspectual shifts in L2 Spanish. In J. Liceras, H. Zobl, & H. Goodluck (Eds.), Formal features in second language acquisition (pp. 452–483). Lawrence Erlbaum. Smith, C. (1997). The parameter of aspect. Kluwer. Tenny, C. (1994). Aspectual roles and the syntax–semantics interface. Kluwer. Terán, V. (2020). The acquisition of variable past-time expression in L2 Spanish: Combining concept-oriented, form-oriented, and variationist research traditions within functionalism [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Pittsburgh. Tong, X., & Shirai, Y. (2016). L2 acquisition of Mandarin zai and –le. Chinese as a Second Language Research, 5(1), 1–25. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/caslar​-2016​-0001 Vendler, Z. (1957). Verbs and times. The Philosophical Review, 66(2), 143–160. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​ /2182371 Verkuyl, H. (1972). On the compositional nature of the aspects. Reidel. Verkuyl, H. (1993). A theory of aspectuality. The interaction between temporal and atemporal structure. Cambridge University Press. Wagner, L. (2009). I’ll never grow up: Continuity in aspect representations. Linguistics, 47(5), 1051–1074. https://doi.org/10.1515/LING.2009.037 Wiberg, E. (1996). Reference to past events in bilingual Italian-Swedish children of school age. Linguistics, 34, 1087–1114. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1996.34.5.1087 Yano, M. (2018). Predictive processing of aspectual information: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33(6), 718–733. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2017.1416150 Yap, F., Kwan, S., Yiu, M., Chu, P., Wong, S., Matthews, S., & Shirai, Y. (2006). Aspectual asymmetries in the mental representation of events: Significance of lexical aspect. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 28(28), 2410–2415. https://doi:10.3758/MC.37.5.587 Yap, F., Chu, P., Yiu, E., Wong, S., Kwan, S., Matthews, S., Tan, L., Li, P., & Shirai, Y. (2009). Aspectual asymmetries in the mental representation of events: Role of lexical and grammatical aspect. Memory & Cognition, 37(5), 587–595. https://doi​.org​/10​.3758​/MC​.37​.5​.587 Zagona, K. (1994). Compositionality of aspect: Evidence from Spanish aspectual se. In C. Parodi, C. Quicoli, M. Saltarelli, & M. Zubizarreta (Eds.), Aspects of Romance linguistics: Selected papers from the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages XXIV (pp. 475–488). Georgetown University Press. Zeng, X., Chen, X., & Shirai, Y. (2021). Lexical and grammatical aspect in on-line processing of English past tense and progressive aspect by Mandarin speakers. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi​.org​/10​.3389​/ fpsyg​.2021​.661923

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21 VIEWPOINT ASPECT María J. Arche and Laura Domínguez

21.1  Description of viewpoint aspect As Klein (2009) puts it, “viewpoint aspect” (also known as “grammatical” or “outer aspect”) is one of the devices languages possess to express the experience of time that humans have. The label of “viewpoint aspect”, from Smith (1983, 1991), captures the fact that aspect conveys information of “perspectival” nature: taking a time as a reference, aspect indicates if a situation has already ‘happened’, ‘is happening’ or ‘is going to happen’. Restricting ourselves to the past, when the situation is understood as ‘happened’, the aspect receives the name of “perfective”, from Latin perfectus meaning ‘accomplished’, illustrated in (1a); when the aspect presents the state resulting from a preceding situation (also finished), it receives the name of “perfect” (see example (1b)); when aspect presents the situation as ‘ongoing’, it receives the name of “imperfective” (see (1c)). Finally, the aspect that presents the situation as ‘non-started’ is known as “prospective” (Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria, 2000; Klein, 1994), (illustrated in (1d)). (1)  a.  Alex watched the movie. b. Alex has watched the movie. c. Alex was watching the movie. d. Alex was going to watch the movie.

perfective aspect perfect aspect imperfective aspect prospective aspect

In examples (1a), (1c) and (1d) the time referred to in the sentence is in the past with respect to the speech time; in (1b) it overlaps with the present. For its ability to establish a relation with the speech time while referring to an ‘occurred event’, the perfect is debated to be a relative tense (see Bohnemeyer, 2014 and reply by Klein, 2014). Viewpoint aspect also conveys another type of perspectival information, namely, that which has to do with the number of occasions or typicality with which a situation happens. In (2a) the most salient interpretation is that whereby the situation of watching the movie is understood to have happened once, but the verbal form is compatible with a modifier that multiplies the instances yielding the so-called “iterative reading” (2b); in (2c), the situation is understood to have happened an undefined plural number of occasions. Many languages use a dedicated aspect marker (Imperfect) to refer to a plural number of occasions that take place in an open period and are spaced out in time in a way that qualifies as a habit (habitual reading). An example from Spanish is shown in (3). Each of the times of Alex watching the movie is understood as complete and perfective, so it is a matter of perspec284

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-25

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tive whether to zoom in and portray each individual instance or zoom out and see the whole set. The reason why habituals typically bear imperfective morphology is because the interval in which the instances take place is not given as bounded and assertions of ongoingness yield well-formed sentences, as shown in (3). A schema of habituality is given in (3b); each x stands for a viewing of the movie, childhood period is within square brackets and the utterance time is shown to overlap with some instances. (2)  (3) 



a.  Alex watched the movie yesterday. b. Alex watched the movie three times yesterday. c. Alex watched the movie every Christmas (when she was a child). a. Alex veía la película cada navidad cuando era niña, (y, de hecho, every Christmas when was a girl and in fact aún lo hace. still it does.

Alex see-impfve.3ps the movie

‘Alex used to watch the movie every Christmas when she was a child, and, in fact, she still does.’ b. ---------x---x----[ x--x--x—x]—x--x-------x---x--------- childhood Utterance Time

The viewpoint contrast that has been mostly researched, namely ongoing (imperfective) vs. finished (perfective), is not always morphologically or grammatically marked. For example, English simple past tense represents both perfective and imperfective meanings––episodic and habitual for events, as in (2c), and episodic as well as continuous and habitual for states, as in (4). (4)  Alex was ill {for three months/ when I visited her/ every winter}.

Of the 222 languages studied by Dahl and Velupillai (2011), more than half do not show any grammatical marking for the imperfective/perfective distinction. Even when such marking is in place, the forms do not have the same range of readings across languages. Example (5) shows a perfective that allows for an incomplete interpretation in Hindi (as expected from an imperfective) and (6) a Japanese perfective unexpectedly allowing for cancellation of event completion. (5)

a. b.

(6)

a. b.

us ne ciTThii he ERG letter ‘He read a letter’ par puurii nahii but complete NEG ‘…but did not complete it’.

paRhii read-pfve

(Sign, 1998)

kii do

Risa-wa hoshi-o keshita. (Kaku-MacDonald et al., 2020) Lisa-Top star-Acc erased ‘Lisa erased (a/the) star(s).’ Risa-wa hoshi-o keshita keredo mada nokotte-iru. Lisa-Top star-Acc erased but still remains ‘Lisa erased (a/the) star(s) but it still remains.’

Finally, the temporal semantics of the perfective and the perfect varies across and within languages and explanations as for how past-shifting semantics can result from a perfect form are still debated (see Stowell, 2008 for discussion). Example (7) shows how Italian perfect behaves like a perfective would in other languages. With respect to variation within the same language, Fuchs and González 285

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(2022), for example, discuss the different distribution of the perfect/perfective in different dialects of Spanish. (7)

Luigi è andato a scuola a piedi ieri. Luigi has walked to school by foot yesterday ‘Luigi walked to school yesterday.’

In sum, the viewpoint distinctions languages mark grammatically and the correspondences between viewpoint meanings and forms vary across languages and across dialects within a given language. The array of aspectual readings that a given type of form allows for in one language may not necessarily be the same in another (Arche, 2014a).

21.2  Theory and background 21.2.1  Theoretical analyses Viewpoint aspect is considered to be part of the universal semantic inventory by authors such as Slabakova (2016). Others consider that the universal component is “viewpoint” only, which can be associated with different (non-temporal) categories, such as mood (Bittner, 2014) or participant marking (Wiltschko, 2014). Where viewpoint aspect is accepted to exist, it is commonly considered as a semantic category represented in the syntax, whose full interpretation often needs contextual information. Classic taxonomies (e.g., Binnik, 2006; Deo, 2020) distinguish boundedness, phasic and relational theories of aspect. Boundedness approaches take viewpoint aspects as operators that select either the totality or a part of a situation, which makes them similar to the mereological approaches found in the description of the inner aspect realm (Filip, 1999; 92; Krifka, 1989; Verkuyl, 1993). In phasic theories, viewpoint aspect is taken as an operator that maps sets of eventualities (of a certain type) onto sets of eventualities (of possibly another type) (Kamp & Rohrer, 1983; Mourelatos, 1978). Here, aspectual operators impose a certain viewpoint on the eventuality description (events combine with perfective; states with imperfect); when a conflict between the eventuality description and some aspectual operator arises, a null operator is introduced to coerce a change of eventuality so the aspect agrees with the eventuality-type. For example, de Swart (1998, p. 359) argues that a telic event is coerced into a state to enable an iterative reading in (8a) or a habitual reading in (8b). (8)  a.  John played the sonata for about eight hours. b. For months, the train arrived late. Finally, relational theories derive viewpoint aspect semantics from the ordering between the three points that Reichenbach (1947) proposed for tense logic: the Event or Situation time; the Speech or Utterance time; the Reference time or Topic time, which is, according to Klein (1994), the time for which the assertion is made. Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria (2000, 2007) proposed a system whereby aspect shares the same semantic primitives and follows the same syntactic regulations as Zagona (1990) and Stowell (1993, 2007) had proposed for tense. Both are topological orderings of predicates (before, within, after), which take intervals represented in the syntax. The difference lies in the intervals they order: aspect takes the Topic time and orders it with respect to the Event time; tense takes the interval taken as a Reference (Speech time in simple clauses) and orders it with respect to the Topic time. The core of this system has been widely accepted among aspectologists of different orientations, with some variations. Arche (2006, 2014b) combines the ordering predicates with a system of quanti286

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fiers of occasions; Arregui et al. (2014) take the imperfective as a modal quantifier itself and propose different bases (i.e., different restrictions on the domain of quantification) to account for the different array of readings.

21.2.2  Theoretical acquisition analyses of viewpoint aspect In the late 1990s, some researchers analyzed aspect as a feature to a large extent monolithic, which languages could have specified in a binary fashion. For example, Giorgi and Pianesi (1997) argued that English eventive (i.e., dynamic) predicates were intrinsically [+perfective], while Romance ones need not be. This led to conceptualising the acquisition task between, for example, English and Spanish, as one where the aspect parameter had to be re-set and an imperfective feature needed to be acquired, which rendered the status of progressive (which is marked in English with a specific form) as an imperfective form in an awkward position. Together with this binary parametric perspective, Slabakova and Montrul (2002, 2003) adopted accounts of aspect involving coercion operators to account for the combination of telic predicates with imperfective morphology, which is seen as an incompatibility. An illustration of the cases they dealt with is in (9). The delayed acquisition of these cases was argued to be due to the involvement of an additional coercion operator triggering a pragmatic reinterpretation process along the lines of de Swart (1998). (9)

Los González vendían la casa pero nadie la compró. The Gonzalez sold-impfv the house but nobody it-bought-pfve ‘The Gonzalez family were selling their house but nobody bought it.’

Constructionist accounts that assume a more specified syntax for different readings (progressive, habitual, continuous, etc.), such as Arche’s (2014b), have opened a new venue of research that makes finer-grained predictions of L2 difficulty vis-à-vis specific meanings. This approach capitalizes on the way that these interpretations are represented in the morphosyntax of the native and target language, especially when combined with views such as Feature Reassembly (Hwang & Lardiere, 2013; Lardiere, 2000, 2009). This approach is based on the generativist-minimalist view of language involving features assembled into lexical items and capitalizes on a specific conception of transfer and the syntactic/semantic-morphology mapping. It treats verbs as not intrinsically involving any aspectual feature and pivots on the semantics-morphological correspondences to define the learning task. This view has proved illuminating in unrelated pairs of languages (Spanish by English natives, Domínguez et al., 2017; Spanish and Chinese by natives of Chinese and Spanish respectively, Yang, 2021; Yang & Domínguez, 2022; a.o.). This approach is not strictly concerned with whether aspect is a feature which exists in the inventory of features (or not) in a particular language; rather, this approach shows that different distributions of forms and meanings across languages can be the source of persistent difficulties in L2 grammars. Particularly problematic cases are predicted to be those where a given form is ambiguous (e.g., imperfective/perfective) in one or two of the languages. The Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen, 1986; Andersen & Shirai, 1996) has been very influential in the investigation of the second language acquisition of viewpoint aspect. This hypothesis establishes a pathway of acquisition of viewpoint aspect according to the inner/lexical aspect properties of the predicates (see Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan-Colomé, 2020 and the chapter by Salaberry & Comajoan-Colomé in this volume for a comprehensive review). The perfective would be the first form to emerge with achievements and accomplishments, the imperfect would appear afterwards with states and activities, and the progressive would be used with activities first. Although these correlations have been shown as more or less strong tendencies across languages, many authors have ques287

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tioned their meaning (see Salaberry’s, 2008, perfective as default past hypothesis), their explanatory power (Slabakova, 2002) and the underlying factors (a dynamicity/state contrast: Domínguez et al., 2013; durative/terminative: González & Quintana, 2018). The fact that perfectivity has been found to be acquired earlier, in particular with culminating (telic) predicates, may derive from a human cognitive bias towards endpoints over ongoingness (Antinucci & Miller, 1976; Ji & Papafragou, 2020; Klein, 2009).

21.3  Methodological approaches to the study of this phenomenon in SLA Many researchers investigating the acquisition of viewpoint aspect are interested in examining the implicit grammar knowledge of (“I(nternalized)-language”, Chomsky, 2005; Houser et al., 2002). In order to tap into this, researchers mostly rely on quantitative data collected through bespoke comprehension tasks, grammaticality judgments and context-dependant acceptability tasks. Comparisons with a baseline, typically a group of monolingual native speakers, are also routinely carried out in order to uncover specific patterns of acquisition. It is also typical for L2/Ln studies that a measure of proficiency of the non-native language is collected, as well as some background information on the learners (e.g., knowledge of other languages, age, gender, years learning the target grammar, etc) to contextualize the results obtained, which are analyzed statistically using variance, regression models and mixed models. Statistical packages commonly used include SPSS and R. Slabakova and Montrul (2002) and Montrul and Slabakova (2002) were pioneers in using a sentence conjunction judgment task to establish the acquisition of semantic implications of perfective and imperfect forms by making learners rate logical and contradictory continuations on a five-point Likert scale (see (14)): (14)

La clase era     a las 10 pero empezό a las 10:30 The class was-impfve at 10 but started-pfve at 10:30 ‘The class was at 10 but started at 10:30.’

(15)

La clase fue    a las 10 pero empezó a las 10:30 The class was-pfve at 10 but started-pfve at 10:30 ‘The class was at 10 but started at 10:30.’

(logical)

(contradictory)

Truth-value judgment tasks have been used by Montrul and Slabakova (2003) and Slabakova and Montrul (2003) to test contrasts between generic and non-generic readings of the imperfect, or by Gabriele, Martohardiono and McClure (2005) to establish the acquisition of change of state interpretations in English by Japanese learners. Picture-based interpretation tasks where learners rate the compatibility of sentences with stories were used by Gabriele (2009) to investigate the acquisition of the interpretation of the present progressive in L2 English and the imperfective marker te-iru in L2 Japanese. Gabriele and McClure (2011) used the same task to investigate the different ways of encoding imperfectivity in Japanese and English and how they were acquired by Chinese speakers. Written production tasks have also been used to test hypotheses and predictions on the acquisition of viewpoint aspect, although their use is rare. One example is the study by González and Quintana Hernández (2018) which used a written semi-controlled narrative. The participants were asked to reconstruct a silent short video clip using past tenses. Although many studies have focused on experimental tasks only, some authors have argued that integrating various research techniques (e.g., oral/written narratives and experimental tasks) is beneficial (Domínguez, 2019; Domínguez et al., 2013; Salaberry et al., 2013), due to the complex nature 288

Viewpoint aspect Table 21.1  Tasks developed by the SPLLOC project Task Type

Area Investigated

Format

Free Personal Narrative

Emergence and development of past tense forms in naturally occurring contexts Emergence and development of past tense forms in naturally occurring contexts Emergence and development of past tense forms in non-prototypical contexts Semantic interpretations associated with preterit and imperfect (e.g., habitual, progressive and continuous)

Semi-structured interview

Semi-controlled Impersonal Narrative Controlled Impersonal Narrative Sentence-Context Matching Preference Task

Cat Story: picture-based story retell Las Hermanas (The Sisters): picture-based story retell Computer-based interpretation task (five-point Likert scale)

of aspect. One methodological advance on the study of the acquisition of viewpoint aspect is embodied by research conducted by the SPLLOC project (http://www​.splloc​.soton​.ac​.uk), which combines several methods to elicit multiple types of evidence to investigate the acquisition of aspect. The SPLLOC team developed a preference task and three oral tasks with different levels of manipulation to elicit the target aspectual forms in a wider range of contexts and situations, which were administered to 60 English learners of Spanish at three proficiency levels, as shown in Table 21.1 (see details in Domínguez, 2019). Target verbal predicates were included in the Las Hermanas tasks but not in the Cat Story, which allowed for a higher use of preterit and imperfect forms in naturally occurring contexts (see Domínguez et al., 2013, 2017). The tasks and materials developed by SPLLOC are freely available and have been productively used and adapted to test various aspect-related hypotheses in a variety of contexts and language combinations (Eibensteiner, 2019; McManus, 2013; Vallerossa et al., 2021; Wallington, 2022; Yang, 2021). These studies show that this type of small-scale learner corpora1 can be a useful link between frequency-based, descriptive approaches and formal, hypothesis-driven approaches to SLA and for the study of aspect in particular (see also Tracy-Ventura & Myles, 2015). Psycholinguistic methods have also been employed. For instance, Roberts and Liszka (2013) used a self-paced reading task to investigate sensitivity to tense/aspect mismatches between a fronted temporal adverbial and the inflected verb in English (e.g., *Last week, James has gone swimming every day). In Roberts and Liszka (2021), a self-paced reading task was also used to investigate whether past tense and progressive aspect affected learners’ sensitivity to ambiguous sentences with early (e.g., As John hunted the frightened rabbit escaped through the dark trees) and late closure (e.g., As John hunted the frightened rabbit it escaped through the dark trees). Domínguez et al. (2021) have combined data from a self-paced reading task and a sentence-matching acceptability task to investigate English speakers’ use of semantic and pragmatic cues when choosing between imperfect and preterit in Spanish. Event-related potential (ERP) experiments have also been carried out to investigate how speakers process aspect phenomena. Zhang and Zhang (2008) ran an ERP experiment (on native s­ peakers) to investigate agreement violations between the Chinese aspect le and a temporal adverb. Qiu and Zhou (2012) employed an ERP to uncover possible neural correlates between the Chinese perfective marker guo and some temporal referents (e.g., ‘last month’). More recently, Liang, Chondrogianni and Chen (2021) have also carried out an ERP experiment to investigate Chinese learners’ processing of the Chinese experiential perfect marker guo by a group of speakers of 289

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various Indo-European languages, revealing the effect of proficiency. In summary, research on viewpoint aspect is dynamic and cross-disciplinary and has made good use of sophisticated dataelicitation techniques.

21.4  Relevant prior studies with other populations on the acquisition of viewpoint aspect Research has suggested an asymmetry in the acquisition between the combinations of imperfective/perfective and atelic/telic predicates as well as between production and comprehension studies. Overall, the use of the imperfective with atelic predicates in the progressive interpretation seems to emerge first in production, but it is markedly protracted in comprehension, especially with telic predicates. The fact that aspect is often ambiguously encoded (i.e., the same form can be perfective or imperfective continuous or habitual, as shown by the English simple past) is likely to play a substantial role in the delay of the imperfective. Van Hout (2016) surveys first language acquisition studies in ten languages and reports that, even at the age of six, children do not comprehend telic predicates in a target-like manner, specifically the contrast between complete (perfective) and ongoing situations (progressive). Despite the lack of homogeneity across tasks and verbs used, the imperfective lags behind in all languages. However, there is substantial evidence indicating that production is fine (Gagarina et al., 2015; Konstantzou, 2015). Research on the acquisition of the different readings of the imperfective (habitual, continuous, vs. perfective), shows a clearly protracted acquisition of the habitual reading in particular; Dosi et al. (2016) show this for Greek monolinguals and (early) Greek/English bilinguals. In heritage speakers’ grammars (where the first acquired language is the one that later becomes non-dominant), viewpoint aspect has also been found to be problematic. In languages that mark a perfective/imperfective contrast, it is again the perfective that seems best acquired. Studies have reported issues with the imperfective, as well as profound difficulties with states in the perfective (for Spanish see Montrul (2002), Cuza and Miller (2015) and Corbett and Domínguez (2020); for Russian see Polinsky (2008)). Studies on the acquisition of aspect by children with specific language disorder (SLI)/developmental language disorder (DLD) converge on showing that the imperfective development is protracted. Dosi (2019) and Konstantzoua’s (2015), both studies on Greek, show that the imperfective is delayed in this population, with children allowing the perfective for incomplete events, and adding qualifications like half of it while rejecting the imperfective. Regarding the closer-up analysis of the morpheme readings themselves (habitual vs. continuous), not all studies converge, and doubt is cast on the task effect. Delay is reported as well in the DLD population of children acquiring purely aspectual languages (e.g., Chinese). Fletcher et al. (2005) attributes this difficulty to the optionality of the overt aspectual marking in Cantonese. Chen et al. (2021) also attribute difficulties to issues involving phonological short-term memory in Mandarin-speaking DLD children, as has been argued for the production of tense and agreement markers by English-speaking children (Bishop et al., 2006). For the above populations, the fact that aspect is often ambiguously encoded (same form can be continuous or habitual; in English the simple past can be perfective or imperfective habitual with events and perfective or imperfective continuous or habitual with states) is likely to play a substantial role in the delay of the imperfective, among other factors. As we commented above, completion and endpoints (telicity and perfectivity) may offer a cognitive advantage for the individuation of events (Ji & Papafragou, 2020). Furthermore, the particular difficulty children experience with the habitual interpretation may be rooted in its greater semantic complexity. Arche (2006, 2014b) argues that habituals refer to an undefined plurality of instances, each of them perfective. Arche explicitly proposes that habituality involves proportional quantification of instances, which is contextually restricted by definition, involving discursive and world knowledge. The cognitive development 290

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required to factor in world knowledge may be what makes L1-acquiring children (including developmentally delayed children) and heritage speakers different from L2ers, who do not typically show acute issues with habituality.

21.5  Critical review of SLA studies of viewpoint aspect SLA accounts of viewpoint aspect have gone through two stages of development. Theoretically, they have moved on from a view on aspect as a monolithic element (e.g., perfective/imperfective) to finer-grained analyses of the particular readings associated with specific morphemes and the role of the native languages; empirically, they have gone from focusing on production to focusing on comprehension and testing theoretically inspired hypotheses. In her review of early studies of the L2 acquisition of viewpoint aspect (Li & Shirai, 2000;Salaberry, 2000), Slabakova (2002) advocates for theoretically grounded studies. This has fuelled progress in the last two decades in a bidirectional fashion, also providing evidence for the theory of interfaces and how different components of grammar fare with respect to the critical period. Since conclusions solely derived from production data (and spontaneous production data in particular) cannot be used to draw definite conclusions (Prévost & White, 2000; White, 2008), studies based on elicited comprehension have played a key role in elucidating the acquisition of form–meaning mappings. Investigating the influence of the L1 in establishing the morphology–semantics mapping in the target grammar has been the focus of important body of L2 research. Works such as Roberts and Liszka (2013) have argued that grammaticalization of aspect in the L1 plays a facilitating role in the acquisition of aspect in an L2, regardless of the particular form investigated. These authors examined learner sensitivity to aspect violations (perfect/perfective) in English in an online processing task, contrasting results from two groups of learners, one with an L1 that has grammaticalized aspect (French) and another one that does not (German), even though the English contrast cannot be said to hold in French. Later on, Roberts and Liszka (2021) looked at the processing of subject–object ambiguities in English simple past/progressive by learners that differed in their L1 grammaticalization of aspect, arriving at same results. Other authors consider that grammaticalization as such is too coarse to predict what forms and meanings present higher difficulty. In a bidirectional acquisition study of Spanish–Chinese and Chinese–Spanish, Yang (2021) and Yang and Domínguez (2022) have shown an asymmetry in the acquisition of perfective/imperfective in Spanish and Chinese, despite the existing grammaticalizations of the contrast in the L1 of the learners, with the imperfective yielding the lowest accuracy rates. How form and meaning correspondences are represented in both the L1 and the L2 has been shown to shed some light in this regard. Authors such as Montrul and Slabakova (2002, 2003); Slabakova and Montrul (2002, 2003), Gabriele (2009), Gabriele and McClure (2011) and Domínguez et al. (2017) converge in claiming that the different correspondences between forms and readings in the L1 and L2, that is, how the features are assembled in each language (Lardiere, 2009; Slabakova, 2008), together with the semantic complexity of each reading, can explain problems in acquisition. The most challenging situation is presented when several meanings are bundled in a single form in the L1 but in different ones in the L2 (DeKeyser, 2005; Izquierdo & Collins, 2008; Yang, 2021). Many influential works in this regard have focused on the acquisition of different interpretations of the Imperfect form and the different imperfective interpretations, namely, progressive, habitual, continuous and futurate (Gabriele, 2009; Gabriele & McClure, 2011; Domínguez et al., 2017; Montrul & Slabakova, 2002, 2003; Slabakova & Montrul, 2002, 2003; Yang, 2021). Very important as well are those works examining the acquisition of completion entailments (or lack thereof) attributed to the perfective. Example studies include Gabriele (2010) and Kaku-MacDonald et al. (2020), involving native speakers of Japanese, where a perfective can be used to describe a non-culminating situation, learning English, where an event in the perfective (simple past) entails culmination. 291

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21.6  Open questions and future directions Open questions for the future include the precise ages at which form–meaning mappings are acquired in a first language for all aspects and by different populations. Some detailed work exists for some forms and readings, for example, the event cancellation in the perfective by Martin et al. (2020), but there is no comprehensive account that includes precise ages for the perfective/imperfective aspectual forms and readings, nor for the perfect or the prospective aspect across languages. Research is scarce about the role that frequency may play across the acquisition of the different readings as well. Viewpoint aspect has not been investigated, to the best of our knowledge, in many languages at all, including sign languages. Comprehensive accounts capturing the acquisition of viewpoint aspect in atypical and clinical populations are needed as well. Some research exists investigating DLD as surveyed above but none (to the best of our knowledge) for populations with Down, Williams or other syndromes. Given its interface status, viewpoint aspect provides an excellent window to investigate the modularity of grammar and how different components are affected across populations. The existing body of SLA research on viewpoint aspect has focused on the readings of the imperfective in some languages but less is known regarding the perfect and its contrast with the perfective in both languages that have the three forms (imperfective/perfective/perfect) and those where a perfect form occupies the semantic space of the perfective (e.g., Italian). To have an empirically upto-date baseline for SLA studies, dialectal studies are needed, since the array of meanings of aspect forms has been shown to be very susceptible to fluctuations in time (Deo, 2020; Fuchs et al., 2021). Complex aspectual forms such as those including the progressive (e.g., perfective progressives) have not received attention, even though they can be very useful in discerning degrees of acquisition for advanced learners. Likewise, further research on the acquisition of interpretations that intersect with modality values (e.g., futurates, Alex was coming for dinner) is needed across languages (see Slabakova & Montrul, 2003; Arche & Domínguez, 2021) and it would be very interesting to explore the second language acquisition of these readings between pairs of languages where one of them does not mark aspect morphologically. In addition, research is only starting to emerge on the impact aspect has on the interpretation of complex temporal relations across clauses, such as sequence of tense phenomena (i.e., where a past tense receives a present tense interpretation, John said Mary was pregnant, meaning ‘is pregnant’), which are expected to arise with imperfective forms only (Arche, 2006, 2010; Hobbelink et al., 2019; Palumbo, in progress). The investigation of the acquisition of discursively complex temporal relations based on aspectual contrasts enables us to tap into the acquisition of the syntax–semantics of the form going beyond the ongoing/ habitual/finished interpretations that can be obtained from context or lexical cues too. Finally, the exploration of the acquisition between pairs of languages where viewpoint information is represented in temporal vs. non-temporal systems (e.g., Spanish and Blackfoot) and others where it is present in the temporal system but in a different assembly (e.g., Spanish and Dutch) could contribute to examining the transferability of the abstract viewpoint feature. This enterprise may be difficult to carry out, however, due to the feasibility of finding participants with the characteristics of the former cited pair of languages. An important area of research would be to examine the acquisition of tense/aspect in comparison with that of pronouns. The parallelism between tense/aspect and pronouns has classically been established (Kratzer, 1998; Partee, 1973) and was given a fully fledged theorization in Stowell (1993, 2007) and Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria (2000, 2014), where intervals have the same syntactic status as pronouns. This would allow us to provide a holistic account for the properties of the acquisition of reference in both the nominal and verbal domains.

Note 1 See Wulff et al. (2009) for the use of large oral corpora to uncover trends constraining the acquisition of tense and aspect forms in a second language.

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22 FUTURE TENSE AND FUTURE EXPRESSIONS Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig

22.1 Introduction The acquisition of tense and grammatical aspect has received significant attention in second language acquisition (SLA) research. Early focus on a variety of inflectional morphemes that encode the past grew into investigations of second language (L2) temporal semantics that explored not only tense and grammatical aspect, but also the role of lexical aspect (Bardovi-Harlig, 1999; Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan-Colomé, 2020). With recent studies on the acquisition of future expression in second language, we see a further expansion of the investigation of tense-aspect systems. This chapter begins with definitions of the future and discusses the duality of future semantics. It then considers methodological approaches that have been used to investigate the acquisition of L2 future expression. Next, it shows how child acquisition of the future involves cognitive as well as linguistic development. A review of second language acquisition of future expression follows and considers the issues that are raised by different frameworks. The final section suggests avenues for further research.

22.2  The future Tense-aspect systems have been robustly investigated in second language acquisition, but most studies have focused on the past. Both past and future are displaced from the time of speaking: past events (E) take place before the time of speaking (S), or E > S (Reichenbach, 1947), and future events take place after the time of speaking, or S > E. However, to put the future on a timeline captures only part of its character. Since the future is uncertain, the concept of the future is at least partially modal, even in the absence of overt modal expression. Thus, future expression may also include desire, obligation, attempt, and ability (Bybee et al., 1994). The semantics of the future may be described in terms of a prototype involving intention, prediction, and future time reference (Dahl, 1985, p. 108). As Dahl observes, Normally, when we talk about the future, we are either talking about someone’s plans, intentions or obligations, or we are making a prediction or extrapolation from the present state of the world. As a direct consequence, a sentence which refers to the future will almost always

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-26

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differ also modally from a sentence with non-future time reference. This is the reason why the distinction between tense and mood becomes blurred when it comes to the future. (p. 103) Many languages have multiple means for expressing the future as shown in Examples (1)– (3). In addition to an inflectional or will future as in the (a) sentences, many languages have a future derived from a verb of motion, typically come or go as in the (b) sentences (Bybee et al., 1994). The future is also often expressed by the present with an adverb as in the (c) sentences. “Lexical-like or rich meanings” of future (p. 256), referred to as the lexical future, are comprised of semantically future verbs such as want to, hope to, and have to (Bardovi-Harlig, 2005; Kanwit, 2019; Moses, 2002) in (d). English has an additional future form, the progressive in (1e). These categories are illustrated by examples from English, French, and Spanish, languages on which most of the SLA research on the future has been conducted.

(1) English (Bardovi-Harlig, corpus) a. b. c. d. e.

I will go back to my country on December 8. (will-future, Carlos, Month 3) I am going to study business (go-future, Satoru, Month 7.5) [spring break] I: What if you don’t like it?…S: If we don’t like it, we go to…Miami or Walt Disney (futurate: pres+ adverb, Hamad, Month 1.5) I'm planning to go to Florida (lexical future, Khaled, Month 9.5) I'm going to Canada this summer (pres progressive, TS, Month 2.5)

(2)

French (Moses, 2002) a. Demain j ’irai a mes cours (4B:W1) tomorrow-Tadv-Fut I go-Fut-1sg to my-pl classes ‘tomorrow I will go to my classes’ (morphological future) b. A deux heures je vais aller en classe d’economie (2E:W1) at 2 hours I go-Pres-1sg go-Infin in class of economy ‘at two-o’clock I am going to go to economics class’ (periphrastic future) c. Demain j ’ai un cours a neufheures. (3A:W1) tomorrow-TAdv-Fut I have-Pres-1sg a class at nine hours ‘tomorrow I have a class at nine o’clock’ (present-as-future) d. Le semester prochain je veux prendre un cours de français the semester next I want-pres-1s take-Infin a class of French ‘next semester I want to take a French class’ (lexical future)

(3)

Spanish (Kanwit, 2017) a. Viviré en una casa no pero suficientemente grande para los niños. muy grande, Live-1s-Fut in a house not but sufficiently large for the kids very big, ‘I will live (MF) in a house [that is] not very big, but sufficiently big for the kids.’ (34-year-old female, Spain) (morphological future) b. Para el verano todavía no sé muy bien qué voy a hacer. For the summer still   no know-1s-pres very well what go-1s-pres do-Infin

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c. d.

“For the summer I still don’t know very well what I’m going to do (PF).” (31-year-old male, Puerto Rico) (periphrastic future) Pues, esta noche vienen los vecinos. Well, tonight come-3p-pres the neighbors “Well, tonight the neighbors come (PI) over.” (36-year-old female, Spain) (present-as-future) La realidad es que este fin de semana quiero relajarme. The reality is that this weekend want-1s relax-Infin “The reality is that this weekend I want to relax.” (27-year-old female, Puerto Rico) (lexical future)

Multiple terms have been used to describe temporal expression. In this chapter, I will use the term morphological future to cover the (a) examples which have been called “morphological,” “inflectional,” and “synthetic,” with the exception of English will, which I will refer to as the “will future” or will. All (b) examples, which include verbs of motion + infinitive, will be referred to as the periphrastic future, in keeping with recent work in SLA. Although other future expressions may also be periphrastic, in this chapter periphrastic future relates specifically to what Bybee et al. (1994) have called the go-future in typological work. I use present for all the (c) examples of present indicative, which are also called futurates or present-as-future. All (d) examples are called lexical futures. The term adverb(ial) rather than lexical temporal indicator is consistent with the theoretical literature. What these forms mean, whether they are equivalent within their respective languages, how they differ, how to classify them, as well as regional variation and language change, have been discussed in recent literature. Before considering their acquisition, I summarize some of these issues.

22.3  Overview of the theoretical analyses The main theoretical questions surrounding future reference are the nature of future, that is, whether it is temporal or modal, and the existence of multiple means of future expression. In their introduction to the book Future Times, Future Tenses, entitled “Future tense vs. future time,” de Brabanter et al. (2014) summarize decades of research. Although the general consensus is that the future is temporal with modal overtones, there are accounts of future as temporal and accounts of future as modal (Comrie, 1985; Dahl, 2000; Salkie, 2010). While we often think of tense as having modal readings, Binnick (1991, p. 251) observes that modals also have future readings, “all modal auxiliaries have future implication, so that we need not attribute any specific futurative quality to the so-called future auxiliary verbs to account for their future reading.” A helpful way to envision the difference between a purely temporal and temporal-modal perspective is to imagine a time line (de Brabanter et al., 2014, Stojanovic, 2014). A purely temporal interpretation would be represented by a straight line which goes from past on the left, to present, to future on the right (Figure 22.1). The modal interpretation would show a straight line from past to present, and beyond present, a line that branches, indicating different possibilities representing the modal nature of the future (Figure 22.2). As Stojanovic explains, “on some branches, it rains on a certain day in Paris, on others, it does not” (2014, p. 27). French and Spanish—languages that have been investigated as target languages in SLA—have an inflectional future (Dahl & Velupillai, 2013), whereas English does not. English has will whose status is debated in article titles such as “Where there’s a will, there’s a modal” (Klinge, 2005) and “Why will is not a modal” (Kissine, 2008) and Will: Tense or modal or both? (Salkie, 2010). The debate on the status of will is an intensified version of the debate on the status of future cross-linguistically. In addition, the systems of future reference in English, French, and Spanish include the periphrastic forms and the present as future. The present-as-future generally requires “adverbials with future 299

Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig Past

Present

Future

Figure 22.1  Temporal representation of future

Past

Present

Branching Future

Figure 22.2  Modal (branching-future) representation of future

time relevance in their textual vicinity” (Bergs, 2010, p. 218) as in (4). In (5) the advertising of an upcoming television program established sufficient context that an adverbial was not used. (4) Witness – please! “The Water Engine”, which premieres on cable’s TNT channel tonight at 8, followed immediately by two repeated shows. (Frown Corpus, text a; Bergs, 2010, p. 224) (5) A new study shows that only one in 20 women undergoes an annual mammogram as recommended by doctors. We look at that and other health stories with our medical contributor … (WTTW11 Chicago, 22 June 2004, http://www​.wttw​.com​/chicagotonight​/archive​/thisweek062104​.html) (Bergs, 2010, p. 224)

However, as Bergs argues, they “need not be in the same sentence, but could also be in a previous paragraph, for example. Sometimes extralinguistic factors such as register or context are also sufficient.” The concept of textual vicinity turns out to be crucial in calculating the use of adverbials in acquisition.

22.3.1  Approaches to future in second language acquisition research The functionalist perspective has guided and motivated the second language acquisition research on the future. Functionalist approaches view language in terms of form-to-function and function-to-form mappings, and the focus of investigations of the future in second language (L2) acquisition has been on how these mappings change over time in interlanguage. Research on future expression in SLA has adopted the concept-oriented approach which identifies a function, concept, or meaning and investigates how it is expressed (Bardovi-Harlig, 2020). Thus, concept-oriented analyses document the range of linguistic devices that speakers use to express a particular concept, the interplay of ways to express a meaning, and the balance of what is explicitly expressed and what is left to contextual information (Klein, 1995). As Klein observes, from the concept-oriented perspective, a substantial part of language acquisition is the permanent reorganization of the balance among means of expression. The analysis seeks to explain how meanings within a larger concept are expressed at a given time, and how the expression of the concept changes over time. Multiple forms for one meaning—in this case multiple forms to express the future—are not expected to emerge all at once. Instead, in early stages interlanguages are hypothesized to follow the one-to-one principle, one form to one meaning (Andersen, 1984). With time, interlanguage expands beyond the initial stage and moves into a stage characterized by multifunctionality. Multifunctionality allows multiple forms for a single meaning and multiple meanings for a single form. 300

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22.4  Methodological approaches There are two main means of data collection in studies of adults acquiring the future: production tasks and preference tasks. Production tasks form a continuum from free production to highly controlled production. The least controlled are conversations between native speakers (NS) and their near-native speaker partners (Donaldson corpus, 2011, used in Gudmestad et al., 2018), written and spoken learner-generated essays, exams, daily journals, and conversations in a half-million-word corpus collected longitudinally (Bardovi-Harlig, 2004a, 2004b, 2005), and conversational interviews (Howard, 2012). Although none of these data sets were collected for the purpose of studying the future, talk about future plans is common enough to assure substantial numbers of future tokens. Like Howard (2012), Blondeau and Lemée (2020) use two corpora of previously collected conversational interviews. As Wiberg’s (2002) use of conversational interviews shows, even questions that are focused on the future may elicit past and present, as both learners and NS may answer a question about future events with a description of what they typically do before constructing future contexts. Wiberg offers an example of a speaker who, when asked about plans for Christmas, began by explaining what the family usually does at Christmas, then concluded with a statement of what the family will probably do (pp. 295–296). In other words, the more natural the discourse, the more likely the discourse will support a variety of temporal references. Studies that test the effect of temporal distance from the time of speaking to the future event typically impose more structure in terms of temporal framing. Moses’s (2002) influential approach introduced “story squares” which provided temporal frames so that learners of French spoke first about the researcher’s plans and next about their own plans (thus varying person) at different distances from the time of the interview, and then wrote about their plans. Solon and Kanwit (2014) used the same format for learners of Spanish in a spoken task, and Kanwit (2014, 2017, 2019) used only first person prompts in which learners were asked to “describe tus planes para/“describe your plans for” + time period (e.g., este fin de semana/“this weekend”),” thus avoiding potential priming through the use of target tense-aspect forms. The most controlled production tasks investigated formal accuracy and appropriate use in L2 French. Côté (2018) used a sentence-formation task with an explicit conjugation task for regular and irregular future verbs. Ayoun (2014) utilized a 20-item cloze passage with obligatory occasions for future. The cloze passage followed a composition in which participants wrote about something they were anticipating, such as college graduation or plans for the future. Both were scored for appropriate use and accuracy. Preference tasks have been used to study variation in L1/L2 French (Moses, 2002) and Spanish (Gudemestad & Geeslin, 2013). Preference tasks manipulate linguistic variables that may influence the selection of future forms in identical sentences. Gudmestad and Geeslin (2013) created a 30-item preference task for Spanish organized into a single text, followed by an equivalent French version (Edmonds & Gudmestad, 2015; Gudmestad & Edmonds, 2016, available on IRIS.) Although both tasks tested for (un)certainty (ten items each for certainty, uncertainty, and neutral), the uncertain items in Spanish also elicited subjunctive forms and were eliminated.

22.5  Child language acquisition Studies of child language acquisition address the temporal and modal nature of future expression, the multiple forms available for future expression, and whether children are able to understand the concept of the future. The ability to pre-experience novel future events is often referred to as future thinking/thought, episodic foresight, and prospection (Atance, 2015). Studies can be divided into three types: a) cognitive investigations of children’s understanding of the concept of the future without language cues, b) interpretation of the future with a verbal component, and c) production of language encoding the concept of the future. 301

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Studies that explore the concept of the future without language employ nonverbal tasks such as asking children to point to a picture with markers along a road to indicate how close or distant they understand events to be (Friedman, 2000) or choose items that would be useful in completing a task from a different physical location (Russell et al., 2010). Studies that include a language component are varied and often test the past as well as the future. Harner (1980) and Zhang and Hudson (2018) asked children to identify pictures that matched language. Harner (1982) and Busby and Suddendorf (2005) asked children about something they had done yesterday and something they would do tomorrow. Three-to-five-year-olds understood past verb forms better than future ones, but in the picture-identification task the order of understanding was less straightforward. Suddendorf (2010) and Busby and Suddendorf (2005) found that the capacity to correctly report events from yesterday correlates with the capacity to report events that are likely to occur tomorrow. Other studies investigate children’s understanding of the future through their production. For example, Atance and O’Neill (2005) and Svane et al. (2022) asked children to pack a backpack for an upcoming trip choosing from pre-selected items. A puppet then asked the children why they chose those items. The expression of future divided into future alone—children produced will and gonna (e.g., when asked about packing juice, because when I’m thirsty I will drink it, or when asked about raisins because I’m gonna be hungry) and future + uncertainty—children produced might, maybe, if, or in case (e.g., when asked about packing band-aids, in case somebody has an owie). The production studies capture the talk of children playing with other children. Gee and Savasir reported that in the talk of two children (3;3 to 3;5 and 3;2 to 3;4) playing together, will seemed to be used for actions that were carried out immediately, whereas gonna referred to a longer time span. The authors hypothesized that gonna suggests planning, and planning can occur at a distance. In contrast, will has immediacy, volition, and willingness to undertake the action; gonna imposes order on events but no restriction on immediacy. Additional production studies draw on corpora including CHILDES for English (O’Neill & Atance, 2000) and the Paris corpus (CHILDES) for French (Parisse & Morgenstern, 2011) for future tense, and the Early Child Mandarin Corpus for Chinese for future adverbs (Liang et al., 2019). The corpus studies include children who are at least a year younger (1;06 to 3;01 in the Paris corpus, and 2;0 to 4;11 in CHILDES) than the 3–5-year-olds tested by the interpretation studies. In the Paris Corpus, one child used one future verb and one past at 1;06; at the same age, the other child produced two past verbs and four futures. Parisse and Morgenstern (2012) reported that French periphrastic future emerged first (1;06–2;00 years) with morphological future following (2;01–3;01 years). Schlyter’s (1990) study of German–French bilingual children suggests that children use lexical futures before morphological futures. Schlyter reported that modal + infinitive used for future reference appeared in Stage 3 (2;6), and va + infinitive (the periphrastic future) appeared at Stage 4 (2;11). Escandell-Vidal (2018) (citing Sánchez Canales, 2018) reported a strikingly different pattern: When interviewed, 20 Spanish-speaking 4–10-year-olds in a bilingual Spanish–English educational environment used only the periphrastic future and present-as-future in both Spanish and English to discuss their upcoming vacations. No uses of morphological future were observed. The differences in age, task, language, and future expression warrant comparisons of children learning different L1s at different ages on the same range of tasks.

22.6  SLA studies of future and future expression In research on the L2 acquisition of future expression, investigations of multifunctionality prevail, with modality surfacing subtly in lexical futures and tests of certainty. This section first considers the emergence of future with respect to the greater tense-aspect system, then the emergence of future 302

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forms with respect to each other. Lastly, it reviews variationist studies of the future, and then discusses studies that investigate whether learners are sensitive to local norms and L1 regional variation in study abroad, immersion settings, or in at-home instruction.

22.6.1  Longitudinal studies Beginning with the order of the emergence of future with respect to other tense-aspect morphemes in Italian, Giacalone Ramat (1992, p. 305) places the acquisition of the morphological future well into the development of tense-aspect morphology as shown in (6). (6) Present > (aux +) Past Participle > Imperfect > Future > Conditional > Subjunctive

Studying the order of emergence of the future quickly becomes a study of competing forms, an observation of increasingly multifunctional future expression, as shown by the analysis of Lavinia’s interlanguage, an Italian learner of English (Dietrich, Klein, & Noyau, 1995). Klein (1995) reported that at about 8 months, Lavinia showed an isolated use of shall, and that by 16 months future was often marked by will or shall. The first occurrence of the prospective going-to occurred at month 17, and by the 18th month “there are many forms of the prospective, still in the present (is-going-to)” (1995:46). Similarly, the learners in Salsbury’s (2000) study also showed earlier use of will than going to with a lag time of two to five months for learners who used going to. In a longitudinal study of beginning level learners in an intensive English program in North America, Bardovi-Harlig (2004a, 2004b, 2005) found that 14 of 16 learners clearly showed emergence of will before the go-future. Will emerged by 2.5 months, with 10 learners showing emergent use between 1.0 and 1.5 months. In contrast, going to emerges as early as 1.5 months for two learners and as late as 16.5 months for one learner. Thus, will emerges early in tense-aspect development, but going to emerges later as tense-aspect morphology is more established. The same learners used more tokens of will than going to aggregated across time. Will occurs at a rate of 60% for oral and 53% for written production, going to at 4% and 9%, respectively. Lexical futures are used in 16% and 22% of written and oral future references. Progressive, the fifth future form in English, is used in only 1% of oral references to future and 2% of written futures. Schlyter (1990) reported that in the adult L1 Swedish learners of French she studied, the lexical future and the periphrastic future emerged at the same time. Inflected forms of the future come later, but none were produced during the observation period. Moses (2002) conducted a cross-sectional longitudinal study of English-speaking adult learners of French as a foreign language, following four levels of learners and testing them at the beginning, middle, and end of the academic year. First-year learners began with the base form plus adverb, which dropped dramatically when the periphrastic future appeared, which in turn dropped dramatically when the morphological future appeared. The number of lexical futures increased with each level. The morphological future was the dominant form after the middle of the second year, and it remained dominant through the end of the year for the fourth-year students, maintaining, approximately, a two-to-one lead over the periphrastic future.

22.6.2  Cross-sectional studies Like the longitudinal study by Moses (2002), the cross-sectional studies by Howard (2012) and Ayoun (2014) found morphological future to be dominant in the L2 of university classroom learners. In sociolinguistic interviews with 18 Irish learners of French from three groups, learners with 2 years of university French, two years plus study abroad, and 3 years of university study, Howard (2012) found that all learners used the present (decreasing its use with increased proficiency); all learners used the morphological future (increasing with proficiency). However, only the second303

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year study abroad learners used the periphrastic future (31% of future contexts); and the third-year group used it in only 8% of future contexts. The composition data from the cross-sectional study by Ayoun (2014) confirms the dominance of the morphological future at the expense of the periphrastic future. Intermediate-mid learners used periphrastic future at 13%, intermediate-high at 9%, and not at all at the advanced level (where the NS also produced no periphrastic future). In contrast, the morphological future grew from 34% by intermediate-mid to 41% by the advanced learners (66% by the NS) and present was steady at 28–29% (21% by NS). The lack of periphrastic future by NS suggests that writing may negatively affect its use when considered in light of spoken data (cf. Edmonds et al., 2017). A similar analysis applied to the informal conversation of near-native speakers (Donaldson, 2011) showed that learners of French who achieve high levels of competence also showed nativelike distribution of future forms for the area in which they lived. Edmonds et al. (2017) found that native and near-native speakers engaged in the same conversations showed the same ranking of the four major means of future expression: periphrastic future, present, morphological future, and lexical future. In the absence of longitudinal studies for Spanish, cross-sectional studies suggest that—as for French and English—the present is used early in future contexts. Kanwit’s (2014, 2017) cross-sectional study of learners of Spanish suggests that present was used first, with low uses of periphrastic future in both the third and fourth semester (9% and 7%, respectively). In the third semester only one learner produced the morphological future; the morphological future appeared at 22% in the fourth semester (66 tokens produced by 17/25 learners). Periphrastic future increased in the fifth semester to 21%, and morphological future declined to 15%. The use of periphrastic future increased further to 32% and 34% by fourth-year and graduate students, whereas NS used periphrastic future in 29% of the future contexts on the same oral task. Morphological future continued to be lower for learners in the fifth semester through graduate students (13%) than native-speaker rates (23%). Kanwit also tracked individual use of morphological and periphrastic future. All of the third-semester students used only one form, 84% in the fourth and fifth semesters, and 67% in fourth year. Thus, on the individual level, learners did not have fully multifunctional grammars, although the group scores obscure this. Such specialization is not found in English where all learners use will robustly and many use going to, although at different rates. Solon and Kanwit (2014) captured an earlier stage for first-semester learners in which no morphological future and no lexical futures were used. In the written task, future meaning was expressed by the periphrastic future in 20% of the future contexts and the present in 61% of the future contexts, and in the oral task, 6% and 77%, respectively. The third-year students used periphrastic future in 28% of the future contexts in the written task, 19% morphological future, 23% lexical future, and 22% present; the scores in the oral task for the same learners were much lower for morphological future 9% and lexical futures 13%, but much higher for periphrastic future 43% and present 25%. Thus, it appears that interlanguage becomes increasingly multifunctional, integrating multiple forms for future reference, although not all at once. From a functionalist perspective, the means of expression do not carry equal functional loads. Whereas will and the morphological and periphrastic futures can signal future by their very occurrence, the present is much less likely to do so. The use of adverbs is a good measure of potential functional load and the adverb-to-verb ratio is one way to quantify it. Bardovi-Harlig (2004b) reports that lexical futures show the lowest ratio with just under three adverbs per ten lexical futures in oral and written samples; going to shows the lowest use of adverbs of the grammaticalized futures, with three adverbs for every ten uses of going to; will shows nearly five adverbs for every ten uses; and base/present and present progressive, forms that are rarely used by learners and have other primary meanings, show the greatest use of future adverbials, at seven adverbs for every ten uses. Similarly, Edmonds et al. report that, overall, 25% of verbs in the native-speaker corpus appear with a temporal adverbial, but 41% of the futurate present do; the nearnative speaker corpus shows 22% overall, and 32% with futurate present. Kanwit (2019) reports that 304

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at all levels (third semester through graduate students, and for NS) the adverb-to-verb ratio is greater for present than lexical futures.

22.6.3  Variationist studies Variationist research asks whether the nativelike distribution of future forms in interlanguage can be attributed to the same predictors that influence the use of the forms by NS. The studies utilize both production data and preference tasks. Kanwit (2017) investigated the predictors of future forms in production, examining the factors of temporal distance (divided into five intervals), temporal adverbials, person and number, lexical type, and temporal morphology of the preceding verb. Adverbials were coded dichotomously: present if they occurred in the same sentence as the future expression and absent otherwise. Lexical type included non-motion dynamic, motion, stative (other than tener “have”), psychological, and perceptual verbs. Multinomial multiple regressions showed that the temporal morphology of the preceding verb and lexical verb type were significant for all groups. Person/number and temporal distance were selected in the regression for NS and advanced learners (fifth semester through graduate). Only the graduate students were influenced by temporal adverbials. Overall, learners became more sensitive to factors that influence NS use of future forms. Gudmestad et al. (2020) also examined the predictors for morphological, periphrastic, present futures in the production data of near-native speakers and NS of French (Edmonds et al., 2017). Gudmestad et al. coded for temporal distance, temporal adverbials, sentence polarity (negative and positive sentences), (un)certainty, and topic seriousness. A multinominal regression suggested that, although the near-native speakers had a usage profile that very closely resembled that of NS in terms of frequency, their uses of the future forms may have been influenced by different factors. The nearnative speaker usage was influenced by adverbial presence and topic seriousness, but not temporal distance or polarity. Near-natives were more likely to use the present than morphological future with time-specific adverbials. Serious topics significantly predicted the use of morphological future. In contrast, all four linguistic factors together determined the use of the three forms of the future for native speakers. NS were less likely to use periphrastic than morphological future for events less than week away. They also showed lower odds of using periphrastic future than morphological future if nonspecific time adverbials were present, or with negative polarity, and showed no effect for seriousness. Present was more likely than morphological future with a specific time adverbial and less likely than morphological future if the topic was serious. Temporal distance and polarity influenced NS but not near-native speakers. In contrast to open production tasks, preference tasks for Spanish (Gudmestad & Geeslin, 2013; Kanwit & Solon, 2013) and French (Edmonds & Gudmestad, 2015; Gudmestad & Edmonds, 2016) offered a context followed by selection of one of morphological, periphrastic, and present futures distributed to test the factors temporal distance, presence of adverbs, and certainty. For both Spanish (Gudmestad & Geeslin, 2013) and French (Edmonds & Gudmestad, 2015), present-as-future tends to be selected the least frequently by learners and NS. In Spanish, periphrastic future was selected most frequently by fourth-semester students through NS. Learners of French in France showed equal selection of periphrastic and morphological future (high 30s% for both), with mid-20% for present, similar to the NS who selected periphrastic future at a rate of 44%, morphological at 38%, and present at 17.9%. Similar factors guided the selection of periphrastic and morphological future for French learners and NS, but different factors guided the selection of present. Learners became less likely to select the present as proficiency increased. For the learners of Spanish, each of the factors played a role in determining selection, but the influence developed gradually. Using an acceptability judgment task modelled on preference tasks with the addition of fourpoint Likert scales, Prada Perez et al. (2021) compared L2 learners and heritage-language learners who were enrolled in Spanish language classes. Both rated periphrastic future and morphological 305

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future equally highly (3–3.5) and present lower (2–2.5). The effect of proficiency was greater on the L2 learners than the heritage-language learners who seemed to have an advantage. No monolingual Spanish-speaking group was tested. The results from preference tasks show more robust selection of morphological and periphrastic future and lower selection of present compared to the production studies, particularly by lower-level learners. For example, comparing the same learners (Kanwit, 2017 for production data; 2014 for selection data), third- and fourth-semester learners who produced periphrastic futures in only 8.8% of future contexts, selected it almost four times more frequently in the preference task. Even NS were affected by task, producing 29% periphrastic future, but selecting periphrastic future in 57% of the forced choices. In the production task, for NS, the periphrastic future, morphological future, and present-as-future account for only 65% of the NS production, whereas the preference tasks only give these three options. Studies have also examined exposure to native speakers and region of contact. The studies included high school learners who went abroad to Mérida, Mexico and Valencia, Spain, sites with different preferences for future expression (Kanwit & Solon, 2013) and learners at two sites in the Laurentian French region: Montreal, Quebec, and Thunder Bay, Ontario (Blondeau & Lemée, 2020). The learners in Spain and Mexico, as well as the Anglo-Montrealers who were learning and using French in a French-majority city, reflected the preferences of their region of contact and factors influencing selection and use. In contrast, the Anglo-Ontarians’ classroom learning of French was not enriched by contact with French speakers. Learners in Mérida preferred periphrastic future just as the NS did; learners in Spain chose periphrastic future less than learners in Mexico, but more than NS in Valencia. Learners at both Laurentian sites used the periphrastic future the most and the morphological future at 10% or less. However, the Anglo-Montrealers use proportionately more periphrastic future (82%) and less of the present-for-future (8%). In contrast, the Ontarian learners used present in 42% of their future contexts, in keeping with more robust use of present in that region. In a study of learners of French at home and abroad, Gudmestad and Edmonds (2016) found that, like the NS, study-in-France high-level learners and at-home low groups selected the periphrastic future most often, followed by the morphological future, with the present last. The at-home high and in-France low group selected the morphological future the most often. All participant groups preferred morphological future over periphrastic future for distant events. The factors that promote use are not entirely clear, especially when the lower-level learners patterned like NS, but the higher-level learners did not. Taken together, the studies by Howard (2012), Gudmestad and Edmonds (2016), and Blondeau and Lemée (2018) on French and Kanwit and Solon (2013) on Spanish suggest that learners are sensitive to the distribution of future forms by speakers in the local community and that learners situated in a community have an advantage over instructed learners without such contact. Future studies would do well to also include information about instructional input (textbooks and materials) in the instructed contexts (Bardovi-Harlig, 2004a; Orozco & Thoms, 2014).

22.6.4  Summary and unresolved issues L2 expression of the future begins with present/base supported by adverbials and gradually adds specialized future forms. For English, this happens rapidly with will. Lexical futures emerge shortly after and are dependent on vocabulary growth. Going to, the periphrastic future, emerges last, with some learners showing use of only will and lexical future. The picture for L2 Spanish and French starts the same way, with base/present plus adverb, but given the additional variables of classroom instruction, contact learning, and cross-sectional rather than longitudinal studies, it is less clear whether periphrastic or morphological future emerges first. What is clear is that interlanguage gradually adds future 306

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forms that it encounters, and that, as the inventory builds, the balance of the future forms shifts toward the target use of the community or the classroom for learners who are exclusively instructed learners. Within the morphological stage, learners move from one specialized means of expressing future in a one-to-one stage to increased multifunctionality. Comparing acquisition across the languages discussed here, we see that no single form dominates L2 French and Spanish the way that will dominates L2 English. We could address the dominance of will by asking why the periphrastic future is delayed, why will is so early and tenacious, or why the periphrastic future seems to be so much easier for English learners of L2 Spanish and French. Although the use of periphrastic future in L2 French and Spanish may make learners of English look slow by comparison, it may be possible that Englishspeaking learners of Spanish and French come to their use of periphrastic future through their L1, where going to is very frequent. An issue that is raised by the combination of studies is the status of present-as-future. In the earliest stages, present + adverb is likely the base form plus an adverb, not the targetlike use of present + adverb seen in native speaker production or selection. It is rather the absence of a morphological or periphrastic future. At some point, the present + adverb changes from a stand-in for a dedicated future form and becomes a future form itself, but it is not clear at what point that happens. The role of adverbs has been addressed in different ways but has not been resolved. Adverbs are one type of temporal framing device. Adverbs always appear in isolated examples of present-asfuture because without an adverb it is not likely to be interpreted as a future. However, in an actual text, it is not clear how close an adverb has to be to a present verb or any future form (Bergs, 2010). In elicited production (e.g., story squares or preference tasks), there is an explicit statement of temporal orientation such that any use of an adverbial in the same sentence as the verb in question would technically be a second adverbial. The question then becomes one of scope and framing. How far does the “reach” of an adverbial extend? In narrative analysis, a time frame holds until a new time frame is explicitly set. One way to address this issue is to calculate an adverb-to-verb ratio for one episode or an entire text. However, that does not solve the problem of determining what adverbs can be counted as supporting adverbs for any one future form. Instead, a discourse analysis of future texts such as Wiberg’s (2002) analysis of dyadic talk is warranted. Discourse analysis would offer a way to understand how temporal framing is established and supported within a text and across turns.

22.7  “Future” research Final sections often call for greater coverage of target languages and greater representation of a first languages as well as longitudinal studies. In the case of the future, with only four target languages thus far examined, it seems especially warranted to investigate the acquisition of future in a range of target languages with learners from a variety of L1s. Given the nature of multifunctionality, closely sampled longitudinal data collection would strengthen claims. Picking up on the potential influence of L1 English going to future on the acquisition of periphrastic future in French and Spanish, the same type of systematic comparisons across L1 and L2 pairings that are found in research on the acquisition of the past (Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan, 2020) would be informative here. For example, a study might compare learners from languages with and without inflectional futures (such as German or Finnish) learning either English or Romance languages. Two areas were outlined earlier. One would be to focus (longitudinally) on the trajectory of the present from a pre-morphological-stage form of base/present + adverb to a morphological stage alternative as a futurate. The other would be to focus on the role of adverbials, their scope, and how to quantify them, employing a temporal analysis within a discourse analysis. Finally, in light of the description of the future as intention, prediction, and future time, it would be informative to ask learners to make predictions. Kanwit (2017, 2019) asked learners to “describe their plans for” a specific time period. That prompt represents intention and future time, and it cor307

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responds to the findings of Dahl’s cross-linguistic survey that the most typical uses of future involve actions that are planned by the speaker of the sentence. The next step would be to compare predictions by learners and NS to determine whether predictions show a different distribution of future forms.

References Andersen, R. W. (1984). The one to one principle of interlanguage construction. Language Learning, 34(4), 77–95. Atance, C. M. (2015). Young children’s thinking about the future. Child Development Perspectives, 9(3), 178–182. Atance, C. M., & O’Neill, D. K. (2005). Preschoolers’ talk about future situations. First Language, 25(1), 5–18. Ayoun, D. (2014). The acquisition of future temporality by L2 French learners. Journal of French Language Studies, 24(2), 181–202. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1999). From morpheme studies to temporal semantics: Tense-aspect research in SLA. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21(3), 341–382. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2004a). Monopolizing the future OR how the go-future breaks into will’s territory and what it tells us about SLA. EuroSLA Yearbook, 4, 177–201. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2004b). The emergence of grammaticalized future expression in longitudinal production data. In M. Overstreet, S. Rott, B. VanPatten, & J. Williams (Eds.), Form and meaning in second language acquisition (pp. 115–137). Erlbaum. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2005). The future of desire: Lexical futures and modality in L2 English future expression. In L. Dekydtspotter, R. A. Sprouse, & A. Liljestrand (Eds.), Proceedings of the 7th generative approaches to second language acquisition conference (GASLA 2004) (pp. 1–12). Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2020). One functional approach to L2 acquisition: The concept-oriented approach. In B. VanPatten, G. Keating, & S. Wulff (Eds.), Theories in second language acquisition (3rd ed., pp. 40–62). Routledge. Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Comajoan-Colomé, L. (2020). The aspect hypothesis and the acquisition of L2 past morphology in the last 20 years: A state-of-the-scholarship review. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 42, 1137–1167. Bergs, A. (2010). Expressions of futurity in contemporary English: A construction grammar perspective. English Language & Linguistics, 14(2), 217–238. Binnick, R. I. (1991). Time and the verb: A guide to tense and aspect. Oxford University Press. Blondeau, H., & Lemée, I. (2020). Future temporal reference in L2 French spoken in the Laurentian region: Contrasting naturalistic and instructed context. Canadian Modern Language Review, 76(1), 70–90. Busby, J., & Suddendorf, T. (2005). Recalling yesterday and predicting tomorrow. Cognitive Development, 20(3), 362–372. Bybee, J. L., Perkins, R., & Pagliuca, W. (1994). The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. University of Chicago Press. Comrie, B. (1985). Tense. Cambridge University Press. Côté, S. (2018). L’effet de la (ir) régularité verbale sur le choix de variante du futur en français L2. Canadian Modern Language Review, 74(4), 523–547. Dahl, Ö. (1985). Tense and aspect systems. Basil Blackwell. Dahl, Ö. (2000). Tense and aspect in the languages of Europe. Mouton de Gruyter. Dahl, Ö., & Velupillai, V. (2013). The future tense. In M. S. Dryer & M. Haspelmath (Eds.), The world atlas of language structures online. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved January 4, 2022, from http://wals​.info​/chapter​/67 de Brabanter, P., Kissine, M., & Sharifzadeh, S. (2014). Future tense vs. future time: An introduction. In P. de Brabanter, M. Kissine, & S. Sharifzadeh (Eds.), Future times, future tenses (pp. 1–25). Oxford University Press. Dietrich, R., Klein, W., & Noyau, C. (1995). The acquisition of temporality in a second language. John Benjamins. Donaldson, B. (2011). Left dislocation in near-native French. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33(3), 399–432. Edmonds, A., & Gudmestad, A. (2015). What the present can tell us about the future: A variationist analysis of future-time expression in native and nonnative French. Language, Interaction and Acquisition, 6(1), 15–41. Edmonds, A., Gudmestad, A., & Donaldson, B. (2017). A concept-oriented analysis of future-time reference in native and near-native Hexagonal French. Journal of French Language Studies, 27(3), 381–404.

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Future tense and future expressions Escandell-Vidal, M. V. (2018). El futuro simple del español. Sistema natural frente a usos cultivados. Verba Hispanica, 26(1), 15–31. Friedman, W. J. (2000). The development of children’s knowledge of the times of future events. Child Development, 71(4), 913–932. Gee, J., & Savasir, I. (1985). On the use of will and gonna: Toward a description of activity‐types for child language. Discourse Processes, 8(2), 143–175. Giacalone Ramat, A. (1992). Grammaticalization processes in the area of temporal and modal relations. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 14(3), 297–322. Gudmestad, A., & Edmonds, A. (2016). Variable future-time reference in French: A comparison of learners in a study-abroad and a foreign-language context. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 61(1), 259–285. Gudmestad, A., Edmonds, A., Donaldson, B., & Carmichael, K. (2020). Near-native sociolinguistic competence in French: Evidence from variable future-time expression. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique appliquée, 23(1), 169–191. Gudmestad, A., & Geeslin, K. L. (2013). Second-language development of variable forms of future-time expression in Spanish. In S. Beaudrie & A. M. Carvalho (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 6th workshop on Spanish sociolinguistics (pp. 63–75). Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Harner, L. (1980). Comprehension of past and future reference revisited. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 29, 170–182. Harner, L. (1982). Immediacy and certainty: Factors in understanding future reference. Journal of Child Language, 9(1), 115–124. Howard, M. (2012). From tense and aspect to modality—The acquisition of future, conditional and subjunctive morphology in L2 French: A preliminary study. In E. Labeau (Ed.), Development of tense, aspect and mood in L1 and L2 (pp. 203–226). Rodopi/Cahiers Chronos. Kanwit, M. (2014). The acquisition of future expression in L2 Spanish (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Indiana University, Bloomington. Kanwit, M. (2017). What we gain by combining variationist and concept-oriented approaches: The case of acquiring Spanish future-time expression. Language Learning, 67(2), 461–498. Kanwit, M. (2019). Beyond the present indicative: Lexical futures as indicators of development in L2 Spanish. The Modern Language Journal, 103(2), 481–501. Kanwit, M., & Solon, M. (2013). Acquiring variation in future time expression abroad in Valencia, Spain and Mérida. In J. E. Aaron, J. Cabrelli Amaro, G. Lord, & A. de Prada Pérez (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 16th Hispanic linguistics symposium (pp. 206–221). Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Kissine, M. (2008). Why will is not a modal. Natural Language Semantics, 16(2), 129–155. Klein, W. (1995). The acquisition of English. In R. Dietrich, W. Klein, & C. Noyau (Eds.), The acquisition of temporality in a second language (pp. 31–70). John Benjamins. Klinge, A. (2005). Where there is a will, there is a modal. In A. Klinge & H. Hoeg Müller (Eds.), Modality: Studies in form and function (pp. 169–186). Equinox. Liang, L. Y., Dandan, W. U., & Hui, L. I. (2019). Chinese preschoolers’ acquisition of temporal adverbs indicating past, present, and future: A corpus-based study. Journal of Child Language, 46(4), 760–784. Moses, J. G. (2002). The expression of futurity by English-speaking learners of French (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Indiana University, Bloomington. O’Neill, D. K., & Atance, C. M. (2000). ‘Maybe my daddy give me a big piano’: The development of children’s use of modals to express uncertainty. First Language, 20(58), 29–52. Orozco, R., & Thoms, J. J. (2014). The future tense in Spanish L2 textbooks. Spanish in Context, 11(1), 27–49. Parisse, C., & Morgenstern, A. (2012). The unfolding of the verbal temporal system in French children’s speech between 18 and 36 months. Journal of French Language Studies, 22(1), 95–114. Prada Pérez, A. D., Gómez Soler, I., & Feroce, N. (2021). Variable future-time expression in Spanish: A comparison between heritage and second language learners. Languages, 6(4), 206. https://doi​.org​/10​.3390/ languages6040206 Reichenbach, H. (1947). Elements of symbolic logic. University of California Press. Russell, J., Alexis, D., & Clayton, N. (2010). Episodic future thinking in 3-to 5-year-old children: The ability to think of what will be needed from a different point of view. Cognition, 114(1), 56–71. Salkie, R. (2010). Will: Tense or modal or both? English Language and Linguistics, 14, 187–215. Salsbury, T. (2000). The acquisitional grammaticalization of unreal conditionals and modality in L2 English: A longitudinal perspective (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Indiana University, Bloomington. Sánchez Canales, E. (2018): La expresión del futuro en español e inglés. Adquisición por parte de niños bilingües (4-10 años). Trabajo Fin de Grado. Facultad de Filología. UNED.

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23 MOOD AND MODALITY Amber Dudley

23.1 Introduction Within the Tense-Aspect-Mood (TAM) system, grammatical mood—the morphosyntactic expression of modality—has been reported to be one of the most challenging linguistic domains for second language (L2) learners to acquire and for linguists to analyse both in terms of its linguistic properties and acquisitional challenges. The complexity of grammatical mood is in large part due to the multicomponential interaction between the (morpho)syntactic, semantic, and discourse–pragmatic factors that condition its uses and meanings. And yet, despite the persistent difficulties it causes for many language learners, research into the acquisition of grammatical mood has been limited at best, particularly in comparison to the breadth of studies focusing on tense and aspect. The available research has largely looked at the distinction between two types of moods—the indicative (1) and the subjunctive (2)—in Romance languages, such as French (e.g., Ayoun, 2013; McManus & Mitchell, 2015) and Spanish (e.g., Collentine, 2014; Iverson et al., 2008). (1)

La fille va à  l’   école. the  girl  go.3SG.IND to the school. ‘The girl goes to school.’

(2)

 veut  que la fille aille à  l’   école. Le père the father want that the girl go.3SG.SUBJ to the school ‘The father wants the girl to go to school.’

The availability of grammatical mood varies greatly between and within languages. It is therefore not surprising that many studies have focused on learners whose first language (L1), such as English, does not express grammatical mood in the same way as the L2. This factor, among others, ultimately complicates the acquisition process for many language learners. The current chapter reviews some of the key findings from studies that have adopted a predominately linguistic approach to the L2 development of mood selection abilities. In particular, it focuses on the indicative–subjunctive contrast in DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-27

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Romance languages, while also touching upon research from first and heritage language acquisition. This chapter is divided into four main sub-topics: (1) the linguistic phenomenon, (2) L1 acquisition, (3) L2 acquisition, and (4) heritage language acquisition. It then concludes with a discussion of future directions for L2 research into grammatical mood.

23.2  Mood and modality Before reviewing research into the acquisition of the subjunctive, we will define and exemplify uses and meanings of mood and modality.

23.2.1  Indicative versus subjunctive mood Grammatical mood refers to the morphosyntactic expression of modality (Portner, 2018). Defining modality, however, is challenging in and of itself. As Bybee et al. (1994, p. 176) point out, “it may be impossible to come up with a succinct characterization of the notional domain of modality”. For the purposes of this chapter, we define modality as a semantic concept that expresses a speaker’s attitude towards a proposition, while, at the same time, acknowledging that such a definition does not fully convey the full nuances of modality as a semantic phenomenon. All languages have the ability to express modality, for example, through the use of adverbs (3), modal verbs (4), or verbal mood morphology (5). However, not all languages grammaticalise modality using dedicated verbal morphology. That is, mood is only a grammatical category in some languages, and the languages that do express grammatical mood use a wide range of forms, such as indicative, subjunctive, and conditional verbal morphology, to do so. Given the predominance of studies on the subjunctive relative to other expressions of mood and modality and space constraints, this chapter will focus largely on research into the acquisition of the subjunctive, an expression of grammatical mood. (3) The teacher is possiblyADV going out.

(4)

Quiero dar la vuelta al   mundo. to give the round to the  world want.1SG.IND ‘I want to travel around the world.’

(5)

Je veux que tu   fasses les  courses. the shopping. I want that  you do.2SG.SUBJ ‘I want you to do the food shopping.’

Indicative and subjunctive morphology are verbal inflections in all Romance languages (e.g., French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish). Broadly speaking, the indicative is associated with realis (i.e., affirmations and facts), and the subjunctive irrealis (i.e.., demands, doubts, hopes, hypotheses, opinions, possibilities, preferences, suggestions, and wishes) (see Portner, 2018, p. 70 for further discussion). As mentioned in the introduction, many studies have focused on learners whose L1, such as English, does not express grammatical mood in the same way as the L2. For example, in English, the subjunctive (i.e., the bare form of the verb) can occur in subordinate clauses as a complement to mandative (i.e., giving commands, demands, and recommendations) predicates, such as in (6). In 312

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many dialects of English (such as British English), however, modals are often preferred, as in (7) (Crawford, 2009).1 (6) My dad suggested that I buy.1SG.IND a car. (7) My dad suggested that I should.1SG.MOD buy a car.

23.2.2  The subjunctive in French and other Romance languages. The use of the subjunctive in French and other Romance languages depends on a complex interplay of syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic factors. In this chapter, we provide a brief overview, but see Portner (2018) for a more in-depth discussion of indicative–subjunctive contrasts in different languages. Unlike the indicative which can occur in both main (8) and embedded clauses (9), the subjunctive in Romance languages overwhelmingly occurs in embedded (complement, adverbial, and relative) clauses, as in (10). (8)

Le garçon mange un the boy eat.3SG.IND a ‘The boy eats a sandwich.’

sandwich. sandwich.

(9)

La fille le français pense que the girl thinks that the French ‘The girl thinks that French is difficult.’

(10)

Pierre que Claude veut Pierre wants that Claude ‘Pierre wants Claude to leave.’

est is.3SG.IND

difficile. difficult.

parte/*part. leave.3SG.SUBJ/*IND

For instance, in (9), the matrix predicate pense ‘think’ requires the indicative mood form, est ‘is.3SG. ’, whereas, in (10), the matrix predicate veut ‘wants’ necessitates the use of the subjunctive mood SUBJ form parte ‘leave.3SG.SUBJ’, in the complement clause. Note that most French-dominant speakers would consider the, indicative mood form, part ‘leave.3SG.IND’, to be ungrammatical in this context.

23.2.2.1  Semantic analyses Mood selection in complement clauses is often determined by the lexical-semantic properties of the matrix predicate. These lexical-semantic properties have been broadly explained in terms of both comparison (Giorgi & Pianesi, 1997) and truth (Farkas, 1985; Portner, 1997) semantics. Comparison-based approaches view mood selection as the contrast between intellectual/cognitive predicates (the indicative) and evaluative/emotive predicates (the subjunctive). Truth-based approaches, on the other hand, explain the indicative–subjunctive contrast in terms of what Elliot (2000) coins “reality status”, with indicative clauses being associated with realis and subjunctive clauses irrealis. Examples of subjunctive-licensing predicates in French include volitional verbs, such as vouloir ‘to want’ in French, as in (10) above, and querer ‘to want’ in Spanish, and indicative313

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licensing predicates include epistemic verbs, such as penser ‘to think’ in French, as in (9) above, and creer ‘to think’ in Spanish.

23.2.2.2  Discourse-pragmatic analyses There are also a number of contexts where mood selection is variable and contingent upon the speaker’s attitude towards the propositional content of the statement. For example, the verb penser ‘to think’ in French and creer ‘to think’ in Spanish can select the subjunctive or the indicative, depending on the speaker’s or the subject of the matrix clause’s commitment to the truth-value of the embedded clause. (11)

Pierre ne pense pas que c’est le cas. Pierre neg​.clit​ic thinks not that it be.3SG.IND the case ‘Pierre doesn’t think that’s the case (but I think that is the case).’

(12)

soit le Pierre ne pense pas que ce Pierre neg​.clit​ic thinks not that it be.3SG.SUBJ the ‘Pierre doesn’t think that’s the case (and I agree with Pierre).’

cas. case

In (11), both the indicative and the subjunctive are licensed when the speaker or the subject of the matrix clause is committed to the truth-value of the embedded clause, whereas only the subjunctive is licensed in (12) when the speaker or the subject of the matrix clause is not committed to the truthvalue of the embedded clause. Another example is the use of the subjunctive in restrictive relative clauses, as in (13) and (14). The indicative morphology in (13) presupposes that there is a French-speaking doctor, whereas the subjunctive morphology in (14) suggests that a French-speaking doctor might not exist. That is, in (13), the speaker has a specific French-speaking doctor in mind and is looking for that specific doctor, whereas in (14), the speaker is looking for any French-speaking doctor. (13)

Je cherche un médecin qui sait parler français. I look  a doctor that know.3SG.IND to speak French ‘I am looking for a doctor that can speak French.’

(14)

qui   sache parler français. Je cherche un médecin I look a doctor that knows.3SG.SUBJ to speak French ‘I am looking for a doctor that can speak French.’

Other variable uses of the subjunctive in Romance languages include contexts where mood use depends on the verb’s meaning (e.g., decir ‘to say’ or ‘ask’ in Spanish) and adverbial clauses (e.g., para que ‘so that’, de manera que ‘so that’, cuando ‘when’ in Spanish). A detailed discussion of these uses, however, is beyond the scope of this chapter.

23.2.2.3  Syntactic analyses As discussed in previous chapters, the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995) makes a principled distinction between lexical and functional categories. Lexical categories are made up of nouns, verbs, 314

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adjectives, adverbs, and some prepositions. Functional categories refer to elements that have strictly grammatical meanings (and occasionally no meaning). That is, they only supply inflectional or grammatical information. Functional categories include verbal morphology, determiners (articles), auxiliary verbs, and some prepositions. Within the minimalist framework, the verb is represented syntactically below the functional categories Tense Phrase (TP) and Mood Phrase (MoodP). The verb must thus check the syntactic and semantic features of these functional categories through inflectional morphology. Giorgi and Pianesi (1997) assume that mood is the morphosyntactic encoding of the semantic feature [+ MOOD] in the functional category MoodP (above the Tense Phrase), where subjunctive morphology allows the [+ MOOD] feature (in the head of ForceP) to be checked (Kempchinsky, 2009; Quer, 2009). Unlike in subjunctive clauses, MoodP is not assumed to be a projection in the syntactic structure of indicative clauses.

23.2.3 Summary Given the complex interplay of linguistic factors conditioning subjunctive use in Romance languages, combined with its relatively limited instantiations in languages such as English, the question arises regarding the extent to which L2 learners of languages that grammaticalise mood—as in Romance languages—can acquire the linguistic properties associated with the subjunctive, even in contexts where significant L1–L2 differences exist. It is this very question that has driven much of the L2 research agenda in relation to the acquisition of the subjunctive. To date, this research agenda has focused predominately on the acquisition of Romance languages and in particular Spanish.

23.3  L1 acquisition Before discussing how grammatical mood contrasts are acquired in L2 acquisition, we will briefly explore how monolingual children acquire this linguistic property when acquiring their L1. Research has consistently shown that full adult-like mastery of grammatical mood emerges much later than other linguistic properties. A series of studies on L1 Spanish in the 1980s (Blake, 1983; Hernández-Pina, 1984) found that, although children begin to produce subjunctive mood morphology from as early as two years of age, it is not until they reach the age of about eight or nine that they have full mastery of its nuances and uses (Blake, 1983; Pérez-Leroux, 1998; Sánchez-Naranjo & Pérez-Leroux, 2010). This research has shown that monolingual Spanish-speaking children follow a clear trajectory of development when acquiring grammatical mood, and this process spans several years. For example, monolingual children first acquire the subjunctive in obligatory contexts (i.e., the intensional subjunctive, deontic licensing predicates, and non-variable governors) and then in variable contexts (e.g., the polarity subjunctive, epistemic predicates, variable governors) (Anderson, 2001; Hernández-Pina, 1984; Jesus et al., 2019; Perez-Cortes, 2021; Silva-Corvalán, 2014). A recent study by Dracos et al. (2019) confirmed these findings with 66 Spanish-speaking children aged between four and ten years of age. Oral sentence completion data consistently showed that, unlike the early acquisition of the volitional subjunctive (e.g., with querer ‘want’), children only demonstrated target-like mood selection abilities in presuppositional contexts (e.g., Mariana está alegre de que estés embarazada ‘Mariana is glad that you are.2SG.SUBJ pregnant’) from the age of six, and in non-assertion (polarity) contexts (e.g., complements to the negated epistemic verb no creer ‘to not believe’) from the age of nine or ten. To date, most L1 studies have focused on the Spanish subjunctive. However, the previously cited order of acquisition has also been reported in a number of other languages (Bascelli & Barbieri, 2002; Papafragou, 2010; Shatz & Wilcox, 1991). Jesus et al. (2019), for instance, examined the acquisition of mood in complement clauses among 80 monolingual learners of European Portuguese 315

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aged between 4 and 9 years of age. Elicited production data revealed that, even by the age of eight or nine, knowledge of the subjunctive was not stable in all contexts, despite high levels of accuracy demonstrated by the youngest learners in a handful of contexts. The authors argued that children’s difficulties with the subjunctive resulted from the semantic values associated with certain contexts that license the subjunctive, in particular the [+epistemic] and [–veridical] features. They therefore suggested that although children can map mood morphology onto semantic features, difficulties arise due to the multiple mapping possibilities available to speakers of European Portuguese.

23.4  L2 acquisition Grammatical mood has been reported to be a particularly vulnerable, but ultimately acquirable, grammatical domain for many L2 learners. Several studies have explored the internal and external factors affecting the L2 development of grammatical mood. Internal factors—the focus of this chapter— include the linguistic influences on acquisition, such as the interaction of distinct linguistic domains (e.g., syntax, semantics, discourse-pragmatics), and L1–L2 differences. External factors include the impact of pedagogical interventions (e.g., Processing Instruction; see VanPatten, 2015 for more information) and non-linguistic variables (e.g., study abroad). The current section seeks to depict the challenges that L2 learners encounter when acquiring grammatical mood. One of the first studies to explore the role of L1–L2 differences was Collentine (1995) who tested 40 English-speaking intermediate learners of L2 Spanish on their knowledge of the indicative and subjunctive in subordinate clauses. Conversational and controlled oral production data revealed that these learners had difficulty accurately producing the subjunctive (but not the indicative) in subordinate clauses, often using the indicative as the default form. Collentine consequently concluded that L2 difficulties are likely to be the result of (morpho)syntactic deficiencies, especially in contexts where the relevant mood morphology is missing from their L1, as is the case for L1 English speakers of L2 Spanish. Further evidence concerning the role of L1–L2 parametric differences has been reported by Bruhn de Garavito (1997) who tested knowledge of coreference restrictions between matrix clauses and embedded subjunctive clauses among 10 intermediate and 18 advanced L2 learners of Spanish, mostly with L1 English. Coreference restrictions refer to the phenomenon in Spanish where the subject of an embedded subjunctive clause cannot refer to the subject of the matrix clause (15), whereas the subject of an embedded indicative clause (16) can. (15)

quiero que proi*/j vaya that go.1SG*/3SG.SUBJ want.1SG.IND ‘I want me*/him/her to go to the party.’

(16)

proi

a to

proi

creo que proi voy that go.1SG.IND want.1SG.IND ‘I believe I am going to the party.’

a to

la the

la the

fiesta party

fiesta party

Truth-value and grammaticality judgment data revealed that the more advanced L2 learners could successfully reject coreference between the subjects of the two clauses, whereas intermediate learners could not. These findings suggest that despite initial developmental delays, L2 learners can eventually overcome L1–L2 parametric differences when interpreting mood contrasts involving coreference restrictions. 316

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As discussed above, researchers in the 1990s largely focused on the extent to which L1–L2 parametric differences could explain variability among L2 learners. In the 2000s, researchers began to focus more on the interaction between distinct linguistic domains (e.g., syntax, semantics, discoursepragmatics). This line of enquiry was largely motivated by the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011), according to which non-target-like L2 interpretation and production arise due to difficulties computing interface structures, especially those at the interface between syntax and external linguistic domains, such as discourse–pragmatics. It is argued that these interface conditions are more cognitively demanding to compute than structures involving a single linguistic domain. Borgonovo and Prévost (2003), for instance, examined the L2 development of the polarity subjunctive among 25 intermediate-to-advanced L1 French learners of L2 Spanish. In both French and Spanish, the polarity subjunctive is licensed by negation (17). (17)

El decano no cree que los estudiantes The dean   not think that the students ‘The dean does not think the students deserve a prize’

merezcan merit.3SG.SUBJ

un premio a prize

(Kempchinsky, 2009, p. 1804) However, the licensing predicates vary between the two languages. In Spanish, the polarity subjunctive is licensed under epistemic (creer ‘believe’), perception (ver ‘see’), and communication (decir ‘say’) verbs, whereas its use is more restrictive in French and is only triggered by epistemic (croire ‘believe’) verbs. These L1–L2 differences mean that L1 French learners of L2 Spanish must extend the class of verbal triggers to include perception and communication verbs. Although the obligatory L1 choice—the indicative—is always grammatical with the extended class of verbs in Spanish, it is not always the pragmatically most felicitous mood choice. This consequently means that successful acquisition requires the integration of a syntax-discourse interface. Truth-value judgment data indicated that the more advanced learners exhibited target-like behaviour, even in contexts where the subjunctive was not used in their L1. These findings suggest that L2 learners can eventually overcome parametric differences and difficulties with the syntax-discourse interface in order to successfully acquire grammatical mood. Iverson, Kempchinsky, and Rothman (2008) also explored the L2 development of the Spanish polarity subjunctive, but with 18 advanced and 25 intermediate L1 English speakers of L2 Spanish. Unlike French or Spanish, English does not grammaticalise the polarity subjunctive, using dedicated surface morphology. Morphology recognition and scalar judgment data showed evidence of targetlike attainment among the advanced learners across all structures, but of vulnerability at the syntaxdiscourse interface among the intermediate learners. Further vulnerability has been observed at the syntax–semantics (i.e., an internal) interface. Borgonovo et al. (2015) focused on the contrast between phrases such as Busco unas tijeras que corten ‘I am looking for scissors that cut.3PL.SUBJ’ and Busco unas tijeras que cortan ‘I am looking for scissors that cut.3PL.IND.’ In Spanish, the indicative is used when the speaker is looking for a specific pair of scissors, but the subjunctive when any pair of scissors will do. Grammaticality judgment and appropriateness judgment data from 16 intermediate and 22 advanced L1 English speakers of L2 Spanish revealed that learners could accurately identify the correct mood, but that this was not consistently the case across the different conditions tested. For example, L2 learners could select the appropriate mood in lexical contexts where the subjunctive was obligatory and relative clause contexts where the two moods were associated with different semantic interpretations. However, learners’ interpretation of the inappropriate subjunctive in relative clause contexts was more targetlike than their interpretation of the inappropriate indicative. In other words, learners appeared to 317

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associate subjunctive morphology with non-specificity and use indicative morphology as a default marker. Similar findings have also been reported for L2 learners of French. Ayoun (2013) investigated the L2 acquisition of the French subjunctive among 14 beginner, 15 intermediate, and 13 advanced university learners, most of whom spoke English as their L1. In their personal narratives, learners’ use of the subjunctive was infrequent but accurate across the three proficiency levels, a finding consistent with studies by Bartning (2008) and Howard (2008). In the sentence completion task where learners had less freedom over which form to use, production was significantly less accurate, especially among those of a lower proficiency, More recently, researchers have begun to re-examine the question of parametric differences, but in the context of Feature Reassembly (Lardiere, 2009). Feature Reassembly assumes that all formal features are transferred from the L1 and that, in cases of L1–L2 mismatches, learners must reassemble specific features into new functional categories and map these features onto L2-specific lexical items. Ahern et al. (2019) explored this hypothesis by investigating the interpretation of mood in concessive structures (e.g., after conjunctions such as aunque ‘although’) by upper-intermediate and advanced L1 French (n = 48) and L1 English (n = 40) speakers of L2 Spanish. According to Feature Reassembly, the L1 English group must assemble features that are absent in their L1 and map them onto the relevant lexical items in the L2, whereas the L1 French group must reassemble features that are present in their L1 but mapped onto different lexical items. This study is one of the very few to have explored the effect of the L1 grammar on acquisition by comparing learners from multiple L1 backgrounds. Metalinguistic interpretation data showed that the learners’ L1 did not play a significant role in the acquisition process, and that learners appeared to rely more heavily on lexical information and world knowledge. This led the authors to argue that L2 learners had difficulty acquiring the necessary discourse and extralinguistic contextual information needed to accurately interpret mood in concessive structures. They therefore proposed that these findings supported a Feature Reassembly (Hwang & Lardiere, 2013; Lardiere, 2009) view of L2 development, given that the availability of the relevant mood feature in the L1 French did not result in any clear advantages. Until now, most L2 studies have used predominately offline measures, such as interpretation tasks, to probe L2 knowledge of the subjunctive. Dudley and Slabakova (2021) recently investigated the extent to which the L1 influences L2 learners’ mood selection abilities during online processing, using eye-tracking during reading, among 45 upper-intermediate-to-advanced learners and 31 L1 speakers of French. In French, the subjunctive is licensed with desire, directive, and emotive-factive verbs, but only with directive verbs in (British) English. Acceptability judgment task revealed that learners had knowledge of the subjunctive, regardless of L1–L2 differences. However, eye-tracking during reading data suggested that learners were unable to apply this knowledge during online processing, irrespective of L1–L2 similarities or differences. Several studies have also explored the role of morphological regularity. Gudmestad (2012) investigated the extent to which linguistic (e.g., form regularity, semantic category, time reference, and hypotheticality) and extralinguistic (e.g., task) factors influenced the mood selection abilities of 130 predominately L1 English speakers of L2 Spanish, with varying degrees of L2 proficiency. Oral production data from a monologic role-play, contextualised clause elicitation task, and contextualised verb elicitation task revealed that L2 development of mood was far from linear. Specifically, they found a drop in the frequency of L2 learners’ subjunctive production before learners were able to use grammatical mood in a target-like manner. Moreover, although learners were sensitive to more linguistic features as they became more proficient, their use of grammatical mood also became less target-like with certain structures (e.g., hypotheticality). A similar study by Kanwit and Geeslin (2014) examined the extent to which factors such as morphological regularity, the order of clauses, and temporal indicators (e.g., cuando ‘when’, después de que ‘after’, and hasta que ‘until’) influenced the mood selection abilities of 97 L1 English speakers 318

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of L2 Spanish across three levels of proficiency. Mood interpretation data showed that learners in the lowest of the three proficiency groups were unable to use mood morphology to interpret utterances and instead relied on the regularity of the verbal morphology and the order of the main and subordinate clauses. However, as they became more proficient learners’ interpretation of mood mirrored the prescriptive norms more closely, with learners using mood morphology to inform their interpretation of the subjunctive in the relevant licensing conditions. Kanwit and Geeslin (2018) also examined the extent to which adverbial class and the individual lexical items within each class influenced the mood selection abilities of 93 L1 English speakers of L2 Spanish across three different proficiency levels. Mood interpretation data showed that both adverbial class and the individual items within each class played a role in the acquisition of mood selection abilities. Specifically, the study found that the lower proficiency learners did not exhibit any differences in their interpretation of adverbs that selected both the indicative and the subjunctive and adverbs that only selected one mood. However, proficiency appeared to play an important role in this respect, with more advanced learners exhibiting target-like patterns in their interpretation of grammatical mood in each adverbial class. The authors further found that individual lexical items modulated morphosyntactic variation among native speakers and highly advanced L2 learners, even with lexical items that were prescriptively said to occur with only one mood. To date, most L2 studies have looked at the influence of linguistic factors on the development of learners’ mood selection abilities. There are, however, several studies that have investigated the extent to which extralinguistic factors, and particularly study abroad, can affect L2 development. For example, McManus and Mitchell (2015) explored the development of subjunctive use over the course of a nine-month study-abroad experience. Oral and written production and grammaticality judgment data revealed that learners demonstrated minimal gains during this period, but that learners’ knowledge of the subjunctive improved more noticeably in obligatory (e.g., with lexically selected triggers) than variable (e.g., with epistemic verbs in negated clauses), contexts especially among those of a lower proficiency. Similar findings were reported by Howard (2008) based on sociolinguistic interviews with 18 Englishspeaking university learners of French. Specifically, this study found a positive correlation between formal instruction and subjunctive use, but that this development was limited to a subset of triggers and forms (e.g., verbal predicates licensing the subjunctive). In contrast, study abroad widened the breadth of triggers and forms used by L2 learners, likely due to increased exposure to the L2 input. In summary, the findings reviewed in this sub-section have highlighted that although learners of varying L2 proficiency face challenges when acquiring grammatical mood contrasts, target-like acquisition is ultimately possible at more advanced stages of proficiency. However, it is important to emphasise that it is not one factor alone that predicts the degree of difficulty. Instead, it appears to be a combination of both linguistic and extralinguistic factors that interact to influence the success of L2 acquisition.

23.5  L2 pedagogical interventions Up until now, this chapter has focused almost exclusively on intermediate-to-advanced L2 learners. This is intuitive and to be expected given the consistent finding, across languages, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies, that grammatical mood emerges late during both L1 and L2 acquisition. There are, however, a number of studies which have explored the extent to which Processing Instruction, a type of pedagogical intervention, can improve beginner-to-low intermediate learners’ knowledge of grammatical mood. Processing Instruction (VanPatten, 2015) requires learners to engage in input-based grammar instruction where referential activities are used to focus learners’ attention on connecting grammatical forms with their meanings in the target language. This contrasts with affective activities where learners must process examples of the target form for meaning rather than form. Most of these studies have used the subjunctive of doubt (e.g., Dudo que él tenga mi número de teléfono ‘I doubt that he has.3G.SUBJ my telephone number’) in L2 Spanish as a test case. For 319

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example, Henshaw (2012) investigated the effectiveness of Processing Instruction on the subjunctive knowledge of 103 beginner learners of Spanish. These learners were placed into three groups: (1) affective activities only, (2) referential activities only, or (3) referential activities followed by affective activities. All three groups demonstrated significant improvements in their interpretation of the subjunctive, but these gains declined over the course of two weeks. The study did reveal, however, that learners who completed the affective activities were more likely to maintain their learning gains over the course of the two week period than the learners who only engaged in referential activities. Explicit information about the target structure can also play a role in the effectiveness of Processing Instruction. Farley (2004) and Fernández (2008), for example, examined whether structured input (i.e., referential) activities alone were sufficient in improving L2 learners’ interpretation of the Spanish subjunctive with expressions of doubt or whether L2 learners also required explicit information during Processing Instruction in order to fully benefit from structured input activities. Interpretation data revealed that although both types of instruction improved knowledge of mood, learners who also received explicit information about the target structure demonstrated greater gains that those who did not. Similar findings using listening, reading, and writing data have also been reported with adverbial clauses (cuando ‘when’) in Spanish (Lee & McNulty, 2013). Most research has assessed the effectiveness of Processing Instruction using offline measures. However, a study by Fernández Cuenca (2019) investigated the effectiveness of Processing Instruction on 57 L2 Spanish learners’ mood selection abilities with the subjunctive in adverbial clauses, using interpretation, production, and eye-tracking during reading tasks. The Interpretation and production data revealed that Processing Instruction led to significant gains in learners’ knowledge and use of the subjunctive. However, the eye-tracking during reading measures only showed limited evidence of the positive effects of language instruction on L2 learners’ processing. In summary, the studies reviewed here have shown that Processing Instruction may help beginnerto-intermediate L2 learners improve their ability to interpret and produce mood in a variety of contexts. Furthermore, any gains from Processing Instruction appear to be enhanced when combined with explicit information about the target structure. Further research, however, is needed in order to determine the extent to which Processing Instruction, despite its name, improves learners’ ability to interpret mood during real-time processing.

23.6  Heritage language acquisition Heritage speakers’ knowledge of the subjunctive has also attracted the interest of language acquisition researchers. Heritage speakers are speakers of “a sociopolitically minority and/or minoritized language acquired as the first or one of the first languages in a bilingual or multilingual context” (Montrul, 2023, p. 1). Numerous studies have found that, like L1 and L2 speakers, heritage speakers exhibit variability in both their interpretation and production of the subjunctive. These studies have largely focused on factors such as age of acquisition and quantity and quality of input. However, heritage speakers’ difficulties often vary in nature from L2 learners’. Due to space constraints and the focus on L2 development, this section only provides a brief overview of some of the key findings from the past decade. Mikulski (2010), for example, looked at the mood selection abilities of 32 heritage and 22 L2 learners of Spanish in volitional constructions. Grammatical judgment and sentence editing data revealed that heritage speakers were consistently more accurate than L2 learners on both tasks and that increased exposure to the target language in the home and community significantly improved mood selection abilities within the hertiage speaker group. Heritage speakers, however, do not always have an advantage over L2 learners when it comes to the acquisition of the subjunctive. Montrul (2011), for instance, tested 72 L2 learners of Spanish and 70 Spanish heritage speakers’ knowledge of the subjunctive across a variety of licensing contexts. 320

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Oral production and written morphology recognition data revealed that heritage speakers did not have a significant advantage over L2 speakers in their use of mood: Both the L2 learners and heritage speakers experienced difficulties with the subjunctive relative to the indicative. However, the nature of their difficulties varied. Where L2 learners were more accurate in the written morphology recognition task (i.e., the more metalinguistic of the two tasks) than the heritage speakers, they were less accurate in the oral production task (i.e., the less metalinguistic of the two tasks). Montrul thus concluded that there was a direct relationship between the mode of acquisition and task modality. Similar findings were also reported in Montrul and Perpiñán (2011) and Correa (2011). Other studies have compared heritage speakers to their monolingual counterparts. Van Osch and Sleeman (2016), for example, investigated subjunctive knowledge in both obligatory and variable contexts of 17 heritage speakers of Spanish from the Netherlands and 18 monolingual speakers of Spanish. Contextualised elicited production data showed that heritage speakers were not as accurate as their monolingual counterparts in their use of mood, especially in variable contexts where semantic and/or pragmatic features determined mood selection. More recently, researchers have moved beyond comparing heritage speakers with their monolingual counterparts and/or L2 learners and have instead drawn comparisons with bilinguals dominant in the heritage language. For instance, Giancaspro (2019) examined subjunctive mood production (of both lexically selected and contextually selected [polarity] mood morphology) with 29 (17 advanced; 12 intermediate) heritage speakers and 14 Spanish-dominant bilinguals. Contextualised elicited production data uncovered significant differences between the two groups, with the heritage speakers consistently underproducing, overproducing, or avoiding subjunctive mood morphology all together. Nevertheless, the heritage speakers did show sensitivity to grammatical mood, as evidenced by their significantly higher production of the subjunctive in expected subjunctive contexts than expected indicative contexts. To date, most studies have focused on Spanish. Flores et al. (2017), however, explored the extent to which age and amount of input influence the acquisition of the subjunctive in complement clauses in European Portuguese by 50 bilingual children, aged between 6 and 17, acquiring Portuguese as a minority language in a German-dominant context. Elicited production data indicated a significant effect of age and amount of exposure. Specifically, the bilingual children’s knowledge of the subjunctive emerged later than their monolingual counterparts, despite higher convergence with the monolingual grammar after 12 years of age. The study also showed that acquisition was more likely to occur at a much faster rate when heritage language speakers received more exposure to the target language in their home environment. In a similar vein to L2 research, several studies have explored the contribution of lexical frequency and morphology regularity in the acquisition of grammatical mood among heritage speakers. Perez-Cortes (2022), for example, studied the effects of lexical frequency and morphological regularity on 17 heritage speakers’ (of Spanish) interpretation and use of mood alternations to convey assertive or jussive meanings (i.e., to express an order, typically in the form of a wish or request). Truth-value judgment and picture-based sentence completion data suggested that both the lexical frequency of the matrix verb and the regularity of the embedded verb modulated heritage speakers’ performance. Specifically, higher frequency matrix verbs and irregular forms resulted in higher accuracy rates across the two tasks. Taken together, the studies presented here indicate that, like monolingual children and L2 learners, heritage language learners also exhibit variability in their mood selection abilities, albeit in different ways. Where heritage speakers tend to perform better in more implicit tasks, such as production, L2 learners’ accuracy is more target-like in more explicit (metalinguistic) tasks.

23.7  Conclusions and future directions The aim of this chapter has been to provide an overview of research into the L2 acquisition of grammatical mood and, in doing so, highlight the implications that these findings have for wider debates within the field of L2 acquisition. 321

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The studies reviewed in this chapter have shown that despite the different learner populations, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks explored, what remains consistent is that the subjunctive emerges much later during language acquisition than other linguistic properties. However, as we have discussed, what distinguishes the different learner populations from each other is often the nature and causes of the acquisitional difficulties. Although these studies have undeniably enriched our understanding of L2 mood selection abilities over the past three decades, there are several future directions that the L2 community might consider in order to advance our understanding in this domain. As we have discussed throughout this chapter, one prominent line of enquiry has been to explore the extent to which learners’ L1 grammar contributes to L2 development. To date, most of these studies have involved testing learners of L2 Spanish, with either L1 English or L1 French. Furthermore these studies, although there are exceptions (see, e.g., Ahern et al., 2019), have largely focused on learners from a single L1 background. This consequently makes it difficult for researchers to disentangle the extent to which L2 difficulties stem exclusively from L1–L2 differences or rather from other contributing factors, such as the interaction between syntax and other linguistic domains (e.g., semantics, discourse-pragmatics). Future studies should therefore be encouraged to expand their research agenda to include L2 learners of languages from multiple L1 backgrounds. Moreover, to investigate knowledge of grammatical mood, researchers have predominately employed measures of production (e.g., controlled oral production, personal narratives, and sentence completion tasks) and interpretation (e.g., acceptability, grammaticality, and truth-value judgment and morphology recognition tasks). Future research would therefore benefit from looking not only at the interpretation and production of grammatical mood, but also how it is processed in real-time. The use of online methods, such as self-paced reading, eye-tracking, and/or event-related potentials, would help language researchers to gain a more in-depth understanding into the linguistic representations underlying L2 learners’ mood selection abilities and how learners interpret mood during real-time processing. This would be particularly helpful when studying differences between L2 learners and heritage speakers. Pedagogically oriented studies would also benefit from the use of online methods to investigate whether processing improves following interventions, such as Processing Instruction (see Fernandez Cuenca, 2019, for example). Several studies, including Suzuki (2017), have reported that traditionally used elicitation techniques (i.e., formfocused tasks such as grammaticality judgment tasks) rely largely on automatised, metalinguistic knowledge rather than the underlying linguistic representations that many formal linguistics researchers are interested in. This can often prove to be problematic, especially when studying linguistic structures, such as the subjunctive, that are extensively taught in the L2 classroom. Online processing data, such as eye movements, may therefore allow researchers to tap into learners’ unconscious knowledge of language in a more indirect manner without requiring learners to engage in additional artificial procedures (Conklin & Pellicer-Sánchez, 2016; Keating & Jegerski, 2015). To conclude, the study of mood selection abilities among different learner populations has much to offer to linguistic theory and its applications to language acquisition research, especially if it embraces recent methodological advances within the wider field of applied linguistics.

Note 1 The use of the subjunctive following directive predicates (e.g., ‘they suggested he be.3SG.SUBJ reprimanded’) is highly variable in English and subject to dialectal differences (Leech et al., 2009). For instance, subjunctive use is much more widespread in American English than British English (Hundt, 2018), with speakers of British English preferring the modal construction ‘should’ to the subjunctive form ‘be’ (Crawford, 2009).

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Interface vulnerability and knowledge of the subjunctive / indicative distinction with negated epistemic predicates in L2 Spanish. EUROSLA Yearbook, 8, 135–163. https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/eurosla​.8​.09ive Jesus, A., Marques, R., & Santos, A. L. (2019). Semantic features in the acquisition of mood in European Portuguese. Language Acquisition, 26(3), 302–338. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/10489223​.2019​.1570203 Kanwit, M., & Geeslin, K. L. (2014). The interpretation of Spanish subjunctive and indicative forms in adverbial clauses. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 36(3), 487–533. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/ S0272263114000126 Kanwit, M., & Geeslin, K. L. (2018). Exploring lexical effects in second language interpretation: The case of mood in Spanish adverbial clauses. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(3). https://doi​.org/ 10.1017/ S0272263117000262 Keating, G. D., & Jegerski, J. (2015). Experimental designs in sentence processing research. 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Subjunctive use and development in L2 French: A longitudinal study. Language, Interaction and Acquisition, 6(1), 42–73. https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/lia​.6​.1​.02mcm Mikulski, A. M. (2010). Age of onset of bilingualism, language use, and the volitional subjunctive in heritage learners of Spanish. Heritage Language Journal, 7(1), 28–46. https://doi​.org​/10​.46538​/hlj​.7​.1.2 Montrul, S. (2011). Morphological errors in Spanish second language learners and heritage speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33(02), 163–192. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0272263110000720 Montrul, S. (2023). Heritage languages: Language acquired, language lost, language regained. Annual Review of Linguistics, 9(1), Null. https://doi​.org​/10​.1146​/annurev​-linguistics​-030521​-050236 Montrul, S., & Perpiñán, S. (2011). Assessing differences and similarities between instructed heritage language learners and L2 learners in their knowledge of Spanish tense-aspect and mood (TAM) morphology. Heritage Language Journal, 8(1), 90–133. https://doi​.org​/10​.46538​/hlj​.8​.1.5 Osch, B. van, & Sleeman, P. (2016). Spanish heritage speakers in the Netherlands: Linguistic patterns in the judgment and production of mood. International Journal of Bilingualism. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​ /1367006916654365 Papafragou, A. (2010). Source-goal asymmetries in motion representation: Implications for language production and comprehension. Cognitive Science, 34(6), 1064–1092. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/j​.1551​-6709​.2010​.01107.x Perez-Cortes, S. (2021). On complexity and divergence in heritage language grammars: The case of double mood selection in reported speech contexts. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1–25. https://doi​.org​ /10​.1017​/S0272263121000589 Perez-Cortes, S. (2022). Lexical frequency and morphological regularity as sources of heritage speaker variability in the acquisition of mood. 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24 COPULAR CLAUSES Sílvia Perpiñán and Rafael Marín

24.1 Introduction Copulas and copular clauses exist in almost all languages of the world, but they constitute an area of grammar with great variation, hence, potentially problematic in second language acquisition (SLA). From a crosslinguistic perspective, copulas vary both in forms – as they may surface in different lexical categories and head different functional heads, may be dropped or not, may be a bound or unbound morpheme – and in behavior, since they participate in different syntactic constructions and agreement patterns. Given this crosslinguistic variation and the high functional component of the copulas, its acquisition in a second language has proven to be very difficult, particularly when there is no correspondence in the number of copulas/omission properties between the languages at play. In this chapter, we offer an overview of the acquisition of the copulas in the most investigated languages, essentially English and Spanish, by L2 learners with a variety of L1s (Arabic, Chinese, English, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish), paying attention to the semantic and syntactic factors that drive their development in the interlanguage, as well as the formal features that the copulas may carry (verbal agreement). We propose developmental paths when enough data are available for language combinations. Due to length constraints, we leave existential constructions out of the overview and mainly focus on adult L2 learners.

24.2  Theoretical issues Copular constructions are difficult to define. Some authors, such as Hengeveld (1992), offer a definition of copulas in which the combination with nonverbal predicates is central: “A copula enables a nonverbal predicate to act as a main predicate in those languages and under those circumstances in which this nonverbal predicate could not fulfill this function on its own” (p. 32). This definition is quite appropriate. Yet, according to Arche et al. (2019), this definition is problematic given that in certain languages, e.g., Bambara, copulas co-occur with verbs, as shown by Pustet (2003). To a certain extent, this is also the case of English passive voice (The door was closed) or progressive sentences (The door is closing), for participles and gerunds are (non-personal forms of) verbs. In these constructions, be acts as an auxiliary verb and, as we will see, its investigation has been typically associated to the development of verbal morphology. Still, languages with double-copula systems may also present alternations in these uses. Pustet (2003) provides another definition in which it is not assumed that copulas do not combine with verbs, and it is stated that “copulas do not add any semantic content to the predicate phrase it is contained 326

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-28

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in” (p. 5). However, this statement can be controversial. For instance, in languages with a binary copulative system, such as Spanish or Portuguese, it is really difficult to account for the distribution of the two copulas while adopting a view in which neither of them introduces any semantic nuance (Maienborn, 2005). This is especially true in those attributive constructions that only differ in the copula (1). (1)

a. b.

Marta es Marta isser Marta está Marta isestar

alta. tall alta. tall

As pointed out by Arche et al. (2019), unless we are willing to duplicate the entries for the adjective alta ‘tall’, cases such as (1) strongly suggest that at least one of the copulas – maybe both – introduce semantic information. A sentence such as Marta is tall displays the properties that are prototypically associated with the copulas: (i) presence of verbal inflection; (ii) combination with non-verbal predicates; (iii) link of the predicate and the subject; and (iv) semantic lightness. In this sentence, the predicate (or attribute) is an adjective, but there are several other possibilities: it could also be a noun/NP (Marta is a professor); a PP (Marta is in the garden), or an adverb (Marta is here) mainly in locative constructions; a participle in passives (The door was closed), or a gerund in progressive sentences (They are closing the door). This is what we observe in English. Yet, languages greatly differ as to which lexical categories copulas combine with. If we take just nouns and adjectives, four patterns can be distinguished (Pustet, 2003): (i) both predicative nouns and adjectives require the presence of a copula (German); (ii) only predicatively used nouns require a copula (Burmese); (iii) only predicative adjectives need a copula (Jacaltec); (iv) both nouns and adjectives can be used predicatively without the need of an overt copula (Tagalog). As we will see, this will be very relevant when we review ESL studies, particularly those from Chinese-speaking learners, as the Chinese copula only combines with nouns. Pustet (2003) further explains that the distribution of the copulas is mainly determined by four semantic features: dynamicity, transience, transitivity, and dependency. Dynamicity distinguishes between events vs. states; transience refers to the distinction between permanence vs. temporariness; transitivity refers to the need of two arguments; and dependency distinguishes between object concepts (prototypically nouns) and property concepts (prototypically adjectives). Yet, transitivity and dependency are so intertwined that Pustet (2003) proposed subsuming them in the valence feature. While we will not be able to cover all these semantic distinctions in the SLA literature, we keep them as a reference point to see what is at stake in each acquisitional context. The aspectual distinction between events and states that dynamicity introduces is especially useful to explain the distribution of copulas (or auxiliaries) in passive constructions. A sentence such as The door was closed is ambiguous between an eventive reading (someone closed the door) and a stative reading (the door was in a state of having been closed). Interestingly, languages with two copulas also use them to distinguish between these two types of passives. In Spanish, for instance, the eventive reading is expressed by ser, while the stative one is expressed by estar:

(2)

a. b.

La puerta ha sido cerrada. the door has beenser closed ‘The door has been closed.’ La puerta está cerrada. closed the door isestar ‘The door is closed.’

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In German (also in Dutch, Hanegreefs, 2004) we find a similar distinction: worden is used in eventive passives, while sein is used in stative passives. (3)

a. b.

Die Tür wurde geschlossen. the door was/getwerden closed ‘The door was/got closed.’ Die Tür ist geschlossen. closed the door issein ‘The door is closed.’

As we will see, these distinctions are relevant to understand several acquisitional studies such as that of Bruhn de Garavito (2009). Furthermore, the alternation between sein and worden in German poses the question about the distinction between copulas and pseudo-copulas, since worden mostly behaves as get or become in English. The contrast between permanence and temporality introduced by transience is better accounted for by the distinction, first proposed by Carlson (1997), between individual-level (IL) and stage-level (SL) predicates. According to Fábregas (2012), IL predicates express (defining) properties of an individual, while SL predicates qualify a stage – or situation – of the individual. The IL/SL dichotomy has been shown to be very useful to explain the distribution observed in languages with more than one copula (Arche, 2006; Marín, 2010) and is the distinction that has been mostly investigated in the acquisition of Spanish as an L2. In Portuguese, as in Spanish, ser + adjective constructions are associated with IL predicates, while estar + adjective constructions are associated with SL predicates: (4)

a. b.

Saramago Saramago O the

era wasser rei king

português. Portuguese está isestar

nu. naked

Finally, the valence feature is related to the possibility of the copulas being dropped, under what conditions, and with which consequences. The copula is omitted in many languages, including Arabic, Russian, Hebrew, Japanese, Bengali, Malay, Turkish, Ukrainian, Berber, Hawaiian, and Sinhala. Probably, the context that most favors copula omission is the present simple tense (PST), to the extent that in certain languages, such as Arabic or Russian, this omission is obligatory in PST.

24.3  The acquisition of the copula Two broad topics have attracted the most interest in SLA studies on copulas: (i) languages with two (or more) copulas and their semantic differences, and (ii) copula omission. Both contexts can be understood under a feature mapping/reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2008, 2009) in which grammatical (person and number, tense) and semantic (Individual-Level vs. Stage-Level, dynamicity, transience) features are selected and later mapped/reassembled onto the copula(s). The factors mostly investigated in the acquisition of double-copular systems relate to the semantic distinctions that the copulas convey and how these are hierarchized, whereas the copulas as agreement markers and the classification of ungrammatical omissions have been factors mostly considered in the acquisition of unique-copula systems. We will briefly review some of the main issues in the emergence and development of the copulas in monolingual acquisition, mainly in English and Spanish, and in bilingual acquisition to set the stage for the acquisition of the copulas in second languages. 328

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24.3.1  The development of copulas in monolingual and bilingual child acquisition There are two main questions in the development of the copula system in child language: the first one relates to copula omission and the grammatical constraints that guide potential non-adultlike behavior; the other main question is whether having a double-copula system helps or hinders the development of the copula system. Concerning the first issue, most studies have shown that children follow grammatical considerations in their copula system development. For instance, Becker (2002) analyzed the speech of four English-speaking children and found more suppliance of the copula be in nominal predicates as compared to locative predicates (76% vs. 19%), and also more suppliance of the copula with IL adjectives (63%) as compared to copula with SL adjectives (47%). She explained this asymmetry by proposing that nominal predicates (IL predicates) are nonaspectual in nature, and that “the copula is a grammatical reflex of the temporal anchoring of a clause containing a nonaspectual predicate” (Becker, 2004, p. 160). She further proposed that in child English, unlike in adult English, SL predicates (locatives in her analysis), thanks to their aspectual projection, may be temporally anchored by T binding Asp, a possibility not available for IL predicates. These results, though, have not been replicated in L2 or bilingual child acquisition. For instance, Gavruseva and Mesterheim (2003) investigated this issue further in L2 child English (ages 6–9), with different L1s: Japanese, Russian, Azerbaijani. Omission rates were very low and identical between SL and IL NPs, a bit higher with SL adjectives (20%) and SL PP (24%). However, when taking all the uses together, the rates of null copula are below 10% and similar between IL and SL predicates. Likewise, when we examine a language that lexicalizes this aspectual distinction (IL vs SL) such as Spanish or Catalan, the results are quite different from those found in Becker (2002). Bel (2013) analyzed the longitudinal data of three Spanish-speaking children and three Catalan-speaking children, aged 1;6–2;11. In Spanish, while ser, the IL copula, was more frequent in the speech of the children, estar, the SL copula, appeared earlier and more consistently. Omissions were very rare but occasional in the case of ser, unattested with estar. Comparable results were found in Catalan. Copular constructions in both Romance languages appear in the following order: first with nominals, then with locatives, and finally with adjectives. There are no instances of errors in the use of the copulas. To summarize, the fact that the aspectual distinction is lexicalized in two copula verbs seems to facilitate their acquisition and the acquisition of their semantic entailments. A binary system, as Bel (2013) argues, may result in more transparent form-to-meaning mapping, resulting in significantly fewer omissions or errors as compared to the acquisition of the copula in a unique-BE system. Similar results were found in Sera (1992), in which monolingual Spanish-speaking children used ser and estar contrastively from very early on. On the other hand, the double-copular system is a long-lasting problem for adult L2 learners, even for those who speak a language with a slightly different distribution of the two copulas. In bilingual acquisition, Fernández-Fuertes and Liceras (2010) analyzed the spontaneous data from two English/Spanish bilingual children of analogous ages and mean lengths of utterance (MLUs) to Becker’s children and found that the bilingual children produced the copula over 90% of the time with adjectives (no differences between IL and SL adjectives), and 89% of the time with locatives. That is, they found strikingly different omission patterns in bilingual English as compared to Becker’s monolingual data. Fernández-Fuertes and Liceras (2010) argued that English monolingual and English/Spanish bilingual acquisition present different developmental patterns, precisely because of the lexicalization in Spanish of the two copulas for IL and SL predicates. That is, this grammaticalized distinction in Spanish exerts a crosslinguistic influence that culminates in an acceleration of the overt realization of be in bilingual English acquisition. This result emphasizes the idea that the same linguistic property, in this case, copular clauses, may have different acquisition timings depending on the language. 329

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In cases in which the two languages are typologically different but with a very similar copula distribution, such as in Basque and Spanish, the acquisition of the two copulas in both languages in bilingual children develops parallelly. In Basque, izan combines with IL predicates and path postpositions, similar to Spanish ser, whereas egon is employed with locative postpositional phrases and aspectually delimited phrases (SL predicates, which appear with estar in Spanish). The main distinction between Basque and Spanish is that Basque employs izan as the auxiliary for the progressive, whereas Spanish employs estar. Larrañaga and Guijarro-Fuentes (2013) investigated the production of Basque copulas in Basque-dominant and Spanish-dominant bilingual children between ages two and four (data from Luque, available in CHILDES). Overall, results indicated quantitative differences but not qualitative ones: Basque-dominant speakers used more predicative nominals with egon as compared to the Spanish-dominant bilinguals, but no errors were found in either group. The only structure that produced target-deviant results were progressives, whose target use diverges between the two languages. Interestingly, both groups used progressives with egon (and with izan), particularly Basque-dominant children. Larrañaga and Guijarro-Fuentes (2013) explained this unexpected result as a potential consequence of children receiving non-native input already influenced by Spanish. Finally, and focusing on locative constructions, Sera (1992) also investigated several contexts with ser and estar with adjectives and locatives in bilingual children (L1 Spanish–L2 English of Cuban descendent, n = 52, ages 3;6–8;11). The results indicated that the correct use of the copulas with adjectives (‘temporary’ attributes with estar and ‘permanent’ attributes with ser) steadily increased with age, with accuracy rates already above 70% in the youngest children. For the expression of location, Spanish generally uses estar (El libro está en la biblioteca. ‘The book isestar in the library.’), except for the location of events, which exceptionally require ser (El congreso es en la Universidad. ‘The conference isser at the university.’). In these contexts, children across ages overwhelmingly used estar to locate objects, but failed to use ser to locate events (percentage correct ranged from 15 to 28), and overgeneralized estar for all expressions of location. Adults behaved as expected. All in all, these results indicate that Spanish-speaking children (monolingual or bilingual) do not seem to have problems with the aspectual distinctions encoded in the two Spanish copulas, except for the location of events. Sera et al. (1991) interpreted these findings from a psychological point of view, suggesting that children do not develop the ontological category of events until later on and that they treat events as objects. Nonetheless, as we will see with data from L2 speakers, this pattern is found systematically, also in adult speakers.

24.3.2  The acquisition of a (non-omitting) unique copula system in L2 As explained in Section 24.2, certain languages such as Arabic or Russian omit overt copulas in the present tense, while other languages, such as English or French, rarely omit the copula. Here, we review acquisition studies that investigate the acquisition of the English copula by learners whose L1 allows omission in the present tense. The learnability task might seem simple, just to produce the copula also in the present tense, but this task poses a challenge for L2 learners. Most of the studies that have found ungrammatical omissions in ESL explain them as the direct result of negative transfer from the L1 of the participants, but this might be a somewhat simplistic view of the phenomenon, which does not fully account for the distribution of the copula in the interlanguage grammar of the learners and does not tease apart genuine developmental errors from transfer effects. In order to address this issue deeper, it is important to analyze the use of the copula, the syntactic environment in which it appears, and the semantics of the copula and the predicate in each context, as these components are known to be deterministic in the acquisition of the copula in English as an L1 and in L2s with binary copula systems. We will predominantly review studies that take these issues into account and speak towards the development of the copulas in L2. Two important factors that have been considered to a bigger extent are (1) the morphological inflection of the copula, and/or the copula as an 330

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agreement marker, and (2) be as a copula or as an auxiliary. In this respect, all studies show the same tendency: there are significantly fewer errors in the suppliance of the copula, even in speakers of languages that omit the copula in the present tense, than in the suppliance of other agreement markers, such as third person -s, or past -ed. Indeed, the copula can be resorted to as a carrier of inflectional morphology when verbal morphology is not yet available in the learners (Bernini, 2003). Likewise, be is mastered earlier when it appears alone (as a copula) than in combination with other verbal forms (as an auxiliary). One language that is well-known for omitting the copula in the present simple tense is Russian. Antonova-Ünlü and Hatipoglu (2012) investigated the acquisition of the be paradigm in the expression of English simple present by 76 native speakers of Russian who had been studying English for one, four, or eight years (ages 8–15). While Antonova-Ünlü and Hatipoglu (2012) found several problems in the use of the copula in the present tense, these cannot be fully explained by direct transfer from Russian. For instance, these L2 learners did not generally transfer the literal translation of Russian nominal sentences into English equivalents and did not make many omissions, even in their first year of learning English (6% of omission, mainly with adjectives). These omissions mostly disappear with exposure, and the authors explained them as developmental errors. One repeated finding is that students would substitute the copula with do-support, clearly marking agreement in negative or interrogative sentences: Does Prague a nice city?, similar to what was found in Tode (2003), in which L2 learners would replace be with can or do, treating it as a modal verb. Finally, Antonova-Ünlü and Hatipoglu (2012) identified another source of errors not previously described, which consists of cases where a copular structure in English (e.g., to be afraid) corresponds to verbal predicates in Russian (e.g., bojat’sja ‘to be afraid / to fear’), producing Helen afraid of dogs. As a final remark, AntonovaÜnlü and Hatipoglu (2012) point out that omission errors and misuse of the be forms, previously identified as one of the most important problems for native speakers of languages with obligatory omission in the present (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1999), are unsubstantial as these disappear with exposure to English. Another language that is prominent for omitting the copula in the present tense is Arabic. The imperfect form of kana (yakunuu) can only be used with a future reference, but not for the present tense, and this is true for any context: in combination with a noun, an adjective, an adverb, or in an existential construction. Indeed, kana is only used in emphatic contexts, negative forms, and with a past or future reference. These forms agree in person, number, and gender in Arabic. Several studies have investigated the omission of the copula in EFL Arabic-speaking students, which has been reported as a very frequent phenomenon in the present tense, but not in other tenses (Abu-Jarad, 1983; Alshayban, 2012; Al-Zahrani, 1993). From a developmental point of view, Kasem (2001) followed for six months the initial stages of acquisition of ten newly arrived Lebanese-born students to Melbourne, Australia. This author defined three different developmental stages, according to the amount and type of errors. In the first stage, omission was predominant, as 60% of the be forms are omitted, in three contexts: after there (existential construction: ‘There four people in my family’), with adjectives ‘My sister unhappy in Australia’, and with nouns ‘My brother a doctor.’ In the second developmental stage, Kasem found an overall of 40% of errors in the use of be, characterized by lack of agreement and not by omission: ‘My brothers is going to school’, ‘The boys names is.’ Finally, in the third developmental stage, errors dropped to an average of 20%, with only 8.5% omissions and 11.5% agreement mismatches. Kasem classified these errors (both omission and agreement errors) as developmental in nature and not due to L1 transfer since they can be found in other language combinations and in L1 acquisition. More recently, Steiner (2019) investigated experimentally 45 L2 learners (intermediate and advanced) with a time-pressured grammaticality judgment task (GJT) in which half of the sentences included an ungrammatical omission of the be paradigm, and an Elicited Imitation (EI) task. In both tasks, tense (present vs. past), use of be (copula vs. auxiliary), and number (singular vs. plu331

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ral) were manipulated. Additionally, items were equally divided among four syntactic environments: negation of simple sentences, embedded declaratives, wh-questions, and subject-auxiliary inversion. Results factored by tense indicated that the advanced group behaved similarly in the present and in the past (92% accurate responses), whereas the intermediate group, with an average of 70% of accurate responses, was able to reject ungrammatical sentences with omission slightly better in the past (60% accuracy) than in the present (48% accuracy); there were no differences with respect to tense in accepting grammatical sentences, or in the EI task. As for verb use, almost no differences were found between be as a copula or be as an auxiliary: only the intermediate group omitted slightly more auxiliary be forms than copula be in the imitation task. As for number, participants behaved better with singular items than with plural items. Finally, and taking into account also syntactic environment, both groups struggled the most with subject-auxiliary inversion plural items and embedded present tense items. When other types of errors are considered in the production task, results indicated that the percentage of errors other than copula omission were significantly higher than omission per se (intermediate group: 35% other errors vs. 13% of omission; advanced group: 17% other errors vs. 2% copula omission). These other errors consisted mostly of agreement errors, tense errors (many times these two appeared together), double-copula errors such as ‘Is Layla is reading a book?’, and omission of -ing. All in all, the author argued that the problems Arabic speakers face when learning the English copula are performance-based and not representational in nature, and mostly linked to mismatches in the surface morphology and not necessarily to the properties of the L1. Chinese is another language whose copula works quite differently from the English copula. Chinese shi can only link a noun phrase as an attribute to indicate profession or identity, but it cannot be used with adjectives or PPs, nor to form a passive. Furthermore, it does not relate to the tenseaspect Chinese system, nor enter into a subject-verb agreement relationship. Lee and Huang (2004) analyzed the story-writing tasks of 270 Hong Kongese students of English, ages 9–10, with 4 years of instructed experience with English. Results indicated a clear asymmetry between the correct uses of be as a copula (80%) and the correct uses of be as an auxiliary (10%). Within the copula uses, there is a learning sequence: Chinese ESL children acquire the copula in combination with NPs most easily, followed by be + AP, and the most problematic was in combination with PPs. As for the uses classified as an auxiliary, these are ambiguous as some of these be uses could be interpreted as progressives, or just to mark tense: ‘I was go your home yesterday.’ Then, all inappropriate uses of be were later analyzed together, and they found that 51% of the cases were uses of be with a main verb, that is, used as tense/agreement markers: ‘I am can make one clothes’, and 21% of the cases as omission errors; there were also problems with agreement and substitutions. Thus, there was some influence from the learners’ L1, together with some developmental patterns. Similar results were found in Hsieh (2009), with less accuracy and more omission in the copula + PP context. Hsieh (2009) analyzed Chinese learners of English from Taiwan (ages 11–14), and compared the use of the copula be with that of verbal inflection such as third person singular -s and regular past tense -ed. Overall, and as we see in many studies, learners perform significantly better with the copula as compared to other verbal inflections. These results were explained in terms of the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997; Prévost & White, 2000), in which the problems are attributed to the surface morphology and not to their mental representation. Many other studies have investigated the acquisition of the copulas indirectly, as a proxy for examining the acquisition of tense and agreement. For instance, Zobl and Liceras (1994), in a survey about acquisition of agreement, noticed that L2 learners from a variety of language backgrounds used be forms to encode finiteness, and these copula forms were used appropriately before agreement markers such as -s or -ed were mastered. Likewise, Lardiere (1999) observed that Patty, her Chinese L1 informant, barely had problems with inflected be forms in L2 English, while hardly produced any agreement inflection. Following this line of thought, Ionin and Wexler (2002) investigated the acquisition of English agreement in L1 Russian children by examining third person -s, past tense 332

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-ed, and the be paradigm. They found that while omission of the third person -s and the past -ed was well above 50% across participants (78%, 58%, respectively), the omission of the auxiliary be (33%) and the copula be in attributive and locative contexts (16%) were significantly lower. In turn, the copula forms also presented some agreement problems (around 8% of errors). The asymmetry between the high percentage of use of be vs. the high percentage of omission of affixal inflection cannot be explained in terms of dominant language transfer, as Russian copulas are always omitted in the present, and there is no equivalent for the auxiliary be. Ionin and Wexler (2002) also found overgeneration of be forms accompanying uninflected lexical verbs without a progressive meaning, such as ‘he is want to go up then’ (Ionin & Wexler, 2002, p. 111). This was interpreted as be being used to mark tense and/or agreement on the verb; in fact, the differential use of be forms compared to the use of inflected thematic verbs was taken by Ionin & Wexler as the result of different raising possibilities in these two types of verbs: copulas (with auxiliary or copula use) raise to Tense in English, whereas thematic verbs stay in situ and receive agreement through ‘affix-lowering.’ Whereas we will not get into the controversy regarding the interpretation of the use of copula forms as undeniable T availability, as these and other studies assume (Haznedar, 2001; White, 2003), or instead as evidence of acquisition of unanalyzed lexical items, as Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1996) suggest, what is apparent is that copula forms in L2 English emerge and are mastered before other agreement inflectional forms.

24.3.3  The acquisition of a double copula system in an L2 Concerning languages with more than one copula, the complexity lies in the copula choice and its differential interpretation. The most investigated language in this respect is Spanish (see Geeslin, 2013, for an overview), which grammaticalizes the IL/SL distinction in the form of ser and estar, respectively. Some studies, though, have proposed that a single binary (semantic) distinction is not able to account for the L2 Spanish development comprehensively, and that either a finer aspectual distinction is needed (Fábregas et al., 2023; Perpiñán et al., 2020), or discourse-pragmatic features should also be taken into account (Geeslin, 2000, 2003). The majority of L2 studies available investigate English L1 speakers; we will try to include other less-researched populations when available. VanPatten’s (1985, 1987) seminal work on the acquisition of the Spanish copular system by English-speaking learners proposed five developmental stages that have been broadly attested in other studies and contexts, with certain disagreement on the acquisition of locatives (Briscoe, 1995; Gunterman, 1992; Ryan & Lafford, 1992; Perpiñán et al., 2020). These are VanPatten’s five stages: (1) Omission of the copula in early stages; (2) Overgeneralization of ser for most functions; (3) Appearance of estar as an auxiliary with progressive constructions; (4) Appearance of estar with locatives; (5) Appearance of estar with adjectives of condition. VanPatten (2010) summarized these stages with a single idea: estar is the more difficult copula to acquire given its additional aspectual meaning. Because the focus then was on the development of estar beyond the overgeneralization of ser, a series of studies carried out by Geeslin and colleagues (Geeslin, 2000, 2002, 2003; Geeslin & Guijarro-Fuentes, 2005, 2006) focused mostly on estar in L2 Spanish, particularly in attributive contexts. Factors such as ‘susceptibility of change’ and ‘frame of reference’ were found to be significant predictors in the development of estar, with no major differences across L1 groups (English, French, German). Overall, they attested a significant correlation between the development and correct use of estar and the increase in L2 proficiency. This body of research highlighted the importance of pragmatic factors in the use and acquisition of the copulas, as well as methodological elements such as task effects. Subsequent studies investigated the interaction of the selection of the copula with other grammatical features. For instance, Pérez-Leroux et al. (2010) combined lexical aspect, encoded in the copulas, with grammatical aspect (perfective and imperfective), morphologically encoded in the Spanish 333

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past forms. They found that L2 learners performed better with the copula choice in the present tense, in which there is no overt mark for aspect, as opposed to the past, in which grammatical aspect needs to be encoded in the verbal form. This finding was interpreted as a result of the extra complexity of combining lexical and grammatical aspect in the past. Additionally, they found robust differences in the location of events contexts, with no progress as proficiency advanced, as opposed to the location of objects. All in all, they showed that adult L2 learners do not exploit the supposed semantic transparency of the copula estar in change of state contexts, against Geeslin’s previous conclusions. Bruhn de Garavito and Valenzuela (2008), and Bruhn de Garavito (2009) examined the relationship between eventive and stative passives and genericity/specificity of the subject in L2 Spanish. Eventive passives are formed with ser (El café es servido) and stative passives with estar (El café está servido), which both would translate as ‘Coffee is served’ in English, expressed only with one copula. Per contra, German shows a similar verb distinction although only in two structures: state passives are expressed with sein ‘to be’, and eventive passives are expressed with werden ‘get, become’, as seen in (3). German and Spanish also share the semantic interpretation of the subjects in these passives: the subject of the eventive passive can be interpreted as generic, whereas the subject of the stative passive is always specific. Thus, if transfer plays an important role in the SLA process, German-speaking learners should outperform English-speaking learners in the interpretation of the passives, and perform similarly in adjectival contexts, as hypothesized in Bruhn de Garavito (2009). The results of the study showed that whereas both English-speaking and German-speaking advanced learners were generally able to distinguish between the two Spanish copulas when combined with adjectives, neither were able to distinguish between the passives regarding the interpretation of the subject. L1 (full) transfer, then, cannot explain these results, probably because the natural developmental path of the copulas interacts with potential L1 transfer. A similar case is that of Italians learning Spanish. As investigated in Perpiñán and Marín (2021), Italian-speaking learners failed to transfer the use of ser (essere in Italian) to locate events in Spanish, and instead overgeneralize the use of estar, not available in Italian (or Spanish) for these contexts. Contrastively, these learners were accurate in the distinction of the copulas with adjectives (Perpiñán et al., 2022), showing once more that the location of events and/or eventive passives are the last contexts to be acquired, both in child language and L2 acquisition, independently of the L1 properties. Additional evidence of no L1 transfer effects comes from L3 data, in particular, from a study on the acquisition of copulas in Portuguese, a language with a very similar double-copular distribution to Spanish. Picoral (2020), who investigated the acquisition of L3 Portuguese by different types of English–Spanish bilingual speakers found overuse of ser and no preference for estar in adjective constructions, which she interpreted as evidence of acquiring estar from scratch and not through transfer from Spanish. Picoral did find some transfer effects, though, in the use of estar with prepositional predicates (mostly locatives), from Spanish into Portuguese, and some transfer from English in the use of cognate adjectives. Overall, Picoral (2020) concluded that transfer, if present, occurs in the bases of structural characteristics of individual constructions, even when two languages share most of the copular distribution. On the other hand, in a study investigating also two very similar languages, Catalan and Spanish, Perpiñán (2015) found some transfer effects in the Spanish of adult Catalan speakers in the form of moderate acceptance of ser to locate objects, as it would be in Standard Catalan but ungrammatical in Spanish. However, these effects are not strong enough to be manifested in production data and are only found experimentally in an acceptability judgment task. More recently, Perpiñán et al. (2020) developed a feature analysis to account for the differences in the use of the copulas to explain their developmental path, and then applied it to acquisitional data. They explained the difficulties in the eventive/stative passives and the location of events as opposed to the fairly unproblematic selection with adjectives in terms of a double aspectual distinction: the feature dynamicity would distinguish events from states on the one hand, and the feature temporal boundedness would characterize SL states and IL states. Temporal boundedness, they propose, 334

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would be mapped onto estar before the feature dynamicity is mapped onto ser; this would explain the (ungrammatical) overextension of estar at intermediate levels of proficiency to locate events, and a long-lasting delay in the eventive uses of ser. In particular, Perpiñán et al. (2020) tested the production and comprehension of locative constructions in beginner and intermediate English-speaking learners. For the semantic interpretation of locatives, they employed ambiguous nouns that could accept an eventive or an objective reading depending on whether they are located with ser (event) or estar (object). For instance, the noun cena (‘dinner’) can only refer to the event of having dinner when combined with ser, whereas it refers to the dinner object (the meal or the actual food) when combined with estar. Results showed that L2 participants behaved better with events than with objects, but they were not able to distinguish the two types of readings. There was an initial overextension of ser in estar contexts, although, later on, estar is overused to express all sorts of locations, also with events, which require ser. As in other studies that investigated locatives, (Dussias et al., 2014; Pérez-Leroux et al., 2010), a developmental improvement in estar but not in ser was found. In short, Perpiñán et al. (2020) claimed that the dynamicity encoded in the eventive subject of locatives or in eventive passives, which both require ser, is the last aspectual feature acquired in the acquisition of the copulas, proposing a new developmental path in which estar is not always the difficult copula, as claimed in VanPatten (2010), since when it comes to the expression of dynamic situations, ser is the last copula to be acquired. Finally, the bulk of the studies on L2 Spanish, when taken together, indicate that there are at least two distinct acquisitional/developmental paths that do not necessarily correspond with the two lexical copulas, but to their aspectual properties: that of the development of states (SL or IL), and that of the dynamic constructions. This fact highlights the importance of acquisitional data to propose, refine, and corroborate linguistic theoretical analyses and vice versa.

24.4  Concluding remarks, open questions, and future directions Overall, we have repeatedly seen that only with a fine-grain linguistic description of the syntactic distribution of the copulas and their semantic denotations, will we be able to make accurate and comprehensive predictions of their developmental stages. On many occasions, we have observed that reporting percentages of errors and simply attributing them to L1 transfer is not a complete description of the reality as other factors may play a stronger role in the acquisition of the copulas, particularly beyond the initial stages of acquisition. Indeed, in bilingual child acquisition, we have seen facilitative effects in the acquisition of the copulas as a result of having another language with a different copula system. Likewise, we have seen that omission in Arabic or Russian speakers only explains a small part of the story as many errors are regulated by independent agreement considerations. Likewise, when analyzing errors, it is important to describe their nature, since problems in the appearance of the copula can have a variety of sources, as these can be morphological (phi features, tense), syntactic (be as an auxiliary is more problematic than be as a copula), semantic (IL vs SL; dynamicity vs. stativity), or pragmatic (evidenciality) in nature. If we encounter morphological problems, we need to further question whether they stay at the surface level and do not affect representation, or whether they compromise linguistic knowledge. This brings us to methodological considerations. Most of the available studies only analyze production data, which fall short in answering many of these impending questions. There is a need to design comprehension experiments that capture many of the semantic and pragmatic distinctions that guide the development of the copulas. This trend has gradually been incorporated in the investigation of the acquisition of double-copula systems, but it is for the most part absent in the acquisition of unique-copula systems such as English. If the IL/SL distinction as well as dynamicity, genericity, or coercion have proven to be significant semantic and pragmatic features in the development of copulas in L1 English and L1 and L2 Spanish, nothing prevents us from assuming that these features are also relevant in other contexts. 335

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Missing surface inflection or impairment in second language acquisition? Evidence from tense and agreement. Second Language Research, 16(2), 103–133. Picoral, A. (2020). L3 Portuguese by Spanish-English bilinguals: Copula construction use and acquisition in corpus data. University of Arizona. http://hdl​.handle​.net​/10150​/641733

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Sílvia Perpiñán and Rafael Marín Pustet, R. (2003). Copulas: Universals in the categorization of the lexicon. Oxford University Press. https://doi​ .org​/10​.1093​/acprof​:oso​/9780199258505​.001​.0001 Ryan, J., & Lafford, B. (1992). Acquisition of lexical meaning in a study abroad environment: Ser and estar and the Granada experience. Hispania, 75(3), 714–722. Sera, M. D. (1992). To be or to be: Use and acquisition of the Spanish copulas. Journal of Memory and Language, 31(3), 408–427. Sera, M. D., Reittinger, E. L., & del Castillo Pintado, J. (1991). Developing definitions of objects and events in English and Spanish speakers. Cognitive Development, 6(2), 119–142. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/0885​ -2014(91)90033-A Steiner, J. (2019). Acquisition of the English copula by Arabic speaking ESL learners: Evidence for feature reassembly (Ph.D. Dissertation). University of South Carolina. Columbia, SC. Tode, T. (2003). From unanalyzed chunks to rules: The learning of the English copula be by beginning Japanese learners of English. IRAL, International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 41(1), 23–53. http://dx​.doi​.org​/10​.1515​/iral​.2003​.002 Vainikka, A., & Young-Scholten, M. (1996). Gradual development of L2 phrase structure. Second Language Research, 12(1), 7–39. VanPatten, B. (1985). The acquisition of ser and estar by adult learners of Spanish: A preliminary investigation of transitional stages of competence. Hispania, 68, 399–406. VanPatten, B. (1987). Classroom learners’ acquisition of ser and estar: Accounting for developmental patterns. In B. VanPatten, T. R. Dvorak, & J. Lee F (Eds.), Foreign language teaching: A research perspective (pp. 61–75). Newbury House Publishers. VanPatten, B. (2010). Some verbs are more perfect than others: Why learners have difficulty with ser and estar and what it means for instruction. Hispania, 93(1), 29–38. White, L. (2003). Fossilization in steady state L2 grammars: Persistent problems with inflectional morphology. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6(2), 129–141. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S1366728903001081 Zobl, H., & Liceras, J. (1994). Functional categories and acquisition orders. Language Learning, 44(1), 159– 180. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/j​.1467​-1770​.1994​.tb01452.x

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Clause-level syntax

25 VERB MOVEMENT Lydia White

25.1 Introduction This chapter provides an overview of the verb movement parameter proposed by Pollock (1989) and how it has been investigated in the context of second language (L2) acquisition. Because of the insights provided by this parameter into differences between languages like French and English, it was taken up in L2 research as a means to investigate potential effects of transfer from the mother tongue to the L2, as well as effects of classroom input. More recently, verb movement has been used to shed light on third language (L3) acquisition as well.

25.2  Verb placement in French and English It has long been observed that there are differences between languages like French and English with respect to the position of finite lexical verbs (Emonds, 1978; Pollock, 1989). These languages show different word orders in a number of apparently unrelated constructions, differences which relate to the position of the verb. Word orders that are grammatical in French are ungrammatical in English, and vice versa. In (1) through (5), the examples in (a) are from French, while those in (b) are their English equivalents. French and English share the same SVO word order in simple declarative sentences; compare (1a) and (1b). However, when other sentence types are taken into consideration, their word orders differ. In the theoretical literature, a range of phenomena has been discussed. Here, I consider cases involving negatives, adverbs, questions, and quantifiers, as these have been looked at most extensively in the L2 context. As can be seen in (2) to (5), the position of the verb differs in relation to negative pas versus not (VNeg versus NegV, as in (2)), the position of adverbs (SVAO versus SAVO,1 see (3)), question formation involving subject verb inversion (VS versus SV, (4)) and the position of quantifiers (VQ versus QV, (5)). (1)

a. b.

Marie regarde la télévision. (SVO) Mary watches the television Mary watches television. (SVO)

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-30

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a. b.

(3)

a. b.

(4)

a. b.

(5)

a. b.

Marie (ne) regarde pas la télévision. (VNeg) Mary (ne) watches not the television Mary does not watch television. (NegV)

Marie regarde souvent la télévision. (SVAO) Mary watches often the television Mary often watches television. (SAVO)

Regarde-t-elle la télévision? (VS) Watches she the television Does she watch television? (SV)

Les amis aiment tous The friends like all The friends all like Mary. (QV)

Marie. (VQ) Mary

Adverbs and quantifiers can occur in other positions as well, common to both languages, for example sentence initial or final adverbs. These positions are independent of verb movement and will not be discussed.

25.3 Background 25.3.1  Syntactic analyses of verb movement The best-known theoretical account of these word order differences was proposed by Pollock (1989), building on work by Emonds (1978). Pollock’s account involves a parametric difference between the two languages depending on differences in feature strength, which has come to be known as the verb movement (or verb raising) parameter.2 This was at a time when linguistic theory was shifting from global (macro) parameters like the null subject parameter towards a more nuanced account in terms of features, involving either differences in the actual features embodied in different languages or in their strength when languages share a common feature. In the case of French and English, the difference between the two languages involves feature strength. Finite verbs have tense and agreement features which have to be checked, at some point, against corresponding features in Infl. Simplifying somewhat, if V-features are strong, there is overt movement of the finite verb to I for feature checking purposes.3 If V-features are weak, overt movement does not take place; rather, there is covert movement, with feature checking taking place at LF.4 In both French and English, then, the verb originates in the VP. In the case of French, it raises out of the VP: see (6). This movement is ‘visible’ when the verb appears to the left of adverbs, or to the left of pas, or before the subject in questions. In English, on the other hand, the lexical verb does not move, appearing to the right of negation, adverbs and subjects. In this way, the behaviour of a cluster of seemingly unconnected constructions can be attributed to just one parametric difference between the two languages (strong versus weak features). This is not a parameter whose effects are restricted to just two languages: other languages may be of the French-type (e.g., Spanish, Italian) or the English-type (e.g., Chinese). 342

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(6)

CP C' C

IP I' I

NegP not/pas

VP adverb

VP

25.3.2.  Analyses of verb movement in second language research Studies on verb movement in L2 acquisition have encompassed a number of different language combinations and a number of different issues. A major concern in generative L2 acquisition research has been the extent to which transfer from the L1 shapes the interlanguage grammar. Principles and Parameters theory and Government and Binding theory (e.g., Chomsky, 1981a, b) offered the means to investigate language transfer in terms of parameters. A question of particular interest was whether L2 learners start off with the parameter settings of their L1 and whether they are subsequently able to reset them to the value appropriate for the L2 (e.g., Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996; White, 1985) or whether they arrive at the appropriate L2 parameter settings right away. The fact of parametric differences between languages allowed for the examination of several issues related to the question of L1 transfer: (i) Is there transfer from the L1 grammar to the interlanguage grammar? If so, does parameter resetting take place?; (ii) Do the various structures clustering within each parameter setting work as a cluster in L2?; (iii) What is the nature of the input required for parameter resetting? Associated with questions about the input is the issue of whether there are directional differences, such that transfer is more likely to occur – or to be persistent – in one direction rather than the other because of lack of suitable input. The verb movement parameter provided the means to explore such questions. The possibility of transfer from the L1 has been formalized in the Full Transfer Full Access (FTFA) hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996), which claims that the L1 grammar in its totality is initially transferred, including L1 parameter settings. A precursor to this position was advanced by White (1985) in the context of the null subject parameter and subsequently investigated in terms of the verb movement parameter. Crucially, according to the FTFA and its precursors, parameter resetting is possible: although the L1 setting is adopted in the initial state, the L2 setting will become accessible under the right input conditions. Alternative theories include the No Parameter Resetting hypothesis, whereby learners are ‘stuck’ with L1 parameter settings, although they may find means to work around them, thus approximating the L2 grammar (e.g., Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Tsimpli & Roussou, 1991). Again, this possibility has been explored in the context of verb placement. The verb movement parameter was the first parameter to be examined from the point of view of exploring effects of classroom input. Much of the early research on this topic was ground-breaking in raising issues of learnability in the classroom context and investigating potential effects of classroom instruction (Trahey, 1996; Trahey & White, 1993; White, 1991; White et al., 1991). 343

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25.4  Studies from child first language acquisition and childhood bilingualism Before considering how the verb movement parameter has been investigated in nonprimary language acquisition, we briefly consider investigation of its effects in L1 acquisition and in early childhood bilingualism. Evidence for verb movement in French and absence of movement in English has been reported, on the basis of spontaneous production data available from various corpora. In L1 acquisition, as in L2, there has been a debate on the status of functional categories, with some researchers maintaining that the initial child grammar involves only lexical categories (e.g., Radford, 1990). Arguing against this claim, Déprez and Pierce (1993) used evidence from verb movement (amongst other properties) to motivate the claim for the availability of functional categories early on. Drawing on four different corpora from monolingual L1 acquirers of French, they report that the children from a very young age (less than two years) show an alternation, with pas occurring to the left of nonfinite forms (7a) and to the right of finite forms (7b), suggesting finite verb movement from V to I. (7)

a. b. c.

Pas la poupée dormir Not the doll sleep-INF ‘The doll isn’t sleeping.’ Elle a pas a bouche she has-3PS not the mouth ‘She doesn’t have a mouth.’ He no bite you

In contrast, for children acquiring English, drawing on corpora available in CHILDES, they show that negation is either sentence initial (which they attribute to absence of subject raising) or medial but occurring before the verb, as in (7c), suggesting no verb movement. Paradis and Genesee (1996) look at simultaneous bilingual acquisition of French and English and argue for the autonomous development of the two grammars in the bilingual child. These researchers gathered spontaneous production data from three children, each of whom had one French-speaking and one English-speaking parent. The children were recorded on three occasions in hour-long play sessions at home from the ages of approximately two to three. Verb placement with respect to negation was one of the structures investigated, in order to determine whether either language influences the other. Paradis and Genesee report that when the children were speaking French, the negative pas predominantly followed a finite verb, VNeg, as in (8a). This order was never found in their English (see (8b)), suggesting a lack of transfer between the two languages. (8)

a. b.

Je veux pas parler à Papa (age 2;6) I want-1PS not talk to Papa ‘I don’t want to talk to Papa.’ *I play not truck (unattested)

In both of these studies of L1 acquirers (monolingual or bilingual), the data are drawn from production, given the ages of the children. In the L2 studies on verb movement, most of the experiments have involved other tasks, as described below.

25.5  Methodological approaches A number of issues arise in terms of investigating verb movement in L2 acquisition. On the one hand, production data can be informative about certain aspects of this parameter, as we have seen for L1 344

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acquisition. For example, failure to reset from the French value to the English value might lead to certain errors in production, as in (9a), whereas production of the appropriate word order, as in (9b), is indicative that the parameter has been reset. (9)

a. b.

*Mary watches often television. Mary often watches television.

Similarly, in the L2 acquisition of French, certain error types could indicate a failure to reset from the English value, as shown in (10). (10)

*Marie souvent regarde la télévision. Mary often watches the television ‘Mary often watches television.’

Some studies on verb movement in L2 have looked at production data. White (1992) elicited the production of L2 English questions by French-speaking children. Of the more than 1000 questions elicited in a pre-test (before instructional intervention, see below), fewer than 0.2% involved finite verb raising. In other words, the children practically never produced questions with a finite lexical verb raised above the subject. However, one shortcoming of production data is that at least some of the structures subsumed under the parameter simply might not show up. This is often the case for adverbs and quantifiers. As a result, attempts at elicited production of adverbs have also been made. For example, in studies by White and colleagues (Trahey & White, 1993; White, 1990/1991, 1991), participants were given cards with words on them, including adverbs, which they had to manipulate to form into sentences. Ayoun (1999) used a written task: participants were provided with grammatical sentences into which they had to insert a given adverb, quantifier or negator. Herschensohn and Arteaga (2009) used a similar methodology. Yuan (2001) devised on oral production task, which was quite similar in its conception to the tasks described above. Participants (L2 Chinese) were given names, activities and frequency expressions; they were asked to describe the daily activities of these people. None of these approaches provides naturalistic data; indeed, the methodologies are similar to typical classroom activities. Another issue is that knowledge of ungrammaticality cannot easily be determined by means of production data. Productions can indicate what is permitted or preferred in the learner grammar but not what is disallowed. Absence of particular forms does not necessarily indicate that they are not permitted; they might be dispreferred or not produced for other reasons. In determining the nature of L2 knowledge, we need to know what learner grammars disallow as well as what they allow. In consequence, other methodologies, such as acceptability judgment tasks (AJT) and preference tasks, have been used to explore learner sensitivity to whether forms that are grammatical in the L1 are ungrammatical in the L2, and vice versa. In the case of AJTs, these have typically involved lists of sentences, testing those properties subsumed under the parameter that the researcher is interested in. In some studies, participants are asked to correct sentences that they have judged as ungrammatical (e.g., Herschensohn & Arteaga, 2009; White, 1991). Sometimes, a context is supplied (e.g., Hawkins et al., 1993; White, 1991) but this is relatively rare. In some experiments, the judgment is made on a scale (e.g., Hawkins et al., 1993; Listhaug et al., 2021), in others it is a binary choice (e.g., Herschensohn & Arteaga, 2009). A variant of the AJT has also been used. This is frequently referred to as a preference task, though in fact it often involves not just comparing sentences but also judging them individually. Participants 345

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are presented with pairs of sentences, the crucial ones contrasting a form that is grammatical in the L2 but ungrammatical in the L1 (or vice versa); see the English pair in (11), from White (1990/1991, 1992). Participants are then asked which sentence they prefer. (11)

Linda takes always the metro (grammatical in French, not English) Linda always takes the metro (grammatical in English, not French)

A potential disadvantage is that the less preferred member is not necessarily ungrammatical in the interlanguage grammar. For this reason, White asked participants to indicate not just their preference but also the grammaticality of the sentences in question. See also Ayoun (1999) for L2 French and Yuan (2001) for L2 Chinese. Asking for judgments of grammaticality renders the task more complex than asking for preferences alone, but it is also potentially more informative. Acceptability judgments, whether in the traditional form or in the form of preferences, have the advantage of allowing knowledge of ungrammaticality to be assessed. On the other hand, there are a number of disadvantages. Such tasks are somewhat conscious and metalinguistic, allowing learners to draw on explicit knowledge learned in the classroom or elsewhere, so that it is not clear that their unconscious knowledge of the L2 is in fact being tapped. The only study that I am aware of that has tried a less metalinguistic task is Eubank et al. (1997) who developed a truth value judgment task. The idea was to provide a context and then a sentence to be judged for its truth value relative to the context. An example is shown in (12). (12)

On vacation trips, Mary usually likes to count different kinds of cars. One time Mary decided to count motorcycles. Those motorcycles move really fast! VROOM!!! But it was really boring for Mary because she saw only four motorcycles all day long! Mary counted slowly moving motorcycles.

True  False

If participants choose ‘true’, this is taken to indicate that the verb has raised over the adverb. In other words, the meaning is ‘Mary slowly counted…’. On the other hand, if they choose ‘false’, they are interpreting slowly as modifying motorcycles, suggesting that the verb has not raised. The methodology is ingenious but, interestingly, has not been taken up in subsequent studies, perhaps because it is very difficult to come up with test items that are ambiguous in the relevant way. Also, selecting ‘false’ is in fact neutral between presence or absence of verb raising, since if slowly moving motorcycles is the direct object of the verb, one cannot tell where the verb is positioned. Furthermore, the test crucially depends on being presented in written form, as there are prosodic differences between the two interpretations in the spoken language. Most studies on verb movement have used a combination of tasks. This approach has a number of advantages. If several different tasks yield similar results, this strengthens any claims that are being made. Furthermore, tasks can complement each other in useful ways, exploring different aspects of verb placement.

25.6  Studies of verb movement in second language acquisition In this section we consider research relating to the following issues: (i) transfer; (ii) the nature of the interlanguage grammar with respect to categories and features; (iii) learnability and classroom input. We then turn to more recent developments relating to how verb movement phenomena have been used to shed light on L3 acquisition. 346

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25.6.1  Transfer and resetting Turning first to L1 transfer, if L2 learners initially adopt L1 parameter settings but can be shown to acquire L2 feature strength where this differs from L1, this constitutes evidence in favour of FTFA and against No Parameter Resetting. In line with this, a number of studies investigated whether L2ers transfer the strength of V-features when they differ in the L1 and L2. Results were not consistent across studies, with some researchers reporting evidence of transfer and others not. For example, as far as L2 English is concerned, White (1990/1991, 1991, 1992) showed that when French is the L1, there is transfer of strong V-features from French to English, at least in the case of adverb placement in child learners at relatively early stages of acquisition. In contrast, for L1 French/L2 Chinese, Yuan (2001) demonstrated that adult learners, including beginners, disallow verb raising over adverbs, with no initial transfer, suggesting parameter resetting from the beginning. Ayoun (2005), in a study of French-speaking adults, reported that advanced proficiency learners acquired the impossibility of verb movement above adverbs in L2 English. In these studies, then, speakers of the same L1, French, a verb raising language, acquiring an L2 that does not have verb raising, English or Chinese, show differing results as far as transfer is concerned. In the case of L2 French, Hawkins et al. (1993) looked at the position of negative pas, the adverb souvent and the quantifier tous. In this case, the L1, English, shows the weak value and the L2, French, the strong value. The L2ers were quite accurate at judging grammatical cases involving the finite verb placed to the left of negatives and adverbs, superficially suggesting resetting. At the same time, they were much less accurate at rejecting ungrammatical sentences, particularly those involving adverbs and the quantifier tous ‘all’. Hawkins et al. propose that, despite accuracy on the grammatical sentences, the parameter had not been reset, explaining performance on the ungrammatical stimuli. Instead, the L2ers arrived at the correct results for the grammatical stimuli by alternative means. The issue of the nature and extent of transfer of settings of the verb movement parameter was not entirely resolved by these studies. While most studies agreed that transfer takes place (with the exception of Yuan, 2001), there was less agreement on resetting.

25.6.2  Interlanguage grammars In addition to issues relating to language transfer, a range of studies used verb movement phenomena to address questions predominant in the 1990s, concerning the nature of the initial state of L2 acquisition, as well as subsequent grammars. Broadly speaking, researchers addressed the question of whether early interlanguage grammars lack functional categories such as I, consisting instead only of lexical categories like noun and verb (Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 1996) or whether functional categories are present from the beginning (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996). Other researchers took the view that functional categories/features might be present but permanently impaired/inert, such that L2 learners treat verb movement as something that can take place optionally, allowing both movement and non-movement randomly within the same grammar (e.g., Eubank, 1996). Those arguing for intact functional categories with appropriate features and feature strength included Grondin and White (1996). Using corpora from two English-speaking children acquiring L2 French, these researchers show that finite verbs are consistently placed to the left of negation from the beginning (in more than 800 utterances involving negation), suggesting verb raising; while quite rare in the data, adverbs and the quantifier tous were appropriately placed after the verb, again suggesting verb movement. As far as adults are concerned, Prévost and White (2000), reporting on data from corpora from two low proficiency adult learners of French (L1 Arabic), found that finite verbs are consistently placed to the left of negation. At the same time, nonfinite verbs appear sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right of negation, which they describe in terms of the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis, whereby nonfinite forms can act as if they were finite even though lacking 347

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finite morphology. Such data show that corpora can be quite informative. Nevertheless, it might be objected that these particular corpora come only from a small number of individuals, so that generalizability might be in question.5 A related question concerns the relationship between morphology and syntax, with some researchers arguing that morphology is a necessary precursor to syntax and others arguing for the independence of the two. As far as verb movement is concerned, the claim was that syntactic verb movement is associated with rich inflection and cannot be acquired in the absence of acquisition of related verbal morphology (e.g., Rohrbacher, 1999). In opposition to this claim, a number of researchers showed that correct verb placement is independent of correct inflection in the interlanguage grammar (e.g., Guijarro-Fuentes & Larrañaga, 2011; Lardiere, 1998). Indeed, as many theoretical researchers have pointed out, verb placement is independent of inflection in a number of native grammars as well (e.g., Bobaljik, 2002). For L2 Spanish, a language with verb raising similar – though not identical – to French, GuijarroFuentes and Larrañaga (2011) tested L1-English speakers at four different proficiency levels, on a task requiring identification of verbal morphology, as well as an AJT, and a preference task on adverb placement and question formation. Both morphology and syntax were also tested via a translation task. Intermediate and advanced learners were accurate with verb raising (syntax) and with morphology, while beginners and low intermediates showed a dissociation: verb raising had been acquired whereas verbal agreement had not. A similar dissociation is reported by Lardiere (1998) for L2 English. In Lardiere’s in-depth case study of Patty, an end-state L2 speaker with Mandarin and Hokkien as L1s, Patty is reported never to raise the lexical verb in English even though her surface morphology is impoverished. On accounts of partial transfer or local impairment which claim that correct verb placement is dependent on inflection, absence of correct inflection should result in variability/optionality in the syntax. While Patty’s suppliance of inflection is variable, verb placement is not optional; rather, she knows that English verbs do not raise. In summary, studies that have tried to show optionality in verb movement related to problems in acquiring inflectional morphology have been relatively unsuccessful. Rather, the syntax of verb movement is acquired, often independent of verbal morphology. There is little evidence for impairment.

25.6.3  Learnability and the language classroom Studies by White and colleagues were, probably, the first to apply insights from linguistic theory to the language classroom, by investigating the verb movement parameter. This was a series of studies6 developed with a particular focus on effects of classroom input, to determine whether negative evidence would be effective in leading to parameter resetting in the French L1/English L2 context. The learnability problem is as follows. For French-speaking learners of English, assuming L1 transfer, feature strength has to be reset from strong to weak. The assumption was that there is no obvious positive L2 input indicating the impossibility of the SVAO order (with a raised lexical verb), in other words, pointing to the ungrammaticality of utterances like (13).7 (13)

*Linda takes always the metro.

Given similarities across the studies by White and colleagues in terms of design, I will generalize across them. In all these studies, participants were children (aged 10–12) in intensive English as a Second Language programs in the Province of Québec, Canada. At the time of testing, they were beginners, having undergone 3 months of English immersion. Participants were assigned to groups, 348

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such that some classes received form-focused instruction on question formation, others on adverb placement. In each case, participants were pre-tested on various tasks (as described in the previous section) which elicited data on negative placement, adverb placement and question formation. They then underwent a two-week-long teaching intervention, with teaching materials explicitly focused on either adverb placement or question formation, depending on which group they had been assigned to. This teaching intervention included negative evidence in the form of grammar teaching and correction, i.e., information as to what forms are not permitted in English. Participants were tested immediately after the teaching intervention, again five weeks later, and, in some cases, again after one year. Results on the pretests from all tasks showed that lexical verbs were never raised in questions or negatives. In other words, the word order appropriate for English was judged to be correct and produced correctly, while French word order in English sentences was rejected. In contrast, adverb placement was treated differently. Sentences like (13) were accepted to a considerable extent, being judged to be as good as or better than the sentences they were paired with in the preference task. Thus, in the case of negation and questions, the learners seemed to have discovered that English has weak features whereas in the case of adverbs they had not. After instruction, the groups instructed on adverb placement improved dramatically, rejecting the French order and accepting the English order, suggesting resetting. This effect lasted till the second post-test but not to the point when they were tested one year later, where they reverted to their original pre-instructional behaviour. According to Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzack (1992), the parameter was never in fact reset; after instruction, the L2ers were exhibiting learned linguistic behaviour, rather than acquisition in the form of parameter resetting. One additional possibility is that there was insufficient positive evidence to preempt the L1 setting (Trahey & White, 1993). This assumption was supported by an examination of audio tapes of the teachers teaching the groups that were exposed to evidence about question formation: adverbs rarely occurred in the classroom. As a result, Trahey and White (1993) and Trahey (1996) devised further experiments, exposing children in the same immersion programme to an ‘input flood’ of structures permitted in English and disallowed in French. The intention was to simulate primary linguistic data. The experimental design was similar to the previous experiments. Flood materials included stories and other activities allowing students to hear adverbs in context without focus on form. They were tested with the same tasks as before, with the addition of an oral production task, involving picture description using designated adverbs. Results showed a significant increase in use and acceptance of English SAVO order at both post-tests but little change in SVAO, which continued to be accepted. In other words, increased exposure to SAVO did not drive out SVAO. In a follow-up study of these children one year after the original testing, Trahey (1996) found that the effects of the flood were maintained. That is, the children continued to permit SAVO but also SVAO. A more recent approach to classroom instruction relating to verb movement is offered by Rankin (2013). Drawing on the fact that earlier studies did not show lasting effects of negative evidence, and regardless of the theoretical implications of such results for claims about parameter resetting, Rankin suggests a different kind of form-focused instruction. This is grammaring (Larsen-Freeman, 2003), which, Rankin argues, might prove more effective in leading to long-term changes, whether these are the result of learning or of acquisition. Grammaring encourages students to discover properties of the language they are learning, as opposed to being instructed by teachers, by adopting an analytical approach to structures in the target language, and formulating hypotheses about what might be going on in terms of form and meaning. In the case of adverb placement, this could involve helping students to discover the various positions for adverbs in the L2, and any associated differences in meaning, as well as providing them with evidence as to what positions are not possible. An additional important finding relating to the classroom studies on verb movement was that there was a lack of clustering of all properties subsumed under the parameter. Verb placement in questions and negatives behaved differently from adverbs, as we have seen. The possibility entertained at 349

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that time (White, 1992) was that two different functional categories (T and Agr) were differentially affected.8 Alternatively, the make-up of the parameter might be questioned; for example, Iatridou (1990) argued that adverb placement differences are not an effect of verb movement. Indeed, the L2 data indirectly lend support to this claim.

25.6.4  More recent studies: L3 acquisition Verb movement in L2 acquisition has attracted less attention recently. However, it has been taken up in the field of L3 acquisition where there has been ongoing debate regarding the effects of previously acquired languages on the developing L3. Various theories are current, relating to the question of which language (the L1, L2, or both) influences the initial L3 grammar, and beyond. On some accounts, transfer arises either only from the L1 (e.g., Hermas, 2010) or only from the L2 (e.g., Bardel & Falk, 2007). For others, either language can be the source of transfer but under differing conditions. Flynn et al. (2004) propose the Cumulative Enhancement model, whereby transfer is allowed from either language but only if it is facilitative (positive transfer in previous terms). According to Rothman’s (2011) Typological Primacy Model, the main source of transfer will be from the language (L1 or L2) that is perceived by the learner to be typologically closer to the L3. Westergaard (2021) advances the Linguistic Proximity Model, arguing that transfer takes place property by property, with structural proximity determining which properties transfer from which language. (See also Slabakova (2017)). The accounts assuming typological or structural proximity allow for both facilitative and non-facilitative transfer. A few L3 studies have investigated verb movement in this context, manipulating which of the languages allow verb movement and which do not (Gunawardena, 2019; Hermas, 2010; Leung, 2006). Along these lines, Hermas (2010) argues for the L1 as the only source of transfer in the L3 initial state. In this study, the L1 is Arabic, the L2 is French and the L3 is English. Arabic, like French, instantiates verb movement, thus exhibiting SVAO order for adverbs, but also, unlike French, allows the word order permitted in English in the case of frequency adverbs, namely SAVO. The L1 and L3, then, share SAVO order; the L1 and L2 share SVAO. Participants were young adult speakers of Moroccan Arabic who were post intermediate or advanced in French, having learned it in childhood; they were beginners in L3 English. On grammatical items in an AJT testing adverb placement and negation, the accuracy rate was very high. For ungrammatical items, on the other hand, accuracy in rejecting SVAO order was very low. In a preference task, exclusive preference for ungrammatical SVAO was as high as for grammatical SAVO. Hermas suggests that it is the L1, Arabic, that is influencing participants’ behaviour. While acceptance of – or preference for – SVAO could be attributed to influence of either the L1 or the L2, acceptance/preference for SAVO could only come from the L1. Taken together, L1 transfer is both facilitative (SAVO) and non-facilitative (SVAO), and inconsistent with claims for typological primacy, unless L3ers perceive Arabic as closer to English than French is, which seems unlikely. One might object, however, that acceptance of SAVO shows acquisition of the L3, rather than L1 influence; participants were at the same time relatively more accurate on negation and this cannot have come from either the L1 or the L2, given that Arabic and French are alike with respect to negation, differing from the L3 in showing verb raising. Leung (2006) looked at the initial state in L3 French, reaching a different conclusion about L1 influence. Her participants were adults, Chinese speakers with L2 English, who were true beginners in L3 French. Word order in Chinese, like English, is SAVO. Leung is a proponent of the morphology before syntax claim and also assumes that Chinese lacks T and Agr. In consequence, there are no (abstract) morphological properties to be transferred from Chinese. L3 tense and agreement marking were found to be accurate in all tasks (elicited production and preference tasks). Adverb placement was also accurate in production, suggesting no transfer of SAVO; however, accuracy was lower on the preference task, with participants varying between the ungrammatical SAVO order and the gram350

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matical SVAO. Leung interprets this as being due to residual transfer from the L2, the idea being that they have acquired verbal features from their L2 English (features which are not present in the L1) but have not fully reset feature strength to the value required for French. In fact, concentrating on word order alone, the results would be consistent with non-facilitative transfer from either the L1 or the L2. Another study involving an L1 typologically distinct from both the subsequently acquired languages is Gunawardena (2019). In this case, the L1 is Sinhala, with English and French the L2 and L3, respectively. Sinhala is an SOV language. When some element is in focus, the verb raises such that the focused element is immediately post-verbal. Two surface orders are possible as a result: SVAO (focused adverb) and SAVO (focused object). Gunawardena’s participants were adults who were enrolled in French classes; they were not beginners. Tasks included AJTs, both written and audio, and a production task. The AJTs involved question and answer dialogues, with the answer to be judged on a scale. L3ers showed a significant difference between *SAVO and SVAO in their responses, with higher acceptance of the latter; however, unlike the native speakers, their judgments were not categorical but rather towards the middle of the scale for both word orders. In the production task, L3ers mostly produced SVAO order, like the native speakers, an order which could have come from the L1 but not the L2. Although all three studies can be interpreted as providing evidence for L1 transfer, sometimes facilitative, sometimes non-facilitative, none of them is supportive of typological primacy, at least interpreted literally, given that the L1s were all typologically distinct from the L3. A final study by Listhaug et al. (2021) looks at the acquisition of L3 French in the context of L1 Norwegian and L2 English, with results suggesting transfer from L2 rather than L1. Norwegian is a verb second (V2) language. In V2 languages, the finite verb always occurs in the second position (see the chapter by Bohnacker and Westergaard in this volume). As a result, in Norwegian sentences involving adverbials, the verb raises, yielding a word order (SVAO) superficially like French, though derived by different means. Here we have a clear contrast: L1 and L3 share the post-verbal SVAO position for adverbs, though for different reasons, while the L2 differs from both, requiring preverbal SAVO. AJTs were administered in both the L2 and the L3. Participants were high school and university students at four different proficiency levels. For L3 French, the groups exhibited some indeterminacy, with the two lower proficiency levels preferring (non-significantly) the ungrammatical SAVO order over the grammatical SVAO order, possibly due to influence of the L2, English. Only the highest proficiency level (university students with more than five years of French) showed a significant difference between grammatical and ungrammatical word orders. For L2 English, participants made much clearer distinctions, not showing influence from L1 Norwegian but, rather, accepting SAVO, suggesting that English could indeed have been the source of their L3 judgments. In several of the studies discussed so far, looking at either L2 or L3 acquisition, the verb raising L1 (Spanish, Sinhala, Arabic) has in fact allowed SAVO order as well as SVAO (Guijarro-Fuentes & Larrañaga, 2011; Gunawardena, 2020; Hermas, 2010). This makes it hard to disentangle L1 effects from appropriate acquisition of the L2/L3, based on input. Ideally, language combinations are required, where word order options involving adverbs do not overlap, as is the case for some of the studies reviewed above (for example, those involving Norwegian or French as L1).

25.7  Future directions Consistent across the many different studies in various acquisition contexts that have been reviewed here is the fact that establishing the verb position vis-à-vis adverbs is much more problematic for language learners than establishing its position with regard to negation or in questions. As discussed by Lardiere (2009) and Westergaard (2021), failure of clustering in such cases suggests that the original broader formulation of parameters does not work. 351

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Indeed, the verb movement parameter was itself an example of the move from macro level parameters to micro, in the sense that language differences are reduced to a featural difference, namely strength of V-features, as we have seen. But perhaps the parameter is not micro enough. Westergaard (2021) argues that language acquisition (L1, L2 and L3) is driven by micro-cues and that crosslinguistic influence takes place property by property, rather than wholesale (see also Slabakova, 2017). Any property has the potential to transfer but will not necessarily do so. This depends on there being a micro-cue in the L1 (or L2) that can be used to parse the L2 (or L3). As far as word order is concerned, research on this claim so far has centred on V2. Perhaps it is time to add Romance type verb movement into the mix, or to reinterpret existing findings in this regard. An additional area where there is room for development is research methodology. AJTs (sometimes in the form of preferences) remain the most common procedure used to test issues relating to verb movement, despite development of other methodologies which may well be more appropriate for tapping unconscious knowledge, especially in the case of structures that are often instructed, such as negatives and questions. It would be interesting to see whether online measures, such as eye tracking or moving window tasks, would yield complementary results. It is possible that reaction time measures could shed light as well; if one of the orders takes longer to parse (all other things being controlled for), this could provide further information about what is acceptable/not acceptable in the interlanguage grammar and, hence, whether or not verb movement is permitted. In conclusion, although theoretical accounts of verb placement phenomena have changed over time, the facts remain: there are crosslinguistic differences in this domain. As long as we are interested in such differences and the possible effects of language transfer in non-native acquisition as well as the nature of interlanguage grammars in general, verb movement phenomena remain a potentially fruitful source of investigation.

Notes 1 In this chapter, we are only concerned with adverb placement relative to transitive verbs. With English intransitive verbs, preverbal adverbs (SAV) are grammatical. SVA order is also permitted but does not involve verb movement. 2 This is not the only parameter with effects on word order relating to the position of the verb. See the chapter by Bohnacker and Westergaard in this volume on verb second (V2). 3 Pollock advanced the split-Infl hypothesis, including two functional projections, TP and AgrP, replacing the single IP projection. Subsequent to the split-Infl account, Minimalism reverted to one category, TP. The terms strong and weak were adopted in the Minimalist program (e.g., Chomsky, 1993); in Pollock’s terms, the issue was whether Agr is opaque or not. 4 There have been subsequent refinements to the Minimalist account of features and feature checking; these changes are not relevant to the early L2 studies on verb movement. 5 Much larger L2 corpora are now available but, as far as I am aware, these have not been used to investigate issues relating to verb movement. 6 Phase 1: White, 1990/1991; White, 1991; White et al., 1991. Phase 2: White, 1992. Phase 3: Trahey & White, 1993; Trahey, 1996. 7 In fact, as pointed out by Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzak (1992) and White (1992), English shows certain word order phenomena that are inconsistent with a strong feature, including SAVO order (showing that the verb is not raised), and do-support in negatives and questions (such that the lexical verb cannot raise). 8 In terms of Pollock’s (1989) split-Infl hypothesis, the idea was that the French-speaking learners of English have not reset the strength of Agr, thus allowing ‘short’ verb movement over adverbs. On the other hand, they have discovered that ‘long’ movement to T is not possible. Hence, the lexical verb never appears above negation or inverted with the subject in questions.

References Ayoun, D. (1999). Verb movement in French L2 acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2, 103–125. Ayoun, D. (2005). Verb movement in the L2 acquisition of English by adult native speakers of French. In S. Foster-Cohen, M. Garcia Mayo, & J. Cenoz (Eds.), Eurosla yearbook: Volume 5. John Benjamins.

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Verb movement Bardel, C., & Falk, Y. (2007). The role of the second language in third language acquisition: The case of Germanic syntax. Second Language Research, 23, 459–484. Bobaljik, J. (2002). Realizing Germanic inflection: Why morphology does not drive syntax. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 6, 129–167. Chomsky, N. (1981a). Lectures on government and binding. Foris. Chomsky, N. (1981b). Principles and parameters in syntactic theory. In N. Hornstein & D. Lightfoot (Eds.), Explanation in linguistics: The logical problem of language acquisition (pp. 32–75). Longman. Chomsky, N. (1993). A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In K. Hale & S. J. Keyser (Eds.), The view from building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger (pp. 1–52). M.I.T. Press. Déprez, V., & Pierce, A. (1993). Negation and functional projections in early grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 24, 25–67. Emonds, J. (1978). The verbal complex V' - V in French. Linguistic Inquiry, 9, 151–175. Eubank, L. (1996). Negation in early German-English interlanguage: More valueless features in the L2 initial state. Second Language Research, 12, 73–106. Eubank, L., Bischof, J., Huffstutler, A., Leek, P., & West, C. (1997). “Tom eats slowly cooked eggs”: Thematicverb raising in L2 knowledge. Language Acquisition, 6, 171–199. Flynn, S., Foley, C., & Vinnitskaya, I. (2004). The cumulative enhancement model for language acquisition: Comparing adults’ and children’s patterns of development in first, second and third language acquisition of relative clauses. The International Journal of Multilingualism, 1, 3–16. Grondin, N., & White, L. (1996). Functional categories in child L2 acquisition of French. Language Acquisition, 5, 1–34. Guijarro-Fuentes, P., & Larrañaga, M. P. (2011). Evidence of V to I raising in L2 Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism, 15, 486–520. Gunawardena, C. (2019). Cross-linguistic influence in French second and third language syntax: An investigation of L1-English L2-French and L1-Sinhala L2-English L3 French speakers (Unpublished PhD dissertation). University of York, UK Hawkins, R., & Chan, C. Y.-H. (1997). The partial availability of universal grammar in second language acquisition: The ‘failed functional features hypothesis’. Second Language Research, 13, 187–226. Hawkins, R., Towell, R., & Bazergui, N. (1993). Universal grammar and the acquisition of French verb movement by native speakers of English. Second Language Research, 9, 189–233. Hermas, A. (2010). Language acquisition as computational resetting: Verb movement in the L3 initial state. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7, 343–362. Herschensohn, J., & Arteaga, D. (2009). Tense and verb raising in advanced L2 French. French Language Studies, 19, 291–318. Iatridou, S. (1990). About AgrP. Linguistic Inquiry, 21, 551–557. Lardiere, D. (1998). Dissociating syntax from morphology in a divergent end-state grammar. Second Language Research, 14, 359–375. Lardiere, D. (2009). Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 25, 173–227. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2003). Teaching language: From grammar to grammaring. Heinle & Heinle. Leung, Y.-K. I. (2006). Full transfer vs. Partial transfer in L2 and L3 acquisition. In R. Slabakova, S. Montrul, & P. Prévost (Eds.), Inquiries in linguistic development: In honor of Lydia White (pp. 157–187). John Benjamins. Listhaug, K. F., Busterud, G., & Dahl, A. (2021). French as a third language in Norway: The influence of prior languages in the acquisition of word order. Oslo Studies in Language, 12, 125–144. Paradis, J., & Genesee, F. (1996). Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or interdependent. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 1–25. Pollock, J.-Y. (1989). Verb movement, universal grammar, and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry, 20, 365–424. Prévost, P., & White, L. (2000). Missing surface inflection or impairment in second language acquisition? Evidence from tense and agreement. Second Language Research, 16, 103–133. Radford, A. (1990). Syntactic theory and the acquisition of English syntax. Blackwell. Rankin, T. (2013). Verb movement in generative SLA and the teaching of word order patterns. In M. WhongBarr, K.-H. Gil, & H. Marsden (Eds.), Universal grammar and the second language classroom (pp. 57–76). Springer Verlag. Rohrbacher, B. (1999). Morphology-driven syntax: A theory of V to I raising and pro-drop. John Benjamins. Rothman, J. (2011). L3 syntactic transfer and typological determinacy: The typological primacy model. Second Language Research, 27, 107–127. Schwartz, B. D., & Gubala-Ryzak, M. (1992). Learnability and grammar reorganization in L2: Against negative evidence causing unlearning of verb movement. Second Language Research, 8, 1–38.

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Lydia White Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the full transfer/full access model. Second Language Research, 12, 40–72. Slabakova, R. (2017). The scalpel model of third language acquisition. International Journal of Bilingualism, 21, 651–665. Trahey, M. (1996). Positive evidence in second language acquisition: Some long term effects. Second Language Research, 12, 111–139. Trahey, M., & White, L. (1993). Positive evidence and preemption in the second language classroom. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 15, 181–204. Tsimpli, I., & Roussou, A. (1991). Parameter resetting in L2? UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 3, 149–169. Vainikka, A., & Young-Scholten, M. (1996). Gradual development of L2 phrase structure. Second Language Research, 12, 7–39. Westergaard, M. (2021). Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition. Second Language Research, 37, 379–407. White, L. (1985). The “pro-drop” parameter in adult second language learning. Language Learning, 35, 47–62. White, L. (1990/1991). The verb-movement parameter in second language acquisition. Language Acquisition, 1, 337–360. White, L. (1991). Adverb placement in second language acquisition: Some effects of positive and negative evidence in the classroom. Second Language Research, 7, 133–161. White, L. (1992). Long and short verb movement in second language acquisition. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 37, 273–286. White, L., Spada, N., Lightbown, P. M., & Ranta, L. (1991). Input enhancement and L2 question formation. Applied Linguistics, 12, 416–432. Yuan, B. (2001). The status of thematic verbs in the second language acquisition of Chinese. Second Language Research, 17, 248–272.

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26 LEARNING AND UNLEARNING VERB SECOND WORD ORDER Ute Bohnacker and Marit Westergaard

26.1 Introduction The phenomenon of Verb Second (V2) word order, where the finite verb obligatorily appears in second position of the clause, is found in a relatively small number of languages, but has nevertheless attracted a great deal of attention in second language acquisition (SLA) research. V2 word order is common in the Germanic languages (Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, Faroese, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Yiddish) with the exception of English, which today only has a few vestiges of V2. Languages such as Ingush (Northeast Caucasian), Kashmiri (Indo-Aryan), Estonian (Finno-Ugric) and Sursilvan Rhaeto-Romansh (Romance) have also been described as exhibiting V2, as have historical varieties of English, French, Portuguese, and Welsh. In most V2 languages, the V2 requirement generally only holds in main clause declaratives and questions, but Icelandic and Yiddish allow V2 in subordinate clauses as well. In this chapter we concentrate on V2 and its acquisition in declarative main clauses in the Germanic languages, as this is where a wealth of empirical and theoretical language acquisition research has been amassed. Many a second-language teacher, and quite a few SLA researchers, consider the mastery of V2 as a hallmark of successful L2 acquisition. For some V2 languages, such as Swedish and German, violations of V2 have even attained iconic status as a marker of nonnative learner language.

26.2  Definition and description V2 is a syntactic phenomenon where the finite verb is preceded by only one constituent, irrespective of whether this initial constituent is the subject or not, as illustrated in (1)–(2) for Norwegian. This means that for nonsubject-initial clauses, inversion of the subject and the verb (XVS) is required, whereas non-V2 word order is (generally) ungrammatical: see (3). (1)

SVX

spiser vanligvis på restaurant når Vi we eat usually at restaurant when ‘We usually eat in restaurants when we are in Oslo.’

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-31

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vi we

er are

i in

Oslo. (Norwegian) Oslo

Ute Bohnacker and Marit Westergaard (2) XVS

(3) *XSV

måtte Under pandemien de fleste restauranter i Oslo during pandemic.DEF must.PAST the most restaurants   in Oslo ‘During the pandemic, most restaurants in Oslo had to be closed.’

være stengt. be closed

*Under pandemien de fleste restauranter i Oslo måtte være stengt. during pandemic.DEF the most restaurants in Oslo must.PAST be closed

In V2 declaratives, the verb in second position can be any type of finite verb (lexical/thematic, modal or other auxiliary). Moreover, the first position can be occupied by virtually any constituent, phrasal or clausal, argument or non-argument, phonologically heavy or light, and with almost any semantic function. However, there is considerable microvariation across V2 languages as to (i) how frequent certain types of constituents are in first position, (ii) which types of elements are excluded from first position (e.g., some modal particles in German or Dutch), and (iii) how strictly the V2 requirement is adhered to; for instance, in Swedish, Norwegian, and Dutch, certain adverbs may precede or follow the subject so that the finite verb appears in third position. (For details on such microcomparative differences, see e.g., Weerman, 1989; Bohnacker, 2005, 2006, 2010; Westergaard, 2009a; Lohndal et al., 2020.) While nonsubject-initial V2 (XVS) is frequent in all Germanic V2 languages, corpus studies indicate that the majority of declaratives in most oral and written genres are subject-initial (SVX): approximately 60–70% (e.g., Bohnacker & Rosén, 2008).

26.3  Standard theoretical analyses Early descriptions of Germanic V2 word order can be found in 19th-century grammars (e.g., Erdmann, 1886 for German). Some decades later, linguists began to couch V2 in terms of a clause schema consisting of ‘topological’ fields (e.g., Drach, 1937 for German; Diderichsen, 1946 for Danish), an approach that is still common in reference grammars. In the latter half of the 20th century, structural analyses of V2 were developed using various tree models. For instance, in Dependency Grammar (Tesnière, 1959) the finite verb is seen as the head of the clause and other elements as dependents. There is only surface structure, and V2 is captured by stipulating that the head must have only one preceding dependent. Such an approach is different from most generative grammar models, which derive V2 by movement. The verb phrase (VP) is headed by the verb and seen as assigning underlying positions and functions to the arguments. The combination of a first position (for a phrase) and a second position (for the finite verb) has been identified as the combination of specifier and head of a phrase (or projection). V2 is typically characterized as a two-step process: movement of the finite verb out of the VP to a functional head position in the left periphery, plus movement of a constituent into the specifier position. This projection is commonly identified as CP (Complementizer Phrase) and C as the host for the raised finite verb, as shown in (4).

(4)

[CP Under pandemieni [C måtteii [TP de fleste restauranteriii [VP de fleste restauranteriii i Oslo måtteii være stengt under pandemieni]]]]

Subject-initial V2 clauses are ambiguous with regard to clause structure, as different heads are potential landing sites for the finite verb. On a symmetric analysis, clause-initial subjects and nonsubjects occupy the same hierarchical position, SpecCP (den Besten, 1983; Holmberg & Platzack, 1995; van 356

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Craenenbroeck & Haegeman, 2007; Vikner, 1995). According to an alternative, asymmetric, analysis of V2, nonsubjects are considered to occupy SpecCP, while clause-initial subjects move to a lower head position than C (e.g., Mikkelsen, 2015; Travis, 1991; Zwart, 1997). Westergaard et al. (2019) argue for the asymmetric analysis based on data from L1 and L2 acquisition, showing that learners often move the verb only as high up in the clause structure as there is evidence for in the input. Within the Principles & Parameters approach (e.g., Chomsky, 1986), V2 was considered to be one of the core parameters: i.e., innate ‘switches’ that could be turned on or off based on minimal input. Parameters were supposed to account for variation across languages (e.g., some have V2 word order, others do not) and the ease and speed with which children learn this. Learners of an L2 with a different setting for the V2 parameter than the L1 were assumed to have to ‘reset’ the parameter for the L2 (e.g., Schwartz & Tomaselli, 1990). However, given the considerable microvariation across V2 languages (e.g., Westergaard, 2009a), it was difficult to uphold the idea of V2 as a parameter, also in the face of (L1 and L2) acquisition data (e.g., Westergaard, 2003, 2009b, 2021a), and it has thus been argued that V2 is instead the result of many smaller rules (e.g., Lohndal et al., 2020). When language learners violate the V2 requirement, this can be syntactically modelled as a lack of verb movement. In the following, we generally concentrate on the linear order of constituents, abstracting away from analytical questions concerning structural accounts, as the findings on the acquisition of V2 do not hinge on any specific syntactic analysis.

26.4  Learning V2 The vast majority of V2 acquisition research relies on data from longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of oral language production (corpora, spontaneous production, and some more focused elicitation). Some studies also include data from written production and/or translation. Only few studies have investigated V2 with the help of grammaticality judgments, comprehension tasks, or processing experiments, though this is slowly beginning to change.

26.4.1  Monolingual and bilingual children In the 1980s and early 1990s, some scholars proposed that monolingual and bilingual children produce V2 only after they have learned the verbal tense/agreement inflectional paradigm and/or the lexical form of complementizers, on the assumption that such forms ‘trigger’ the functional syntactic structure necessary for V2 (e.g., Clahsen, 1990/91; Clahsen & Muysken, 1989). However, numerous studies have since shown that neither the mastery of verbal inflection nor overt complementizers are a precondition for V2 (e.g., Fritzenschaft et al., 1990; Jordens, 1990; Santelmann, 1995; Westergaard, 2009b). The L1 acquisition of V2 has been investigated by a range of studies in most of the Germanic languages. There is general consensus that monolinguals master the V2 requirement early, often already by age 2 or 3. The empirical evidence for this usually comes from case studies of a handful of children between the ages of 1;10 and 4;0, based on recordings of longitudinal spontaneous interaction between the child and adult caregivers (e.g., for German, Clahsen, 1990/91 and Poeppel & Wexler, 1993; for Icelandic, Sigurjónsdóttir, 2005; for Faroese, Jonas, 1995; for Dutch, Blom, 2003; for Swedish, Santelmann, 1995 and Waldmann, 2012; and for Norwegian, Westergaard, 2009b). In these child language corpora, both subject-initial and nonsubject-initial V2 structures are attested from early on, and ungrammatical non-V2 structures (XSV or SXV) are generally rare. That said, when there are data available from a range of children for the same language, there is sometimes one child who does produce substantial proportions of nontargetlike non-V2 for some time before converging on the target (e.g., Swedish-speaking Tea in Waldmann, 2012). The dictum that typically developing children always master V2 early should therefore be tested against data from larger groups, as there might be more individual variation than generally assumed. 357

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As regards (near-)simultaneous child bilingualism in a V2 and a non-V2 language, the empirical evidence is limited and mainly consists of case studies, mostly involving German. A commonly reported finding is that 2-to-4-year-old bilinguals often produce subject-initial clauses (SVX), i.e., a linear word order that is frequent in the input and compatible with both V2 and non-V2 grammars (e.g., Meisel, 1989 for German/French; Döpke, 1998 for German/English). As far as nonsubject-initial clauses are concerned, some studies document early, abundant and error-free V2 in the child’s V2 language (Meisel, 1989 for German/French bilinguals; Fritzenschaft et al., 1990 and Tracy, 1994/95 for German/English; Bohnacker, 1999 for Icelandic/English). Other simultaneously bilingual children undergo a more protracted development, producing (targetlike) V2 alongside (nontargetlike) non-V2 (e.g., Döpke, 1998 for German/English; Meisel, 1989 for one German/ French child). A typical explanation for the occurrence of nontargetlike non-V2 is that it is due to crosslinguistic influence from the dominant non-V2 language. Nevertheless, there also appears to be a consensus that bilingual children eventually master the V2 requirement, some as early as age 2, others by age 3–4. Conversely, some bilingual children overextend nonsubject-initial V2 word order from the grammar of their V2 language to their non-V2 language, at least occasionally (e.g., Döpke, 1999 for German/English; Anderssen & Bentzen, 2018 for Norwegian/English), whereas other bilingual children do not do so (e.g., Tracy, 1994/95 for German/English; Bohnacker, 1999 for Icelandic/English; Anderssen & Bentzen, 2018 for other Norwegian/English children). Concerning successive bilingualism, where the child is exposed to an additional language from around age 3–6 (early child L2), the empirical research base is largely restricted to German. Sometimes an initial period of predominantly SVO is reported, or an initial period of nontargetlike word order. However, most case studies of successive bilingualism (starting out with a non-V2 L1, followed by exposure to a V2 L2) find that children are quick to adopt V2. Especially in immersion contexts, early child L2 learners appear to acquire the V2 requirement easily and early, after only some months of exposure (e.g., Rothweiler, 2006 for L1 Turkish/L2 German; Czinglar, 2017 for L1 Russian/L2 German). As shown below, such early acquisition of V2 appears to be less common in adult L2 learners.

26.4.2  Nonnative acquisition of V2 in adolescents and adults For adult learners, Germanic V2 has been claimed to be exceptionally difficult. L2 learners whose L1 is non-V2 have been found to acquire V2 late and to produce nontargetlike word orders for an extended time, violating the V2 constraint. Even L2 learners whose L1 is V2 have sometimes been said to start out with a non-V2 interlanguage grammar. This was related to the extensive discussion of the initial state of L2 acquisition during the 1990s, when several models of transfer/crosslinguistic influence were developed, ranging from full transfer (e.g., Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996) to partial transfer (e.g., Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 1996) to no transfer (e.g., Platzack, 1996). The partial transfer models typically argued that, while lexical elements transfer from the L1, functional categories must be re-learned in the L2. This meant that processes that involved the CP-domain, such as V2 (cf. Section 26.3), would not transfer from the L1, which gave rise to proposals that describe V2 as being universally difficult for adult nonnative learners, and for much of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, this was a commonly held view in SLA research and education. However, since the mid-2000s, research has been amassed that calls these claims into question. Empirical studies have documented different developmental paths, depending on L1/L2 and L1/L2/ L3 combinations. For certain language pairings, the evidence unambiguously points to crosslinguistic influence and early acquisition of V2, while for other pairings, V2 is mastered late. As a result, it can no longer be claimed that the syntactic property of V2 is difficult to acquire per se. 358

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26.4.2.1  Classic L2 studies of V2 acquisition In the 1970s and 1980s, the uninstructed post-puberty acquisition of German by L1 Italian, Spanish and Portuguese labor migrants aged 15–65 was studied in the Pidgin-Deutsch project (48 learners) and the ZISA project (Zweitspracherwerb italienischer, (portugiesischer) und spanischer Arbeiter, 45 learners). The oral L2 data, consisting of spontaneous production during informal interviews, indicated that these largely untutored learners struggled with German syntax and morphology. Exploring the cross-sectional data via implicational scaling, the ZISA investigators argued that all learners, irrespective of their L1, exhibited the same implicational hierarchy of developmental stages in L2 German verb placement, first producing SVO utterances and soon after (nontargetlike) non-V2 utterances (XSVO), e.g., Clahsen (1984); Clahsen et al. (1983); Clahsen and Muysken (1986, 1989); Pienemann (1998). At the time, a fundamental difference was proposed between child language learners, who make use of Universal Grammar (UG) and master verb placement early and effortlessly, and post-puberty L2 learners, who allegedly no longer have access to UG, need to resort to ‘general learning strategies’, and do not acquire V2 early, easily, fully, or ever. ZISA L2ers who did produce V2 word orders were not credited with a grammar with hierarchical structural relationships and syntactic movement, but with base-generated SVO plus ‘unnatural rules’ of linear reordering, i.e., surrogate operations of fronting, subject-verb inversion and postposing that only give the appearance of V2, as illustrated by the following quote. By fixing on an initial assumption of SVO order, and then elaborating a series of complicated rules to patch up this hypothesis when confronted with conflicting data, the L2 learners are not only creating a rule system which is far more complicated than the native system, but also one which is not definable in linguistic theory. (Clahsen & Muysken, 1986, p. 116) Not all SLA researchers agreed with such views. Reanalyses of the ZISA data (e.g., duPlessis et al., 1987; Schwartz & Tomaselli, 1990) showed that the implicational developmental stages observed in the L1 Romance learners of German could also be captured by assuming initial transfer of the Romance L1 non-V2 grammar to German, i.e., interlanguage grammars constrained by UG. These alternative analyses spurred a flurry of publications at the time. The German ZISA data have repeatedly been cited in support of the claims that (surface) V2 word order can only be acquired once an L2 learner, irrespective of their L1, has gone through an extended stage of (nontargetlike) non-V2, and furthermore, that V2 can only be acquired once the learner has acquired German OV word order (e.g., Meisel, 2011; Pienemann, 1998). In essence, these ideas reflect the notion that certain word orders are easier to process because they map semantic and pragmatic functions more straightforwardly than others, SVO aligning with the linear order of agentaction-patient and topic-first (e.g., Bever, 1970; Meisel, 2011; Pienemann, 1998, pp. 84–85). If SVO is easier to process, it will be easier to produce, and L2ers will produce it first. However, research on learners with typologically different L1s seriously called into question the alleged universality of the implicational hierarchy of developmental stages. In the early 1990s, the Lexlern project used a variety of methods to elicit a substantial corpus of oral production from elementary adult learners of German with native Turkish or Korean, i.e., speakers of SOV languages. These untutored learners (11 L1 Turkish, six L1 Korean) did not follow the ZISA implicational hierarchy, but started by producing OV, transferring the head-final VP from their L1 to their German interlanguage (Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 1994). Several studies have reported similar results for other L1 Turkish learners of German and Dutch (e.g., Jansen et al., 1981). The debate continued when Håkansson et al. (2002) published cross-sectional results from an oral elicitation task with 20 L1 Swedish-speaking teenage learners of German. Clauses that included both a subject and a verb mostly had SVX word order (85–92%). Very few clauses were nonsubject-initial 359

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V2 (0–3%), while some were non-V2 (8–12%), even though both the L1 (Swedish) and the target language (German) are V2 languages. The authors interpreted this finding as supporting the idea that L2ers, irrespective of their L1, follow the same path of development for L2 German verb placement, starting out with (X)SVO. However, these findings were not verified. Bohnacker (2005, 2006), having collected a larger database, investigated the acquisition of German V2 and OV in Swedish native speakers (23 adolescents with 3 years of classroom German, and six older adults who were ab initio learners). Here we focus on the ab initio learners, who fell into two groups, three L1 Swedish L2ers of German, and three L1 Swedish L2 English L3ers of German. After 4 months of German classes, both learner groups produced large proportions of SVX clauses (64%), a word order that is frequent in Swedish, German (and English). In the nonsubject-initial clauses however, the L2ers (who did not know English) produced exclusively V2 word orders (100%), while the L3ers (who did know English) produced both V2 (54%) and non-V2 (46%). Five months later, these rates stayed much the same. This comparative setup shows that the nontargetlike non-V2 word orders in L3 German are related to knowledge of L2 English. Since both the L2 and the L3 ab initio learners of German were able to produce targetlike nonsubject-initial V2 after only 4 months (35 hours) of exposure, it is likely that they transferred this syntactic property from their L1 Swedish grammar.1 For the L3 learners, the non-V2 property of L2 English exerted a partial counterinfluence. Crosslinguistic influence from English was evident in other language domains as well, especially the lexicon.2 Thus, both L1 Swedish and L2 English (which are typologically close and have many cognates with German) were activated and used as supplier languages in the L3ers’ German production, as illustrated in (5), from Bohnacker (2006, p. 470). (5)

and then I # denn ich geh ein studiecirkel und I go a study-circleSWE and [and then I]ENG then ‘And then I, and then I do a course where we do silk painting.’

wi mache we make

sidenmåleri. (German) silk-paintingSWE

Bohnacker suggested that the influence of the English non-V2 grammar is strengthened by the existence of pockets of non-V2 in Swedish, which had been overlooked in earlier acquisition research, in particular two sets of Swedish high-frequency adverbs that also allow non-V2, focalizing adverbs such as bara (‘only’), nästan (‘nearly’), kanske (‘maybe’), and clause-initial connective adverbs such as så (‘so/therefore’), the latter being cognate and homophonous with German. The L3ers’ mix of V2 and non-V2 patterns is explained as follows: They transfer a version of V2 from their L1 Swedish that is already less strictly V2 than German, and under the influence of L2 English, the non-V2 pattern found in pockets of Swedish grammar is extended to other adverbials in their German interlanguage. As a consequence of the findings in Bohnacker (2005, 2006), it could no longer be claimed that the syntactic property of V2 (and thus the syntax of the CP-domain) is necessarily difficult for nonnative adult learners, nor that they follow the same order of developmental stages. The acquisition of V2 has also been studied for other L1 Swedish learners of German (with English as an L2). Production tasks in a range of spoken and written genres have been used to elicit data from beginner, intermediate and advanced groups of learners (e.g., Bohnacker 2005, 2007; Bohnacker and Rosén 2008). As in previous studies, the majority of German declarative clauses produced were SVX. Nonsubject-initial clauses overwhelmingly exhibited V2 and no or only few instances of (nontargetlike) non-V2. However, the distributions of particular types of clause-initial constituents differed markedly from those found in native-German corpora (which exhibit a wide range of clause-initial adverbials and objects); instead, they matched those in native-Swedish corpora (i.e., mostly informationally light elements, including many expletives). Bohnacker and Rosén (2008) interpreted these patterns as crosslinguistic influence from L1 Swedish: While the learners evidently adhered to the syntactic V2 constraint (which Swedish and German share), the information-structural patterns continued to be an acquisitional challenge. 360

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26.4.2.2  Other studies of V2 acquisition Conradie (2005) investigated V2 in nonnative learners in South Africa, comparing adult L1 English L2ers of Afrikaans with L1 German L2 English L3ers of Afrikaans at different proficiency levels (and with native Afrikaans controls). Here we focus on Conradie’s beginners, who were tested after 70 hours of instruction. They participated in an oral production task (‘sentencemanipulation’, shuffling word cards and making as many sentences out of them as possible), as well as a written grammaticality judgment task (GJT). The native Afrikaans controls produced and accepted exclusively V2. By contrast, the L1 English L2ers (N = 8) nearly always produced (nontargetlike) non-V2 on the oral task and accepted only non-V2 word orders on the GJT. A very different picture emerged for the L1 German L2 English L3ers of Afrikaans (N = 25). In the oral sentence-manipulation task, they produced 50% V2 (targetlike) and 50% non-V2 (nontargetlike), though some individuals leaned heavily towards V2 and others towards non-V2. On the written GJT, the L1 German learners tended to accept both word orders. There was thus a striking difference between the L1 English and the L1 German groups. Conradie interprets this as evidence for L1 transfer. Furthermore, the German informants, who also accepted and produced a non-V2 word order that would be ungrammatical in their L1, are argued to additionally have influence from their L2 English, a language that they proficiently communicate in on a daily basis. Like Bohnacker (2005, 2006), Conradie (2005) finds both facilitative crosslinguistic influence of (V2-) L1 syntax as well as non-facilitative influence of the (non-V2) L2 in her L3 learners. Thus, while there are a number of models in the current field of L3 acquisition arguing that crosslinguistic influence is predominantly (or exclusively) from one of the previously acquired languages (see e.g., Puig-Mayenco et al., 2020 for an overview), Conradie’s and Bohnacker’s results resonate with models of L3 acquisition which argue for co-activation of both previously learned languages, e.g., the Linguistic Proximity Model (Westergaard et al., 2017, Westergaard, 2021a, b) and the Scalpel Model (Slabakova, 2017). Some more recent L3 acquisition studies have also found an influence of the V2 property from the L1 on the L3: Dahl et al. (2022) examined the L3 acquisition of the word orders V-Adv and XVS in nonsubject-initial declaratives, both of which are structurally similar in L1 Norwegian and L3 German. The results showed that early L3 learners whose L2 is English have no preference for either V2 or non-V2. Thus, both Norwegian and English word orders seem to compete in an emergent L3 grammar, suggesting that both previously acquired languages are activated. Jensen and Westergaard (2023) compared two Norwegian L1 learner groups who were exposed to an artificial language that is lexically and phonologically similar to their L2 English. One group was exposed only to SVO word order (frequent in both the L1 and the L2) and the other to a word order that exists only in Norwegian (postnominal possessives). In an experiment where the learners had to choose between V2 and non-V2 in nonsubject-initial declaratives (which they had not been exposed to), all learners had a preference for non-V2 (the English word order), but the group exposed to structural cues from Norwegian selected V2 to a significantly larger extent. This shows that not only lexical/phonological proximity, but also structural similarity may influence the target L3.

26.4.2.3  Urban ethnolects V2 has also been the topic of much research on urban ethnolects (e.g., Ganuza 2008; Opsahl and Nistov, 2010; Alexiadou and Lohndal, 2018; Walkden 2017, describing these varieties of Swedish, Norwegian and German). The general finding is that standard word order is intact in wh-questions (V2) and subordinate clauses (non-V2), but declarative main clauses sometimes exhibit nonstandard non-V2, as in the following example (from Opsahl, 2009, p. 117). 361

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egentlig jeg syns det er bra på en måte (Norwegian) actually I think it is good on a way ‘Actually, I think it is good in a way.’ Standard: Egentlig syns jeg det er …

The frequency of nonstandard non-V2 in urban ethnolects is generally lower than what is often assumed: e.g., Ganuza (2008) found only 3.5% non-V2 in a large corpus (126 speakers) and 9.9% in a smaller corpus (20 speakers). Furthermore, the use of non-V2 varied considerably across situational contexts and tasks and between individual speakers (some with L1 and some with L2 backgrounds and varying ages of onset). Neither linguistic nor demographic factors (alone or combined with others) could fully explain this word order variation. Such results are important because they disconfirm the hypothesis that non-V2 is a nonnative (L2) learner feature. Interestingly, Ganuza (2008) found that non-V2 was more common when adolescents talked to each other without an adult present, in a ‘high involvement’ style, often accommodating to the other interlocutor(s). Thus, urban ethnolect speakers seem to employ non-V2 as a stylistic device in certain situational contexts.

26.5  Unlearning V2 In this section we briefly examine contexts that may be described as unlearning V2, including cases where the previously acquired language(s) have the V2 property while the target language does not, as well as cases of loss or attrition due to lack of input and use of the V2 language, e.g., in returnees and in heritage children and adults.

26.5.1  L2/L3/Ln acquisition Despite numerous claims that V2 word order would not transfer into an L2 (cf. Section 26.4.2.1), many studies have found evidence of considerable V2 effects in non-V2 L2s, especially at early stages (e.g., Bohnacker, 2006; Westergaard, 2003). Targetlike non-V2 is generally mastered at later stages, although some residual effects have been found in acceptability judgments and in processing (Bosch & Unsworth, 2021; Rankin, 2012; Robertson & Sorace, 1999). Interestingly, subject-initial and nonsubject-initial declaratives behave differently in this respect: For L1 Norwegian learners of L2 English (N = 24, age 12), Westergaard (2003) found that the proportion of (nontarget) V2 word order in subject-initial declaratives was significantly higher than in nonsubject-initial clauses: see examples (7) and (8). Such findings indicate that L1 speakers of Norwegian have to unlearn two verb movement rules and that V2 is not a monolithic phenomenon (i.e., a parameter, cf. Section 26.3). (7) *John plays always soccer.   (*SVAdv, target: SAdvV, 17% accuracy) (8) *Every day plays John soccer. (*XVS, target: XSV, 49% accuracy)

Similar findings are attested in L3 studies (e.g., Westergaard et al., 2017; Jensen et al., 2023; Kolb et al., 2022), where the L3 is English in all cases, and the previously acquired languages are a non-V2 language (Russian) and a V2 language (Norwegian or German). All three studies compare the L3ers with two L2 groups, in order to isolate the effect of each language on the L3. The L2ers with a V2 L1 (Norwegian or German) produce considerable proportions of (nontarget) V2 word order in their L2 English, while the L1 Russians do not. The L3 learners generally score in between the two L2 groups, confirming older findings (e.g., Bohnacker, 2005, 2006; Conradie, 2005) and indicating that there is influence from both previously acquired languages in L3 acquisition (cf. Section 26.4.2.2). These findings constitute further evidence that V2 does transfer, also in cases where it is non-facilitative, and thus has to be unlearned or ‘lost’ in the L2/L3 acquisition process. V2 word order has also been investigated in returnees, i.e., heritage-language speakers who grow up with a V2 language as the majority language, but who then return to the country where the herit362

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age language is spoken. Flores (2010) studied Portuguese heritage children growing up in Germany and found that they experienced erosion of V2 word order after losing contact with German input (when returning to Portugal). Interestingly, the attrition of V2 was clearly linked to age: Speakers who returned before age 11 displayed great variability, while speakers returning after this age showed minimal attrition. Flores argues that language acquisition is followed by a stabilization phase in adolescence, and that the attrition effects are due to insufficient activation of the German grammar.

26.5.2  V2 in heritage languages Generally, there is less attrition of V2 in heritage languages than one might expect when the majority language is non-V2. Investigating nonsubject-initial declaratives produced by German Jews who immigrated to England and the US in the 1930s, Schmid (2002) found only 2% V2 violations. More recently, there has been considerable research into word order in Germanic heritage varieties in North America, focusing on verb movement (e.g., Hopp and Putnam (2015) for Moundridge Schweitzer German, Kühl and Heegård Petersen (2018) for heritage Danish, Arnbjörnsdottir et al. (2018) for heritage Icelandic, Larsson and Johannessen (2015) for heritage Swedish, Eide and Hjelde (2015) and Westergaard et al. (2023) for heritage Norwegian). While findings indicate that V2 word order is generally intact, these recent studies also attest more variation. For example, while V2 is robustly attested in the production of many speakers of heritage Norwegian, there are also some V2 violations in the data. Eide and Hjelde (2015) demonstrate that there is a difference between subject-initial and nonsubject-initial declaratives with respect to V2 (cf. Section 26.3 and the syntactic difference between these two constructions according to the asymmetric analysis). This discrepancy is also found in Arnbjörnsdóttir et al.’s (2018) study of heritage Icelandic. In an acceptability judgment task, heritage speakers often accepted both V2 and non-V2 in nonsubject-initial declaratives, as in (9), while they clearly preferred V2 in subject-initial declaratives, such as (10). (9)

(10)

(heritage Icelandic)

Á morgun sjáum við/við sjáum það Tomorrow see we/we see it ‘Tomorrow we see it.’

Kristín talar stundum /stundum talar … Kristin speaks sometimes/sometimes speaks … ‘Kristin sometimes speaks …’

The V2 violations in the heritage language seem to be due to influence from non-V2 word order in the dominant language, English. It is well-known that both languages of a bilingual are always active, and, when one language is used, the other one needs to be inhibited (e.g., Green, 1986). Generally, inhibiting the dominant language is more difficult than inhibiting the weaker language, which suggests that the dominant language has a stronger influence on the heritage language than vice versa. Westergaard et al. (2023) also discuss possible attrition of V2 word order by investigating a corpus of spontaneous speech produced by 50 2nd–4th generation Norwegian heritage speakers in North America. The study confirms previous findings that V2 word order is generally stable in heritage situations; nevertheless, approximately 10% V2 violations were attested in the corpus. The non-V2 word order is argued to be due to lack of activation of the heritage-language grammar, making it vulnerable to crosslinguistic influence from the speakers’ dominant language, English. Interestingly, this crosslinguistic influence does not simply replace V2 by non-V2, but operates more indirectly: Firstly, 363

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the distribution of contexts for V2 word order is affected in that there are fewer nonsubject-initial declaratives, which resonates with findings from the study of L2 learners of German in Bohnacker and Rosén (2008). Secondly, two new distinctions are introduced into the heritage language, one (indirectly) based on a similar distinction in English, viz. a difference between adverbs and negation with respect to verb movement (the heritage speakers hardly ever produce non-V2 in sentences with negation (Neg-V), but this word order does appear with adverbs (Adv-V)). Finally, there is also a statistically significant difference between initial elements in nonsubject-initial declaratives, in that short and very frequent elements (e.g., then, now, so) virtually always trigger V2, while non-V2 is more frequent with longer and less frequent adverbs. Together, these findings also indicate that crosslinguistic influence affects different contexts of V2 differently, providing support for analyses that treat V2 word order as the result of many smaller rules (cf. Section 26.3).

26.6  Concluding remarks This chapter has provided an overview of the V2 phenomenon in SLA research, with a focus on the numerous studies of this construction in different populations. Empirical findings from these studies have been important for the syntactic analysis of V2 as well as for theories of transfer and crosslinguistic influence in nonnative language acquisition. Many of these V2 studies have focused on learners of L2 or L3 German, so future research could profitably study new language combinations, and here the microvariation across Germanic V2 languages (cf. Sections 26.1 and 26.4.2.1) deserves more attention. Furthermore, as some of the generalizations about V2 acquisition are based on relatively small samples or case studies, larger groups should be investigated, while controlling for exposure and language background (i.e., taking into account all previously learned languages (L3/Ln)). Another worthy endeavor would be longitudinal studies that trace the entire developmental trajectory from the emergence of V2 until provision plateaus or reaches ceiling, using repeated measures for a variety of tasks. Despite the large number of existing studies, surprisingly little has been done on the processing of V2, and there are still many unexplored aspects of this phenomenon. For instance, how do comprehension, acceptability judgments, and production of V2 and non-V2 word order go together for learners of different language backgrounds? A combination of behavioral tasks with newer online processing measures may be promising here. We thus expect V2 to remain one of the core linguistic constructions to be investigated also in future L2 and L3/Ln studies.

Notes 1 Other aspects of the learners’ German interlanguage syntax were strikingly nontargetlike, such as the placement of the nonfinite verb vis-à-vis its complement/object (see Bohnacker, 2006 for details). The acquisition of V2 is thus not developmentally dependent on target headedness of the VP (here, OV) having been acquired first. See also Bohnacker (2005) on V2 and OV in L1 Swedish intermediate learners of German. 2 The L3ers frequently used English words (alongside Swedish ones) in their German production; they sometimes began their utterances in English and then switched to German (see (5)) and used English editing elements in self-repairs, introspective and metalinguistic comments.

References Alexiadou, A., & Lohndal, T. (2018). V3 in Germanic: A comparison of urban vernaculars and heritage languages. Linguistische Berichte, 25, 245–264. Anderssen, M., & Bentzen, K. (2018). Different outcomes in the acquisition of residual V2 and do-support in three Norwegian-English bilinguals: Cross-linguistic influence, dominance and structural ambiguity. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2130. Arnbjörnsdóttir, B., Thráinsson, H., & Nowenstein, I. (2018). V2 and V3 orders in North-American Icelandic. Journal of Language Contact, 11(3), 379–412.

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27 INTERROGATIVES Gita Martohardjono and Pamela Franciotti

27.1 Introduction Interrogatives have been a staple of language acquisition research since the 70s when systematic investigations into wh-questions and yes-no questions resulted in proposals for universal patterns of development (Wode, 1976, p. 70). Crosslinguistically, interrogative structures can involve prosodic, lexical, morphological and syntactic properties, such as specific intonation; selection of question words or particles; verbal inflection; use of non-canonical word order; and placement of the question element. Traditional studies on the development of interrogatives have focused on the order of acquisition of these elements in both naturalistic (L1 and L2) and instructed (L2) modes (e.g., Bellugi, 1965; Spada & Lightbown, 1999, among others). More recent approaches to interrogatives have attempted to explain the acquisition and development of questions, based either on grammatical representation or processing operations. Like the L2 acquisition literature in general, studies on interrogatives have overwhelmingly focused on Western European languages, especially L2 English, L2 German, and to some extent, L2 Spanish and L2 French. Investigations have focused on wh-questions and yes/no questions and their associated phenomena: placement of the wh-word (sentence-initial or in-situ) and its interaction with universal and language-particular principles (see Section 27.2.2); and word order (see Sections 27.3.2 and 27.3.3). In this chapter we present and discuss some of the most significant findings on the L2 acquisition of wh-questions and yes/no questions in the last decade or so. We illustrate how interrogatives have been used in SLA theory and give a brief summary of methodology and results for a number of select studies focusing on L2 adults. Two major approaches have been taken in the study of interrogatives: grammar-based and processing-based accounts. In Section 27.2 we present findings from studies that are primarily based on grammatical explanation, mostly within a generative framework; Section 27.3 presents studies with a focus on the L2 processing of interrogatives, including those that investigate interaction with the L1 grammar and those that center on processing strategies alone.

27.2  Grammar-based studies of interrogatives in L2 acquisition Interrogatives figured largely in the early years of generative SLA theory, especially during the Principles and Parameters phase. Research within this framework was not so much concerned with describing the sequential development of interrogatives as it was with potential maturational effects

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on Universal Grammar (UG) (White, 2003). This was motivated by the belief that behavioral differences between monolingual native speakers and L2 learners could best be explained by positing differences in grammatical representation. Wh-questions, and, to a lesser extent, yes/no questions, became part of the focus of generative SLA theory because of their relevance to syntactic constraints on movement, either that of wh-words (constrained by Island Effects) or of verbs (constrained by Subject-Aux Inversion (see Section 27.2.2.2) or V-to-I movement).

27.2.1  Methods used to probe interrogatives Following the intuition-based methodology of generative syntax, early generative SLA studies used grammaticality judgments as their primary experimental task, although some also included production tasks (e.g., Flynn, 1984; Hawkins & Chan, 1997). Metalinguistic judgment was at the time seen as the most appropriate way of making inferences about the L2 grammar. In later years, attention shifted to extra-grammatical factors, most notably processing, as playing a significant role in L2 acquisition (see Section 27.3). As a result, tasks and measures commonly used in psycholinguistics, such as reaction times (RTs), self-paced reading and eye-movement while reading and in the Visual World Paradigm (VWP), began to be used as well (see Section 27.3). In what follows, a description of the methodologies used is included when appropriate.

27.2.2  Studies on wh-dependencies in questions In some languages, wh-questions create a dependency between the wh-word and its argument position in the equivalent declarative sentence (see (1a–b)). This relationship is also termed “filler-gap” dependency: in questions the wh-word is the “filler” and the position of the questioned word in the equivalent declarative is the “gap”. Some, though not all wh-questions, violate a set of principles of Universal Grammar that govern long-distance dependencies across clauses, creating so-called “Island Effects” (for a recent treatment of this phenomenon from a psycholinguistic perspective, see Sprouse & Hornstein, 2013). (1) a. Susan read War and Peace in one sitting. b. Whati did Susan read___i in one sitting? War and Peace.

In (1b), the word what is related thematically to the argument of the verb read, i.e., War and Peace. Wh- gap dependencies can be unbounded in the sense that they can hold across several clauses (and arguably across an unlimited number of clauses) as seen in (2). (2)  a.  Whati did Leigh think cp[that Susan read __ i in one sitting]?  b. Whati did John claim cp[that Leigh thought cp[that Susan read___i in one sitting]]?

With certain clause-types, e.g., relative clauses (3b) the wh-gap dependency becomes degraded and results in unacceptability. (3)  a.  Jill likes the bookstore [RC that sells War and Peace in fifty languages].  b. *Whati did Jill like the bookstore [that sells __i in fifty languages]?

In other languages wh-questions do not form a dependency: the wh-word holds the same argument position as in the declarative (“wh-in-situ”), thereby avoiding Island Effects. This crosslinguistic contrast provided the opportunity for L2 investigations of UG accessibility and L1 transfer. Starting in the late 80s language pairs with and without wh-gap dependencies were examined to test L2 learners’ sensitivity to Island Effects. Studies focused on the L2 English of learners whose

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first language had “wh-in-situ”. Typically L2 groups showed significantly higher acceptance rates of island violations than native speaker control groups, although this was modulated by proficiency. This led to the initial conclusion that adult L2 learners were no longer sensitive to UG constraints unless these were also instantiated in their L1, leading to L1 transfer as the primary explanation for L2 behaviour (Schachter, 1990; Johnson & Newport, 1989). Several studies (e.g., Martohardjono, 1993; White, 1988, 1992; White & Juffs, 1998; Yusa, 1999) subsequently demonstrated that learners of L2 English coming from a variety of in-situ languages did in fact exhibit island effects in their L2 and that another factor needed to be taken into consideration: Island effects are modulated by type of island: “Strong” islands, for example wh-questions out of relative clauses (see 4a), were recognized by L2 learners to a higher degree than “weak” islands, such as wh-questions out of NP complements (see 4b)1. (4)  a.  *What1 did you watch the program that was showing__1? b. ?? What1 did you hear the news that Trump did__1?

Importantly, this pattern of gradience across weak and strong islands was also seen in native speakers (Sprouse & Hornstein, 2013), suggesting that differential island effects were operative for native and non-native speakers alike, even if they did not result in identical behaviour across the two groups. As an alternative explanation of native/non-native differences, some researchers appealed to performance factors, such as differences in L1 and L2 processing procedures, input frequencies, etc. (for a comprehensive discussion of island effects in L2 acquisition, see Belikova & White, 2009; for further discussion of island constraints, see Sprouse, this volume). With the arrival of the Minimalist Program in generative theory, the locus for crosslinguistic differences shifted from parameters to abstract syntactic features specified for items in the lexicon. Under this view syntactic features that are devoid of semantic content (e.g., agreement and case markers, resumptive pronouns) are classified as “uninterpretable”. SLA theory followed suit with the Interpretability Hypothesis (IH). For example, Hawkins and Hattori (2006) and Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007) postulated that uninterpretable features are not accessible in adult L2 learning unless they are also available in the L1. Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007) applied this to the acquisition of wh-questions by L1 Greek learners of L2 English. Greek optionally allows resumptive pronouns in wh-questions and the finding that L1 Greek learners accepted resumptives in English questions such as (5) led the authors to argue for the IH in SLA. (5) *What did you say that Maria forgot it when she was leaving home?

This conclusion was challenged by Leal Méndez and Slabakova (2014) and Leal Méndez et al. (2016) who pointed to potential issues in Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou’s methodology. First, the optionality of resumptive pronouns in Greek wh-questions exacerbates individual variation; and second, without context, wh-questions can lead to increased difficulties in a judgement task, especially for lower level L2 learners. Focusing on Kuwaiti Arabic, a language with obligatory resumptive pronouns in wh-questions, Leal Méndez et al. used context sentences and a bimodal presentation (text + audio) showing that their learner groups correctly rejected illicit resumptive pronouns in English wh-questions. Interest in wh-questions and their interaction with island effects largely receded in the 2000s (but see Aldwayan et al., 2010 discussed in Section 27.3 and Covey et al., 2022) until it was revived by studies in Experimental Syntax (Sprouse & Hornstein, 2013) which examined these effects in native speakers using a combination of online and offline methods. Following this approach, Kush and Dahl (2020) looked at embedded wh-questions to test island effects in the L2 English of L1 Norwegian speakers. Both English and Norwegian exhibit island effects, but the two languages differ in the 370

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particular structures affected: Wh-islands are ungrammatical in English but not in Norwegian, while Subject Islands are ungrammatical in both (compare (6) and (7)).2 (6)  a.  *Those were the signalsi that the sailors knew [who could understand i __]. b. Det var signal-ene i som sjømennene visste [hvem som kunne forstå__ ]. That was signal​-def​​.pl that seamen​-def​​.pl knew who expl could understand (7) a.  *The judge read the reporti that the lawyer hoped that [the information in __i ] would     confirm the suspicions b. *Dommer-en leste rapport-eni som advokaten    håpet at [opplysning-ene __ i] Judge​-def​​.sg read report​-def​​.sg      that. lawyer​-def​.​sg. hoped that information​-def​​.sg ville bekrefte mistank-ene would confirm suspicion​-def​​.pl

Transfer from the L1 predicts acceptance of (6a) and rejection of (7a), but results from their L2 learner groups, tested in both languages, showed a significant wh-island effect in English, which was unexpected. A significant subject-island effect was found, as expected, in both English and Norwegian. The wh-island effect was smaller than the subject effect in both languages and follow-up analyses revealed less consistency in the treatment of English items than the Norwegian items, indicating a level of indeterminacy in the recognition of L2 English violations. Kush & Dahl interpret this as evidence for the initial transfer of the functional structure in Norwegian onto the L2 English. However, they concede that restructuring of the L2 must also have taken place, since the learners did in fact reject wh-island violations in English to a significantly higher degree than they did in Norwegian, indicating some recognition of the L2 violation.

27.2.2.1  Interrogatives as measures of computational complexity in the grammar Another set of studies focuses on how structural complexity affects L2 acquisition of questions. In a production task, Slavkov (2015) examines the development of long-distance wh-questions in L2 English by L1 French Canadian and L1 Bulgarian speakers. Based on the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis (DCH; Jakubowicz, 2005), a model originally conceived for child language acquisition, Slavkov predicts that less complex wh-structures will be produced before more complex ones, measured by the number of derivations required (i.e., the greater the number of merging operations the greater the complexity). By this measure, wh-questions requiring both do-insertion and wh-movement (see 8a) are more complex than yes/no questions requiring only do-insertion (8b): (8)  a.  What do you think Mary is eating __? b. Do you think Mary is eating pizza?

Both L1 French and Bulgarian groups produced long-distance wh-questions in L2 English. This was expected, since these constructions are present in all three languages. However, compared to the native speaker control group, learners also produced a large number of alternative structures, such as biclausal sentences with short or no wh-movement, medial wh-constructions and monoclausal questions. Slavkov saw this as evidence of an avoidance strategy: Structures with higher complexity 371

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are avoided in favour of structures with lower complexity, even if higher-complexity structures are available in the L1. (9) DCH complexity hierarchy for wh-questions:   Long Distance wh-movement > Medial wh-constructions> constructions with short movement > constructions with no movement

Of particular interest were the wh-medial constructions such as (10). (10) a. *who do you think who ate the sandwich? (wh-copying)  b. * what do you think where John is? (wh-scope)

Interestingly, neither of these constructions are allowed in L1 French or Bulgarian, while the target LD wh-question is, suggesting that, rather than L1 transfer, complexity seemed to play a role. The DCH is also tested in late L2 learners of English whose L1 is a variety of German spoken by Mennonites in southwestern Kansas, Plautdietsch (PD; Hopp et al., 2019). Using production and judgment tasks, Hopp et al. compare the L2 group to heritage speakers (HSs) of Plautdietsch who are dominant in the later-learned language, English. They find that wh-medial constructions were produced to a higher degree in the weaker language of either group (i.e., English in the late L2 learners and Plautdietsch in the HSs of PD), regardless of whether the dominant language allowed these constructions. This was taken as evidence against crosslinguistic transfer from the dominant language. Instead, the authors propose that wh-medial constructions serve as a scaffold in the processing of complex sentences, since they are simpler and require less working memory than longdistance wh-constructions. By capturing the interplay of processing difficulty and stability of mental representations (i.e., between the processor and the grammar), the authors argue that the DCH can serve as a metric to predict developmental sequences of constructions varying in complexity. The fact that wh-medial constructions are allowed in many languages also lends support to the “no-rogue grammar” view that L2 grammar construction, even if non-target-like, does not deviate from what is licensed by Universal Grammar. The approach to the development of wh-questions taken in DCH studies is notably different from that described in Section 27.1.2, where accessibility to UG and L1 transfer were seen as the primary sources of non-target L2 behaviour. In DCH studies, the focus is rather on the computational procedures underlying L2 grammar construction. While not directly measuring L2 processing through the use of online methods these studies explicitly accord processing factors a role in L2 grammar construction, opening the door to a closer examination of the L2 parser (see Section 27.3).

27.2.2.2  Studies involving Aux or Verb movement in questions Another aspect of the syntax of questions is inversion of the finite verb and the subject, also known as Subject-Aux Inversion (SAI), Verb to Infl movement (V-to-I) or Tense-to-Complementizer movement, whereby the tense-bearing element (aux or verb) moves from the TP (Tense Phrase) to the CP (Complementizer Phrase). In many languages, inversion is a syntactic property of both wh-questions and yes/no questions. Observationally, child L1 studies have shown that “inversion errors” are common and can last until the age of six (Ambridge et al., 2006; Brown, 1968; Klima & Bellugi, 1966; Thornton, 2008). For adult L2 acquisition, various studies find persistence of inversion errors with a variety of modulating factors: L1 transfer (Jackson, 1981; MacDonald, 2000; Spada & Lightbown, 1999; Zobl, 1992), type of interrogative, i.e., yes-no or wh-question (Eckman et al., 1989; Pienemann et al., 1988) and type of wh-word used (Lee, 2008). 372

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Chilla and Bonnesen (2012) compared the L2 acquisition of French and German using a production study and found a notable difference between adults learning an L2 and children learning L1 and L2. Adults do not show parallel mastery of finite verb endings, inversion and question word placement, while children do. This dissociation between syntax and morphology was also reported in a study on the L2 acquisition of Spanish by L1 English speakers at varying levels of proficiency. Testing subjectverb inversion in yes/no questions and wh-questions, Guijarro-Fuentes and Larrañaga (2011) found that mastery of verbal inflection lags behind mastery of syntax, with learners of lower proficiency showing greater accuracy in subject-verb inversion than in person and number agreement. Pozzan and Quirk (2013) tested L1 Spanish and Chinese learners of L2 English on yes-no and wh-questions questions in main and embedded clauses using an elicited production task. Spanish has inversion in both main and embedded questions, although it is optional in adjunct questions (why, if) and yes/no questions. Spanish and English differ in embedded clause questions, with Spanish requiring inversion and English disallowing it. Chinese, on the other hand, disallows inversion in any type of question. An L1 transfer explanation predicts that L1 Spanish speakers should outperform L1 Chinese speakers in main clause question, since inversion occurs in Spanish and English but not Chinese. In embedded clauses, on the other hand, L1 Chinese speakers should outperform L1 Spanish speakers since Chinese and English do not allow inversion in this type of question. Results did not exactly follow these L1-based predictions. Instead, higher inversion rates were found for both groups in main clause yes/no questions than in wh-questions. In embedded clauses there were higher (non-target) inversion rates in wh-questions than in yes/no questions. These patterns were largely in line with early L2 studies (e.g., Pienemann et al., 1988; Spada & Lightbown, 1999) and with patterns found for children acquiring English as their L1 (Gleitman et al., 1984; Klima & Bellugi, 1966). Pozzan and Quirk conclude that inversion errors are a developmental phenomenon, constrained by the same factors in the two types of acquisition.

27.3  Studies on L2 processing of interrogatives Growing awareness that performance factors must also play a role in L2 acquisition, and in particular, that difficulties in processing the L2 input might mask underlying competence3 led to L2 research that included measures of processing load, such as RTs, and other online measures, such as eye-movements in eye-tracking-while-reading tasks and VWP studies (e.g., Juffs & Harrington, 1995, 1996; Juffs, 2005). In one of the first studies of this type, Juffs and Harrington (1995) collected judgements and reading times from a group of L1 Chinese L2 learners of English with a self-paced reading task (Just et al., 1982) comparing their performance to that of English native speakers. The aim was to see (i) whether the L2 and native speaker groups had comparable responses in the judgement task and (ii) whether differences in accuracy between the two groups correlated with reading times at the site of the gap and after the gap. Structures tested were grammatical subject and object who/which questions and ungrammatical who/what questions containing a variety of island violation (examples from Juffs & Harrington, 1995, p. 496): (11) a. *Who does Sam deny the story that he kissed _? (complex NP island)  b. Which man did Jane say her friend likes _? (finite, object extraction)  c. Who does Tom expect _ to fire the manager? (infinitival, subject extraction)

In the judgment task, learner and control groups showed island effects. Furthermore, both groups showed a subject/object asymmetry with longer reading times for subject (11c) than object extracted dependencies (11b), suggesting a higher processing load for the former due to a greater number of reanalysis operations. The similarity in these patterns across native and non-native groups showed convergence both in grammatical representation and processing procedures. However, the L2 group 373

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exhibited overall longer reading times when compared to native speakers, indicating that the point of divergence lay mainly in increased processing load when parsing sentences in the L2, rather than in the grammar per se. Similar results were reported in Juffs & Harrington (1996), Juffs (2005) and Dussias and Piñar (2010).

27.3.1  Interaction between L2 grammar and the parser By incorporating processing measures into the design, the goal was now to come to a better understanding of the interplay between L2 grammar and parser; whether and how learners use L2 syntax during real-time language processing; whether L2 learners deploy incremental language parsing strategies similar to what had been established for native speakers (e.g., Frazier & Clifton, 1989); and exploring similarities and differences in native and non-native parsing in general. For example, Williams et al. (2001) investigated the L2 processing of object which-questions in L2 learners of English with different L1s (Chinese, Korean and German). One aim was to test whether L2 learners would adopt the active filler-gap strategy postulated by Frazier and Clifton (1989) for monolingual speakers, whereby the parser posits a gap at the first syntactically available position. Another was to test plausibility effects. L2 learners were asked to read which-questions with plausible and implausible fillers in a self-paced reading task and to stop the sentence at the point of implausibility. Reading times were collected at the critical regions following the NP in bold below (examples from Williams et al., 2001, p. 516): (12) a. Which girl did the man push the bike into __ late last night?  b. Which river did the man push the bike into__ late last night? 

(plausible) (implausible)

The plausibility distinction between (12a) and (12b) is predicated on a gap being postulated immediately after the verb push, which would make the girl, but not the river, a likely argument. L2 learners, regardless of their L1 background, showed significantly longer reading times at the critical region, demonstrating the so-called “filled-gap effect” that is also seen in native parsing. That is, in wh-fronted questions, L2 learners expect a gap rather than an NP, indicating that they, like native speakers, follow Frazier and Clifton’s active filler-gap strategy. L2 learners and native speakers also patterned alike in showing sensitivity to plausibility constraints, indicating that the sentence stopped making sense at the NP region more often in the implausible than the plausible condition. Taken together these findings support the hypothesis that L2 learners adopt the same strategies as native speakers when parsing the target language (see also Williams, 2006 for more evidence on the use of plausibility constraints and Dussias & Piñar, 2010 for the contribution of cognitive resources on effective use of plausibility in L2). Other studies, however, argued for fundamental differences in L1 and L2 parsing strategies. In a widely cited study, Clahsen and Felser (2006) proposed the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), according to which L2 learners rely primarily on semantic rather than syntactic features when parsing the L2. In a follow-up study, Felser et al. (2012) used eye-tracking methodology to test the SSH on the L2 processing of wh-dependencies and concluded that while L2 learners recognize island constraints, subtle differences in timing between native and non-native groups suggest higher sensitivity to semantic features than to syntactic features in nonnative parsing.4 Evidence against the SSH comes from Aldwayan et al. (2010) who investigated L1 Najdi Arabic learners of L2 English, again probing the issues of L2 incremental processing and access to L2 syntactic representations. Two self-paced reading tasks were used: The first tested the filled-gap effect found in Williams et al. (2001) using sentence pairs like those below. If L2 learners, like native speakers, expect a wh-gap dependency in 13b (but not in the if-clause in 13a), a slowdown in reading time is expected (for b compared to a) after the verb (photograph) in the subordinate clause. 374

Interrogatives (13) a. My brother asked if Barbara will photograph us/Sam beside Mom at the graduation.  b. My brother asked who Barbara will photograph us/Sam beside__ at the graduation.

The second task tested whether L2 learners would avoid positing an ungrammatical gap within a complex NP island (14 a and b). Here no slowdown was expected in 14b compared to 14a if L2 learners, again like native speakers, respect island constraints and avoid positing a gap after the preposition (about) in 14b. (14) a. My sister wondered if [the boring comments about John’s used car] were intended to entertain someone.  b. My sister wondered who [the boring comments about John’s used car] were intended to entertain ___.

The predictions were borne out by the results, with no significant differences between the native speaker and L2 groups. Aldyawan et al. interpret this as evidence against the SSH, since their results show similar patterns between L2 leaner and native groups, indicating sensitivity to syntactic features in L2 processing, rather than just to semantic ones. Interesting evidence for differential processing of wh-gaps in L2 English by L1 Chinese speakers comes from an ERP study by Covey et al. (2022). Comparing evoked potential types (N400 vs. P600) across native speakers and L2 learners, Covey et al. find that both groups showed sensitivity to island constraints, yet evidence for gap prediction was found in native speakers only and seemed to be limited in L2 learners. Studies on predictive processing in L2 are only beginning, but may lead to fruitful avenues of identifying what extra-grammatical factors contribute to differences in L1/L2 processing.

27.3.2  Co-activation of L1 word order on L2 parsing of wh-questions Crosslinguistically, the interpretation of wh-questions is affected by L1/L2 differences in word order options. This has been tested in a series of studies on L1 German/L2 English learners. Rankin (2014) used a picture selection task to ask whether L2 learners use L1 German (V2/OV) options which lead to ambiguity when interpreting unambiguous wh-questions in English (compare sentences below, taken from Rankin, 2014, p. 436): (15) a. Was jagt die Katze? what.NOM/ACC chase.3ps the.FEM.NOM/ACC cat Reading 1: “What is chasing the cat?” Reading 2: “What is the cat chasing?”

(ambiguous S/O)



(ambiguous S/O)

b.

Was hat die Katze gejagt?  what.NOM/ACC has.3ps the.FEM.NOM/ACC cat chased Reading 1: “What has chased the cat?” Reading 2: “What has the cat chased?”

(16) a. What chases the cat? b. What does the cat chase?

Subject only  Object only

Results showed a slight tendency to assign an object interpretation to a subject question, though not the other way around. Rankin concludes that even at reasonably higher levels of proficiency, L1 word order options can still interfere in L2 parsing of wh-questions. 375

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In a more recent VWP study, Hopp and Grüter (2021) extended the investigation to L1 structural priming effects. L2 English which-questions were primed by German and Japanese questions in two independent experiments with L1 German and L1 Japanese learners, respectively. Participants’ responses were measured via eye-movement and offline comprehension questions to two contrasting images, one depicting a subject interpretation, the other an object interpretation. Offline interpretation responses confirmed the L1 German object bias found in Rankin’s studies (lower accuracy for English subject wh-questions). However, this bias was found regardless of the L1 German prime, and hence could not be driven by L1 structural priming. Instead, the authors suggest that the bias was due to the activation of the L1 word order during L2 parsing. Eye-tracking results from the same experiment did show an effect of crosslinguistic priming in the form of anticipatory looks towards the target picture in the L2 English trials, but only when the German prime and the English target matched in meaning (object-object); no crosslinguistic priming effect was found when the L1 German object question preceded the L2 English subject question (same word order, mismatched meaning). In a second experiment, the task was replicated with Japanese prime structures and administered to L1 Japanese/L2 English learners to see whether findings from Experiment 1 were language specific (driven by the L1 grammar). Offline comprehension results indicated the well-attested subject/object asymmetry (higher accuracy for subject questions) and no structural priming was found. In the eyegaze data, L1 Japanese learners showed priming by L1 Japanese object questions when processing L2 object questions. These mixed results led the authors to conclude that, while co-activation of L1 word order options has influence on the interpretation of L2 wh-questions, “real-time L2 sentence comprehension is remarkably robust against competition from conflicting L1-based parses” (p. 23).

27.3.3  Processability Theory: processing as the sole explanation of development In contrast to the studies described so far, which investigate L2 processing in conjunction to potential influence from the L1 grammar, Processability Theory (PT) offers a more radical approach to the study of interrogatives (Pienemann, 1998). Based on Levelt’s (1989) model of speech production and Bresnan’s Lexical Functional Grammar (2001), PT posits that L2 development is governed by a hierarchy of computational routines that outweigh transfer from the L1 grammar. Structural options available in L1 and L2 are hypothesized to be produced only after the necessary computational routines are acquired. Pienemann specifies that PT does not seek to determine the properties of grammar. Instead, the goal is to construct a model of language development based on psychological and processing principles, “focusing solely on the developmental problem as an explanatory issue” (p. 2). The development of interrogatives falls under the Prominence Hypothesis (PH) within PT (Bettoni & Di Biase, 2015), which posits that at the first stage the L2 learner does not differentiate between grammatical and discourse functions, e.g., between subject and topic. Once this differentiation occurs and question words are labeled as topic or focus, they are added to the canonical string and placed in a position of prominence, usually at the beginning of the sentence. Canonical word order is predicted to precede non-canonical word order. For both wh-questions and yes-no questions the following sequence is predicted: (17) Stage 1: Lemma or one-word questions Stage 2:  Canonical word order marked only by prosody declaratives Stage 3: Question-element followed by canonical word order Stage 4: Non-canonical word order

to

distinguish

questions

from­

While this sequence is meant to be universal, the particular structural outcomes are language-specific, depending on the grammatical elements required by the language. Importantly, the sequence con376

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stitutes an implicational hierarchy: learners at more advanced stages may still produce structures belonging to less advanced ones, but not vice versa. Morphological development is considered distinct from syntactic development and the above sequence applies only to the syntax of questions. The main methodology used in PT studies is collection of naturalistic speech through elicitation tasks. Because PT is a theory of development (both for L1 and L2) oral longitudinal studies are considered ideal, though cross-sectional data collection at various proficiency levels is allowed and constitute the bulk of the data presented in the studies reviewed here. Analysis consists of checking oral production data against language-particular sequences predicted by the theory. A particular structure is deemed to be acquired once it is used productively and systematically in the output. Data supporting PH in the adult L2 acquisition of interrogatives have been collected from several languages, including L2 Japanese (Kawaguchi, 2019), L2 Italian (Bettoni & Ginelli, 2015), and L2 German (Jansen & Di Biase, 2015). In their study of wh-questions in L2 Italian, Bettoni and Ginelli (2015) note that while Italian word order is primarily SVO, it is relatively free, governed by discourse and pragmatic choices. For example, Italian allows post-verbal subjects, so that the NP il ragazzo/the boy in the sentence “Chi ha chiamato il ragazzo?” is ambiguous between a subject or an object questions (either “who did the boy call?” or “who called the boy?”). Topicalized and focused elements appear at the beginning of the sentence and clitics are required with object topicalization (e.g., La tortaobj/foc, la obj clitic mangia il ragazzo subj / “As for the cake, the boy is eating it”). The predicted sequence for Italian wh-questions is given in (18), starting with single words marked by question prosody to canonical word order first preceded then followed by the question word, and, at the highest stage, non-canonical word order with the inclusion of clitics: (18) Single words + prosody > SV + Que > Que + SV > TOP + Que + Clitic + VS > TOP+ Que + CliticAux VS

L2 Italian learners from a variety of L1 backgrounds and at various stages of proficiency were tested with an elicited production task. As seen in (19), they found that most of the participants have passed initial Stages 1 and 2, topicalizing wh-words with canonical word order. A few are at Stage 4 and 5, correctly producing post-verbal subjects, and in some instances, cliticization. (1) Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Stage 5

none attested What? When? tu preferisci quale musica? you prefer-2sg which music? Dove tu trovi questi fiori where you find-2sg these flowers Qualche musica preferiscia Marco? What music prefer-3sg Marco? Elisa dove l’hai conosciuta Elisa where CL-have-2sg met​-FEM​​.sg

(lemma access) (SV+Que canonical) (Que+SV canonical) (Que+VS non-canonical ) (TOP1 Que+ Cl1 VS non-canonical)

Importantly, the hierarchy is maintained by all: participants who produce higher stage utterances also produce lower stage ones, but not the other way around.

27.4 Conclusions As we have seen in this chapter, the L2 acquisition of interrogatives has been approached from the perspective of grammatical representation as well as processing procedures. Basing itself on a purely 377

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grammatical explanation of native/non-native differences, early generative SLA investigated interrogative structures to see whether and how Universal Grammar and L1 grammars constrain their development. Wh-questions and Yes-No questions were examined mainly through the lens of the particular operations or features required by the L2 and not instantiated in the L1 (e.g., island effects, subject-verb inversion, absence or presence of resumptive pronouns) and whether these are attainable in L2 acquisition. In more recent years, and with the inclusion of online methodologies, the role of processing in L2 grammar construction has gained more prominence, but the main questions still revolve around whether and how the L1 grammar interacts with and affects L2 parsing. As this stage of the field is fairly recent, we must await further studies, looking also at a greater range of L1s and L2s, to come to any definitive conclusions as to whether native/non-native differences can best be explained by differences in grammatical representation or processing procedures. But the pursuit of studies on L2 processing is an important step forward and offers promising directions in deepening our understanding of attested phenomena related to the development of interrogatives. Exclusively processing-based accounts, such as PT’s Prominence Hypothesis, on the other hand, are rare. But its focus on explaining development, rather than properties, of grammar has resulted in explicit predictions of how interrogatives, wh- and yes/no questions alike, should progress in the L2. Studies undertaken within this framework have so far lent support to the predicted sequence, but they have overwhelmingly focused on naturalistic speech production, (and in fact intentionally avoided comprehension). Although psycholinguistic measures, such as RTs, have occasionally been used (e.g., Pienemann, 2002), they are only considered useful for testing procedural knowledge, and not developmental trajectories, which is the main goal of the theory. It may be the case that the approach taken in PT is more adept for applications to L2 pedagogy, for example, knowing at which stage in L2 development it is useful to introduce non-canonical word order in the teaching of questions. Grammar-based explanations, on the other hand, do not readily offer such pedagogical applications to questions, being primarily concerned with mental representation and its interaction with the parser. What both grammar- and processing-based investigations have revealed, however, is that in spite of their structural complexity, interrogatives are attainable in the L2 and that deeper investigations into their processing are likely to shed more light into why we find the distinct developmental patterns observed.

Notes 1 Other types of constructions, which for reasons of space we are not exemplifying here, are involved in the strong-to-weak classification. 2 Note that while the property tested was the islandhood of embedded wh-questions, the actual experimental items used here were relative clauses. 3 For a conceptual treatment of this question, see e.g., Klein & Martohardjono 1999; for empirical studies, see e.g., White & Juffs (1998) and Prévost & White (2000). 4 We do not discuss these studies in detail here, as they focused on relative clauses rather than interrogatives.

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Gita Martohardjono and Pamela Franciotti Juffs, A., & Harrington, M. (1995). Parsing effects in second language sentence processing: Subject and object asymmetries in wh-Extraction. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 17(4), 483–516. https://doi​.org​/10​ .1017​/S027226310001442X Juffs, A., & Harrington, M. (1996). Garden path sentences and error data in second language sentence processing. Language Learning, 46, 283–323. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/j​.1467​-1770​.1996​.tb01237.x Just, M. A., Carpenter, P. A., & Woolley, J. D. (1982). Paradigms and processes in reading comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 111, 228–238. Kawaguchi, S. (2019). Acquiring yes/no questions in Japanese as a second language: A cross-sectional study. The International Journal of Communication and Linguistic Studies, 13–34. https://doi​.org​/10​.18848​/2327​ -7882​/CGP​/v17i02​/13​-34 Klein, E. C., & Martohardjono, G. (Eds.). (1999). The development of second language grammars: A generative approach (Vol. 18). John Benjamins Publishing. Klima, E. S., & Bellugi, U. (1966). Syntactic regularities in the speech of children. In J. Lyons & R. J. Wales (Eds.), Psycholinguistic papers: The proceedings of the 1966 Edinburgh conference (pp. 183–219). Edinburgh University Press. Kush, D., & Dahl, A. (2020). L2 transfer of L1 island-insensitivity: The case of Norwegian. Second Language Research. http://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0267658320956704. Leal Méndez, T., & Slabakova, R. (2014). The interpretability hypothesis again: A partial replication of Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007). International Journal of Bilingualism, 18(6), 537–557. Leal Méndez, T., Slabakova, R., Ivanov, I., & Tryzna, M. (2016). Uninterpretable features in L2A again: Interrogatives in the L2 English of Kuwaiti Arabic speakers. In Proceedings of the 13th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition conference (GASLA 2015) ed. David Stringer (pp. 101–112). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Lee, S.-Y. (2008). Argument–adjunct asymmetry in the acquisition of inversion in wh questions by Korean learners of English. Language Learning, 58, 625–663. Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From intention to articulation. The MIT Press. Martohardjono, G. (1993). Wh-movement in the acquisition of a second language: A cross-linguistic study of 3 languages with and without overt movement. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. McDonald, J. L. (2000). Grammaticality judgments in a second language: Influences of age of acquisition and native language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 21, 395–423. Pienemann, M. (1998). Developmental dynamics in L1 and L2 acquisition: Processability theory and generative entrenchment. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1(1), 1–20. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/ S1366728998000017 Pienemann, M. (2002). Issues in second language acquisition and language processing. Second Language Research, 18(3), 189–192. Pienemann, M., Johnston, M., & Brindley, G. (1988). Constructing an acquisition based procedure for second language assessment. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 10(2), 217–243. https://doi/10.1017/ S0272263100007324 Pozzan, L., & Quirk, E. (2013). Second language acquisition of English questions: An elicited production study. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35(6), 1055–1086. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0142716412000690 Prévost, P., & White, L. (2000). Missing surface inflection or impairment in second language acquisition? Evidence from tense and agreement. Second Language Research, 16(2), 103–133. https://doi​.org​/10​.1191​ /026765800677556046 Rankin, T. (2014). Variational learning in L2: The transfer of L1 syntax and parsing strategies in the interpretation of wh-questions by L1 German learners of L2 English. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 4(4). https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/lab​.4​.4​.02ran Schachter, J. (1990). On the issue of completeness in second language acquisition. Interlanguage Studies Bulletin (Utrecht), 6(2), 93–124. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/026765839000600201 Slavkov, N. (2015). Long-distance wh-movement and long-distance wh-movement avoidance in L2 English: Evidence from French and Bulgarian speakers. Second Language Research, 31(2), 179–210. https://doi​.org​ /10​.1177​/0267658314554939 Spada, N., & Lightbown, P. M. (1999). Instruction, first language influence, and developmental readiness in second language acquisition. Modern Language Journal, 83(1), 1–22. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/0026​-7902​.00002 Sprouse, J., & Hornstein, N. (Eds.). (2013). Experimental syntax and Island effects. Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 37(3), 463–470. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0332586514000316 Thornton, R. (2008). Why continuity. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 26(1), 107–146.

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Interrogatives Tsimpli, I. M., & Dimitrakopoulou, M. (2007). The interpretability hypothesis: Evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 23(2), 215–242. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​ /0267658307076546 White, L. (1992). Subjacency violations and empty categories in second language acquisition. In H. Goodluck & M. Rochemont (Eds.), Island constraints. Studies in theoretical psycholinguistics (Vol. 15). Springer. https:// doi​.org​/10​.1007​/978​-94​-017​-1980​-3​_17 White, L. (1988). Island effects in second language acquisition. In S. Flynn & W. O’Neil (Eds.), Linguistic theory in second language acquisition. Studies in theoretical psycholinguistics (Vol. 8). Springer. https://doi​.org​/10​ .1007​/978​-94​-009​-2733​-9​_10 White, L. (2003). Second language acquisition and universal grammar (Cambridge textbooks in linguistics). Cambridge University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/CBO9780511815065 White, L., & Juffs, A. (1998). Constraints on wh-movement in two different contexts of non-native language acquisition: Competence and processing. In S. Flynn, G. Martohardjono, & W. O’Neill (Eds.), The generative study of second language acquisition (pp. 111–130). Erlbaum. Williams, J. (2006). Incremental interpretation in second language sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9(1), 71–88. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S1366728905002385 Williams, J., Möbius, P., & Kim, C. (2001). Native and non-native processing of English wh- questions: Parsing strategies and plausibility constraints. Applied Psycholinguistics, 22(4), 509–540. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/ S0142716401004027 Wode, H.. (1976). Developmental sequences in naturalistic L2 acquisition (Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 11, pp 1-31, ), Ontario Inst. for Studies in Education, Toronto. Yusa, N. (1999). Multiple-specifiers and Wh-Island effects in L2 acquisition. In The development of second language grammars: A generative approach ed. E.C. Klein and G. Martohardjono. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. p. 289–315). Zobl, H. (1992). Prior linguistic knowledge and the conservatism of the learning procedure: Grammaticality judgments of unilingual and multilingual learners. In S. Gass & L. Selinker (Eds.), Language transfer in language learning (Rev. ed., pp. 177–196). John Benjamins.

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28 NON-CANONICAL WORD ORDERS Rex A. Sprouse

28.1 Introduction Two of the central requirements for any serious model of language acquisition are: (1) a characterization of the initial state; and (2) an account of how subsequent development occurs. Within the generative paradigm, it is generally recognized that the initial state of native language (L1) acquisition must include a set of substantive primitive elements and operations together with a set of restrictions on how the elements can concatenate and how further operations can apply to the output of this concatenation. This initial state is standardly referred to as Universal Grammar (UG). Many of the specific research questions animating generative syntactic research seek to refine our understanding of specific facets of UG through a rigorous study of the morphosyntactic and semantic properties of particular languages. L1 development research within this paradigm typically addresses questions such as whether all of UG is indeed operative from the earliest stages of language development, what the nature of the primary linguistic data (PLD) available to young children is and how the PLD affect language development, how children set parameters of morphosyntax and semantics, and whether parameters can be reset (however parameters are characterized within a particular formal framework). The clear assumption is that all of this occurs within the sets of systems of mental representations of grammar that are permitted by UG. Turning to (adult) non-native language (NNL) acquisition, the two central questions remain, but the specific research questions diverge. Unlike a child acquiring their L1 (an L1er), someone acquiring a new language (an NNLer) approaches this task with (at least) one full-fledged grammar already in place.1 It thus becomes an empirical question whether all, part, or none of this previously acquired grammar constitutes the initial state of NNL. It is a priori far from obvious whether UG guides and constrains NNL development in whole, in part, or not at all. Overwhelmingly, L1 acquisition is characterized by success, in the sense that children appear to acquire grammars that are essentially isomorphic with the grammars of other members of their speech community, allowing for (usually) slight variations that linguists chalk up to change in progress. The typical success in L1 acquisition includes both what we may label canonical and non-canonical word orders. While there is no standardly recognized definition of these terms, for the purposes of this chapter, we will assume that a non-canonical word order has the following properties: (1) it alternates with canonical word order; (2) it occurs rather infrequently in target language (TL) input; and (3) it is associated with some kind of morphosyntactic or semantic restriction to which the canonical word order is not subject.2

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In the famous formulation of Bley-Vroman (1990, p. 6), “[t]he lack of general guaranteed success is the most striking characteristic of adult foreign language learning.” It is primarily for this reason that some NNL acquisition scholars in the generative paradigm have claimed that UG does not fully guide or constrain (post-puberty) NNL development, or even that UG is not involved at all. After all, in contrast to child L1ers, adult L2ers have well developed analytic capabilities and skills for complex social interaction. In many cases, they have access to systematic instruction and access to written PLD. Thus, two central research questions arise: (1) What is the role of transfer in NNL acquisition? (2) What is the role of UG in Interlanguage development? Restricting ourselves to word order, it becomes clear that if we consider only canonical word orders, our investigation of L1 grammars and Interlanguage grammars will be neither empirically nor theoretically adequate. This is because it is precisely with non-canonical word orders that we see many of the intricacies of the language faculty at play. As an example, consider the phenomenon often referred to as quantification at a distance (QAD) in French. In the canonical word order, the Quantifier beaucoup ‘many’ occurs together with its restriction de NP, as in (1a). In contrast, in the non-canonical QAD structure, beaucoup is displaced to the left of a nonfinite verb (1b). (1)

a. b.

Jean a trouvé beaucoup Jean has found many ‘Jean found many gold coins.’ Jean a beaucoup trouvé Jean has many found ‘Jean found many gold coins.’

de pièces d’or. coins of gold de pièces coins

d’or. of gold

(1a) and (1b) are not synonymous variants. Consider the contrast that arises when adverbials unambiguously denoting multiple events vs. a single event are added. (2)

a. b.

(3)

a. b. *

En cherchant partout, Jean a trouvé While looking everywhere Jean has found ‘While looking everywhere, Jean found many gold coins.’ En une seule fois, Jean a trouvé at one single time Jean has found ‘In a single stroke, Jean found many gold coins.’

beaucoup many

de pièces coins

d’or. of gold

beaucoup many

de pièces coins

d’or. of gold

En cherchant partout, Jean a beaucoup trouvé while looking everywhere Jean has many found ‘While searching everywhere, Jean found many gold coins.’ En une seule fois, Jean a beaucoup at one single time Jean has many ‘In a single stroke, Jean found many gold coins.’

de pièces d’or. coins of gold trouvé found

de pièces coins

d’or. of gold

As illustrated in (2), the canonical word order is compatible with either multiple events or a single event. In contrast, the non-canonical QAD word order is compatible with multiple events (as in (3a)), but not with a single event (as in (3b)). The semantics of the non-canonical QAD structure have been studied by Obenauer (1983), de Swart (1988), Doetjes (1995, 2004), and Dekydtpotter, Sprouse, and Thyre (1999/2000), each offering a distinct formal account. The central point here is that consideration of such noncanonical structures and their interpretation is necessary, if we hope to gain a full understanding 383

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not only of the grammar of French, but also of the principles and restrictions included in UG. This is because of the severe poverty of the stimulus that the ungrammaticality of sentences like (3b) present. One can reasonably make the claim that an L1er exposed to French PLD will be presented with the canonical word order in both multiple-event and single-event contexts and thus become aware of both interpretations. Such an L1er will also be exposed to the noncanonical word order in multiple-event contexts, although this pattern appears to be far less frequent in TL input. Natural analogical extension should then lead the L1er to assume that the non-canonical word order can also be associated with single-event contexts, given that successful L1 acquisition involves a multitude of analogical extensions. However, this does not occur in this specific case. Making the inevitable assumptions (1) that children growing up in a Frenchspeaking environment receive no systematic instruction on the restriction against the non-canonical QAD construction in a single-event context and (2) that there is nothing in the PLD to signal this restriction, one is left with the logical conclusion that this restriction requires an explanation grounded in some principle of innate linguistic (or at least, linguistically relevant) knowledge. It is very difficult to see how principles of “general cognition” could suffice. In the sections that follow, we will first provide a brief overview of the methodologies typically used to investigate non-canonical word orders in Interlanguage grammars. Then, we will review examples from the published literature illustrating how instances of the study of non-canonical word phenomena have offered evidence for claims about the nature of the acquisition of Interlanguage grammars. We will begin with the “pure” morphosyntax examples of syntactic islands and remnant movement3 and then turn to the syntax-semantics interface examples, involving left-branch extractions, pre-nominal adjectives, and the distinction between topicalization, focus fronting, and left dislocation. Due to space limitations, it will not be possible to discuss all of the intricate details that arise with the non-canonical word orders whose acquisition we consider, let alone the (competing) analyses each has received in the general linguistics literature. Readers are always referred to the original studies for further information.4

28.2  Methodologies used for investigating non-canonical word orders in Interlanguage grammars Scientific interest in the non-canonical word orders discussed in this chapter is seldom, if ever, motivated by active production of these patterns by L1ers or L2ers. By definition, native speakers very infrequently produce these patterns, and there is no expectation that even advanced NNLers would produce them. For NNL researchers working in the generative paradigm, a central question is whether NNLers come to have Interlanguage grammars that display the same UG-based contrasts found in L1 grammars. As a result, none of the studies reviewed here rely on naturalistic production data. Overwhelmingly, these studies rely on (contextualized) Acceptability Judgment Tasks (AJTs) or Truth Value Judgment Tasks (TVJTs). In those cases where distributional syntax is at issue and an AJT is used, contextualization greatly facilitates a participant’s ability to assess an experimental sentence item under optimal conditions for acceptance if it is indeed licensed by the participant’s grammar. Some researchers employ AJTs with a binary choice (‘yes’ vs. ‘no’; ‘OK’ vs. ‘bad,’ etc.), while others prefer the use of a Likert scale. When the issue is the precise semantic interpretation associated with a given non-canonical sentence pattern, the most straightforward test item is the TVJT, which includes a context in which the experimental sentence can be judged as true or false. In some instances, the intonation of the experimental item may be crucial as well. In such cases, a bimodal (written and auditory) presentation may ensure that the participant considers the experimental item with the intended sentence intonation; otherwise, the experimenter relies on the intonation that each participant happens to impose on the written item. 384

Non-canonical word orders

28.3  Syntactic islands in Interlanguage grammars The very first empirical study designed to test whether adult Interlanguage development is constrained by a principle of UG is Ritchie’s (1978) pioneering study of the Right Roof Constraint, first identified by Ross (1967).5 Ross noted that certain elements, e.g., relative clauses, properly contained within a sentential subject in (more or less) underlying structure (4a) can be moved rightward to a position at the right edge of the sentential subject, as seen in (4b). (4)  a.   b.  c.

[That a gun [which I had cleaned] went off] surprised no one. [That a gun ti went off [which I had cleaned]i] surprised no one. * [That a gun ti went off] surprised no one [which I had cleaned]i. (adapted from Ritchie (1978, p. 36, ex. 8))

However, such an element cannot be moved further to the right, as in (4c). A similar restriction applies to the extraposition of that-clauses associated with an expletive it in subject position, as seen in the contrast in (5). (5)  a.   b.

 [That iti surprised Mary [that John had left]i] amused Alice. * [That iti surprised Mary] amused Alice [that John had left]i.

The common metaphor is to refer to a configuration out of which an element cannot be extracted, such as a sentential subject, as an island. It is not possible that an L1er could reliably deduce the Right Roof Constraint from PLD. This is because certain instances of rightward movement appear to be possible (e.g., (4b), (5a)), but there is nothing in the PLD that could inform the L1er about the structural limitation on this rightward movement. Thus, the constraint must be stated in or follow from a statement of UG. Ritchie devised an AJT comprising 120 items, including six items specifically targeting the contrast between (4b) vs. (4c) and six items specifically targeting the contrast between (5a) vs. (5b). Twenty adult L1-Japanese/L2-English NNLers, 19 of whom were classroom learners of English until their arrival in the United States, participated in the study. With respect to the contrast in (4), 15 of the 20 participants displayed prerequisite knowledge of the relevant structures on other test items; 13 of those 15 exhibited the Right Roof Constraint contrast in either five or six of the relevant test items. For the contrast in (5), 16 of the participants displayed prerequisite knowledge of the relevant structures, and all 16 of them exhibited the Right Roof Constraint contrast on either five or six of the relevant test items. Ritchie’s early study of the Right Roof Constraint’s restriction on non-canonical rightward movement meets what we may term the tripartite gold standard for a study designed to test for UG effects in NNL acquisition research, laid out in (6): (6)  a.   The restriction cannot be deduced from PLD available to the learner.  b. The restriction is not directly replicable in the learner’s L1.6  c. The restriction is not the object of classroom instruction on the TL.

Martohardjono’s (1993) dissertation offers a second classic study of island effects in NNL acquisition, which we will briefly summarize here.7 This study introduces an additional layer of subtlety, exemplified in (7). (7)  a. ** [CP [Which man]i [C did] [TP Tom fix [DP the door [CP [Op]j [C that] [TP [t]i had broken [t]j]]]]]?  b. *  [CP [Which mayor]i [C did] [TP Mary read [DP the book [CP [Op]j [C that] [TP [t]i praised [t]j]]]]]?

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Although (7a) and (7b) both involve ill-formed extractions from relative clauses, English L1ers generally perceive the unacceptability of the extraction of the direct object (7b) to be relatively weaker than the unacceptability of the extraction of the subject (7a). A similar distinction holds for other syntactic islands, such as adjunct clauses and wh-clauses. Martohardjono’s (1993) study exploits the distinction between weak vs. strong islands. The results of an AJT administered to advanced English learners, L1ers of Chinese, Indonesian, and Italian, and as well as to a group of English L1ers, are reproduced in Table 28.1. The English L1ers rejected the strong violations virtually at ceiling, but their rejection rate dropped to 78% on weak violations. That is, in a binary forced-choice AJT, different respondents set the threshold (slightly) differently for accepting vs. rejecting an item. Hence, group means can reflect degrees of unacceptability. The three learner groups represent languages in which wh-movement in overt syntax varies. Chinese is known to be a wh in situ language; Indonesian exhibits limited wh movement8; Italian is very similar to English with respect to overt wh-movement. Although these learners exhibit the effects more or less strongly depending on the pervasiveness of wh-movement in their respective L1s, all three learner groups exhibit effects of the Subjacency Condition. This represents an extreme poverty of the stimulus problem, considering that these English L2ers are making distinctions between grammatically distinct structures that are all vanishingly rare to non-existent in the PLD. This makes sense only if principles of UG guide and restrict Interlanguage representations.9

28.4  Remnant movement in Interlanguage grammars Remnant movement represents a second case of non-canonical word order that has attracted the attention of second language acquisition research, in particular the distinction between remnant topicalization and remnant scrambling. The former is extremely rare in German, but fully grammatical, while the latter is ungrammatical. Here we will take scrambling to refer to overt movement of the direct (or indirect) object out of the VP to a higher position in the clause. This is illustrated by the German example in (8). (8) Klaus hat [das Buch]i [NegP nicht [VP ti geschrieben]]. Klaus has the book not ‘Klaus did not write the book.’

written

It is immediately striking here that the direct object das Buch ‘the book’ is separated from the verb of which it is the complement geschrieben ‘written’ by the negation particle nicht. In German, the scrambled direct object can also appear to the left of the subject of the clause: in (9a), in a nonsubject-initial V2 main clause; in (9b), in a finite-verb-final embedded clause.

Table 28.1  Rejection rates on Martohardjono’s (1993) AJT

strong violations weak violations

Chinese-Eng (n = 16)

Indonesian-Eng (n = 17)

Italian-Eng (n = 11)

English (n = 10)

75% 44%

88% 46%

91% 62%

99% 78%

386

Non-canonical word orders (9)

a. b.

Leider hat [das Buch]i der berühmte unfortunately has the book the famous ‘Unfortunately, the famous linguist did not write the book.’ … dass [das Buch]ider berühmte Linguist nicht ti that the book the famous linguist not ‘… that the famous linguist did not write the book.’

Linguist linguist

nicht ti not

geschrieben. written

geschrieben hat. written has

Traditionally, scrambling in German is viewed as an instance of A-bar movement, which is distinct from another sub-type of A-bar movement known as topicalization, which involves the movement of a constituent to the Spec,CP position, as in (10). (10)

[Das Buch]i hat der berühmte Linguist 1981 ti the book has the famous linguist 1981 ‘The famous linguist wrote the book in 1981.’

geschrieben. written

Neither scrambling as in (8)–(9) nor topicalization as in (10) is a particularly non-canonical word order in German. Non-canonical word orders arise, however, when scrambling and topicalization interact. Consider an underlying structure in which the complement of a verb like versuchen ‘to try’ is an infinitival, as in (11a).

(11)

a. b. c. d. e. *

… dass Peter schon [den Wagen zu reparieren] versucht hat. that Peter already the  car     to fix tried has ‘…that Peter has already tried to fix the car.’ … dass Peter [den Wagen zu reparieren]i schon ti versucht hat. that Peter the  car to fix     already tried   has ‘…that Peter has already tried to fix the car.’ [Den Wagen zu reparieren]i hat Peter schon ti versucht. the car to fix has Peter already tried ‘Peter has already tried to fix the car.’ [ti Zu reparieren]j hat Peter [den Wagen]i schon tj versucht to fix has Peter the car already tried ‘Peter has already tried to fix the car.’ … dass [ti zu reparieren]j Peter [den Wagen]i schon tj versucht hat. that to fix  Peter the   car already tried has

In (11b), the infinitival has scrambled to the left of the adverb schon ‘already.’ In (11c), the infinitival has undergone topicalization to Spec,CP in a main clause. In (11d), den Wagen ‘the car,’ the direct object of zu reparieren ‘to fix’ has undergone scrambling to a position to the left of the adverb schon ‘already.’ The remnant of the infinitival zu reparieren ‘to fix’ has then undergone topicalization to Spec,CP. While vanishingly rear in spoken or written German, this is pattern is grammatical. However, a parallel attempt to scramble the remnant infinitive to an otherwise possible landing site for scrambling (cf. (9b)) results in ungrammaticality in (11e). Given the extreme poverty of the stimulus involved in acquiring the distinction in grammaticality between remnant topicalization (11d) and remnant scrambling (11e), various principles of Universal Grammar have been proposed to account the knowledge of this contrast on the part of native speakers of German.10 387

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Schreiber and Sprouse (1998), using a contextualized paper-and-pencil AJT, found that advanced L1-English/L2-German NNLers displayed sensitivity to the distinction between remnant topicalization and remnant scrambling. Hopp (2005) significantly extended this finding by employing additional paradigms of acceptable remnant topicalization vs. unacceptable remnant scrambling, by very carefully controlling for discourse contexts, and by presenting the items bimodally, i.e., both in writing and in recordings in which intonation was tightly controlled. Hopp also found that although both L1-English and L1-Japanese learners exhibit knowledge of the contrast, L1-Japanese learners of German, whose L1 also has scrambling, are at a clear advantage over L1-English learners of German in converging on the TL-German distinction. Hopp’s study thus provides evidence of both transfer (the two learner groups display differences in their Interlanguage development in a way that is straightforwardly attributable to differences in their L1 grammars) and an active role for UG in NNL development (accounting for convergence on the TL grammar despite the severe poverty of the stimulus).

28.5  Left-branch extraction in Interlanguage grammars It is well known that languages differ with respect to the possibility of left-branch extraction. For example, French displays an array of such structures, whereas the corresponding structures are ungrammatical in English. We have already seen one such example in (1)–(3) in the introduction. As we saw with that example, while a sentence with a left-branch extraction may appear synonymous with the corresponding canonical word order, a closer examination of the semantics of the left-branch extraction sentence may reveal an interpretative gap not found with the canonical word order. Consider the alternation in (12).

(12)

a. b.

[Qui de célèbre] fumait au bistro dans les années 60? who of famous smoked in​.t​he bar in the years 60 ‘What famous person used to smoke in the bar in the ’60s?’ bistro dans les années 60? [Qui]i fumait [ti de célèbre] au who smoked of famous in​.t​he bar in the years 60 ‘What famous person used to smoke in the bar in the ’60s?’

(Dekydtspotter & Sprouse, 2001, p. 3, (1) –(2)) In (12b) the interrogative pronoun qui ‘who’ on the left branch of the subject phrase qui de célèbre ‘what famous person’ has been extracted from the subject and fronted, leaving the rest of the subject phrase in situ. Although the glosses given above are identical, as Dekydtspotter and Sprouse (2001) point out, the sentences are not fully equivalent semantically. Specifically, the continuous interrogative in (12a) allows either an interpretation where the adjectival restriction célèbre refers to the set of individuals famous in the 1960s or an interpretation where it refers to the set of individuals famous at speech time. However, the discontinuous interrogative in (12b) allows only the former interpretation. It is highly implausible that L1-English/L2-French NNLers would receive sufficient “indirect negative evidence” in naturally occurring input to allow them to systematically deduce this interpretive asymmetry. Likewise, L2-French learners would never receive classroom instruction about it. If knowledge of the interpretative restriction on the non-canonical word order can be documented, the source of this knowledge must spring from innate principles.11

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In order to test for knowledge of the interpretative asymmetry between canonical continuous interrogatives and non-canonical discontinuous interrogatives, Dekydtspotter and Sprouse designed a TVJT based on a 2 × 2 design, crossing word order with temporal interpretation of the adjectival restriction. The items were based on a set of brief scenarios that involved two individuals both engaging in a particular activity at some interval in the past. One of individuals exhibited a specified property at that past interval, while the other individual exhibits that property in the present. Each such scenario was then the basis for four items, crossing continuous vs. discontinuous interrogatives with responses representing past time vs. speech time. For example, in the scenario paired with questions such as (12a)–(12b), it is explicit that two characters used to smoke in bars in the 1960s, and one of them was famous in the 1960s (past-time interpretation), while the other one is famous “now” (speech-time interpretation). Thus, a participant in the study first read a scenario (in English),12 then a question in French, and then a response to the question. The participant’s task was then to indicate whether the response was correct. The participants’ only choices were ‘yes’ and ‘no’ (plus ‘cannot decide,’ which was rarely chosen). While one might suppose that the ‘yes’ responses might be at floor for discontinuous interrogatives paired with speech-time responses and at ceiling for the other three pairings, this would be an unrealistic expectation. This is because it is much more difficult for linguistically naïve participants to access the speech-time interpretation on a task of this nature. Past-time interpretations, on the other hand, are very easy to access. Participants were asked to respond ‘yes’ or ‘no’ fairly quickly (although the task was not timed) and to avoid pondering over their responses or returning to items once they had responded. It is thus not surprising if the percentage of ‘yes’ responses on past-time items is generally high, while the percentage of ‘yes’ responses on speech-time items is generally suppressed. The relevant question is whether there is a significantly lower rate of acceptance of speech-time responses to discontinuous interrogatives vs. continuous interrogatives. Table 28.2 reproduces the acceptance rates of the 47 intermediate L1-English/L2-French NNLers and 11 advanced L1-English/L2-French NNLers who completed the task. While there is no statistically significant difference for either proficiency group in accepting pasttime responses to continuous vs. discontinuous interrogatives, there is such a difference for both groups in accepting speech-time responses to continuous vs. discontinuous responses, with p = .002 for the Intermediate group and p = .027 for the Advanced group. Given the extreme poverty of the stimulus associated with this phenomenon, Dekydspotter and Sprouse interpret these results as evidence for the role of UG principles restricting the interpretation of the non-canonical word order in Interlanguage.13

28.6  Pre-nominal adjective placement in Interlanguage-French Instructed L1-English/L2-French NNLers are frequently taught that English and French differ in the position of attributive adjectives: Such adjectives appear pre-nominally in English, but in French, all but a highly restricted set of adjectives appear post-nominally in French. However, this is not the whole story. Consider the examples in (13)–(14).

Table 28.2  ‘Yes’ responses based on Dekydtspotter and Sprouse’s (2001, pp. 14–15, Tables 1 and 2)

Continuous Discontinuous

Intermediate (n = 47)

Advanced (n = 11)

Speech time

Past time

Speech time

Past time

41.22% 25.00%

90.69% 90.69%

46.59% 15.90%

79.55% 90.90%

389

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a. b. * a. b.

La The La The

police a police have police a police have

intercepté captured intercepté captured

le the le the

criminel violent dans criminal violent in violent violent

la the criminel criminal

forêt. forest cet this

après-midi. afternoon.

(Anderson, 2007, p. 172, exx (6)–(7)) The post-nominal position of the attributive adjective violent in the English example (13b) is straightforwardly ungrammatical, but, contrary to the expectations of traditional pedagogical grammar, the pre-nominal position of the attributive adjective violent ‘violent’ in the French example (14a) is not ungrammatical. However, the interpretation of violent in pre-nominal position is subject to a restriction to which its post-nominal position in (13a) is not subject, viz., (14a) is acceptable only in a context in which there is a unique criminal, while no such restriction obtains for (13a). In other words, the pre-nominal position of violent in (14a) is possible only in cases of non-restrictive modification (i.e., the fact that the criminal is violent is additional information), while the postnominal position of violent in (13a) is compatible with both non-restrictive and restrictive modification (e.g., reference to the violent criminal as opposed to the white-collar criminal in the same context).14 The pre-nominal position of violent in (14a) is clearly a case of a non-canonical word order. Anderson (2007b) reports on an extensive observational study of classroom input available to typical university-level learners of French, which found that pre-nominal position of adjectives like violent (i.e., adjectives that do not belong to the special sub-class of adjectives that regularly appear in pre-nominal position) is vanishingly rare even through the third year of French language instruction. This is an intriguing research step, seldom employed in studies of NNL acquisition, because it empirically confirms our intuitive sense that a particular linguistic phenomenon not only qualifies as non-canonical, but is indeed extremely rare in the input to which NNLers are primarily exposed. Consider now the learnability problem for an L1-English/L2-French classroom NNLer. Such a learner’s L1 grammar will be totally uninformative. Explicit grammatical instruction would lead the learner to expect that pre-nominal position of adjectives like violent should be impossible, on any interpretation. The ambient input barely includes any exemplars of the non-canonical word order, let alone sufficient examples to allow for detection of the uniqueness restriction. Anderson (2007a) reports on a study employing an AJT in which participants were asked to judge French sentences as either “fine” or “odd” after reading brief descriptive contexts in English. Of interest to us here are the 28 items that probed the interaction of adjective position and the uniqueness restriction. A total of 100 L1-English/L2-French NNLers, across four levels, completed the task. Their results are shown in Table 28.3. While it is unclear why the first three groups exhibit a statistically significant lower acceptance rate for non-unique noun referent interpretations than for unique noun referent interpretations when the adjective is in post-nominal position, the results for pre-nominal position are nevertheless more striking. When the adjective is in pre-nominal position (as it would necessarily be in the NNLers’ L1), there is no significant difference between the two interpretations for the 2nd year group. However, once the NNLers reach the 3rd year level, there is a very striking depression in the acceptance of non-unique referent interpretations for pre-nominal adjectives, one which appears to stabilize, if not increase.15 The more robust acceptance of pre-nominal adjectives in non-unique noun reference contexts appears to follow from restrictions on the syntax-semantics interface imposed by UG on the NNLers acquiring a TL with the typological properties of French.

390

Non-canonical word orders Table 28.3 Acceptance rates. Significant net differences in acceptance rates between unique noun referent and non-unique noun referent interpretations by group are indicated by * for p < .05, ** for p < .01, *** for p < .001 (Anderson, 2007a, p. 194, Table 8) Adjective position Interpretation Unique noun referent   2nd year (n = 29)   3rd year (n = 24)   4th year (n = 27)   Advanced (n = 20) Non-unique noun referent   2nd year (n = 29)   3rd year (n = 24)   4th year (n = 27)   Advanced (n = 20)

pre-N

post-N

62.31% 62.50% 50.43% 51.43%

78.32% 86.55% 82.98% 76.43%

57.64% 38.10%*** 35.19%** 33.57%**

65.02%** 60.32%*** 68.25%** 67.14%

28.7  Topicalization, focus fronting, and left dislocation in Interlanguage grammars Finally, we turn to the NNL acquisition of three non-canonical word orders in English, each associated with distinct kinds of links to the discourse context in which they can be felicitously uttered. These noncanonical word orders all involve a constituent in a non-canonical position on the left periphery of a clause. Consider the examples in (15)–(17) offered (among others) by Slabakova and García Mayo (2015) at the beginning of their study. Following Slabakova and García Mayo’s practice, the preposed constituents are underscored, and the resumptive pronouns in the left dislocation examples in (17) are in bold. (15) Topicalization a. Brains you’re born with. A great body you have to work for. (Slabakova and García Mayo, 2015, p. 208, ex. (1a), attributed to Brook Shields, in health club commercial, Ward and Prince corpus)

b.

A: Did Janice like the wine? B: Oh, the wine she didn’t drink. She stuck to lemon ices. (Slabakova and García Mayo, 2015, p. 208, ex. (1c))

(16) Focus fronting a. I made a lot of sweetbreads. A couple of pounds I think I made for her. (Slabakova and García Mayo, 2015, p. 208, ex. (2a), attributed to a natural conversation, collected by G. Ward)

b.

M: Did I take my jacket to be cleaned? I think I need to wear it today. N: The SHIRTS you took to the cleaner’s, not the jacket. Here it is in the closet. (Slabakova and García Mayo, 2015, p. 208, ex. (2c))

(17) Left dislocation a. One of the guys I work with, he said he bought over $100 in Powerball tickets. (Slabakova and García Mayo, 2015, p. 208) ex. (3a), attributed to JM to WL, in conversation, collected by G. Ward) b. My wonderful Felix, everyone likes him. (Slabakova and García Mayo, 2015, p. 209, ex. (3b))

Core properties of topicalization and focus fronting include a necessary link of some kind to the discourse and a gap in the canonical position of the preposed constituent. Unlike with topicalization, 391

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focus fronting involves preposing of the sentential focus. Left dislocation differs from both topicalization and focus fronting in that (1) the preposed constituent need not bear any particular link to the discourse in which it is uttered and (2) a resumptive pronoun, rather than a gap, occurs in the canonical position of the preposed constituent. Slabakova and García Mayo (2015) report on a study of the NNL acquisition of these three constructions, primarily as a test of Sorace’s (2011) Interface Hypothesis, which states (inter alia) that the interface between syntax and discourse is especially “vulnerable,” in the sense that it is particularly difficult for NNLers to acquire (as well as particularly prone to L1 attrition, prolonged indeterminacy in bilingual native language acquisition, etc.). A second motivation for this study was to test three models of third language (L3) acquisition: Na Ranong and Leung’s (2009) L1 Status Factor, which states that the L1 grammar is the preferred source of transfer in L3 acquisition, Bardel and Falk’s (2007) L2 Status Factor, which states that the L2 grammar is the preferred source of transfer in (instructed) L3 acquisition, and Flynn, Foley, and Vinnitskaya’s (2004) Cumulative Enhancement Model, which states that either previously acquired grammar may be a source of transfer in L3 acquisition, but only if the transfer would be facilitative. The previously acquired languages represented in this study include Spanish and Basque. Both of these languages have structures analogous to the three English structures functionally, but with morphosyntactic differences. Basque simply does not allow overt pronouns in any of the three constructions, including left dislocation. Spanish, on the other hand, requires a clitic pronoun in its analog to topicalization. One of the challenges associated with acquiring the full grammar of this part of the syntax-discourse interface in English is that there are no overt morphosyntactic clues distinguishing topicalization and focus fronting, whereas the Spanish analogs require and disallow clitics, respectively. The three English constructions discussed above are not only non-canonical in the sense that they involve a preposed constituent. They are also extremely rare in naturally occurring English speech and writing. For example, as pointed out by Slabakova and García Mayo (2015, pp. 214–215), roughly comparable corpus studies of Spanish suggest that the analogous structure in Spanish occurs on the order of 1000 times more frequently in Spanish than topicalization occurs in English (Gregory and Michaelis, 2001; Postolache, 2005). Slabakova and García Mayo devised an AJT in which the experimental items included six contexts for each of the three constructions. Following each context, there were two test sentences with a preposed constituent, differing only in whether or not there was a resumptive pronoun in the canonical position of the preposed constituent. These items were presented bimodally, but in writing and on a recording. Participants were asked to rate each sentence on a seven-point Likert scale, ranging from one (“not natural in this context”) to seven (“perfectly natural”), with a separate option of “I don’t know.” The experimental participants included L1-Basque/L2-Spanish/L3-English learners (n = 23), L1-Spanish/L2-Basque/L3-English learners (n = 24), and L1-Spanish/L2-English learners (n = 39). Slabakova and García Mayo report that “intermediate” vs. “advanced” English proficiency was not a significant predictor of performance on the task. There was also a group of native speakers of English (n = 24). All three NNLer groups exhibited response patterns similar to those of the L1-English group on focus fronting and left dislocation, preferring a gap with focus fronting and an overt resumptive pronoun with left dislocation. Although the differences between acceptable and unacceptable choices were greater for the L1-English group, the NNLer groups also displayed statistically significant differences in their acceptance rates. However, all three NNLer groups diverged sharply from the L1-English group on topicalization. English disallows a resumptive pronoun here, but all three NNLer groups gave intermediate ratings to items both with and without resumptive pronouns, as shown in Table 28.4. Although examination of individual results revealed that a minority in each of the three NNLer groups distinguished between items with the acceptable gap and items with the unacceptable resump392

Non-canonical word orders Table 28.4 Mean ratings on topicalization items with Likert scale ranging from one (“not natural in this context”) to seven (“completely natural”) based on Slabakova and García Mayo’s (2015, p. 218, Table 4)

Gap (acceptable) Resumptive (unacceptable)

L1-English (n = 24)

Ba-Sp-En (n = 23)

Sp-Ba-En (n = 24)

Sp-En (n = 39)

5.8958 1.2028

4.6804 4.2355

4.1071 4.1792

4.1758 4.4459

tive pronoun, topicalization was clearly the construction where the NNLers were least TL-like. On the assumption that the Spanish analog of English topicalization requires an overt resumptive pronoun in Spanish, Slabakova and García Mayo note that transfer from Spanish (whether a given participant’s L1 or L2) could well be the source of this. Of course, this does not account for the virtually equal rating of topicalization items with acceptable gaps. One could posit that this is transfer from Basque, but that could not account for the performance of the L1-Spanish/L2-English group, who have had no exposure to Basque. Of course, as with any piece of Interlanguage behavior that is TL-congruent, there is also the possibility that it has been acquired not through transfer, but through exposure to TL input. On the other hand, this would not account for the merely moderate rating of the topicalization items with gaps, and we are reminded of the relatively rarity of the construction in spoken and written English. What are we to make of the predictions of the three models of L3 acquisition under consideration in this study and the Interface Hypothesis? Since the L1-Spanish/L2-Basque/L3-English and the L1-Basque/L2-Spanish/L3-English groups behave similarly on all three constructions, including TL-divergently on topicalization, these results are incompatible with all three of the L3 acquisition models under consideration: neither the properties of the participants’ L1s nor of their L2s are consistently observed (undermining the L1 Status Factor and the L2 Status Factor), and apparent transfer from Spanish is clearly non-facilitative on topicalization (undermining the Cumulative Enhancement Model). As Slabakova and García Mayo point out, the Interface Hypothesis does not fare particularly well either, because even the “intermediate NNLers do not generally exhibit difficulty acquiring basics of the syntax-discourse mapping for English focus fronting and left dislocation; on the other hand, the Interface Hypothesis receives a certain amount of support from the NNLers’ performance on topicalization. Slabakova and García Mayo conclude that the relatively higher frequency of left dislocation in Spanish (which requires a resumptive) than left dislocation in English coupled with the unavailability of input in English showing that a resumptive is not possible in English topicalization may have more explanatory power here than either the Interface Hypothesis or the three models of L3 acquisition tested. While the results of this study seem to evade any easy explanation, it marks an important departure from most of the extant L3 acquisition studies in that it examines the acquisition of three constructions with genuinely non-canonical word order, whereas most L3 acquisition studies as of this writing tend to focus on linguistic phenomena of a somewhat more quotidian nature.

28.8  Future prospects and conclusion While NNL acquisition studies based on non-canonical word orders are probably of the least interest to most workaday classroom language teachers, such studies are crucial for a deep understanding of the nature of NNL acquisition. This is because precisely such studies allow the field to explore Interlanguage development in the absence of abundant directly relevant TL input—indeed, in some cases in the absence of any directly relevant TL input. By exploring NNLers’ knowledge of the syntax and semantics of these structures, it is possible to distinguish which facets of Interlanguage grammars 393

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may or must be acquired through robust TL input and which “come for free” from transfer and/or from UG. It is possible to explore whether the acquisition of one new property of the TL triggers a cascade of other properties for which the learner has slight or literally no direct evidence in the input and for which the learner receives no explicit instruction. Designing, securing funding for, and carrying out such studies may involve very significant effort on the part of researchers and more than a bit of patient cooperation on the part of participants, but the potential for such studies to continue to provide new insights into NNL acquisition justifies the effort. As the ratio of very recent studies to slightly older studies in this chapter suggests, the field of NNL acquisition seems to have been concentrating less on the acquisition of non-canonical word orders and their interpretation in the last decade. It is my hope that this apparent trend will soon be reversed and that the value of such studies will again inform more NNL acquisition research programs.

Notes 1 Questions regarding the simultaneous acquisition of two or more language in early childhood exceed the limits of this chapter. 2 Given these properties, certain alternations in natural language do not include a non-canonical member, because neither member of the alternation is particularly low in frequency in the TL input (despite the fact that one of the members of the alternation may be subject to a restriction to which the other member is not subject). We exclude from this chapter consideration of the acquisition of sentence patterns that occur robustly in TL input or where there can be any reasonable doubt about their status as non-canonical. Examples would include the alternation between pre-verbal and post-verbal subjects of intransitive verbs and Clitic Dislocation in Spanish, and the Dative Alternation and so-called Particle Shift in English. 3 This is not to suggest that there are no semantic or discourse restrictions involved in the grammar of syntactic islands or remnant movement. The point is simply that the focus of investigation in the studies discussed here is not on those aspects of the phenomena. 4 It will also not be possible to provide information about the acquisition of these phenomena in L1 acquisition, by heritage language users, or other learner populations, because to my knowledge, there is virtually no research on these topics. 5 Chomsky (1973) later subsumed the Right Roof Constraint under the more general Subjacency Condition. 6 In the case of Ritchie’s study, Japanese does not exhibit rightward movement at all. 7 See Martohardjono and Franciotti (this volume) for a more detailed discussion of this important study. 8 See Martohardjono (1993) for justification of this statement about Indonesian. 9 Kush and Dahl’s (2022) study of island constraints in L1-Norwegian/L2-English Interlanguage considers certain non-canonical word orders from a perspective opposite to that of L1-Chinese/L2-English and L1-Indonesian/L2-English. In Kush and Dahl’s study, the L1 is more permissive than the L2-TL, in that Norwegian (unlike English) allows the non-canonical word order of extraction from wh- clauses, although Norwegian (like English) disallows extraction from embedded subjects. This study is also important methodologically, because it employs the procedure for analyzing data on non-canonical word orders pioneered in Sprouse (2007), which takes into account the potential compounding influence of more than one noncanonical or complicating property in a single sentence pattern. I refer the reader to Martohardjono and Franciotti (this volume) for detailed discussion of this study. 10 See, for example, Müller (1996), who proposes the Principle of Unambiguous Domination, and references cited therein. 11 Dekydtspotter and Sprouse offer an analysis in which the speech-time interpretation becomes available only when the adjectival phrase is moved into the CP-domain, thus ruling this interpretation out when only qui is fronted. 12 The contexts were presented in English in order to maximize the participants’ understanding of the relevant nuances. 13 For additional studies involving interpretive restrictions on non-canonical left-branch extractions in Interlanguage, see Dekydtspotter et al. (2005), Dekydspotter et al. (2001), and Dekydtspotter et al. (1999/2000). 14 See Anderson (2007a) for a formal account. 15 It would be of significant interest if the results of this study could be reanalyzed using the technique developed by Sprouse (2007 and subsequent studies) discussed above in the context of Kush and Dahl (2022).

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References Anderson, B. (2007a). Learnability and parametric change in the nominal system of L2 French. Language Acquisition, 14(2), 165–214. Anderson, B. (2007b). Pedagogical rules and their relationship to frequency in the input: Observational and empirical data from L2 French. Applied Linguistics, 28(2), 286–308. Bardel, C., & Falk, Y. (2007). The role of the second language in third language acquisition: The case of Germanic syntax. Second Language Research, 23(4), 459–484. Bley-Vroman, R. (1990). The logical problem of foreign language learning. Linguistic Analysis, 20(1), 3–49. Chomsky, N. (1973). Conditions on transformations. In S. R. Anderson & P. Kiparsky (Eds.), A festschrift for Morris Halle (pp. 232–286). Holt. de Swart, H. (1988). Kwantificatie op afstand: Betekennisaspecten van een adverbiale bindungsrelatie [Quantification at a distance: Semantic aspects of an adverbial binding relation]. Tabu, 18, 129–158. Dekydtspotter, L., & Sprouse, R. A. (2001). Mental design and (second) language epistemology: Adjectival restrictions of wh-quantifiers and tense in English-French interlanguage. Second Language Research, 17(1), 1–35. Dekydtspotter, L., Sprouse, R. A., & Meyer, T. G. (2005). Was für N interrogatives and quantifier scope in English-German interpretation. In L. Dekydtspotter, R. A. Sprouse, & A. Liljestrand (Eds.), Proceedings of generative approaches to second language acquisition (GASLA) 7 (pp. 86–95). Cascadilla Press. Dekydtspotter, L., Sprouse, R. A., & Swanson, K. A. B. (2001). Reflexes of the mental architecture in second language acquisition: The interpretation of discontinuous combien extractions in English-French interlanguage. Language Acquisition, 9(3), 175–227. Dekydtspotter, L., Sprouse, R. A., & Thyre, T. (1999/2000). The interpretation of quantification at a distance in English-French interlanguage: Domain-specificity and second language acquisition. Language Acquisition, 8(4), 265–320. Doetjes, J. (1995). Quantification at a distance and iteration. North East Linguistics Society, 25, 111–125. Doetjes, J. S. (2004). Degree quantifiers. In F. Corblin & H. de Swart (Eds.), Handbook of French semantics (pp. 83–98). CSLI Publications. Flynn, S., Vinnitskaya, I., & Foley, C. (2004). The cumulative-enhancement model for language acquisition: Comparing adults’ and children’s patterns of development in first, second and third language acquisition of relative clauses. International Journal of Multilingualism, 1(1), 3–16. Gregory, M. L., & Michaelis, L. A. (2001). Topicalization and left dislocation: A functional opposition revisited. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(11), 1665–1706. Hopp, H. (2005). Constraining second language word order optionality: Scrambling in advanced EnglishGerman and Japanese-German interlanguage. Second Language Research, 21(1), 34–72. Kush, D., & Dahl, A. (2022). L2 transfer of L1 island-insensitivity: The case of Norwegian. Second Language Research, 38(2), 315–346. Martohardjono, G. (1993). Wh-movement in the acquisition of a second language: A cross-linguistic study of three languages with and without overt movement [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Müller, G. (1996). A constraint on remnant movement. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 14(2), 355–407. Na Ranong, S., & Leung, Y.-K. I. (2009). Null objects in L1 Thai-L2 English-L3 Chinese: An empiricist take on a theoretical problem. In Y.-K. I. Leung (Ed.), Third language acquisition and universal grammar (pp. 162–191). Multilingual Matters. Obenauer, H.-G. (1983). Une quantification non canonique: La Quantification à Distance [A non-canonical quantification: Quantification at a distance]. Langue française, 58, 66–88. Postolache, O. (2005). Information structure in written English: A corpus study. Presented at the International Graduate School (Saarbrücken/Edinburgh) Colloquium, December 8, 2003. Retrieved June 20, 2013, from http://www​.coli​.uni​-saarland​.de​/projects​/irtg​/contents​/Colloquium​/WS​-05​.oana​.pdf (as citied by Slabakova and García Mayo, 2015). Ritchie, W. C. (1978). The right roof constraint in an adult-acquired language. In W. C. Ritchie (Ed.), Second language acquisition research: Issues and implications (pp. 33–63). Academic Press. Ross, J. R. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Schreiber, T., & Sprouse, R. A. (1998). Knowledge of topicalization and scrambling in English-German interlanguage. McGill Working Papers in Linguistics, 13, 162–172. Slabakova, R., & García Mayo, M. D. P. (2015). The L3 syntax–discourse interface. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(2), 208–226.

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29 RELATIVE CLAUSES David Stringer

29.1 Introduction Relative clauses (RCs) are among the most studied phenomena in linguistics, as they involve complex syntactic structures and serve as a window on the workings of the human language faculty. They show interesting differences across languages and present intriguing complications in first language (L1), second language (L2) and heritage language acquisition. This chapter departs from the basic notion of a clausal modifier that relates to a constituent of a sentence, the latter usually being a noun phrase known as the head of the RC, and it provides a brief overview of both syntactic and semantic variation. Given the wealth of research on RC acquisition, a broad variety of experimental methods have been employed, including written and oral production, grammaticality and truth-value judgments, and more recently corpus analyses, as well as online measures such as self-paced reading, eventrelated potentials (ERPs), and eye-tracking. In acquisition research, RCs have been analyzed in order to shed light on competing models and fundamental hypotheses of language learning. Such studies have furthered our understanding of crosslinguistic influence, avoidance phenomena, the availability of Universal Grammar beyond a purported critical period in childhood, and the psycholinguistics of L2 sentence processing. L2 research into RC phenomena continues to furnish valuable insights into aspects of the structures themselves, such as filler-gap dependencies and subject-object asymmetries. Overall, the literature points to the possibility of successful acquisition of these complex forms, supporting theories that posit a fully functioning language faculty at work in adult L2 acquisition.

29.2  Typological variation in syntax and semantics While most, perhaps all, human languages, have clausal modifiers of nouns, there is considerable variation in the forms that such modification can take, due to fundamental typological differences as well as more subtle variation in the morphosyntactic tools independently available in each language. Moreover, different types of relativization can be available in the same language, creating a rich array of linguistic elements in play in contexts of L2 acquisition. Before examining interactions between languages, it is essential to consider some of the more notable forms of variation, both in terms of syntactic structure and semantic interpretation. Structurally, a classic exemplar of an RC contains a relativized NP that binds a variable in an embedded clause, and in many languages this NP combines with a determiner to form a DP. In the

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-34

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following example, relevant relationships are shown within the complex DP that functions as the object of the main verb. (1) Charlotte loved [the delicious curry that her father cooked [x] yesterday].

Here, the RC is in italics; the relativized NP is delicious curry. The NP binds a variable x in the embedded clause, and this binding relation is key to understanding the nature of the construction in all its manifestations. In a restrictive RC such as (1), the determiner forms a referential expression by merging with the complex NP comprising both the relativized NP and the RC. In English, the RC is postnominal, but in many languages, it may be prenominal, as illustrated below in Mandarin (adapted from Xiong et al., 2019, p. 238).

(2)

Tuijian yisheng de jiaoshoui denghou huanzhe. recommend doctor REL professor wait for patient “The professor who recommended the doctor waited for the patient.”

These last two examples illustrate externally headed post- and prenominal RCs, but in some languages the relativized NP can appear inside the relative clause, as shown here in Navajo, where the internal head may appear between a time adverbial and the verb (Andrews, 2007, p. 212). (3) [(T’éédą́ą́) ashkii ałą́ą́’-ą́ą́] last​.nig​ht boy 3sG​.IMP​.snore​-REL​​.PAST “The boy who was snoring last night will speak.”

yádoołtih. FUT​.3SG​.sp​eak

Another typological pattern involves the repetition of the external head inside the clausal modifier, leading to what is known as a double-headed RC, seen here in Kombai (L. de Vries, 1993, p. 78). (4) [[doü adiyano-no] sago give.3PL.NONFUT-CONN “The sago that they gave is finished.”

doü] deyalukhe. sago finished.ADJ

Although previous research has treated the double-headed RC as a typological curiosity which surfaces, at least as an optional strategy, in several unrelated languages such as Bundeli, Japanese, and Tibetan, Cinque (2020) argues at length that all syntactic variations in the world’s languages are actually derived from a single, universal, double-headed structure. The impressive breadth of crosslinguistic analysis in Cinque’s monograph makes it required reading for current research on RCs, although the central claim relies on previously aired syntactic assumptions that remain controversial.1 Three other forms whose basic descriptions have led to continuing debate in the literature include free, correlative, and adjoined RCs. Free relatives are also known as headless, as the nominal head is not overtly expressed. In example (5), the relative pronouns who and what may be understood as ‘the person who’ or ‘the thing that’. (5) I know {who/what} is arriving tomorrow.

Free relatives are widespread in the world’s languages and have been subject to competing analyses. Bresnan and Grimshaw (1978) argue that the relative pronoun takes the place of the relativized NP 398

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outside the RC, while Andrews (2007) shows that at least in some cases it is best analyzed as a preposed NP internal to the RC. Correlatives, as found in languages such as Hindi and Turkish, are positioned to the left of the main VP, the latter containing a resumptive (or “correlative”) pronoun or copy of the relativized NP. The following example is from Bambara (Bird, 1968, p. 43). (6) n ye tyὲ mìn ye, ὸ be fìnì [I COMPL man REL saw] D3 IMPF cloth:DEF “The man I saw, he sells the cloth.”

fère. (preposed) sell

The distinction between correlatives and adjoined RCs has been a subject of much discussion. Adjoined RCs appear outside the main clause relativized NP, either at the left or right periphery of the matrix, as shown in these examples from Hindi (adapted from Srivastav, 1991, pp. 639–640).

(7)

a. b.

[Jo laRkii kaRii hai] vo WH girl standing is DEM Vo laRkii lambii hai DEM girl tall is “The girl who is standing is tall.”

lambii tall [jo khaRii WH standing

hai is hai] is

However, it is clear these patterns are not simply a product of optional attachment before or after the main clause: Srivastav (1991) convincingly demonstrates that left-and right-adjoined RCs have distinct patterns of syntactic integration and semantic interpretation. Cinque (2020, Ch.2) argues that neither correlatives nor adjoined RCs are, strictly speaking, independent variations, as correlatives always contain one of the forms exemplified here in (1–5), and adjoined RCs may be analyzed as either correlatives or extraposed RCs. In addition to basic syntactic patterns of RCs, languages also differ in which syntactic functions in the RC may be subject to relativization. To be clear, any NP in the main clause, whether a subject, object, indirect object, etc., may contain an RC. But within that RC, there appears to be a Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) (Keenan & Comrie, 1977), such that if a language allows relativization of a particular function, it will necessarily allow relativization of all functions of a higher order. (8) 

1: subject 2: direct object 3: indirect object 4: object of preposition 5: genitive 6: object of comparative

The girl who kissed the boy was happy. The boy who the girl kissed was happy. The boy who the girl gave the flower to was happy. I met the girl that the boy was talking about. I love the girl whose hair is blue. The boy who Emily is taller than is Ken.

Another point of variation across languages is the linkage to the head noun by means of relative pronouns (which surface only in postnominal or correlative RCs), complementizers (either clauseinitial or clause-final), or the possibility of having no overt linking element. English contains all three possibilities. (9) 

 a.  You know the girl who I saw yesterday. b. You know the girl that I saw yesterday. c. You know the girl I saw yesterday.

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Languages that do not utilize relative pronouns often make use of resumptive pronouns in the RC, a strategy that can even be seen in languages with relative pronouns as RC complexity increases. Languages that systematically use resumptives include Persian, Yoruba, and, as exemplified in (10), Hebrew (Borer, 1984, p. 220). (10)

raʔiti ʔet ha-yeled she-/ʔasher saw-I ACC the-boy that “I saw the boy that Rina loves.”

rina Rina

ʔohevet loves

ʔoto him

Regarding syntactic analysis, the conventional account of restrictive, externally headed RCs, following the seminal work of Chomsky (1977), has assumed movement of a wh-pronoun or an abstract operator to Spec-CP, as shown below.2 (11) [DP D [NPrel [CP whi /OPi (C) [TP …ti… ]]]]

This analysis has informed much of the L2 research on relative clauses; however, it has engendered considerable debate in the theoretical syntax literature, as it cannot be applied over all typological variants and fails to capture certain reconstruction effects.3 Turning to semantic considerations, one fundamental distinction is between restrictive and nonrestrictive (or appositive) RCs.4 While restrictive RCs delimit the reference of the relativized NP and thus contain essential information, nonrestrictive NPs add extra information about the NP without affecting reference. Nonrestrictive RCs are often set apart by pauses (or by commas in writing). In (12a), having lower cholesterol is predicated of those Japanese women who drink green tea, but in (12b), it is predicated of Japanese women in general. (12)  a.  Japanese women who drink green tea have lower cholesterol. (restrictive)  b.  Japanese women, who drink green tea, have lower cholesterol. (nonrestrictive)

Some linguists consider nonrestrictives to be “orphans”, and not part of the syntactic representation of the sentence at all (Andrews, 2007; Fabb, 1990). However, restrictives and nonrestrictives share similar structure, and in some languages, they may be syntactically identical and semantically ambiguous (Kuno, 1973, p. 235). While earlier work sometimes analyzed nonrestrictives as adjuncts, more recent accounts either treat them as parentheticals or propose alternative means of syntactic integration (see the discussion between Ott, 2016 and Griffiths & de Vries, 2019). The above summary captures some of the basic variation between and within languages, but ignores a multitude of permutations within each pattern, involving, for example, relativization morphology (which can include bound morphemes, classifiers, or demonstrative elements instead of relative pronouns), variations concerning determiners or definiteness markers, case-marking on the head or on the whole RC, finite and infinitival RCs, constraints on movement in the case of whpronouns, right-extraposition of the RC in many languages, possibilities of stacking, etc. For more detailed overviews, see, for example, Andrews (2007), Lehmann (1986), or M. de Vries (2018), and for advanced discussion, see especially Cinque (2020) and the references therein.

29.3 Methods Research on the acquisition of RCs has made use of an impressive range of testing methods. The following overview provides a small window into this experimental toolshed. Several studies mentioned here are discussed in more detail in the next section in terms of their theoretical motivation and findings. 400

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Production tasks have encompassed both free and elicited production and have included both written and oral expression. In one pioneering study, Schachter (1974) examined restrictive relatives in the L2 English of several different L1 groups of L2 English learners, by combing through 50 written compositions for each group. Free production may result in ample comparative data, but this choice is not without problems, as some learners may avoid complex sentences, and the researcher has little control over the number of different types of RCs for comparison. Other studies have opted for the greater oversight afforded by elicited production tasks, which can manipulate the types and tokens of RCs across participants. For example, Lee-Ellis (2011) conducted an oral elicited production task with Korean Heritage speakers in the United States, using picture stimuli whose conditions controlled for gap position (subject vs. object), animacy (± animate), and the topicality of head nouns (± topicalization). The inverse of tasks that furnish language output is the whole array of tasks based on language input. Such methodology can involve act-out tasks, as well as judgments of grammaticality or acceptability, and interpretations of reference involving picture-selection or perceptions of truth value. In early L1 acquisition work, researchers such as Tavakolian (1978) and Hamburger and Crain (1982) asked children to act out sentences with RCs to show whether they had the intended interpretation or whether they simplified the sentence and systematically misunderstood the meaning. In L2 acquisition research, there have been many examples of grammaticality judgment tasks (GJTs). For example, Hawkins and Chan (1997) presented a GJT involving grammatical and ungrammatical RCs to L1 Cantonese and L1 French learners of L2 English. Stimuli were simultaneously presented in written form and aurally via a tape-recorder. Participants were asked to write the letter A if they judged the sentence to definitely correct, B for probably correct, C if they thought it was probably incorrect, and D if they believed it to be definitely incorrect. For C and D judgments, they were asked to correct the part of the sentence they thought was problematic. Acceptability judgment tasks (AJTs) tap learners’ knowledge of appropriate or felicitous forms. Borgonovo et al. (2015) investigated the acquisition of mood in Spanish relative clauses by L1 English speakers, using an AJT for one of their tasks. Learners of Spanish were given scenarios in English, followed by two sentences in Spanish, one with an indicative RC verb (suggesting a specific referent) and one in the subjunctive (suggesting a nonspecific referent). Participants were asked whether each sentence was appropriate given the description in the scenario. Participants may be asked to show their interpretation of reference in sentences that they hear or read by selecting among pictures or by indicating whether the sentence is true in the context of a single picture. One example of a picture-selection task is in O’Grady et al. (2003), in which participants were presented with three pictures, each of which contained two figures. They heard noun phrases such as the woman who sees the man (in Korean) and had to circle with a pencil the one figure whom this phrase accurately described. In a more recent instantiation of this method, participants in Xia et al. (2022) read sentences such as Show me the king who the boy pushed on a laptop computer, and then had to press a key to indicate which of four pictures matched the sentence. A truth-value judgment task (TVJT) was used by Chen (2022) in order to test whether L1 Chinese learners of L2 Japanese could acquire a different range of interpretation for reflexive anaphors inside the head NP of RCs. In Chinese, the anaphor can refer to either the RC subject or the matrix subject, but in Japanese it can only refer to the matrix subject. Participants saw a single picture of a hat with a picture of the owner on it, together with a test sentence on a computer screen, and they had to select either ‘match’ or mismatch’, depending on whether they thought the picture was a possible referent for Japanese sentences containing the phrase “self’s hat” (see Section 29.4.3 for further discussion with an example). The various behavioral methods discussed above remain part of the modern experimental repertoire, but over the last two decades there has been an increase in the use of computer-assisted techniques of investigation. One such approach involves the use of corpus-search software to retrieve 401

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naturally occurring data. As part of Diessel’s (2009) investigation of the L1 acquisition of RCs in English and German, he used the CHILDES database to retrieve longitudinal data from two English children: this search provided him with 55 one-hour recordings from ‘Adam’, age 2;3–5;2 (180 RCs), and 210 30-minute recordings from ‘Abe’, age 2;4–5;0 (309 RCs). In another corpus-based study, Luzi (2012) examined production strategies for strategies for restrictive and nonrestrictive RCs in L2 Italian. She analyzed L2 Italian data from the Italian Certification Corpus (CO.CER.IT), after transcribing 96 recordings using the CHAT format (MacWhinney, 2000). Other forms of computer-mediated methodology include various measures of RC processing in real time, such as self-paced reading/listening, ERPs, and eye-tracking. In self-paced reading tasks, participants press a button to reveal successive words or phrases in a sentence that they either read on a screen or hear through a speaker. One early, influential study that made use of self-paced reading was Juffs (1998), who used word-by-word, center non-cumulative presentation to deliver stimuli such as the following to L2 learners of English (p. 122). (13)  The bad boys /criticized almost every day / were playing /in the park. The slashes indicate where reading times were measured and were not part of the visual presentation. Such ambiguous sentences can contain misleading cues, and recovery results in spikes in reading time, which reveal where exactly the participant has difficulty in the sentence. Self-paced reading lacks the prosody that typically distinguishes restrictive from nonrestrictive RCs, although inserting commas for pauses can compensate somewhat for the missing phonological input. Two more recent examples of self-paced reading in language-learning research are Kim and Christianson’s (2017) investigation of how working memory capacity may affect the processing of globally ambiguous relative clauses in L2 English, and Hu et al.’s (2022) study of the processing of subject vs. object RCs by L1 Italian/L2 English learners of L3 Chinese. Neurocognitive models of L2 processing have involved a variety of measures. Perhaps the most common method has been to record event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants read sentences. However, despite a lot of ERP research on native RC processing, and ample use of ERPs in L2 research, there have been very few ERP studies of RCs in L2 processing. Research that has applied ERP methodology specifically to RCs and bilingual populations includes Jessen and Felser’s (2019) study of how L1 German-L2 English participants recover from garden paths with filler-gap dependencies, and Kasparian and Steinhauer’s (2017) investigation of RC processing in contexts of L1 attrition by L1 Italian-L2 English residents of Canada. ERPs provide both time-sensitive information and insights into activity in particular brain regions. Structures like RCs with long-distance dependencies between an operator and a variable have often revealed a left anterior negativity (LAN) effect, which appears to be linked to working memory, and a P600 effect, which has been argued to reflect syntactic integration or reanalysis: the higher the positivity, the greater the processing difficulty. However, lack of reliability of the P600 effect and significant variation in NS responses suggest that claims of fundamental L1-L2 differences need to be interpreted with caution (Tanner et al., 2014; Tanner & Van Hell, 2014). As pointed out by Dekydtspotter et al. (2021), ERPs are only one aspect of the neurolinguistic activity detected by electroencephalography (EEG), and it is likely that future research may investigate RCs in terms of event-related spectral perturbations (ERSPs), which capture electrical rhythms at various frequencies that have been linked to sentence comprehension, phrase-structure building, syntactic processing load, and ambiguity resolution. More recent research has also made increasing use of eye-tracking technology. For example, Cunnings and Fujita (2023) studied differences in reading times of subject and object relatives when the matrix subject and the overt noun within the RC were similar common nouns (the boy, the girl) or differed between common and proper (the boy, Rebecca), in variations of the stimulus below.

402

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(14)  The boy that {the girl/Rebecca} saw yesterday afternoon, walked through the park. Participants read with both eyes, but only the movements of the right eye were measured. They fixated on a gaze trigger before each text appeared, and, as they read the onscreen sentences, three measures were taken at two regions of interest: the matrix verb and the RC (each including spillover regions). The first measure was “first-pass time”, which sums fixations within a region before the gaze leaves it; “regression path time”, which sums fixations in a region before the first fixation to the right; and “total viewing time”, which adds up all the fixations in a given region. When compared to self-paced reading, it is clear that eye-tracking has several advantages, perhaps most notably that the stimulus is not artificially segmented, participants are allowed to return to regions that cause difficulty, and the button-pushing in the middle of readings is eliminated. Other studies that have made use of eye-tracking as a window on RC processing in L2 populations include Hopp’s (2014) analysis of attachment preferences in L1 German learners of English, and Sung et al.’s (2016) investigation of subject and object RC parsing by L1 Japanese learners of Chinese.

29.4  A testing ground for theories of acquisition and processing RC structures have been used to examine a broad range of theoretical questions concerning the nature of language acquisition by children and adults. One early and influential series of studies addressed whether young children have recourse to complex syntactic representations, and whether they demonstrate knowledge of Universal Grammar that they could not have gained from input alone. Subsequent research into heritage language acquisition has sought to shed light on whether the complex syntax required for RCs is maintained in cases of reduced input and attrition. Fundamental questions addressed in L2 studies include the nature of crosslinguistic influence, proposed stages of acquisition, knowledge of universals beyond a purported critical period, whether learners can successfully converge on the L2 grammar, and subject-object asymmetries. Examples of each of these lines of investigation will be examined below.

29.4.1  L1 acquisition and L1 attrition A persistent question in L1 studies has been whether child grammar is in some way fundamentally different from adult grammar. Some researchers have argued that child knowledge of the abstract workings of syntax is basically the same throughout development, an idea that has been couched in terms of the Continuity Hypothesis (Roeper, 1992) or the Modularity Matching Hypothesis (Crain & Thornton, 1998). Others have argued that children have difficulties with complex syntax, either because such knowledge comes with biological maturation (Radford, 1988) or because it requires prolonged exposure to input (Vainikka, 1993). In one early study, Tavakolian (1981) asked children (aged 3–5;6) to act out sentences such as The lion stands on the duck that bumps into the pig using toy animals, to see whether semantic interpretation was in terms of the RC or if the input was restructured and simplified to derive a conjoined-clause interpretation (in which case that is processed as and, and the lion bumps into the pig). Tavakolian considered that children’s willingness to act out the conjoined interpretation was evidence that they lacked principles of recursion in their grammar. However, Hamburger and Crain (1982) argued that such sentences with one duck in isolation are infelicitous: restrictive RCs need to restrict something, so there ought to be at least one more duck. They replicated the experiment after adding an extra animal, and the children’s performance dramatically improved. In another set of experiments lending weight to arguments for continuity of syntactic knowledge, Crain and Nakayama (1987) examined children’s understanding of the principle of structure dependence, that is, the idea that grammatical rules make reference to abstract structures and not simply linear order. One experimenter showed pictures to each child (age range 3;2–5;11), while the

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other experimenter manipulated a toy (Jabba the Hutt, from Star Wars). The child was promoted to put questions to the toy as follows: (15)  Ask Jabba if the boy who is watching Mickey Mouse is happy.

A linear question formation strategy would result in extraction of the auxiliary from the RC subject: Is the boy who _ watching Mickey Mouse is Happy? No child produced sentences of this type either in this task or in a subsequent task that varied the auxiliaries and modals in the RC and in the matrix clause, suggesting that children understand abstract syntactic principles from the outset. That children may quickly converge on adultlike forms is not a guarantee that they have entered into some kind of steady state of grammatical knowledge. In Polinsky’s (2011) study on Heritage Russian speakers’ knowledge of RCs, she sought to find out if divergent grammars in heritage adult RCs were a product of incomplete acquisition in childhood or attrition following years of reduced input. Russian RCs allow scrambling for constituents and involve the relative pronoun kotoryj, which carries the gender, number, and underlying case of the extracted element. The results of her picturematching TJVT show that both monolingual and bilingual heritage children have adult competence when it comes to RCs, which points to attrition rather than incomplete acquisition in the adult population.

29.4.2  L2 research: Crosslinguistic influence The issue of crosslinguistic influence (CLI), or transfer, has been fundamental to L2 research, although it is in evidence in all populations that hold two languages in the same mind, including early bilinguals, heritage learners, and dominant L2 users whose L1 has undergone attrition. One of the earliest and most influential studies of CLI in the L2 acquisition of RCs is that of Schachter (1974), who analyzed written L2 English compositions by L1 Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Persian learners. RCs in these L1s differ along various dimensions: prenominal vs. postnominal, complementizers vs. relative pronouns vs. subordinate affixes, and resumptive pronouns at various positions in the accessibility hierarchy. According to the kind of a priori comparison of languages prescribed by Lado’s (1957) Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) framework, transfer should have resulted in Chinese and Japanese learners producing the most errors, while Arab and Persian learners ought to have had less difficulty. However, percentage error rates revealed the opposite pattern. What Schachter’s study showed was that Chinese and Japanese students had low error rates precisely because they were avoiding English RCs and resorting to conjunction or paraphrase. In fact, a traditional a priori comparison sheds light on the avoidance phenomenon, while simple post-hoc error analysis reveals little about transfer effects in such cases. A key element of Lado’s (1957) CAH was the prediction that similarity between analogous aspects of grammar should facilitate acquisition, while differences will lead to difficulty. The greater the disparity between forms, structures, or rules, the more challenging for acquisition. Interestingly, the exact opposite prediction has become canon in L2 phonology: similarity implies difficulty; greater difference leads to ease of acquisition (Flege, 1995). Lado’s prediction has had mixed support in subsequent L2 research. In Hu and Liu’s (2007) investigation of the acquisition of Chinese restrictive RCs by English and Korean learners, they found that the similarity between the basic forms of Korean and Chinese RCs (both prenominal) did not give the Korean learners an advantage; rather, the surface dissimilarity recognized by English learners led to faster restructuring of the grammar, including acceptance of resumptive pronouns, which are licensed in Chinese but in neither L1. A fully acquired grammar does not have to be in place before there is evidence of CLI from the dominant language in bilingualism. Yip and Matthews (2007) give clear evidence of transfer from 404

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Cantonese to English in RCs produced by their own three bilingual children, all of whom used prenominal relatives in English during early language development, as shown in the following example. (16)  Where’s the Santa Claus give me the gun? (Timmy 2;07;05)  [i.e., “Where’s the gun Santa Claus gave me?”]

Although some argue for a view of CLI as primarily transfer from a single language system in the construction of an L2 or L3 (Schwartz & Sprouse, 2021), evidence from the transfer of RC structures indicates that CLI may occur between any two languages instantiated in the same mind regardless of order of acquisition. In addition to the above findings from childhood bilingualism, it also seems that a dominant L2 can influence an underused L1 in later life. Kasparian and Steinhauer (2017) administered a reading task with acceptability judgments to 24 Italian-English adult migrants with dominant L2, and a control group of 30 Italian monolinguals, while measuring ERP responses. L1 attriters had “nonnative” responses to the Italian stimuli in terms of both judgments and ERPs when the equivalent RC structures were ungrammatical in English. The authors conclude that “high levels of L2 proficiency and exposure may render a grammatical sentence in one’s native language ungrammatical” (p.1).

29.4.3  L2 research: Syntactic, semantic, and prosodic knowledge The syntactic complexity of RCs has made them an ideal set of structures to test hypotheses concerning whether L2 acquisition following a purported critical period is supported by continued knowledge of Universal Grammar (UG). (Similar argumentation applies for interrogatives in some languages: see Martohardjono and Franciotti, this volume.) Such studies bear on the basic question of whether adult L2 acquisition is fundamentally akin to or different from child language acquisition. Hawkins and Chan (1997) hypothesized that adult L2 learners can only access principles of UG previously instantiated in their L1 and are unable to acquire new functional features. They administered a GJT to Cantonese and French learners of English, predicting that the [±wh] feature that drives wh-movement should be available for French but not for Cantonese participants. They tested for acceptance of grammatical RCs, as well as knowledge of the restriction on resumptive pronouns (e.g., *The patient that I visited him was very sick), and subjacency violations such as wh-islands (e.g., *This is the lady who(m) Richard told me when he will meet) and complex-NPs (e.g., *This is the building which they heard the news that the government will buy). L1 Cantonese participants did improve significantly with proficiency in recognizing wh-fronting and rejecting resumptives, challenging the notion of a deficit in adult L2 acquisition. However, there was an interesting pattern in that the L1 Cantonese beginners had accuracy rates of only 38% with resumptives but 71% with subjacency violations, while the advanced groups had an inverse pattern of 90% and 38%, respectively. Hawkins and Chan speculate that the beginners were more successful in rejecting sentences with subjacency violations not because of constraints on wh-movement, but because they lacked overt resumptives. As acceptances of gaps instead of resumptives increased, they became more tolerant of the subjacency test sentences. This analysis led the authors to suggest that even though accuracy on grammatical RCs increased dramatically, the learners may in fact have a different interlanguage grammar based on L1 principles. On this account, they interpret sentence-initial wh-phrases as base-generated topics in Spec-CP that bind a null resumptive pro in the gap position. It is not clear how advanced the higher proficiency learners were in this study. They are described as university-level classroom learners, but they presumably had English outside the classroom in Hong Kong with input from other L2 speakers in a code-switching environment. Other studies examining knowledge of subjacency in wh-questions have shown quite clearly that advanced L1 Chinese learners of English can approach nativelike competence in their judgments (e.g., White & Juffs, 1998). 405

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Another aspect of RC acquisition that requires learners to glean syntactic knowledge that cannot derive from the L1 is the distinct binding properties of anaphors inside RCs in Chinese and Japanese, as investigated by Chen (2022) using a TVJT. In Chinese, the anaphor can refer to the RC subject, but the Japanese anaphor jibun ‘self’ may not, as shown below. (17) 

Daisyj-ga Mickeyk-ga arat-ta jibunj/*k-no booshi-o  yogoshi-ta. Daisy-NOM Mickey-NOM wash-PST self-GEN hat-ACC stain-PST ‘Daisyj stained self’sj/*k hat‑ that Mickeyk washed.’

On Chen’s (2022) analysis, an uninterpretable feature in the determiner (D) triggers the raising of the head NP in Chinese RCs, while there is no D in Japanese RCs, which are adjoined to a base-generated NP, hence the difference in binding possibilities. Chinese learners of Japanese were able to acquire the relevant syntactic knowledge, which Chen interprets as evidence against the deficit account of L2 acquisition espoused by Hawkins and Chan (1997). Other research that points to successful acquisition of facets of grammar not available in the L1 concerns the acquisition of mood distinctions in RCs related to interpretations of specificity. Borgonovo et al. (2015) used a GJT and an AJT to tap L1 English learners’ awareness of the following type of mood variation in Spanish.

(18)

Busco unas tijeras que {cortan/corten} look-for.1SG some scissors that cut-IND/cut-SUBJ} “I’m looking for some scissors that cut wire”

alambre. wire

The indicative mood inside the RC implies that the speaker is looking for a specific pair of scissors, while the subjunctive suggests that any pair of scissors that can cut wire will do. The indicative presupposes the existence of the scissors that the speaker has in mind; the subjunctive carries no such presupposition (for further discussion of mood in SLA, see Dudley, this volume). The results did contain some variation, both for L2 learners and for NS controls, in that the association between subjunctive and nonspecificity was stronger than that between the indicative and specificity. But generally speaking, learners were able to select the appropriate mood, despite that lack of any such distinction in the L1. One arguably under-researched aspect of L2 grammatical knowledge in the interpretation of RCs is the ability to infer syntactic structure from prosody. The vast majority of work on ambiguity in RCs has involved reading tasks, whether self-paced or using eye-tracking technology, that do not provide a window into how the reader is activating phonology while reading. A few studies, however, stand as important exceptions. Dekydtspotter et al. (2008) examined RC attachment to either the first noun phrase (NP1) or the second noun phrase (NP2) in French sentences such as (23). (19)

Nous adorons le secrétaire du psychologue qui   se promène (au  centre ville). We adore the secretary of-the psychologist who REFL walk at-the center town “We adore the secretary of the psychologist who takes a walk (downtown).”

In languages such as French, native speakers generally prefer high attachment (HA) to NP1, such that the secretary takes the walk. Native speakers of English usually choose low attachment (LA) to NP2, such that the psychologist is the one having a stroll. In one of the experiments conducted by these authors, the test sentences were delivered aurally, varying the length of the RC and the intona406

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tion contour. Short RCs excluded ‘downtown’ and had a prosodic break after secrétaire, favoring LA for native speakers, while long RCs included ‘downtown’, and had a prosodic break following psychologue, favoring HA. The English learners of French in this study appeared to have overcome their L1 bias: 57 of the learners in fact overgeneralized to a systematic HA preference, while 30 used intonational contour determine the locus of attachment. Given the complexity of the task and the difficulty of isolating prosodic cues, especially for beginner and low-intermediate learners, the authors conclude that the relevant phonological sensitivity shown by a significant number of participants is evidence that “a prosodic reflex is an integral part of interlanguage processing” (p. 476). A more recent study by Goad et al. (2021) takes a similar approach, investigating the role of prosodic breaks and RC length in attachment preferences for Spanish learners of L2 English, with Spanish, like French, being reported as having a general HA preference. Goad et al. refine their analysis to incorporate not just RC length, but the tendency of languages to balance prosodic weight across “sister constituents” (Fodor, 1998). They found a significant change with proficiency level, as higher proficiency learners were increasingly able to associate the appropriate prosodic break with HA. That lower-level learners quite systematically preferred LA cannot be attributed to transfer, so the authors suggest that this might be due to a recency effect (Gibson et al., 1996). However, note that these findings arguably replicate those of Dekydtspotter et al. (2008), with less advanced learners arguably overgeneralizing to the general attachment preference of the L2 in advance of eventual sensitivity to intonational contours.

29.4.4  L2 research: The NPAH and subject-object asymmetries Following Keenan and Comrie’s (1977) crosslinguistic evidence for the NPAH, Gass (1979) hypothesized that the relative order of typological frequency should be reflected in the order of L2 acquisition of RCs in any given language. Given that the underlying factors governing the NPAH are supposedly universal, this order of difficulty should hold across L1s. Gass analyzed L2 English data from three tasks – free compositions, sentence combining, and GJs – completed by learners from a range of L1s (Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, and Thai). The predicted acquisition sequence was SU > DO > IO > OPREP > GEN > OCOMP, which the results strongly supported. The only exception was the surprisingly high accuracy with the genitive across all L1 groups. One possible explanation might lie in language particular properties of genitive relatives in English, as the relative pronoun whose is the only such marker prominently coded for case and grammatical relation (Gass, 1979, p. 341). While much research that followed in the wake of the NPAH proposal assumed that the grammatical relations themselves were the primitives that determine accessibility, Comrie (2007) makes clear that the original paper was deliberately noncommittal in this regard, and he suggests that the underlying determinants are likely to be psycholinguistic in nature. Over the last two decades, explanations have been offered for this hierarchy (either in its entirety or subparts of it) in terms of working memory and linear locality (e.g., Gibson & Wu, 2013), processing and syntactic prominence (e.g., J.A. Hawkins, 2004), and expectation-based theories (e.g., Hale, 2006).5 Perhaps the most enduring aspect of this line of research has involved the very top of the hierarchy, with subject relatives predicted to exhibit ease of processing with respect to object relatives. This has in fact turned into a vigorous debate that has continued for decades and shows little sign of diminishing. Lau and Tanaka (2021) provide an excellent review of research on subject-object asymmetries in RCs, at the end of which they supply comprehensive reference lists for research involving particular populations (e.g., NS, child L1, adult L2, Heritage, aphasic, autistic, and SLI studies, among others). They conclude that overall, across populations, previous research does point to a subject advantage, although the strong evidence from languages with postnominal RCs stands in contrast to the more mixed evidence from those with prenominal RCs and those with ergative-absolutive case-marking. 407

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An important distinction within languages with prenominal RCs is between Korean and Japanese, which have SOV word order in main clauses, and Chinese, which is SVO. One account of the subject advantage in languages like English is that postnominal subject RCs [S [RCVO]] show isomorphism with main clause word order [S [VO]] (Diessel & Tomasello, 2005). However, in Chinese, such isomorphism is found with prenominal object RCs [[RC SV] O], and several studies, including Yip and Matthews’ (2007) investigation of Cantonese-English bilingual development, found evidence for earlier emergence of object RCs in acquisition. Nevertheless, the results of the research on Mandarin and Cantonese reviewed in Lau and Tanaka (2021) is mixed: in studies of adult, NS processing, 14 showed a subject advantage (S > O), 22 showed an object advantage (O > S), and ten showed either no preference or were unclear; in studies of L2 acquisition, four were S > O, 11 were O > S, with four no preference / unclear.6 As argued by Tanaka and Cherici (2022), some of the confusion in these findings may be due to task effects relating to “comprehension-related confounds” in experimentation that has largely relied on real-time processing of input. Their own picture-based elicited production experiment reveals a clear subject preference at group levels and with no significant differences at the level of individual participants. More generally, relative difficulty in the NPAH can be manifested differently depending on the task or population. Lau and Tanaka (2021, pp. 2–3) observe that this is operationalized in comprehension studies in terms of lower accuracy, longer processing time, or greater demands on working memory; whereas in production studies, difficulty is understood in terms of slower response time, greater error rate, or substitutions; and in L1/L2 acquisition studies, in terms of late emergence, delayed acquisition, or avoidance. To establish a foundation for future research, it seems crucial to go beyond the apparent confusion of previous results and to consider the effects of method and measurement as we strive for a clearer understanding of acquisition sequences of RC types across languages.

29.5 Conclusion Despite the voluminous and ever-expanding literature on RCs, these selected studies are to a meaningful extent representative of empirical research in this area of syntax, and they afford us several insights into the workings of L2 acquisition. One significant finding across research frameworks, methods employed, and combinations of languages is that there is unambiguous evidence for crosslinguistic influence, or CLI, in childhood bilingualism, L2 acquisition, and L1 attrition in contexts of a dominant L2. This supports hypotheses of CLI that go beyond models of transfer only from previously acquired to newly acquired languages and is in line with theories that allow for more dynamic relationships between multiple languages in a single mind. Another observation is that studies that track learners into advanced proficiency almost always find a gradual convergence on the L2 grammar. That is, even when the relevant features, structures, or strategies are not instantiated in the L1, learners are able to take advantage of a fully functioning language faculty in acquiring new forms, which casts doubt on “deficit accounts” of L2 acquisition. With regard to order of acquisition of RCs that instantiate difference grammatical relations, the NPAH finds ample crosslinguistic support, and subject-object asymmetries are in evidence across a range of languages. That said, it is clear that several language-specific aspects of grammar are in play, and findings from languages with prenominal relatives or ergative case-marking continue as a topic of animated debate. In future research, it seems clear that close attention to method is imperative, given disparities in findings between studies of comprehension and production, perhaps in part due to the extra layers of processing in reading tasks. Regarding investigative scope, there remain significant gaps in the literature regarding the L2 acquisition of major clause types, such as double-headed, free, correlative, and adjoined RCs, and typological differences in morphology and movement. RCs are among the most complex and varied forms of syntactic structure, and acquisition research in this domain still has 408

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much to reveal about the nature of human language in general, as well as what makes each human language distinct.

Notes 1 One contested feature of this cartographic approach to syntactic architecture is the postulation of unspecified functional projections (FPs) with empty heads whose specifier positions serve as landing sites; these play a central role in making possible Cinque’s (2020) unified analysis. 2 For an accessible introduction to wh-movement in RCs, see Carnie (2013, p. 369 ff.). 3 Alternative proposals have been offered in terms of raising and matching analyses. For detailed discussion, see Cinque (2020), Hulsey and Sauerland (2006), and Salzmann (2017). 4 A third semantic type which has been much discussed in the semantics literature is maximalizing RCs, in which the RC does not modify the head, as such. The head acts as a degree variable within the RC, while an operation of maximalization applies at the level of CP. Maximalizing RCs remain to be investigated in terms of acquisition and will not be discussed further here. 5 A concise summary of these contrasting approaches is provided by Lin (2018). 6 For current purposes, data from Mandarin and Cantonese have been collapsed. See Lau and Tanaka (2021) for separate findings.

References Andrews, A. (2007). Relative clauses. In T. Shonen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description: Volume 2, complex constructions (pp. 206–236). Cambridge University Press. Bird, C. S. (1968). Relative clauses in Bambara. Journal of West African Languages, 5, 35–47. Borer, H. (1984). Restrictive relatives in Modern Hebrew. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 2, 219–260. Borgonovo, C., Garavito, J., & Prévost, P. (2015). Mood selection in relative clauses: Interfaces and variability. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 37(1), 33–69. Bresnan, J., & Grimshaw, J. (1978). The syntax of free relatives in English. Linguistic Inquiry, 9, 331–391. Carnie, A. (2013). Syntax: A generative introduction (3rd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. Chen, Y. (2022). Acquisition of Japanese relative clauses by L1 Chinese learners: Evidence from reflexive pronoun resolution. Second Language Research, 38(3), 499–529. Chomsky, N. (1977). On wh-movement. In P. Culicover, T. Wasow, & A. Akmajian (Eds.), Formal syntax (pp. 71–132). Academic Press. Cinque, G. (2020). The syntax of relative clauses: A unified analysis. Cambridge University Press. Comrie, B. (2007). The acquisition of relative clauses in relation to language typology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 29(2), 301–309. Crain, S., & Nakayama, M. (1987). Structure dependence in grammar formation. Language, 63, 522–543. Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (1998). Investigations in universal grammar. MIT Press. Cunnings, I., & Fujita, H. (2023). Similarity-based interference and relative clauses in second language processing. Second Language Research, 39(2), 539–563. Dekydtspotter, L., Donaldson, B., Edmonds, A., Fultz, A., & Petrush, R. (2008). Syntactic and prosodic computations in the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity by English-French learners. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 30(4), 453–480. Dekydtspotter, L., Miller, A. K., Iverson, M., Xiong, Y., Swanson, K., & Gilbert, C. (2021). Minimal brain adaptation for representational prioritization in non-native parsing: Evidence from a time-frequency analysis of recursion in Wh-dependencies in French. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 59, 101002. Diessel, H. (2009). On the role of frequency and similarity in the acquisition of subject and non-subject relative clauses. In T. Givon & M. Shibatani (Eds.), Syntactic complexity (pp. 251–276). John Benjamins. Diessel, H., & Tomasello, M. (2005). A new look at the acquisition of relative clauses. Language, 81(4), 882–906. Fabb, N. (1990). The difference between English restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses. Journal of Linguistics, 26, 57–78. Flege, J. E. (1995). Second language speech learning: Theory, findings, and problems. In W. Strange (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-linguistic research (pp. 233–277). New York Press. Fodor, J. D. (1998). Learning to parse. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 27, 285–319. Gass, S. (1979). Language transfer and universal grammatical relations. Language Learning, 29, 327–344.

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30 QUANTIFIER SCOPE Heather Marsden

30.1 Introduction Quantifiers such as every and some, and their scope-taking properties, have been an enduring topic of linguistic enquiry (e.g., Fox, 2000; Ionin & Luchkina, 2018; Kuroda, 1965; May, 1977; Szabolsci, 1997; among many others). Of issue is that sentences containing two quantifiers (1), or one quantifier and another scope-taking element such as negation (2), potentially allow two interpretations: a surface-scope interpretation, where the first scope-taking element takes scope over the second; and an inverse-scope interpretation, where the second element takes scope over the first.1 (1) Someone stroked every cat. Surface scope, someone > every (∃ > ∀): ‘there is one person who stroked all the cats’ Inverse scope, every > someone (∀ > ∃): ‘for each cat, some person stroked it’ (2) Every horse did not jump over the fence. Surface scope, every > not (∀ > ¬): ‘for each horse, that horse did not jump over the fence’ Inverse scope, not > every (¬ > ∀): ‘it is not the case that every horse jumped over the fence’

There are often differences in the relative availability of the different scope interpretations. Further, there is considerable crosslinguistic variation in the availability of inverse scope. Such within- and between-language variation means that quantifier scope offers fertile ground for language acquisition research. This chapter provides a critical review of research on quantifier scope in second language (L2) acquisition.

30.2  Linguistic background Linguistic accounts of surface- and inverse-scope interpretations of quantified sentences such as (1–2) are typically framed in terms of the structural relationship between the scope-taking elements, along with the notion of covert quantifier movement (Fox, 2000; May, 1977, 1985). One quantifier is argued to take scope over another if the former is higher in the syntactic structure than the latter (more formally, if the former c-commands the latter). However, at the level of semantic interpretation, quantifiers may undergo covert quantifier movement to scope-taking positions. This is illustrated in

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(3), for the sentence in (1). The subject has raised to Spec,TP for case-checking (following standard assumptions about the syntax of subjects, and independent of quantifier movement), while the object has undergone covert quantifier raising. Thus, someone c-commands every cat, yielding the surfacescope interpretation. For inverse scope, further covert quantifier movement applies: either every cat raises to a TP-adjoined position, or someone reconstructs to its VP-internal position. In either case, every cat c-commands someone, giving rise to inverse scope. (3) [TP … [TP Someonei … [VP every catj [VP ti stroked tj]]]]

Similarly, for quantifier–negation interactions (e.g., (2)), quantifiers are argued to raise or lower to yield the inverse scope interpretation. Although English doubly quantified (QP-QP) sentences allow both surface and inverse scope, inverse scope is typically dispreferred (e.g., 67.5% acceptance by native English speakers compared with 98% for surface scope in experimental research by Marsden, 2009). Turning to quantifier–negation sentences, with every N as the subject, both scope interpretations are available, though experimental results are mixed as to whether there is a native English preference for surface scope (e.g., Lee, 2009; Wu & Ionin, 2019) or inverse scope (e.g., Musolino et al., 2000; Musolino & Lidz, 2006). When every N is the object, as in (4), negated sentences tend to be treated as unambiguous, with just the surface-scope not > every interpretation (Musolino et al., 2000). (4) Cookie Monster didn’t eat every cookie. Surface scope, not > every: ‘it is not the case that Cookie Monster ate every cookie’ #Inverse scope, every > not: ‘for each cookie, Cookie Monster didn’t eat it’

Turning to crosslinguistic differences, many languages, including Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, and Turkish, are argued to demonstrate ‘scope rigidity’ in QP-QP sentences, allowing only the surfacescope interpretation. This lack of ambiguity is exemplified in (5) for Japanese (Hoji, 1985; Kuroda, 1965) and (6) for Mandarin (Aoun & Li, 1993; Huang, 1982). Experimental research confirms that inverse scope tends to be rejected in rigid-scope languages (e.g., 16% acceptance by native Japanese speakers in Marsden, 2009; a mean rating of 1.56 out of 7 for inverse scope by Mandarin speakers in Scontras et al., 2017). (5) Dareka-ga dono hon-mo yonda someone-NOM every book read ‘Someone read every book’ Interpretation: ∃ > ∀, *∀ > ∃

(6)

You yi-ge xuesheng kan-le mei-yi-ben shu exist one student read-ASP every book “A/one student read every book.” Interpretation: ∃ > ∀, *∀ > ∃

Crosslinguistic differences in the availability of scope ambiguity are also found in quantifier–negation sentences. For example, in contrast to the ambiguity of English every…not sentences (2), experimental research has confirmed that native Mandarin speakers accept only a surface-scope (‘none’) interpretation in sentences such as (7) (e.g., Zhou & Crain, 2009).

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Heather Marsden (7) Mei-pi ma dou meiyou tiaoguo liba. every-CL horse all NEG jump​.ov​er fence ‘Every horse didn’t jump over the fence.’ Interpretation: ∀ > ¬, *¬ > ∀

And in Korean, the surface-scope interpretation is strongly preferred in negated sentences with a universally quantified object, such as (8) (e.g., Han et al., 2007). Because Korean is an SOV language in which objects occur before negation in linear order,2 the surface-scope interpretation of (8) is the every > not interpretation, thus contrasting with the dominant not > every interpretation of corresponding sentences in English.

(8) Khwukhi Monste-ka   motun khwukhi-lul  an mek-ess-ta. Cookie Monster-NOM every cookie-ACC NEG eat-PST-DECL ‘Cookie Monster didn’t eat every cookie.’ Interpretation: ∀ > ¬, *¬ > ∀

Given these within- and between-language asymmetries in the availability of inverse scope, it is clear that covert quantifier movement alone cannot account for all quantifier scope effects. Other factors may include general processing strategies, syntactic parameters, lexical features, semantic entailment, and pragmatics. Considering processing first, Anderson (2004) proposed that processing economy accounts for the general preference for the surface-scope interpretation of QP-QP sentences. On encountering a sentence-initial QP, the parser builds a structure in which this phrase is a subject and will c-command what follows. If, on integrating further information, the need to represent an inverse-scope interpretation is perceived, then the structure-in-progress can be revised through quantifier movement so that the object c-commands the subject. Such revision incurs a processing cost; hence, processing economy favours the surface-scope interpretation. O’Grady (2006) argues that the increased processing cost of inverse scope is the reason why languages that permit both inverse- and surface-scope interpretations are less common than those that allow only surface scope. Inverse scope is the marked option, and it has been shown for a range of linguistic properties with marked and unmarked options that the marked option is often associated with higher processing costs. O’Grady rejects any role for grammar in the crosslinguistic variation of inverse-scope availability, but other proposals ascribe the crosslinguistic differences to variation in syntactic structure (e.g., Aoun & Li, 1993) or in the morpholexical features of quantifiers (e.g., Beghelli, 1995). A unified morphosyntactic account is the object of ongoing research. Semantic entailment and pragmatics are argued to play a role in the scope of quantifiers with negation (e.g., Musolino & Lidz, 2006). In sentences with a universal quantifier and negation, scope of negation over every entails every > not. Thus, for (4), repeated as (9), the not > every interpretation (‘it is not the case that Cookie Monster ate every cookie’) is true even if Cookie Monster ate no cookies (every > not). (9) Cookie Monster didn’t eat every cookie.

This entailment relationship leads to a scalar implicature whereby the every > not interpretation (i.e., ‘none’) makes a more informative claim than not > every (‘none/some’). According to the pragmatic Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1989), speakers are not expected to use a less informative statement when a more informative one is true. Applying this to (9), if Cookie Monster ate no cookies, then use of no/none should be preferred over the less informative not…every. As a result, the pragmatic 414

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interpretation of (9) is that Cookie Monster ate some but not all the cookies, which is compatible only with surface scope of negation over every, but not with inverse scope. However, when every is the subject (e.g., Every horse didn’t jump over the fence), both the surface and inverse-scope interpretations are available. This may be due to the interaction of pragmatic preference with processing economy. Processing economy favours the surface-scope interpretation but pragmatics favours the inverse; hence, either interpretation can arise. This issue has been investigated in first language (L1) acquisition research, as outlined in the next section.

30.3  L1 acquisition of quantifier scope interpretation A key finding from L1 research on children’s scope interpretation is that children are less likely than adults to allow scope ambiguity. Most available research focuses on sentences containing a quantifier and negation, and uses Truth Value Judgement Tasks (TVJTs), which, along with contextualised acceptability judgement tasks (AJTs), are the chief method used in L2 research too. A representative experiment, from Musolino and Lidz (2006), investigated 5-year-old L1-English children’s knowledge of the inverse-scope (not > every) interpretation of sentences with a universally quantified subject, such as (10) (previously (2)): (10) Every horse didn’t jump over the fence.

Each sentence for judgement was preceded by a story, narrated using toys. A puppet then uttered the target sentence, and the child had to decide whether the puppet’s statement was right or wrong. The context story for (10) involved three horses in a jumping contest. They first considered jumping over a barn, but decided it was too tall. They then considered jumping over a fence. Two of the horses cleared the fence, but the third decided not to jump. In this scenario, the puppet’s statement is false if a surface-scope interpretation is applied, but it is true on the inverse-scope (‘not all’) reading. Half of the 20 children in this experiment judged sentences such as (10), but the other half judged sentences with a different story, and where the target was preceded by a contrasting statement, as in (11): (11) Every horse jumped over the log but every horse didn’t jump over the fence.

In the story for (11), the horses first tried jumping over a log, and all of them succeeded. They then considered the fence, and two of them cleared it but the third decided not to jump. Again, the target sentence is correct on an inverse-scope interpretation. The results showed that while an adult native English control group judged the puppet’s statements correct in both the ‘No Contrast’ (10) and ‘Contrast’ (11) conditions over 90% of the time, thereby indicating an inverse-scope interpretation, the children’s responses were affected by the condition. In the No Contrast condition, they accepted the inverse-scope interpretation only 15% of the time, but this rose to 60% in the Contrast condition. Musolino & Lidz argued that the Contrast condition facilitated the children’s ability to interpret the negated sentence, on the grounds that negated sentences become more plausible in a contrastive context. They used this finding and the findings of further experiments to argue that children’s apparent failure to access a certain scope interpretation in a TVJT does not necessarily indicate that their grammar does not allow such an interpretation (as had previously been proposed in Musolino et al., 2000). Rather, children’s sensitivity to pragmatic factors is less developed than in adults, and this can lead to different scope preferences. Research on L1 acquisition of quantifier–negation interpretation in Kannada (Lidz & Musolino, 2002) and Chinese (Zhou & Crain, 2009) also showed that children’s interpretations differ from adults’ interpretations. The precise source of the differences remains to be determined, but in both 415

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situations, the authors identified pragmatic or discourse-level development as a potential factor. As detailed in the following sections, pragmatics and linguistic structure are key areas of interest for L2 research, too, though with a different perspective.

30.4  Quantifier scope and L2 theories Key theoretical questions in L2 acquisition that have been explored through quantifier scope research concern, variously, the nature of L1 influence, the epistemological status of L2 knowledge, and the relative ease of acquisition at different linguistic interfaces (e.g., syntax–semantics, syntax–pragmatics). Influential hypotheses that encompass these first two issues are Full Transfer/Full Access (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996) and Feature Reassembly (Lardiere, 2009). While the empirical coverage of these two hypotheses is essentially the same, Full Transfer/Full Access is informed by an earlier instantiation of generative linguistic theory. Both propose that the L1 grammar transfers to the L2 at the outset of L2 acquisition, and that this L1-based interlanguage grammar is then modified on the basis of positive evidence in the input. Further, they propose that L2 acquisition is guided by the same innate, language-specific knowledge as L1 acquisition, namely Universal Grammar (UG). From a generative perspective, crosslinguistic differences in scope interpretation offer an ideal testing ground for both transfer and UG access. In L1–L2 pairings where the L1 allows inverse scope but the L2 does not, a poverty-of-the-stimulus problem is argued to arise, on the grounds that the input cannot provide evidence from which to induce that inverse scope is not possible. Thus, if L2 speakers can nonetheless acquire the absence of inverse scope, this could indicate access to UG in L2 acquisition.3 Further, L1 transfer can be investigated by comparing L1 speakers of an ambiguous-scope language and L1 speakers of a rigid-scope language with respect to a particular L2. The group whose L1 scope-taking properties match those of the L2 is predicted to demonstrate knowledge of target scope interpretations from the outset. The Interface Hypothesis (e.g., Sorace, 2011; Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006) proposes that acquisition at the interface of syntax with semantics is easier than at the interface with language-external domains including discourse and pragmatics. The difficulty proposed here is not the same as the challenge of pragmatics in L1 acquisition, because adult L2 speakers are assumed to have fully developed pragmatic knowledge. Rather, it is the complexity of integrating pragmatic knowledge with syntactic knowledge in the cognitively demanding L2 processing environment. Where scope interpretation arises from the interface of syntax-semantic structure with pragmatics as in the case of universal quantifiers and negation, the Interface Hypothesis predicts that L2 acquisition of the target scope interpretations will be more difficult than in cases that do not involve pragmatics. The next section reviews a body of L2 research on scope interpretation that engages with the key L2 theoretical questions outlined here.

30.5  Quantifier scope interpretation in non-native language acquisition Research on L2 acquisition of quantifier scope interpretation includes studies with a range of L1–L2 combinations with roughly even coverage of QP-QP scope and quantifier–negation scope. Third language (L3) acquisition is also represented. All of the studies use some form of TVJT, or a picture-based or context-based AJT. QP-QP studies are presented first, followed by quantifier–negation studies.4

30.5.1  L2 scope interpretation in QP-QP sentences Marsden’s (2005, 2009) influential study of quantifier scope interpretation examined L2 acquisition of Japanese by L1-English, L1-Korean and L1-Chinese speakers.5 As indicated above, Japanese 416

Quantifier scope

Figure 30.1 Pictures representing some > every (left) and every > some (right) interpretations (images reprinted from Marsden, 2009 by permission of Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, www​.tandfonline​.com)

QP-QP SOV sentences allow only a surface-scope interpretation, unlike English, which additionally allows inverse scope. The goal was to find out whether L1-English L2-Japanese speakers could overcome poverty-of-the-stimulus and acquire the absence of inverse scope in Japanese. Further, since Korean and Chinese are rigid-scope languages like Japanese, the study tested the prediction that L1-Korean and L1-Chinese speakers should demonstrate knowledge of the absence of inverse scope in Japanese at an earlier stage of development than the L1-English speakers. A picture-based AJT was used. The critical items were QP-QP SOV sentences such as (12), presented in the context of a picture that depicted either the surface-scope or the inverse-scope interpretation, as illustrated in Figure 30.1. Participants indicated how well the sentence matched the picture by selecting from among four response options: two that were coded as acceptance of the picture–sentence pair, and two that were coded as rejection. (12)

Dareka-ga dono neko-mo someone-NOM every cat ‘Someone stroked every cat.’

nadeta stroked

∃ > ∀, *∀ > ∃

The results supported the L1 transfer prediction. Rates of acceptance of inverse scope were higher in the L1-English groups (intermediate: 58%; advanced 43%) than in the L1-Korean and L1-Chinese groups (intermediate: 31–33%; advanced 10–27%). Moreover, the proportion of individuals in the L1-English groups that consistently rejected inverse scope increased with higher proficiency: 15% in the intermediate group compared with 50% in the advanced. This suggests that at least some individuals were able to acquire the absence of inverse scope in Japanese, despite there being no direct evidence for this absence in the input. Marsden (2009) proposed that target scope interpretation was achieved through acquisition of the feature composition of the Japanese universal quantifier construction dono N-mo, for which evidence is available (though not plentiful), independent of encountering dono N-mo in QP-QP sentences. Assuming initial transfer of the features of English every to dono…mo, inverse scope will be available to L1-English L2-Japanese speakers until those features are reconfigured, but once reconfigured, access to the specific syntactic structure that underpins inverse scope would automatically be ruled out, as per the target Japanese. The findings of this study thus are consistent with Full Transfer/Full Access, and Feature Reassembly. 417

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Other studies of QP-QP scope interpretation focus on the situation where the L2 allows inverse scope: L2 English by L1-Chinese speakers (Chu et al., 2014; Wu & Ionin, 2022b) and L1-Japanese speakers (Kimura, 2022); and L2 Russian by L1-English speakers (Ionin et al., 2014; Ionin & Luchkina, 2019). Since direct evidence of the inverse-scope interpretation of SVO sentences in English and Russian is potentially available in the input, this is not a poverty-of-the-stimulus situation. However, such evidence is scarce: QP-QP sentences are not common, and those used with an inverse-scope meaning are likely to be in the minority, given that inverse scope is dispreferred in both English and Russian compared with surface scope (e.g., Ionin et al., 2014; Marsden, 2009). Thus, for L1-speakers of rigid-scope languages such as Chinese and Japanese, L1 transfer along with the scarcity of direct evidence in the input predicts that acquisition of inverse scope in English will represent a challenge. For English speakers acquiring L2 Russian, on the other hand, knowledge of inverse scope is predicted to be automatic, through L1 transfer. The results of the L2 English and L2 Russian studies together confirm these predictions. Participants in all the studies had intermediate to advanced L2 proficiency. The studies all used picture-based judgement tasks, where the pictures provided a surface- or inverse-scope context. Test items included SVO sentences with an existential subject and universally quantified object, as illustrated in (13) from Chu et al. (2014) and (14a) from Ionin et al. (2014). The L2 Russian studies additionally included scrambled OVS sentences, in the existential-first configuration illustrated in (14b). Scrambled sentences in Russian allow both surface and inverse scope, with inverse scope arising if the scrambled object is interpreted in its post-verbal base position.6 (13) Someone dropped every plate. (14) a. b.

Odna devočka gladit one.NOM girl.NOM strokes ‘One girl strokes every kitten.’ Odnogo kotenka gladit one.ACC kitten.ACC strokes ‘Every girl strokes one cat.’

∃ > ∀, ∀ > ∃ každogo every.ACC

kotenka. kitten.ACC

∃ > ∀, ∀ > ∃

každaja every.NOM

devočka. girl.NOM

∃ > ∀, ∀ > ∃

The L2 speakers in all studies readily accepted surface scope. However, in the L2-English studies, both L1-Chinese and L1-Japanese speakers showed low acceptance for inverse scope. By contrast, in L2 Russian, L1-English speakers demonstrated at least 50% acceptance of inverse scope whether in SVO or OVS sentences. In short, these results suggest L1 influence on L2 scope interpretation. Further, the L2-English results show no evidence of development beyond the L1-influenced rigidscope grammar. A study by Ay and Aydın (2016) investigated QP-QP scope interpretation in L3 Turkish, another rigid-scope language. The 14 L3-Turkish participants were L1-Japanese speakers whose L2 was English. The study aimed to find out whether L3 speakers would transfer scope rigidity from their L1 Japanese or scope ambiguity from their L2 English. However, the authors did not test their participants’ English scope interpretation, and, given the findings reported above for L2 English by L1-Chinese and L1-Japanese speakers, it seems questionable whether Ay & Aydın’s participants’ L2-English grammar would really have allowed inverse scope. The results showed low acceptance of inverse scope in Turkish SOV sentences (22%) and high acceptance (90%) for surface scope. To summarise so far, the research on QP-QP sentences suggests that the L1 scope interpretation transfers to the L2 (or L3). Consequently, when the L1 and L2 scope behaviours match, even lower proficiency L2 speakers demonstrate target-like interpretation. However, for speakers of a rigidscope language acquiring an L2 that allows inverse scope, no clear evidence of acquisition of inverse scope was found. For speakers whose L1 allows inverse scope, acquisition of rigid scope was found 418

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in a subset of advanced L2 speakers. Together, these findings suggest that it is difficult to acquire L2 scope interpretation that differs from the L1. A different perspective on crosslinguistic influence in bilingual QP-QP interpretation comes from a study of the effect of crosslinguistic priming in L1-Dutch–L2-French, by Slim et al. (2021). They investigated French scopally ambiguous sentences such as (15).7 (15) Tous les randonneurs montent sur une colline all the hikers climb on a hill ‘All the hikers climb on a hill.’ Universal-wide interpretation: ‘each hiker climbs a (possibly different) hill’  Existential-wide interpretation: ‘there is a hill such that all the hikers climb that hill’

A picture selection task was used to find out about participants’ interpretation preferences. For each trial, participants read a sentence such as (15) and saw two pictures, one depicting the universal-wide interpretation (three climbers each climbing a different hill), and the other depicting the existentialwide interpretation (three climbers all climbing the same hill). Participants were asked to select the picture they felt matched the sentence. In a preliminary study on native French and native Dutch, the universal-wide surface-scope interpretation was selected only 37–38% of the time. However, Slim et al. found that, if a universal-wide interpretation was presented as a prime before the target trial, rates of selection of the universal-wide interpretation increased. Slim et al. then aimed to discover whether a similar priming effect would occur in L2 French, when the target French sentence (e.g., (15)) was preceded by an unambiguous prime in the L1 Dutch, such as (16). (16) L1 Dutch prime for universal-wide reading of French target given in (15) Alle All

kinderen children

klimmen climb

oop up

een a

ladder. ladder

Picture 1: Three children each climbing a different ladder Picture 2: Three children each climbing a different tree

The universal-wide interpretation of the prime in (16) is unambiguous because the alternative, Picture 2, is a lexical mismatch. The researchers found that when a Dutch universal-wide prime (16) preceded an ambiguous target trial in French (15), L1-Dutch–L2-French speakers selected a universalwide interpretation of the target more frequently than when the prime depicted an existential-wide interpretation. Slim et al. interpret this to show that scope representations are shared between languages in bilingual comprehension. This finding of cross-language priming in QP-QP interpretation potentially has implications both for understanding L1 transfer effects and for experiment design in quantifier scope studies. I return to this issue in the discussion.

30.5.2  L2 scope interpretation in quantifier–negation sentences Most studies of L2 scope interpretation in quantifier–negation sentences focus on English universal quantifiers (every/all) as either the subject (Chung & Shin, 2023; Lee, 2009; Wu & Ionin, 2019) or object (Chung, 2013; Jo, Kim & Kim, 2021; Lee, 2009). Özcelik (2018) is an exception, focusing on object numeral quantifiers with negation in L2 English and L2 Turkish. All these studies used variations of TVJTs, which typically presented the critical sentence after a written—or written and illustrated—context that biased towards either a surface- or inverse-scope interpretation, as in (17) (Chung & Shin, 2023, p. 793). 419

Heather Marsden (17) Context opening: Last week there was a horse race at the stadium, and the horses had to jump over a very high fence. However, … a. Continuation biasing to surface scope (every > not) … none of the horses jumped over the fence. b. Continuation biasing to inverse scope (not > every) … only some of the horses jumped over the fence. c. Sentence for judgement Last week every horse didn’t jump over the fence at the race.

Considering subject-every first, the key finding for both L1-Korean L2-learners of English (Chung & Shin, 2023; Lee, 2009) and L1-Mandarin L2-learners of English (Wu & Ionin, 2019) was that surface scope was strongly preferred. This L2 preference could be due to L1 transfer since surface scope is the dominant interpretation in Korean and Mandarin subject-QP–negation sentences. However, it is important to observe that the native English control groups in all three studies also had a clear preference for surface scope. Recall that other studies (e.g., Musolino et al., 2000) have found the opposite: a native English preference for inverse scope of every…not sentences. Chung & Shin noted that in studies such as Musolino et al., the contexts were acted out rather than presented in written format. They considered whether the dispreference for inverse scope found in a design like (17) could be an effect of encountering unambiguous quantifiers (none/some) before the ambiguous every…not sentence. To investigate this, their TVJT additionally tested target sentences containing none or some following ambiguous contexts that incorporated every…not, as illustrated in (18) (Chung & Shin, 2023, p. 793). (18) a.  Ambiguous context continuation (following the opening given in (17)) … every horse didn’t jump over the fence. b. Surface-scope sentence for judgement (every > not) Last week none of the horses jumped over the fence at the race. c. Inverse-scope sentence for judgement (not > every) Last week some of the horses jumped over the fence at the race.

In this ambiguous condition, the native English speakers had a 78% rate of selection of “True” for inverse scope (i.e., (18c)) compared with 28% by the L2 participants; whereas for surface scope (18b) the native group had only 31% selection of “True” compared with 67% by the L2 group. Chung & Shin’s study additionally incorporated measurement of real-time processing (as did Lee, 2009), using self-paced reading for the target sentences. Processing economy would predict slower reading of the critical phrase (jumped/didn’t jump over the fence) in the inversescope conditions. However, this was found only for the native English group in unambiguous contexts (17c). Chung & Shin interpret this in relation to the pragmatic infelicity of every…not in the unambiguous context along with inverse scope being dispreferred, though “True”, in (17c). The longer processing time in (17c) could reflect computation of both scope interpretations together with consultation of pragmatic and semantic information in order to determine that the sentence is true. In the L2 results, there was no evidence of longer processing time for inverse scope. Chung & Shin ascribe this to processing economy: the L2 speakers tended to create the more economical syntactic structure regardless of the ambiguity of the context. However, this finding differs from Lee’s (2009) self-paced reading results, where the L2 participants showed longer reading times in the inverse-scope condition (corresponding to (17b)). Further research is needed to shed light on L2 quantifier scope processing. Turning to object-every/all and negation (e.g., Cookie Monster didn’t eat every cookie), the dominant interpretation in English is surface scope (not > every). However, the relevant studies showed a 420

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preference for the inverse-scope interpretation (every > not) by low proficiency L2-English speakers whose L1 was Korean (Chung, 2013; Lee, 2009) and L3-English children (age 11–12) whose L1 was Russian or Chinese and L2 Korean (Jo et al., 2021). Recall that every > not is the dominant interpretation in Korean (e.g., (8)), where it corresponds to the surface, rather than the inverse, scope. Jo et al. found that in Chinese and Russian, the children accepted both surface and inverse scope, whereas in Korean, they preferred every > not scope. The L2/L3 English findings thus all suggest influence from Korean at low English-proficiency level. Chung’s and Lee’s studies also included higher proficiency L2-English speakers, who preferred surface scope (Chung, 2013) or accepted both surface and inverse scope (Lee, 2009). Özcelik’s (2018) investigation of QP–negation scope interpretation focused on sentences with a numerically quantified object, as in (19). (19) Donald didn’t find two guys. Following Lidz and Musolino’s (2002) method for investigating child L1 English, Özcelik presented sentences such as (19) after a story context in which Donald was searching for four friends and managed to find two of them but two remained unfound. In this scenario, only the inverse scope two > not interpretation is true (‘there are two guys that Donald didn’t find’), since the surface-scope reading, ‘it is not the case that Donald found two guys’, contradicts the story. While both “true” and “false” answers are correct in response to (19) depending on which interpretation the speaker assigns, the conversational Principle of Charity (Grice, 1975) means that speakers prefer to treat utterances as true if there is a way to interpret them as such. This pragmatic principle is assumed to underlie native English speakers’ preference for a “true” response—and hence for an inverse-scope interpretation. In Turkish, however, the corresponding sentence (20) does not allow a two > not scope reading, so in the context given, the Turkish sentence is false. (20) [TP

Donald [VP iki çocuk bul] Donald two child  find Interpretation: ¬ > ∃, *∃ > ¬

-ma-dı.] -NEG-PAST

The syntactic structure sketched in (20) (following Özcelik, 2018, p. 216) indicates that, although the object QP precedes negation in linear order, the negation morpheme is situated in a higher projection, which c-commands and consequently takes scope over the object. Özcelik states that Turkish bare noun phrases such as the object QP in (20) always remain within VP and hence cannot take scope over other elements. Özcelik found that low proficiency L1-Turkish L2-English speakers had low (33%) acceptance of the target English two > not interpretation—suggesting influence from their L1—whereas intermediate and high proficiency groups demonstrated >76% acceptance: an acquisition trajectory similar to that found for object-every by Chung (2013). However, Özcelik also investigated L1-English speakers’ interpretation of Turkish negated sentences such as (20). In this L1–L2 configuration, there was no evidence of acquisition of the Turkish scope interpretation: the L2 Turkish speakers of low, intermediate and high proficiency levels accepted two > not scope 80% of the time, while a native Turkish control group strongly rejected this (>86% rejection). Taken together, these findings on the acquisition of quantifier–negation scope interpretation clearly suggest crosslinguistic influence. Scope interpretation by lower proficiency L2/L3 speakers in all studies reflected scope preferences in the speakers’ L1, or their L2 in the L3 study. Evidence of acquisition of target-like scope interpretation with object-QPs was found for more advanced L2-English speakers whose L1 was Korean or Turkish, though not for advanced L1-English speakers of Turkish. With subject-QPs, no evidence of acquisition of target scope interpretation was found, even after modifying the task to avoid a potential effect of encountering more informative quantifiers prior to 421

Heather Marsden

encountering every. Chung (2013) interprets L1-Korean speakers’ gradual acquisition of the English preference for the surface not > every interpretation in object-every sentences as evidence that learners may initially rely on translation into their L1, which would invoke the L1 every > not preference. Subsequently, reliance on the L2 structure develops, but the processing burden of integrating semantic entailment and pragmatic inferences alongside building the syntactic and semantic structure leads to the target interpretation emerging only in advanced L2 speakers. This account aligns with the Interface Hypothesis, though it raises the question of why a similar gradual acquisition does not arise for subject-every with negation. Furthermore, Özcelik argues that the Interface Hypothesis predicts greater difficulty in acquisition of the pragmatically mediated preference for the inverse scope two > not interpretation in English than of the not > two interpretation in Turkish, contra what his data showed. Before discussing the implications of these findings, one final study is presented which investigated both QP-QP and quantifier–negation sentences.

30.5.3  Instruction on inverse scope in L2 English Noting previous findings that L1-Mandarin speakers do not seem to acquire inverse scope in English (Chu et al., 2014; Wu & Ionin, 2019), and acknowledging the scarcity of unambiguous evidence for this interpretation in the input, Wu and Ionin (2022a) aimed to find out if explicit instruction about inverse scope, along with practice and feedback, could lead to acquisition by intermediate–advanced L1-Mandarin speakers of English. The study targeted inverse scope in both QP-QP sentences (e.g., A dog got every bone) and quantifier–negation sentences (e.g., Every pirate didn’t leave the ship). There were two experimental groups, differentiated by the focus of the training: QP-QP interpretation, or quantifier–negation interpretation. However, in the pre-test and two post-tests, both groups completed TVJTs that included both QP-QP and quantifier–negation scope interpretation. The key finding was that, while acceptance of inverse scope on the instructed structure changed from low in the pre-test to high in the post-tests, there was very little change in the low acceptance of inverse scope in the structure that had not been taught. Furthermore, the group that had been instructed on QP-QP scope overgeneralised inverse scope to an additional structure in which inverse scope is not actually possible, namely when the object QP is inside a relative clause (e.g., There is one cat which chased every mouse). Wu & Ionin concluded that each group’s post-test high acceptance of inverse scope on the structure they had been trained on did not represent acquisition in the sense of change to the learners’ unconscious linguistic structure, but rather learning of an explicit rule. Implications of this finding, along with the findings from the studies presented above, are explored further in the final section.

30.6  Open questions and future directions The research on L2 acquisition of quantifier scope to date has yielded a number of converging findings but also some contradictory results, and it also raises questions both about the nature of quantifier scope acquisition in L2, and about research methods. In terms of convergence, it is clear that the L1 scope-taking properties influence scope interpretation in the L2 at lower proficiency levels. There was also evidence that target scope preferences could be acquired at higher proficiency levels, in some of the object-QP–negation studies (Chung, 2013; Özcelik, 2018 [L2 English]). However, many studies found that, even for advanced L2 speakers, acquisition of target scope that differed from the L1 scope was scarce (Marsden, 2009) or non-existent (Ay & Aydɪn, 2016; Chu et al., 2014; Kimura, 2022; Özcelik, 2018 [L2 Turkish]; Wu & Ionin, 2019, 2022b). A broad goal for further research, then, would be to investigate what led to successful acquisition in some cases but lack of acquisition in the majority. By way of an agenda, three proposals are offered for taking forward L2 research on quantifier scope. 422

Quantifier scope

First, studies could investigate the relationship between L2 knowledge of the specific linguistic details that determine quantifier scope in the given language and L2 speakers’ scope interpretation. For example, the difference between English and Japanese with regard to inverse-scope availability in QP-QP interpretation could boil down to different features of universal quantifiers, as argued by Marsden (2009) and Kimura (2022). Though the specifics of the two proposals differ, both account for the absence of inverse scope in Japanese in terms of the particular morphosyntactic feature configuration of dono…mo ‘every’. In both cases, the features proposed are responsible for other properties of dono…mo; not just its scope-taking behaviour. This leads to a prediction that, if English speakers of Japanese acquire the target feature configuration of Japanese dono…mo, they should show knowledge both of the target scope interpretation and the other properties constrained by that configuration. This predicted relationship between scope and other properties of dono…mo could be tested, and potentially shed light on both L2 acquisition and the linguistic analysis of scope in Japanese. This line of enquiry could also be applied to investigation of the effect of training. Wu and Ionin (2022a) found that training on how scope works did not lead to acquisition, but perhaps training and practice that focused on the differences between Chinese and English universal quantifiers could facilitate acquisition. A second strand of enquiry could build on Slim et al.’s findings that a given target QP-QP interpretation can be primed through the L1. These findings were for speakers for whom both the L1 and the L2 were scopally ambiguous, but an extension of this research could investigate whether L1-priming can facilitate acceptance of a given interpretation when the L1 and L2 scope properties differ. Slim et al.’s findings also raise question about incidental priming within any task. In most of the research on L1 acquisition of scope, children experienced only one scope context within a single experiment, on the grounds that, as Han et al. (2007) point out, once awareness is raised of one interpretation this may decrease participants’ ability to later assign a different interpretation. However, most L2 research exposes participants to two scope interpretations. Investigation of the extent to which priming occurs in L2 speakers in such experiments could lead to improved experiment design. Finally, the need for further investigation of real-time processing during scope interpretation has already been identified, given the discrepancy between the L2 findings of the two existing studies (slower reading times for inverse scope in Lee, 2009, but not in Chung & Shin, 2023). A useful step could be to focus on a case where successful L2 acquisition of inverse scope has been found, such as English negated sentences with a numerically quantified object (Özcelik, 2018). Since the target inverse-scope interpretation here requires integration of pragmatic information in addition to quantifier movement, this interpretation is predicted to be costly in terms of processing resources, even though it is the preferred interpretation. Such research could help to solve the puzzle of why even intermediate-proficiency L2-English speakers were able to acquire inverse scope in Özcelik’s study, despite L1 transfer from Turkish leading to surface-scope interpretation initially and the Interface Hypothesis prediction that integration of pragmatic information is difficult. Beyond these three suggestions, other avenues for investigation can be envisaged. This chapter has aimed to illustrate the contribution of L2 research on quantifier scope to date, and to highlight just some of the future directions this area of research could take.

Notes 1 In most cases discussed in this chapter, the linear order of scope-taking elements can be assumed to correspond to their hierarchical order in terms of syntactic structure. Exceptions to this are pointed out where they arise. 2 Korean has two forms of negation: short-form, shown in (8), and long-form, in which the negative morpheme an co-occurs with a verbal suffix -ci and an auxiliary verb hada ‘do’. Whether short-form or longform, the object precedes negation in the linear order. For both forms, it is a matter of debate whether the object also c-commands negation, or vice versa. Lee (2009) reports experimental findings that suggest that

423

Heather Marsden the two forms have equivalent scope-taking properties. For the present purposes, it is not necessary to adopt one particular account. For simplicity, the terms ‘surface’ and ‘inverse’ scope will reflect the linear order. 3 Alternatively, O’Grady’s (2006) emergentist approach proposes that knowledge of the absence of inverse scope could arise through weakening of the relevant processing routine due to lack of use. 4 L2 research has also been conducted on the scope of universal quantifiers with a wh-word (Dekydtspotter et al., 2001; Marsden, 2008; Miyamoto & Yamane, 1996). This topic is omitted for space reasons, but, in brief, the findings show emergence of target scope knowledge only among advanced L2 speakers. This aligns with findings detailed below that testify to the significant challenge of L2 scope acquisition. 5 Marsden (2009) reports on the same study as in Marsden (2005), but with additional data and further analysis. The data from the L1-Chinese speakers are reported only in Marsden (2005). 6 Marsden’s (2009) L2-Japanese study also included OSV sentences. However, the sentences began with a universal quantifier (e.g., every cat-ACC someone-NOM stroked). As Ionin & Luchkina (2019) note, the inverse-scope interpretation (‘there is some person who stroked every cat’) is a sub-case of the surface-scope interpretation (‘for every cat, someone stroked it’). This contrasts with the existential-first configuration (14b), where the surface-scope reading excludes an inverse-scope interpretation. Chu et al. (2014) and Kimura (2022) also included a patient-first word order, namely the English passive (e.g., Every plate was dropped by someone). Here, as in Marsden (2009), the inverse-scope reading is a sub-case of the surface reading. 7 I follow Slim et al. in referring to the two interpretations as ‘universal-wide’ and ‘existential-wide’. As noted above for other QP-QP sentences beginning with a universal, the existential-wide interpretation is a sub-case of the universal-wide interpretation.

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Quantifier scope Jo, K., Kim, K., & Kim, H. (2021). Children’s interpretation of negation and quantifier scope in L3 English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 24, 427–438. Kimura, T. (2022). Explaining the difficulty with L2 acquisition of scope interpretation by speakers of a scoperigid language. In T. Leal, T. E. Shimanskaya, & C. Isabelli (Eds.), Generative SLA in the age of minimalism: Features, interfaces, and beyond (pp. 41–65). John Benjamins. Kuroda, S.-Y. (1965). Generative grammatical studies in the Japanese language (PhD thesis). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Reprinted, Garland Press, 1979). Lardiere, D. (2009). Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 25(2), 173–227. Lee, S. (2009). Interpreting scope ambiguity in first and second language processing: Universal quantifiers and negation (PhD thesis). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Lidz, J., & Musolino, J. (2002). Children’s command of quantification. Cognition, 84(2), 113–154. Marsden, H. (2005). Quantifier scope in non-native Japanese: A comparative interlanguage study of Chinese-, English- and Korean-speaking learners (PhD thesis). Durham, UK: Durham University. Marsden, H. (2008). Pair-list readings in Korean-Japanese, Chinese-Japanese and English-Japanese interlanguage. Second Language Research, 24(2), 189–226. Marsden, H. (2009). Distributive quantifier scope in English-Japanese and Korean-Japanese interlanguage. Language Acquisition, 16(3), 135–177. May, R. (1977). The grammar of quantification (PhD thesis). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. May, R. (1985). Logical form: Its structure and derivation. MIT Press. Miyamoto, Y., & Yamane, M. (1996). L2 rigidity: The scope principle in adult L2 grammar. In A. Stringfellow, D. Cahana-Amitay, E. Hughes, & A, Zukowski (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th annual Boston University conference on language development (Vol. 2, pp. 494–505). Cascadilla Press. Musolino, J., Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (2000). Navigating negative quantificational space. Linguistics, 38(365), 1–32. Musolino, J., & Lidz, J. (2006). Why children aren’t universally successful with quantification. Linguistics, 44(4), 817–852. O’Grady, W. (2006). The syntax of quantification in SLA: An Emergentist approach. In M. Grantham O’Brien, C. Shea, & J. Archibald (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition conference (GASLA 2006) (pp. 98–113). Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Özçelik, Ö. (2018). Interface hypothesis and the L2 acquisition of quantificational scope at the syntax-semanticspragmatics interface. Language Acquisition, 25(2), 213–223. Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the full transfer/full access model. Second Language Research, 12(1), 40–72. Scontras, G., Polinsky, M., Tsai, C.-Y. E., & Mai, K. (2017). Cross-linguistic scope ambiguity: When two systems meet. Glossa, 2(1), 1–28. Slim, M. S., Lauwers, P., & Hartsuiker, R. J. (2021). Monolingual and bilingual logical representations of quantificational scope: Evidence from priming in language comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 116, 104184. Sorace, A. (2011). Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 1–33. Szabolcsi, A. (1997). Strategies for scope taking. In A. Szabolcsi (Ed.), Ways of scope taking (pp. 109–155). Kluwer. Tsimpli, I., & Sorace, A. (2006). Differentiating interfaces: L2 performance in syntax-semantics and syntaxdiscourse phenomena. In D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia, & C. Zaller (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th annual Boston University conference on language development (BUCLD 30) (pp. 653–664). Cascadilla Press. Wu, M.-J., & Ionin, T. (2019). L1-Mandarin L2-English speakers’ acquisition of English universal quantifiernegation scope. In M. M. Brown & B. Dailey (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd annual Boston University conference on language development (pp. 716–729). Cascadilla Press. Wu, M.-J., & Ionin, T. (2022a). Does explicit instruction affect L2 linguistic competence? An examination with L2 acquisition of English inverse scope. Second Language Research, 38(3), 607–637. Wu, M.-J., & Ionin, T. (2022b). L1-Mandarin L2-English learners’ acquisition of English double-quantifier scope. In T. Leal, E. Shimanskaya, & C. Isabelli (Eds.), Generative SLA in the age of minimalism: Features, interfaces, and beyond (pp. 93–114). John Benjamins. Zhou, P., & Crain, S. (2009). Scope assignment in child language: Evidence from the acquisition of Chinese. Lingua, 119(7), 973–988.

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31 WEAK PRONOUNS Clitics and clitic placement Juana M. Liceras

31.1 Introduction Clitic pronouns are linguistic elements of great interest for linguists working on any subfield of the discipline (phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, acquisition, pathology …) or issue (information structure, language impairment …) related to linguistics. However, linguists are seldom aware of the empirical facets of cliticization (Pescarini, 2021) which, together with the many variants displayed by clitics even within typological families, explains why there is not an agreed-upon definition of clitics. Moreover, clitics differ from other function words in regard to pronominal function, their position with respect to the verb, the fact that they seldom carry stress, and their topic-like interpretation. The examples in (1) illustrate object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages. (1)

a.

lo him/it

voglio I.want

b.

je I

le him/it

c.

lo him/it

quiero want

[Spanish]

d.

ho it

vull I.want

[Catalan]

e.

îl him/it

vreau I.want

[Romanian]

[Italian] veux want

[French]

‘I want/love him’

[Pescarini, 2021, Ch. 1, ex. (1)]

The acquisition of clitics has occupied a central role in language acquisition research. Such literature is vast, and in this chapter we limit ourselves to reviewing the research of the last decade. While clitics are also referred to as weak pronouns, following Cardinaletti and Starke (1999), we assume the three-way pronominal distinction: strong, weak and clitic pronouns. Clitic pronouns are deficient with respect to weak pronouns and weak pronouns are deficient with respect to strong 426

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Weak pronouns

pronouns at the distributional, morphological, semantic and prosodic level. Zwicky (1985) states that clitics can be conceptualized as a single-word continuum between the two poles of independent words and inflectional affixes. Among the main theoretical issues surrounding clitics, two that have been extensively debated in the literature are: (i) their argument versus their affixal status; and (ii) accounting for their structural position (base-generation versus movement). To this, it is important to add, whether or not we situate the distinction within the classical view of parameters, such that there are [+object drop] and [–object drop] languages, a division that is not categorical as it is nuanced by definiteness and specificity features, as well as syntactic structures, such as topicalization and left dislocation. These issues have received extensive attention in the acquisition literature.

31.2  The phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic properties of clitics Like affixes, clitics, are ‘dependent’ on adjacent words but, as syntactic constituents, they can be heads, arguments or modifiers within a given phrase. The term clitics is used as an umbrella term to refer to phenomena that reflect mixed phonological, morphological or syntactic properties. Being phonologically dependent, clitics can attach as enclitic to the end or as proclitic to the beginning of a word. According to Andersen (2005), the phonological sense of the term clitic is attributed to Wackernagel’s Law (1892). However, Perlmutter (1971) brought to the fore the morphosyntactic properties of clitics (their combinations and ordering). From there on, the syntactic properties of clitics (e.g., clitic-climbing, clitic doubling, clitic left dislocation or clitic omission) have been investigated in depth throughout many languages. In what follows, I provide a succinct account of the types of clitics concerning case and the syntactic processes they are involved in, as these are the properties that are to be acquired by language learners. I use examples from the Romance languages because all these processes are represented in this language family, and there is a substantial body of research on the acquisition of clitics in the Romance languages. For Kayne (1975) clitics have rather distinctive syntactic properties, among them, their position with respect to verbal expressions (clitics but not strong pronouns precede the verb) as shown in the examples from Romance languages in (1). The distribution of strong pronouns, on the other hand, mirrors the distribution of nominal expressions, as in the Italian examples in (2):

(2)

a. b. c. d.

voglio solo lui/Mario I.want only him/Mario ‘I only want him/Mario’ Lui/Mario voglio non lei Him/Mario I.want not. her ‘Him/Mario I want, not her’ Lui/Mario lo voglio a tutti i costi him/Mario him I.want at all costs ‘Him/Mario I want at all costs’ Lo voglio a tutti i costi lui/Mario Him I.want at all costs him/Mario ‘Him I want at all costs’

[Pescarini, 2021, Ch. 1, ex. (2)]

Other distinctive properties pointed out by Kayne (1975) are that clitics cannot be focalized, modified, conjoined or occur in isolation, as exemplified in the French examples in (3): 427

Juana M. Liceras (3)

a.

(3)

b.

(3)

c.

Il parle à he speaks to ‘To whom does he speak? *Je seul te I only to​.y​ou ‘I only speak to you’ *Je te et I to​.y​ou and

qui? whom To you parle speak

*te to. you

nous to​.​us

parle speak

[Pescarini, 2021, Ch. 1, ex. (3)]

31.2.1  Accusative, dative, oblique and subject clitics The clitics that have received the most attention in the literature are object clitics. They are marked for gender, number, and, especially third-person clitics, display case morphology, as the clitics in (1) that are marked for the features masculine, singular and accusative case. Romanian differs from the other Romance languages because it also displays case morphology with first and second-person singular clitics. Dative clitics are seldom inflected for gender. Some languages exhibit partitive and locative clitics that stand for various types of prepositional phrases (Kayne, 1975). For instance French and Italian have a genitive/partitive clitic (French en, Italian ne) and the so-called locative clitic (Catalan hi, French y, Italian ci). The clitics ci/y/hi usually pronominalize locative complements, but they may stand for comitative or instrumental PPs. The clitic en/ne usually pronominalizes PPs headed by the preposition de as well as the NP complements of quantifier expressions or genitive PPs. Modern Spanish, Romanian and Portuguese do not display locative or partitive forms. There are also special clitics which are different from the phonologically weak pronouns that may occupy subject position as in English. These special clitics occupy the subject position as full NPs and accented pronominals. They occur in some varieties of Romance, particularly French, as shown in (4): (4) Il m’a donné un livre. / Jean m’a donnè un livre. he(cl) me(cl) has given a book / John me(cl) has given a book ‘He gave me a book. / John gave me a book.’ [Luraghi, 2013, p. 174

A fact that stands out when addressing the grammatical function of clitics is the widespread absence of subject clitics in the languages of the world.

31.2.2  Clitic placement Cross-linguistically, according to Klavans (1985), clitic placement is determined by two possible tendencies: (i) constituent-based, or constituent-hosted clitics that attach phonologically to specific constituents; and (ii) second-position clitics that attach to a specific position in a sentence. Romance clitics are type (i), as they always occupy a fixed position that is language specific and clause dependant. Also, and within a given language, there is variation depending on whether clitics appear before the finite verb (proclitic) or after it (enclitic) and there may also be variation relative to auxiliaries and modal verbs. Clitic placement in Romance depends on syntactic factors such as finiteness (in Italian and Spanish enclisis is mandatory with non-finite verbs and imperatives), fronting, polarity or embedding (Pescarini, 2021). See examples in (7).

428

Weak pronouns

31.2.3  Clitic doubling While, in some languages, clitics and arguments (NPs or strong pronouns) are in complementary distribution, in others they can co-occur. This contrast is illustrated in (5), which depicts the ungrammaticality of the clitic doubling construction in Italian (5a) versus the grammaticality of this same construction in Spanish (5b). (5)

a. b.

*Le deidi un regalo  Le di un regalo to her I. gave  a gift ‘I gave a gift to my mother’

a mia madre a mi madre to my mother

[Italian] [Spanish] [Pescarini, 2021, Ch. 1, ex. (8)]

Left dislocation of topicalized constituents as in Los clíticos los tenemos hasta en la sopa (‘the clitics we have them even in the soup’) triggers clitic doubling. In these contexts, clitic doubling is obligatory in Spanish as well as in Italian and other languages, as shown in the next section.

31.2.4  Clitic left dislocation Clitic left dislocation (CLLD), a structure which is instantiated in most Romance languages, has received a great deal of attention in adult SLA. As shown in (6), the examples from Spanish and Italian contain dislocated accusative NPs which are followed by a pronominal. (6) a. Este libro lo compré ayer this book it I. bought yesterday b. Aquest llibre el vaig comprar ahir this  book it I. go to buy yesterday c. Questo libro lo comprai ieri this  book it I.bought yesterday ‘This book I bought yesterday’

[Spanish] [Spanish] [Catalan] [Italian]

In fact, dative NPs, PPs, bare nominals, adjective phrases, quantifier phrases or clauses can also be left dislocated in Romance (Anagnostopoulou, 1997; Leal, 2016). As we will see in Section 31.4, the acquisition of CLLD has been investigated not only in itself but also in terms of the relationship between syntax and discourse (Donaldson, 2011; Leal Méndez, 2016; Slabakova & Ivanov, 2011).

31.2.5  Clitic climbing and clitic clusters The so-called clitic-climbing phenomena occur in periphrastic constructions with two or more verbal forms. The term refers to the fact that clitics climb to be optionally attached to the inflected verb. Direct and indirect objects can undergo clitic-climbing in Spanish with verbs such as ‘want’ or with modals as shown in (7): (7)

Quiero dártelo / Te lo quiero dar I. want to give you it You it I.want to give ‘I want to give it to you’

429

Juana M. Liceras

As it is shown in (8), object clitics tend to cluster together, either before the verb or after the verb, and their order is language specific. In Italian, as in Spanish, the third-person dative clitic always precedes the accusative, as in (8a), while French displays the inverse order, as shown in (8b). (8)

a.

Glie lo to him/her/them it/him ‘They give it/him to him/her’

danno they​.gi​ve

b.

Ils le they it/him ‘They give it/him to him/her’

lui to him/her

[Italian]

donnent give

[French] [Pescarini, 2021, Ch. 1, ex. (43)]

In order to account for the combinatorial possibilities and restrictions on clitic clusters, linguists have taken morphological and syntactic approaches. A pioneer approach is Perlmutter’s (1971) linear ordering templates. Bonet (2008) and Heap (2005) embrace morphological accounts while Adger and Harbour (2007), Anagnostopoulou (2005) or Pescarini (2021) have proposed syntactic approaches. Both morphological and syntactic approaches tend to rely on morphosyntactic features such as person and on feature hierarchies.

31.2.6  Clitic omission Clitic omission has been extensively investigated, on its own and also in relation to pronoun omission and object drop, as there are languages that do not have clitics but allow object drop and also languages which display clitic drop. For instance, European Portuguese is considered an object-drop language, while having a complex system of clitics, a situation that has led Costa, Lobo and Silva (2012) to argue that the high number of instances of clitic omission in child European Portuguese can be accounted for as an overuse of the null-object option available, independently, in the adult grammar. Another example is Ukranian and Polish, two languages that allow object-drop omission in the same discourse setting, although Polish but not Ukranian has object clitics (Mykhaylyk & Sopata, 2015). Clitic omission presents as complex a status as clitics themselves. An illustration of this complexity is provided by the obligatory expression together with the optional and obligatory omission of reflexive clitics in Catalan. In this Romance language, some verbs and some argument-structure configurations require a reflexive clitic, while in other constructions the clitic can be optionally missing and, interestingly enough, there are configurations where the reflexive clitic has to be obligatorily null (Alsina, 2020).

31.3  Child and heritage acquisition of clitics Research on the production and comprehension of pronominal clitics by monolingual, bilingual and multilingual children with typical and with non-typical language development is substantial: we can only provide a very succinct depiction of some of these findings.

31.3.1  Object omission, clitic omission and the emergence of clitics in child language The omission of direct objects has been observed in the world languages to various degrees. In the early stages, children use transitive verbs without their objects even if object omission is illicit in the adult language. Perez-Leroux, Pirvulescu and Roberge (2017) offer a rather comprehensive view of experimental approaches to the acquisition of objects in general. 430

Weak pronouns

An interesting research outcome of the last decade concerning clitic omission can be found in Varlokosta et al.’s (2016) report on the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects by 5-year-olds from 16 different languages. The importance of this research is the comparison of clitic-languages and pronoun-languages (without clitics) using the same methodology. They found high rates of pronominal production in the 16 languages, which suggests that, at age 5, children have a solid morphosyntactic and pragmatic knowledge of pronominals. A preference for null arguments versus clitics or full object pronouns was also found in child experimental data from two Slavic languages, Polish and Ukrainian (Mykhalyk & Sopata, 2015). Object omission can occur in the same discourse setting in both languages, but the former is a socalled clitic-language while the latter does not have clitics but full object pronouns. Three–six-yearold children did not make errors in direct object realization but their preference for null arguments lasts to five years of age, which leads them to conclude that the morphological characteristics of object pronouns are not primary predictors of object realization in languages that allow discoursebound omissions. Similar findings are reported by Tryzna (2015) for Polish and Mykhaylyk and Sopata. (2015) for Ukranian. Children acquiring Spanish (Wexler et al., 2004), Greek (Tsakali & Wexler, 2004) and Romanian (Babyonyshev & Marin, 2006) produce clitics earlier than children acquiring French (Hamman et al., 1996) or Italian clitics (Guasti, 1993/1994). Children learning European Portuguese (Costa et al., 2012) omit more objects than children learning other languages and allow a transitive interpretation of sentences with null objects. This is taken as evidence that these children ‘know’ that the adult grammar displays both clitic pronouns and null objects. Mwansa (2011) also shows that children acquiring Bemba (a Bantu language) do not randomly omit objects but appear to obey semantic and pragmatic constraints that license null objects in Bemba. This is unlike child French, where high rates of random non-target omissions have been reported (Grüter, 2009). Mateu (2015) found substantial clitic omission in 2- and 3-year-old Mexican children’s production (52.9% and 35.71%), even though Mexican Spanish is not an object-drop variety. At the same time, the results of a comprehension task with the same children were close to adult-like (93%). Rather than signs of representational deficits, these findings suggest that clitic omission is affected by linguistic processing and short-term memory limitations.

31.3.2  L1 acquisition of accusative (ACC) and dative (DAT) clitics Differences on the acquisition of the various types of clitics have been reported for different languages. For instance, there is evidence that 3p-ACC clitics are omitted at a higher rate than reflexive (RE) and 1p and 2p clitics in French (Jakubowicz et al., 1998; Tuller et al., 2011; Zesiger et al., 2010), Italian (Arosio et al., 2014; Pozzan, 2007) and Romanian (Coene & Avram, 2012). The analysis of spontaneous data shows that Italian 3DAT clitics are produced later than 3ACC clitics but they are omitted less frequently than 3ACC clitics (Cardinaletti et al., 2021). Romanian 3DAT clitics also emerge later than 3ACC (Coene & Avram, 2012). In the case of elicited production, Blasco (2000) reports that Spanish children aged 1;9–2;10 produced 3ACC and 3DAT clitics in similar percentages. In European Portuguese, the rate of omission of ACC and DAT clitics in children 3–6 years of age is comparable (Costa et al., 2008; Silva, 2010). ACC clitics are reported to be more problematic than DAT clitics in L1 French (Tuller et al., 2011) and L1 Italian (Cardinaletti et al., 2021). However, the differences are not consistent across languages and evidence varies depending on the source of the data (spontaneous versus experimental) and the properties of clitics in the different languages (e.g., argumental vs. valency-reduction marker, obligatory clitic doubling, agreement with past participle). A difference between dative and accusative clitics is that accusative clitics have gender features. So, accusative clitics are structurally more complex than dative clitics (Cardinaletti et al., 2021) 431

Juana M. Liceras

As for clitic doubling, the Italian children studied by Cardinaletti et al. (2021) only used clitic doubling with datives. Since accusative clitic doubling is not grammatical in Italian, these results show that this construction has an adult-like status in the child grammar.

31.3.3  L1 acquisition of oblique clitics in Romance In a study involving the use of partitive clitics by 5-year-old Catalan, French and Italian children, Gavarró et al. (2011) found that the rates of omission were low and similar in the three languages, although the Catalan-speaking children produced more partitive clitics than the Italian-speaking children. All three groups of children used full DP complements instead of clitics when answering questions. Gavarró et al. (2011) argue that typically developing children do not omit partitive clitics at that stage of development, which is also the case for object clitics: they are no longer omitted at the age of 5.

31.3.4  Clitic placement in L1 and heritage language There is no agreement as to whether or not the reordering of Spanish sentences with proclisis as sentences with enclisis by bilingual children is due to influence from English. While Pérez-Leroux, Cuza, and Thomas (2011) argue that that is the case, other studies have reported that monolingual and bilingual child clitic placement is almost adult-like (Shin et al., 2017). More specifically, the production of variable clitic placement, as in (9), in Spanish narratives of monolingual and bilingual children was similar, which casts doubts on the existence of influence from English. (9) a. Queremos  verlo    We-want to see him/it b.  Lo queremos   ver     Him/it we-want to see     ‘We want to see it’

Flores and Barbosa (2014) found that the bilingual children, unlike monolinguals, produced enclisis where proclisis was expected, while Di Venacio et al. (2016) found no errors in Italian heritage speakers raised and residing in Germany. Other studies found robust knowledge of clitics in Portuguese are Flores and Barbosa (2014) and Flores et al. (2017). The results described so far seem to suggest that HSs avoid the use of clitic pronouns whenever they can resort to demonstratives and null-object constructions. Cross-linguistic influence from German structure is unlikely as an explanation because null objects do not exist in German. However, the fact that German lacks clitics together with the complexity of the EP clitic system may lead the HSs to avoid clitics altogether. The HSs produced the highest rates of deviant structures with respect to clitic placement, albeit non-standard structures are found in all groups. Non-standard placement in the speech of HSs followed very much the same direction as in the other groups: all replaced proclisis with enclisis. This shows, once more, that enclisis is the unmarked order for monolingual as well as for bilingual speakers and that cross-linguistic influence can be ruled out as an explanation for the production of non-standard placement.

31.4  Adult SLA acquisition of clitics In this section, we discuss clitic omission, accusative, dative and oblique clitics, clitic clusters, clitic doubling and CLLD in relation to clitic placement and to the syntax-discourse interface. The main question in adult acquisition is the extent to which the L1 plays a role in the patterns found in L2 acquisition or whether there are interface learnability issues. 432

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31.4.1  Omission of object clitics The acquisition of French object clitics by adult L1 English learners has been shown to cause learnability problems (Gunawardena, 2018; Hamann et al., 1996). In fact, it has been consistently found that L1 English learners omit obligatory object clitics, and that omission errors are more frequent than placement errors, a finding that has also been reported in the L1 acquisition of French (Grüter, 2009). Gunawardena’s (2018) study showed that the L1 English learners accepted object-omitted constructions in French. Based on the results of a written acceptability judgment task, a preference task and a production task, Gunawardena concluded that null objects are part of the intermediate interlanguage grammar, which confirms that adult learners of French “initially hypothesize that French has object pro, based on the absence of phonetically specified pronouns in the post-verbal position” (Towell & Hawkins’s, 1994, p. 137). The morphological development of object clitics in L2 Spanish by L1 English speakers was examined by Arche and Dominguez (2011). The results of a question-and-answer task showed low rates of null objects and high rates of overt DPs by beginner and intermediate learners, while the advanced learners used clitics productively. Cuza, Perez-Leroux and Sanchez (2013) investigated the acquisition of clitics by speakers of two typologically different L1s. L1 child and adult L2 immigrant learners of Spanish and simultaneous Spanish-Chinese bilinguals showed influence from the L1 in their interpretation of null object in Spanish as referential contexts (linked to a discourse antecedent), as this property is not present in Spanish; and produced and accepted null objects in context where Spanish requires obligatory clitics. The child and adult L2 speakers behaved differently from the native speaker control group, while the heritage speakers displayed nativelike behaviour, except for some overextensions of clitics to contexts where native speakers would not use them. Cuza et al. concluded that there is a clitic deficit in the child immigrant grammar, mainly in relation to the morphosemantic conditions of object drop, where the transfer from the L1 grammar is rather pervasive. As for adult immigrant learners, they overused DPs and null objects, suggesting that they do not go beyond their L1 grammar. Cuza et al. concluded that, in spite of the intense exposure in an immersion setting, the representation of their L1 continues to be available. Therefore, the acquisition of clitics may present similar difficulties within specific interlanguages but not for interlanguages with typologically distant L1s.

31.4.2  Clitic placement, clitic doubling and CLLD and the role of modularity in language acquisition As in the case of L1 acquisition, differences with respect to enclisis and proclisis between experimental and naturalistic production data have also been found in adult corpus data versus adult priming data. Corpus data from adult monolingual and bilingual Spanish speakers show that proclisis is more frequent than enclisis and that variation between the two clitic positions is constrained by the type of verb (Gutiérrez, 2008). However, in experimental data obtained via syntactic priming, it was found that “for 25% of ten Spanish sentences containing proclisis, bilingual adults repositioned the clitic to the postverbal position” (Meijer & Fox Tree, 2003, p. 80). The acquisition of double object constructions in Spanish, which are realized as clitic doubling, presents more problems at the semantic than at the syntactic level (Cuervo, 2007). English L2 learners’ of Spanish knowledge of argument-structure alternations of the PPC construction (Marco envió un libro a Lea/‘Marco sent a book to Lea’) versus the DOC construction (Marco le envió un libro a Lea/‘Marco sent Lea a book’), suggests that they are more accurate judging sentences involving morphosyntactic properties such as word order, clitic agreement, case or the preposition ‘a’ than constructions with inanimate datives or inalienable possession between two inanimate entities. This syntax/semantics dichotomy is taken as evidence of the role of modularity in language acquisition. 433

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It has been observed that native Spanish speakers often produce clitic doubling with recipient constructions (Ana le dio un libro a su hijo/‘Ana gave a book to her son’) and non-recipient constructions (Leo le lavó la camisa al niño/‘Leo washed the boy’s shirt’), while L2 and Heritage Spanish speakers tend to avoid clitics. In order to determine whether priming would influence clitic production with these constructions, Hurtado and Montrul (2021) exposed the three groups of Spanish speakers to experimental structural priming and showed that this treatment resulted in the production of more clitics by the three groups, albeit the effects were only long lasting in the case of the L2 and the Heritage Spanish group. Furthermore, this lasting effect differed depending on the construction: for the L2 group, it was more obvious in the case of the recipient constructions (more frequent) and the opposite was the case for the Heritage group. This interplay between the role of frequency and proficiency supports previous findings involving priming and leads the authors to suggest that implicit learning can account for the L2 behaviour which in turn could have implications for using priming tasks in the classroom. The mental representation of clitic object pronouns in the Spanish L2 of beginning, intermediate and advanced L1 English learners is discussed in Halloran and Rothman (2015). Using a scalar grammaticality judgment task, they examined knowledge of clitic placement in infinite and modal + infinitival constructions (Juan me la quería cantar ayer/‘Juan wanted to sing it to me yesterday’) as well as in Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) verb constructions (Juan me escuchó cantarla ayer/‘Juan heard me sing it yesterday’). Their results seem to suggest that these L1 English/L2 Spanish learners were able to acquire knowledge of clitic placement and that advanced learners do capture the restrictions placed on clitic in ECM constructions. However, given the fact that these learners had received explicit instruction in this particular area of Spanish grammar, it would be important to have data from the acquisition of clitics by naturalistic L1 English/L2 Spanish learners, namely outside the classroom, to determine whether formal instruction makes a difference for adult learning of ECM constructions. The comparison of CLLD in the L2 Spanish of near-native speakers (Valenzuela, 2006) and the L2 Bulgarian of advanced speakers (Ivanov, 2009), two languages that have CLLD, led Valenzuela to conclude that there is residual optionality at the syntax-discourse interface because the near-native speakers were 100% native-like when accepting specific dislocated objects doubled by a clitic but less accurate with generic dislocated objects. Ivanov (2009) reached the opposite conclusion, namely he argues that the advanced Bulgarian speakers are successful at the interface because they behaved native-like. Slavakoba and Ivanov (2011) analyzed the L2 Spanish and the L2 Bulgarian CLLD results and concluded that lower accuracy with generic dislocated objects by near-native Spanish speakers may be due to a processing mechanism which leads some participants to pay attention to discourse cues rather than to semantic cues when judging those sentences rather than to a problem with the syntax-semantic interface. Evidence that structures located at the syntax-pragmatics interface are acquired by adult speakers is also provided by oral data on the acquisition of CLLD in L2 French (Donaldson, 2011). Conversations between near-native and native speakers were recorded and all instances of CLLD were analyzed for grammatical properties and information structure. All participants were also administered two oral experimental tasks intended to test their intuitions about French left-dislocated structures. The results showed that nine of ten learners had successfully integrated the syntactic and discourse-pragmatic knowledge of this specific area of the syntax-pragmatics interface. Therefore, these results provide further evidence that even though the external interfaces may present problems for L2 learners, it is not the case that they will necessarily result in permanent deficit, at least in nearnative grammars.

31.4.3  Clitic clusters A rather challenging aspect of the morphosyntax of clitics is the placement and agreement restrictions that arise when clitics are combined in different languages (Adger & Harbour, 2007; Haspelmath, 434

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2004). Alba de la Fuente’s (2012) study of clitic clusters in the non-native grammar Spanish of L1 English, French and Romanian adult speakers is an example of how linguistic theory can guide experimental research and, conversely, of how data from different sources may shed new light on the theoretical proposals intended to understand clitic cluster constraints and their motivations. It also explores the effects of typological similarity. Bonet (1991) discusses Person-case constraint (PCC) that distinguishes two types of languages: strong PCC languages, like French, which rejects combinations of 1st and 2nd person clitics (*Tu te m’es présenté à la fête / ‘You introduced yourself to me at the party’), and weak PCC languages, like Spanish (Te me presentaste en la fiesta) and Romanian (Mi te-ai prezentat la petrecere), which accept such clitic combinations. Given the different versions of clitic combinations that are available in natural languages, this phenomenon allows us to explore the effects of typological similarity vs. typological proximity (Liceras & Alba de la Fuente, 2015). Spanish and Romanian pattern together with respect to clitic clusters (both languages accept 1st and 2nd person combinations under certain conditions), whereas French categorically rejects such combinations. If language typology in general plays a role in the acquisition of clitic cluster restrictions, we would expect L1 French and L1 Romanian speakers to outperform their L1 English counterparts. If, on the other hand, only typological similarity plays a role, L1 Romanian speakers would be at an advantage in this case, since the restrictions in their L2 (Spanish) match those of their L1. The results of a scaled grammaticality judgment task showed that only the L1 Romanian speakers patterned with the native control group, assigning higher scores to grammatical combinations and lower scores to ungrammatical ones. These results suggest that typological proximity in itself does not necessarily provide an advantage to L2 speakers. Rather, typological similarity matters more.

31.4.4  Accusative and dative clitics The acquisition of clitic case (accusative and dative clitics) in the Spanish interlanguage of L1 English speakers as investigated by Santoro (2007, 2011) speaks to the role of cross-linguistic influence (transfer from English), access to Universal Grammar and possible underlying syntactic impairment in relation to the morphological variability reflected in the clitic case system of Spanish interlanguage. Data elicited from a Preference Task where the second occurrence of an NP had to be replaced with the appropriate object pronoun showed that: (i) even though it decreases with time, variability (use of dative for accusative clitics and vice versa) is quite persistent; (ii) in the early acquisition stages, variability affects more the use of dative pronouns than that of accusative pronoun; and (iii) English seems to play a role in the occurrence of morphological errors in the early stages as, rather than target dative clitics, learners use accusative clitics required by the English cognate verbs. Evidence that the learners do not use cognitive learning mechanisms or hypothesis formation but rather linguistic mechanisms, is provided by the fact that morphological errors are systematic. Although clitic case morphology seems to be acquired in a rather slow and piecemeal manner, the data reflect problems mapping the morphology with the appropriate syntactic features. For Santoro (2011), the results reflect a performance rather than a representational problem and can be accounted for by the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis. It has also been systematically observed that L2 acquisition of French clitics is problematic. They are acquired late, they are replaced by subject clitics in the early stages of acquisition and they display person, gender and number errors. An aural French-English translation task, administered to L2 learners of French led Wust (2010) to conclude that learners with 3 to 13 years of L2 instruction demonstrate difficulties when processing and encoding the meaning of object clitics. Inanimate objects and those with multiple form/meaning mappings such as la and lui were the most difficult. Besides animacy, factors such as proficiency and total amount of exposure to French (immersion participants do better than core French participants) also played a role in the participants success when processing and encoding object clitics. 435

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Smith et al. (2022) investigated the production of accusative clitics in the grammar of Italian Heritage speakers born and raised in Scotland in order to determine whether they differed from the immigrant Italian speakers who grew up in the homeland. A group of bilinguals were administered a clitic production task involving questions about pictures whose answers required object clitics. The results showed that while the adult bilinguals who grew up in a monolingual Italian setting produced a high percentage of target clitic pronouns (80% accuracy), the HSs were poor producers of clitic pronouns (35% accuracy). The authors conclude that while the clitic system of these Italian Heritage speakers is structurally accurate, it does not display the same preference for the use of clitic pronouns as native Italian.

31.4.5  Oblique clitics The L2 acquisition of oblique clitics has received less attention. One of the clitics included in Wust’s (2010) translation task mentioned in the previous section was partitive en, and it was found that this clitic paired together with the inanimate versions of the other object clitics. The status of Catalan oblique clitics en (oblique and partitive) and hi (oblique and locative), which do not exist in Spanish, was investigated by Perpiñán (2017), using two different elicitation techniques (an Acceptability Judgment Task and an Elicited Production Task) and three different groups of CatalanSpanish bilinguals (Spanish-dominant, Catalan-dominant and Balanced bilinguals). The results showed that the Spanish-dominant bilinguals’ grammar was different from the grammar of the Catalan-dominant bilinguals, as the former accepted more ungrammatical omission and doubling of the clitics. Interestingly, the Balanced bilinguals were closer to the Catalan-dominant group in their judgments but closer to the Spanish-dominant group in the production of clitics. Given that the participants of the Balanced bilinguals group were simultaneous bilingual learners, these results suggest that simultaneous bilinguals and L1 speakers are similar when it comes to intuitions or interpretation and with L2 speakers in their production.

31.5  Future directions and areas for further research Let us briefly summarize some relevant findings and point to some areas that would benefit from further research. As this review has demonstrated, clitic omission in clitic-languages has been found to be a rather pervasive feature of intermediate and advanced interlanguage grammars, unlike in L1 acquisition, where clitics have not been found to be more difficult than full object pronouns in non-clitic languages. In fact, adult immigrant learners of Spanish whose L1s are not clitic-languages continue to rely on their L1s, overusing DPs and null objects. These findings suggest strong influence from the L1 beyond the initial stages of development. Clitic omission has been found to be more problematic than clitic placement both in SLA and in L1 acquisition. With clitic placement, the results of L1 and L2 studies are similar, as non-target enclisis (postverbal positioning of the clitic) seems to occur more in experimental data than in naturalistic production data. The analysis of adult L2 oral and written CLLD constructions has led researchers to conclude that, even though external interfaces may present problems for L2 learners, they do not necessarily result in permanent deficit, as learners from languages such as Spanish and Bulgarian acquire the syntactic and discourse-pragmatic knowledge of this specific area of the syntax-pragmatics interface. Further research is needed to confirm whether SLA of clitic doubling in double object constructions is more problematic with respect to the semantic properties (animacy) than to the morphosyntactic properties, as this speaks to the role of modularity in SLA. The rather different constraints that apply to clitic clusters in Romance languages have been shown to be a source of L1 transfer and learning difficulty in spite of typological proximity, while typological similarity has proven to result in positive transfer. 436

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In SLA as in L1A, accusative clitics seem to be more problematic than dative clitics, which seems to be due to the gender features displayed by the former. However, when dative clitics require clitic doubling, they present even more difficulties than accusative clitics. Three instances of the SLA of clitics that are in clear need of further research are oblique clitics, clitic-climbing and subject clitics, both in themselves and in relation to object clitics. The comparative analysis of SLA of subject and object clitics in Romance-type languages and languages such as Swahili, which has received attention in L1A but not in SLA, would be an important contribution for SLA of different types of clitic-languages but also for one of the important theoretical debates involving clitics: their argumental versus affixal nature. All the studies discussed in this chapter used methodologies such as naturalistic production, elicited production, written production and acceptability judgment tasks; future studies can include online tasks to investigate the processing of clitic pronouns. Beyond typical L1 and L2 acquisition, clitics are clinical markers in non-typical language, and thus it would also be important to carry out more research on non-typical language development. Also, and while, to the best of our knowledge, the SLA of clitics has not been investigated using an artificial language, we would like to suggest that the studies on the differences between L1 and L2 acquisition carried out by Hudson Kam and Newport (2005, 2009), making use of an artificial language targeting determiners, provide an extremely useful framework for investigating the acquisition of clitics in similar artificial languages. The main objective of these studies was to determine what child and adult learners do with input which contains inconsistent grammatical morphemes, as in pidgins and creoles, namely, to determine whether learners reproduce variability as displayed by input or whether they regularize variable input. The two artificial languages taught to the child and adult participants (the children’s language was simpler) displayed variation for one grammatical category, the Determiner. Following a similar methodology, researchers could use direct object clitics, manipulating the input around the degree of inconsistency of the clitic. This would allow us to determine whether: (i) both children and adults learn the language including the inconsistent clitic; and (ii) the adults’ output reflected inconsistency or consistency, depending on input, while the children regularized the output regardless of input consistency. If the experiments with clitics provide the same results as the experiments with determiners, they would further evidence that children and adults do not learn from variable input in the same way, which in turn would suggest that children may play a unique role in creole formation by regularizing grammatical patterns. Finally, clitic production has been found to be challenging for monolingual and bilingual children suffering from dyslexia (Vender et al., 2018) and for the last twenty years a substantial body of research dealing with the acquisition of clitics and determiners by children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI)—also referred to as Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)—has been carried out (Arosio et al., 2014; Chodrogianni, et al., 2013; Guasti, 2014; Guasti et al., 2016; Jakubowicz et al., 1998; Jakubowicz, 2002; Paradis, Crago & Genesee, 2003; among many others). However, the acquisition of clitics or determiners by bilingual speakers with non-typical language development involving genetic syndromes has received much less attention. Only recently the linguistic and metalinguistic abilities of bilingual individuals with genetic syndromes such as Prader-Willi Syndrome have been investigated (García Alcaraz, 2018, 2021; Liceras & Garcia Alcaraz, 2019), and we still know nothing about the status of clitics in the grammar of bilingual individuals with genetic syndromes. Consequently, the status of clitics in L2 non-typical language development involving genetic syndromes is a clear candidate for further research.

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The expression of non-personal Catalan clitics n the adult grammar of early bilinguals. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7(5), 477–513. Pescarini, D. (2021). Romance object clitics. Microvariation and linguistic change. Oxford University Press. Pozzan, L. (2007). A dissociation between clitics and determiners in a group of Italian SLI children. In Proceedings of the 8th CUNY-SUNY-NYU Mini-conference. LIBA (Linguistics in the Big Apple: CUNY/ NYU Working Papers in Linguistics). Santoro, M. (2007). Second language acquisition of Italian accusative and dative clitics. Second Language Research, 23(1), 37–50. Santoro, M. (2011). L2 acquisition of Spanish clitic case morphology: A generative approach. Journal of Language and Culture, 2(4), 56–66. Shin, N. L., Requena, P. E., & Kemp, A. (2017). Bilingual and monolingual children’s patterns of syntactic variation: Variable clitic placement in Spanish. In A. Benavides & R. G. Schwartz (Eds.), Language development and disorders in Spanish-speaking children (pp. 63–88). Springer International Publishing. https://doi​.org​/10​ .1007​/978​-3​-319​-53646​-0_3 Silva, C. (2010). Asymmetries in the acquisition of different types of clitics in European Portuguese. In V. Torrens, L. Escobar, A. Gavarro, & J. Guttierez (Eds.), Movement and clitics: Adult and child grammar (pp. 361–388). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Slabakova, R., & Ivanov, I. (2011). A more careful look at the syntax–discourse interface. Lingua, 121, 637–651. Smith, G., Spelorzi, R., Sorace, A., & Garrafa, M. (2022). Language competence in Italian Heritage speakers: The contribution of clitic pronouns and nonword repetition. In C. Hamman (Ed.), Languages, special issue Bilingualism and language impairment. Languages, 7(4), 180). Towell, R., & Hawkins, R. (1994). Approaches to second language acquisition. Multilingual Matters. Tryzna, M. M. (2015). Acquisition of object clitics in child Polish: Evidence for three developmental stages. Lingua, 161, 67–81. Tsakali, V., & Wexler, K. (2004). Why children omit clitics in some languages but not in others: New evidence from Greek. In J. van Kampen & S. Baauw (Eds.), Proceedings of GALA 2003 (Generative approaches to language acquisition) (Vol. 2, pp. 493–504). LOT. Tuller, L., Delage, H., Monjauze, C., Piller, A., & Barthez, M. (2011). Clitic pronoun production as a measure of atypical language development in french. Lingua, 121(3), 423–441. Valenzuela, E. (2006). L2 end state grammars and incomplete acquisition of Spanish CLLD constructions. In R. Slabakova, S. Montrul, & Ph. Prévost (Eds.), Special volume in honour of Lydia White. John Benjamins. Varlokosta, S., Belletti, A., Costa, J., Friedmann, N., Gavarró, A., Grohmann, K. K., Guasti, M. T., Tuller, L., Lobo, M., Anđelković, D., Argemí, N., Avram, L., Berends, S., Brunetto, V., Delage, H., Ezeizabarrena, M.J., Fattal, I., Haman, E., van Hout, A., de López, K. J., … Yatsushiro, K. (2016). A cross-linguistic study of the acquisition of clitic and pronoun production. Language Acquisition, 23(1), 1–26. Vender, V., Hu, Sh., Mantione, F., Delfitto, D., & Melloni, C. (2018). The production of clitic pronouns: A study on bilingual and monolingual dyslexic children. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2301. https://doi​.org​/10​.3389​/ fpsyg​.2018​.02301 Wackernagel, J. (1892). Über ein Gesetz der indogermanischen Wortstellung. Indogermanische Forschungen, 1, 333–436. Wexler, K., Gavarró, A., & Torrens, V. (2004). Feature checking and object clitic omission in child Spanish and Catalan. In R. Bokbennema, B. Hollerbrandse, B. Kampers-Manhe, & P. Sleeman (Eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2002 (pp. 253–270). John Benjamins. Wust, V. (2010). L2 French learners’ processing of object clitics: Data from the classroom. L2 Journal, 2, 45–72. Zesiger, P., Zesiger, L. C., Arabatzi, M., Baranzini, L., Cronel-Ohayon, S., Franck, J., Frauenfelder, H., Hamann, C., & Rizzi, L. (2010). The acquisition of pronouns by French children: A parallel study of production and comprehension. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31(4), 571–603. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716410000147 Zwicky, A. M. (1985). Cliticis and particles. Language, 61, 283–305.

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32 ELLIPSIS Nigel Duffield

32.1 Introduction Ellipsis is the cover term for a set of constructions involving a dependency between some overt antecedent phrase and an associated anaphoric expression, which, though it goes unpronounced, is assumed to be part of the syntactic computation. Certain grammatical features aside, this silent expression is analyzed as having the same constituency and intensional meaning as its antecedent. Ellipsis is sometimes referred to as SURFACE ANAPHORA, following the seminal work of Sag (1976) – see also Hankamer and Sag (1976), Sag and Hankamer (1984): the term distinguishes this class of construction from DEEP ANAPHORA, where the syntactic form of the antecedent is supposed to be irrelevant.1 At first sight, though this is certainly the wrong metaphor, Ellipsis constructions share the same general description as Control constructions,2 in that both involve silent anaphors. However, the two are clearly contrasted distributionally. In the case of Ellipsis, the elided expression is generally construed with a predicate of some kind; typically, the antecedent phrase is a verb phrase, as in (1a) below. In Control, by contrast, the dependency holds between argument positions; consider example (1b), which exemplifies Object Control (the antecedent Bill is an object of the higher predicate).3 In the case of Control infinitives, the predicate phrase is usually overt; still, example (1c) shows that both Ellipsis and Control may co-occur (here, only the non-finite auxiliary to survives): (1) a. Amy studies English, and her partner does study English, too. b. Amy persuaded Billj [PROj to find a hairdresser.]  c. Amy studies English, but she can’t convince her friendsj [ PROj to study English ] 

[VPE] [ (Object) Control ] [ (Object) Control + VPE ]

Whilst it may be the most common form of ellipsis, verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) is only one of a range of Ellipsis constructions found in English.4 Some others are illustrated in (2): (2) a. Amy studies English, and her partner studies French.  b. Amy has studied English for a year, and has studied Chinese for six months.  c. Amy has been studying English more than she has been studying Chinese.

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-37

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[‘Gapping’] [‘Stripping’]5 [‘Pseudo-Gapping’]

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d. Amy has been studying something, but I don’t know what Amy has been studying. [‘Sluicing’: Ross (1967)] e. Amy tried to read every book that Sam did read every book that Sam did read every ...∞ [Antecedent Contained Deletion] f. Amy bought two books, while Jim bought three books.6 [Nominal Ellipsis]

A property of Ellipsis constructions which has been claimed to distinguish them from other ‘unpronounced form’ constructions is the optionality of the elision: in all of the sentences in (2), for example, pronunciation of the subscripted phrases would not lead to grammatical unacceptability.7 This is not true of other deletions, such as Comparative Deletion or ‘Sluice-stranding’ in (3),8 and it certainly does not hold of Control constructions, given that overt subjects are generally prohibited in PRO contexts.9 (3) a.  The galaxy contains more stars than the eye can see (*stars).  b. The shapes seem to be longer than they are (*longer) thick.  c. He bought a boat, but I don’t know what for (*he bought it).

[CD: Kennedy (2002).] [CSD] [Sluice-stranding]

Ellipsis constructions are subject to a variety of negative constraints; see Crain (1993). Some of these are structural – silent phrases are licensed in some syntactic contexts, but not in others – see Lobeck (1995); Saito and Murasugi (1990); Johnson (2001) – or in some languages, but not others, whereas other constraints are interpretive, the silent phrases allowing a different set of referential interpretations, according to language or construction; Lappin and Benmamoun (1999). See also contributions to Craenenbroeck and Temmerman (2018), for a more comprehensive survey. One of the most researched issues concerning Ellipsis is the closeness of the formal and/or phonological relationship between the overt antecedent phrase and the elided material. It has long been recognized that English VPE tolerates antecedent-ellipsis mismatches with respect to certain temporal, aspectual, and agreement features (Sag, 1976). Consider, for instance, the sentences in (4), taken from Shiraishi and Abeillé (2016): (4) a. I haven’t watched the show, but I will watch/*watched the show. [VPE] b. We’ll let you know if it deals with the heat and humidity as well as it did deal/*deals with the frigid slop [Pseudo-gapping, Miller (2014)].

The possibility of this kind of feature mismatch has been used to support ‘Tense-lowering’ analyses, in which tense and agreement features occupy a position outside of the thematic verb phrase prior to PF/Spellout; see Chomsky (1993), Merchant (2001), and subsequent work. Conversely, the term VPE has been extended to cover constructions in which the finite verb is still pronounced: in so-called ‘verb-stranding-VPE’ (vVPE) languages, the finite verb ‘survives’ ellipsis even as the other elements of the predicate phrase go unpronounced; cf. McCloskey (1991), Goldberg (2005). The Modern Irish sentences in (5) below can be analyzed in this way; notice that in VSO languages the post-verbal subject also gets elided:

(5)

Dúirt mé go gceannóinn é agus cheannaigh said I COMP buy.COND.1sg. it and buy.​pe​rf lit. ‘Said I that would buy [(I) it] and bought [I it].’ (cf. English ‘..​.and I did [buy it].’) (McCloskey, 1991, ex.27a)

442

[mé  I

] é. it

Ellipsis

Not all grammatical features can be ignored, however. In English VPE, for example, some mismatching grammatical properties must be semantically recoverable from the form of the stranded auxiliary; see Rouveret (2012, p. 900). It is this Recoverability Constraint that is taken to rule out (6b) below, where the auxiliary fails to identify the aspectual feature [PROG]; see Al-Thubaiti (2009, 2018), Hawkins (2012), and also Koyama (2016), from whom this minimal contrast is taken. (6) a.  John washed the dishes, and Mary has [ -en [ uPERF ]], too.  b. *John painted a wall, and Mary was [ ing [PROG ]], too.

Example (6a) is less than perfect, but still more acceptable than (6b). Even where the form of the auxiliary allows feature recovery, VPE may still not be tolerated. The examples in (7c, d) show that Voice mismatches typically result in grammatical anomaly, even though the auxiliary combination formally distinguishes active from passive VPs: (7)

a.  Amy has been promoted, but Jane hasn’t (been) promoted. b. Rumi dismissed Amy, before her boss could dismiss Amy.  c. #Amy was dismissed by Rumi, before her boss could dismiss Amy. d. #Rumi promoted Amy, but Jane hasn’t been promoted, yet. 

P/A

P/P A/A A/P

Hence, feature recoverability per se is not a sufficient constraint on divergences between the antecedent and the elided phrase: an overarching Structural Parallelism constraint also applies. Besides recoverability and structural parallelism, a third kind of mismatch has received extensive attention. This time the divergence is interpretive, rather than structural. In the theoretical literature, interest has focused on the contrast in the elided phrase between so-called ‘strict’ vs. ‘sloppy’ readings of anaphoric pronouns and/or pronouns used as bound variables. Sentence (8a) illustrates the baseline ambiguity, where the elided pronoun may have either a strict or sloppy interpretation; (8b) illustrates the possibility of ‘vehicle change’ in the elided clause (Fiengo & May, 1994), which forces a mismatch in person, number, or gender features; lastly, example (8c) demonstrates that pronouns cannot switch ‘mid-stream’ between referential and bound variable readings: (8)

a. Barti loves hisi sister, and Bob does love his sister, too. [ = Bob loves Bart’s sister (strict); Bob loves Bob’s sister (sloppy); ≠Bob loves a different person’s sister (disjoint reference)] b. Barti greatly admires himselfi, and Lisa and Maggie do admire HIM/THEMSELVES/*HIMSELF too. [= Lisa and Maggie admire Bill (strict v/c); Lisa and Maggie admire themselves].10 c. Barti loves hisi mother, but no-one else does love his mother. [ = No-one else loves Bart’s/someone else’s mother (strict/disjoint); (*No-one loves their own mother (bound variable))]

The often contentious, theory-internal disputes surrounding the correct treatment of these effects play only a minor role in acquisition research since generally, SLA researchers have simply adopted the standard theoretical assumptions and designed their studies accordingly. As a result, sole interest lies in whether learners are sensitive to the contrasts among different kinds of silences, especially where these silences are licensed differently in their L1 grammars.

32.2  Learnability considerations Ellipsis constructions present a classic L2 ‘Poverty of Stimulus’ problem. On one hand, speakers’ intuitions cannot come from lexically encoded knowledge, nor can they be inferred by observing overt phrasal distributions, or mismatches between clausal positioning and the interpretation of thematic or grammatical relations – among the possibilities available to the learner acquiring passives or 443

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wh-movement, for example. If the same constraints on ellipsis held universally, then the instinctive generativist solution would be to attribute knowledge of ellipsis constraints to the initial state (‘UG’). However, the fact that licensing conditions on Ellipsis vary cross-linguistically seems to rule out the nativist reflex: sensitivity to L2 settings must be acquired independently of the L1, from linguistic experience. This learning problem is exacerbated by the fact that acceptability judgments are often gradient, conditioned by a range of non-structural factors, including finiteness. The Parallelism Constraint on VPE is a case in point: as Hardt (1993), Kehler (2000), and others have shown, native speakers freely produce ‘parallelism violations’ such as those in (9), whilst still judging such sentences deviant when compared to their parallel counterparts. The incidence of such examples implies that L2 learners cannot acquire the constraint though indirect negative evidence; cf. Lust (2006, p. 31). (9) a. A lot of this material can be presented in a fairly informal and accessible fashion, and often I do [ ]. (Chomsky, 1982, cited in Dalrymple et al.). [Hardt (134) - passive] b. We should suggest to her that she officially appoint us as a committee and invite faculty participation. They won’t [ ] , of course… [Hardt (116) - nominal]

It is the tension between these learnability considerations that makes the study of ellipsis in SLA particularly interesting. To this point, the concern has been to provide a description of Ellipsis at a phenomenological level, focusing on those aspects of the phenomenon that have attracted the most theoretical attention: feature recoverability, structural parallelism, and the strict vs. ‘sloppy’ resolution of anaphoric reference. The remainder of the chapter is concerned with quantitative research bearing on these issues.

32.3  Methodological approaches to the study of ellipsis in SLA The range and distribution of methodologies used to investigate L2 learners’ knowledge of Ellipsis constructions is broadly consistent with what is observed in other areas of SLA research. That is, most studies are offline, with dependent measures being taken only at the end of the stimulus presentation. This is true irrespective of whether test items are presented via a computer interface, or through more traditional pencil-and-paper-based stimulus lists. Computer-based presentation allows for response latencies (RT) to be used as a secondary measure, alongside a basic judgment score, with elevated response times relative to some baseline control sentence being taken as proxy for a reduction in grammatical acceptability. A small number of online studies have been published, specifically, eyetracking and self-paced reading studies: see Roberts et al. (2013) and Hwang (2020), respectively. However, in contrast to recent processing work with adult monolinguals (see Section 32.4.1 below), genuinely online studies have been the exception in L2 research. Table 32.1 summarizes the methods used in the L2 acquisition studies discussed here.

32.4  Relevant prior studies with other populations 32.4.1  Experimental psycholinguistics By comparison with research on other ‘filler-gap dependencies’ little attention was paid to ellipsis processing until the mid-1980s, following the publication of the results of Sag’s dissertation (1976) in Hankamer and Sag (1976). Early experimental work by Murphy (1985) and Tanenhaus and Carlson (1990), involving offline measures – acceptability judgments and end-of-sentence response latencies

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Ellipsis Table 32.1  Summary of methods used in SLA studies of Ellipsis Author(s)

Task/dependent measure/ presentation mode

Phenomenon investigated

Participants

O’Grady (1999)

Bidirectional AJT/5 point scale judgment/offline

Forward vs. backward Gapping

Sentence Completion Judgment Task (SCJT)/ Acceptance/Rejection; EOS response latency/ online (timed) Bi-modal AJT/ 2018: restricted stimulus presentation/five-point scale judgment TVJT (all four experiments)/offline

VPE (syntactic parallelism)

English NS vs. Japanese L2 learners Japanese L1 vs. English and Mandarin L2 learners of Japanese English NS: Int./Adv L2 learners (Dutch, Japanese, Spanish) English NS, Dutch L2 learners.

Kanno (1999) Duffield and Matsuo (2009) Duffield et al. (2009) Al-Thubaiti (2009, 2018) Kim (2012)

Hawkins (2012) Roberts et al. (2013) Koyama (2016) Gandón-Chapela and Gallardo del Puerto (2019) Hwang (2020, Exp. 1–3) Hwang (2020, Exp. 4)

SCJT/3-way response/ offline Eye-tracking/fixation time and regressions/online AJT/Likert scale/offline Forced choice interpretation task #1 (Corpus study); #2 screen-based AJT; #3 screen-based picture matching task #4 Self-paced reading (SPRT)

VPE (morphosyntactic recoverability) VPE vs. NOC; interpretation of ‘one pronominalization’ VPE (morphosyntactic recoverability) VPE (syntactic parallelism) VPE (morphosyntactic recoverability) VPE (strict vs sloppy identity)

English NS, (2009intermediate Arabic L2 learners; 2019-Arabic high proficiency L2 learners) Bidirectional English L2 learners of Korean; Korean L2 learners of English. Adult L2 learners of English L1{Arabic, Mandarin} English NS; (Dutch L2 group in ms.) English NS; Japanese L2 learners English NS; Spanish L2 learners

VPE vs. Gapping

L1 English children; early and late Korean L2 learners

VPE vs Gapping

English NS: adult Korean L2 learners

– investigated sensitivity to contrasts between VPE and VPA with respect to non-parallel antecedents, such as those illustrated in (10a, b):11 (10) a. The tap needed to be replaced. So I *did/did it. b. Those clothes needed washing. So I *did/did it,  c. ‘He might never fully appreciate what you accomplished out there. But I did (*it)’  d. Do these doors lock? No, do you want them to (*do it) ? 

[*VPE; √VPA] [*VPE; √VPA] [√VPE; *VPA] [√VPE; *VPA]

Since around 2000, the psycholinguistic focus with monolingual adults has been on online measures. Specifically, the concern has been with the time-course of antecedent matching – see, e.g., Arregui et al. (2006), Kim et al. (2011), Roberts et al. (2013) – and/or with specifying the types of semantic

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information accessed at the ellipsis site (Shapiro & Hestvik, 1995; Martin & McElree, 2009). Phillips and Parker (2014) provide a detailed critical review of experimental research up to 2012, while the contributions to an ongoing special collection of Glossa (2018–) address still-current issues in ellipsis processing; see especially Xiang et al. (2019).

32.4.2  Child language studies Also in (early) first language acquisition, Ellipsis has received little attention when compared with other long-distance dependencies. In part this is due to inherent structural complexity and utterance length: the fact that Ellipsis constructions necessarily span two main clauses, each with their own morphosyntax and thematic, grammatical and discourse relations among arguments, makes it difficult to tease apart young children’s difficulties with processing from problems of structural computations. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that child language research has largely focused on relatively simple cases of VP-Ellipsis – especially ‘V-stranding VPE (vVPE)’ – in languages where this is available; see Santos (2006, 2008, 2009). Experimental research on VPE with English children has examined the three sub-areas identified earlier: recoverability, strict vs. sloppy readings, and structural parallelism. With respect to the first two issues, research by Barbara Lust and her colleagues suggests that young children (2;7~3;11) can produce VP-ellipsis sentences when presented with a non-elided model sentence, and that somewhat older children (3;0–7;11) assign adult-like interpretations to VP-ellipsis structures, correctly rejecting non-matching interpretations of the elided pronoun. Lust’s first experiment (Postman et al., 1997)) used Elicited Imitation, the second (Foley et al., 1997, 2003) utilized both Act-Out and TruthValue Judgment (TVJT) tasks. A companion study by Guo et al. (1996), using the same methodology with L1 learners of Mandarin Chinese, yielded similar results to those found in English. Research reported in Thornton and Wexler (1999) further supports the idea that children between four and five years are aware that reference may not jump between referential and bound variable interpretations; cf. (8c) above. Studies of ellipsis in FLA in other languages include work on European Portuguese (Santos, 2006, 2008, 2009) and Japanese (Matsuo, 2007); also, Mandarin (Li & Hu, 2014), and Cantonese (Cheung, 2008).12 In her 2005 dissertation, Santos’ central concern is with ‘verbal answers’ to questions in EP, sentence fragments that are assumed to contain elided VPs, as in (11a): (11)  Deste o jornal ao professor na biblioteca?   [Santos, 2009] gave the paper to​.t​he teacher in​.t​he library ‘Did you give the newspaper to the teacher at the library?’   a. Dei    - ‘verbal answer’ gave[1.sg] ‘Yes.’   b. Sim.   - ‘yes’ answer   c. É/ Foi.   - ‘be’ answer be/was

Analysis of a spontaneous production corpus shows that young Portuguese-speaking children are not only able to produce verbal answers but are also able to correctly change the tense/agreement features of the verb to conform to the ellipsis clause (Deste→Dei in (12a)). Subsequent work by Santos (2008, 2009), using a Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT), indicates that EP children as young as 4 years old can discriminate licit VPE interpretations from ungrammatical readings, though in certain conditions children displayed non-adult preferences in ambiguous contexts.

446

Ellipsis

Many languages with V-stranding VPE (vVPE) also permit object omission: hence, silences following a finite verb – preceding, in head-final languages – are ambiguous between VPE and NOC analyses. The two can be teased apart interpretively, however: whereas VPE entails copying of all semantic information associated with the object, null objects only require that the head noun be interpreted identically; see Hoji (1998).13 Matsuo (2007) exploits this difference to examine whether young Japanese children entertain VPE or NOC analyses of silent expressions. Again using the TVJT method, Matsuo examined the acceptance rate for sentences such as those in (12) – and for their Japanese equivalents – across four context conditions: (a) sloppy reading; (b) strict reading; (c) color mismatch; (d) object mismatch. If children analyze silences as NOCs they should accept the pairings in (c) in addition to (a) and (b), whereas if they adopt a VPE analysis, they should accept the pairings in (a, b), but reject those in the latter conditions (c, d): (12) a.

Sloppy reading. Scene: Cookie Monster ate Cookie Monster’s cookie and Mike ate Mike’s cookie. Target: ‘Cookie Monster ate his cookie, and Mike did too.‘



b. Strict reading. Scene: The mother and the girl hid behind the mother’s tree. Target: ‘The mother hid behind her tree, and the girl did too.‘



c.

Color mismatch. Scene: Mr. Bear found a blue fish and Mr. Tiger found a pink fish. Target: ‘Mr. Bear found a blue fish, and Mr. Tiger did too.‘



d.

Object mismatch. Scene: The cow ate asparagus, and the elephant ate carrots. Target: ‘The cow ate asparagus, and the elephant did too.‘

Matsuo’s two-language study involved 14 English-speaking children (4;9–6;9) and 17 L1 Japanese children, together with two adult control groups. The results reveal significant cross-linguistic differences among participant groups: whereas the English-speaking children’s and adults’ results were constrained by the VPE analysis, L1 Japanese-speaking children were more inclined to accept condition C mismatches than a VPE analysis would predict (this was also true for a minority of the Japanese adults).14 The two other L1 studies of note – Matsuo and Duffield (2001), and Hwang (2020, A)15 – each form part of larger projects directly comparing L1 and L2 learners. Both experiments are concerned with sensitivity to structural parallelism constraints across different anaphoric constructions: VPE vs. VPA in Matsuo and Duffield’s study, VPE vs. Gapping in Hwang’s work. In the former experiments, the researchers manipulated two factors: Antecedent Parallelism and Anaphor Type, along with a nested factor Construction Type {non-parallel: passive, nominal}. The design is illustrated in Table 32.2. A modified form of McDaniel and Cairns (1996) Grammaticality Judgment Task was used; see Hiramatsu and Lillo-Martin (1998). Results from 12 children (3:11–6:7) showed a pattern consistent with early knowledge of the structural parallelism constraint: overall, children rejected non-parallel items reliably more often than parallel ones (active/passive 100/65%; verbal/nominal 100/82%).16 There were two points of particular significance, which carried forward to the corresponding L2 studies. First, none of the participants rejected non-parallel VPE out of hand (adults’ passive: 65%; nominal 38% acceptance); this confirmed the gradient nature of the effect. Second, for all participants

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Nigel Duffield Table 32.2  Conditions in Matsuo & Duffield’s L1 study (2001) First Clause

Second Clause

Parallelism

Anaphor Type

Someone had to fix the cat’s tire The cat’s tire had to be fixed

…but Cookie Monster didn’t want to (do it)

√VPE/√VPA *VPE/√VPA

The clowns were very full, and the dogs said they should take a nap The clowns were very full, and the dogs said that a nap would be good for them

…but the clowns didn’t want to (do it)

Parallel (Verbal) Non-Parallel (Passive) Parallel (Verbal) Non-Parallel (Nominal)

√VPE/√VPA *VPE/√VPA

Construction Type (passive vs. nominal antecedents) proved a more significant factor than structural parallelism per se, in determining the rate of acceptances. The experiments in Hwang’s (2020) study manipulated a different Ellipsis contrast: VPE vs. Gapping. The examples in (13) show that whereas VPE is flexible regarding the conjunction introducing the ellipsis clause (and/because), Gapping exclusively requires and (cf. 13b); see Jackendoff (1971). Conversely, Gapping – at least according to Hwang – is more flexible with respect to the interpretation of surviving arguments: in (13c), it is claimed that Dad can be interpreted either as Agent or Theme, whereas in (13d) only the Subject reading is possible:17 (13)

a. Sara made pizza …and Kelly did too/because Kelly did. b. Sara made pizza …and Kelly pasta/#because Kelly pasta.  c. Mum hugged the boy at home, and Dad in the park.  d. Mum hugged the boy at home, and Dad did too. 

[VPE-C/A] [GAP-C/#A] [GAP-S/O] [VPE-S/*O]

Hwang (2020) examined English children’s sensitivity to these contrasts by means of a computerbased Acceptability Judgment Task (structural constraint) and a Picture-Matching Task (interpretive constraint). (Hwang also carried out a preliminary corpus study to examine the incidence of VPE and Gapping in child-directed utterances). The AJT involved 33 children (3~7years: M. 5;7) and a group of adult controls; 24/33 children in the AJT experiment took part in the PMT. Overall, the results indicated that older English children are sensitive to both constraints by the age of six (5;11, AJT; 5;6, PMT). In the AJT, however, most participants – especially the younger children – showed a clear preference for VPE over Gapping structures irrespective of conjunct type; see Table 32.3A. Furthermore, as might have been predicted, the Object interpretation was clearly preferred over the Subject reading in the Gapping structures; see Table 32.3b (both tables from Hwang (2020), p. 77, 115). Tables 32.3A and 32.3B also contain results from Hwang’s L2 groups, to which we return directly. Here once again the effects of Construction Type are typically larger than any general (cross-constructional) effects of grammaticality that might be predicted by theoretical principles.

32.5  L2 Studies 32.5.1  Experiments investigating structural constraints 32.5.1.1  Duffield and Matsuo (2009), Duffield et al. (2009) Let us first consider the L2 components of the two studies just discussed, namely, (i) Duffield and Matsuo (2009), Duffield et al. (2009); and (ii) Hwang (2020). 448

Ellipsis Table 32.3A  Mean Acceptance Rates (%) in AJT by group and condition (redrawn from Hwang, 2020)

English NS Adults (n=70) English NS Children (n=33) Early L1-Korean L2ers (n = 27) Late L1-Korean L2ers (n = 30)

VPE-C

VPE-A

Gapping-C

*Gapping-A

97.14 (SD = 16.68)

88.34 (SD = 32.14)

68.50 (SD = 46.51)

3.11 (SD = 17.38)

84.90 (SD = 35.90)

78.12 (SD = 41.45)

38.54 (SD = 48.80)

25.53 (SD = 43.72)

78.57 (SD = 41.17)

68.75 (SD = 46.51)

44.16 (SD = 49.82)

24.52 (SD = 43.16)

97.77 (SD = 14.82)

86.67 (SD = 34.09)

55.56 (SD = 49.83)

12.92 (SD = 33.64)

Key: VPE-C: VPE/Conjunct clause; VPE-A: VPE/Adjunct Clause; Gapping-C: Gapping/Conjunct Clause; *Gapping-A: Gapping in an adjunct clause.

Duffield and Matsuo (2009), Duffield et al. (2009) adopt the basic item design used in Matsuo and Duffield (2001) – cf. Table 32.2 – substituting adult-appropriate materials and a different test instrument: both sets of experiments in Duffield et al.’s L2 studies implemented versions of the Sentence Completion Judgment Task (SCJT), originally developed by Tanenhaus and Carlson (1990). In the SCJT task, participants are visually presented on a computer screen with short stories consisting of a context sentence, and a following completion sentence. The participants read the first sentence (the antecedent clause), and press a button when they have understood it; this sentence is removed from the screen, and replaced by the target sentence, containing the ellipsis clause. Participants are asked to decide whether the second sentence forms a ‘sensible and accurate completion.’ Each trial yields two measures: an acceptance/rejection decision; and a response latency (measured from onset of the second sentence). In their experiment, Duffield and Matsuo (2009) investigated the extent to which second language learners’ responses to parallelism violations (L1 = {Dutch (n = 20), Spanish (n = 20), and Japanese (n = 20)}) matched those of twenty native speakers of English. Overall, the results obtained were consistent with those of Tanenhaus and Carlson’s native speakers: results from all groups yielded robust main effects of Parallelism and Anaphor Type. However, only the native speakers’ results showed a reliable interaction between these two variables, such that items containing non-parallel antecedents were rejected significantly more often in the VPE condition than items with a VPA completion. The intergroup differences are perhaps more notable than the overall convergences: for every L2 group, different factors were responsible for the absence of an interaction between Parallelism and Anaphor Type. (L1-Dutch L2-English learners, for example, rejected non-parallel instances of VPA, which native speakers treated as fully acceptable, whereas L1-Spanish and L1-Japanese L2-English learners tended to reject all VPE structures, irrespective of parallelism.) These considerations prompted the follow-up investigation reported in Duffield et al. (2009), in which the number of learner groups was reduced to one (Dutch), but which introduced two new item variables: finiteness of the anaphor clause (so he did (it) vs. but he didn’t want to (do it); (the nested variable of) recoverability of the VP (presence or absence of a by-phrase, zero/non-zero nominal antecedents [e.g., nap vs. decision])). As in the first study, participants also completed a pen-and-paper AJT. The results of both tasks again show reliable main effects of Structural Parallelism and Anaphor Type. In addition, reliable main effects of Construction Type and Finiteness were also observed, as well as significant interactions between these latter factors and Parallelism. Reliable differences were also observed between native speakers and L2 learners across several conditions: especially Finiteness and Construction Type, which exerted a stronger effect on L2 learners than on native speakers. 449

Nigel Duffield Table 32.3B  Mean Acceptance Rates (%) in the PMT, by group and condition (redrawn from Hwang, 2020)

English NS Adults (n=32) English NS Children (n=24) Early L1-Korean L2ers (n = 27) Late L1-Korean L2ers (n = 30)

VPE-SR

*VPE-OR

Gapping-SR

Gapping-OR

98.44 (SD = 12.45)

1.56 (SD = 12.45)

53.54 (SD = 50.07)

96.88 (SD = 17.47)

85.42 (SD = 35.48)

21.05 (SD = 40.98)

62.22 (SD = 48.75)

86.46 (SD = 34.40)

87.04 (SD = 33.75)

39.62 (SD = 49.14)

76.19 (SD = 42.80)

86.92 (SD = 33.88)

98.32 (SD = 12.91)

5.88 (SD = 23.63)

76.67 (SD = 42.47)

87.18 (SD = 33.58)

Key: VPE-SR: VPE/subject reading; *VPE-OR VPE/Object Reading; Gapping-SR Gapping/Subject Reading; Gapping-OR: *Gapping/Object Reading.

32.5.1.2  Hwang (2020) – L2 experiments Returning to Hwang’s (2020) investigation, Tables 32.3A and 32.3B show that the participants in her first two experiments included two groups of Korean L2 learners of English: 27 ‘early learners’ (mean AoO: 4.96/AoT: 8.52); and 33 ‘late learners’ (mean AoO: 8.83/AoT: 23.03). Overall, Hwang’s participants behaved similarly: all participant groups accepted the sentences in the conditions deemed ungrammatical – *Gapping-A, *VPE-Or – significantly less often than they accepted sentences in grammatical conditions. Where a discrepancy was found between groups, the split was between children and adults, not L1 vs. L2, with the L1 and early L2 children over-accepting grammatically unacceptable forms. In fact, the more interesting discrepancies between adult L1 and L2 learners (early and late) are to be found in two of the ‘grammatical’ conditions, namely, Gapping-C and Gapping-S, both of which were judged marginal by adult native speakers – 68.5% and 53.4%, respectively. Hwang attributes the low acceptance of Gapping-C to a processing effect; in this case, there is an age-related incline up to the adult L1 judgment. On the other hand, in the Gapping-SR condition, all three learner groups over-accept sentences that adult native speakers treat as marginal; it is unclear what would cause L2 learners to revise their judgments of these structures downwards.

32.5.1.3  Gapping and null-object constructions: O’Grady (1999), Kanno (1999), Kim (2012) Here, it is worth mentioning another facet of the Gapping construction that has received some attention, namely directionality. In closely related experiments, O’Grady (1999) and Kanno (1999) explored the contrast in (14), between English, which allows only ‘forward gapping’ and languages such as Japanese, where the gapped constituent precedes the pronounced verb (from O’Grady, 1999, reproduced in Hwang, 2020, p. 45): (14) a. Forward Gapping: [John reads Time] and [Sue [e] Newsweek]. b. Backward Gapping: *[John [e] Time] and [Sue reads Newsweek]. c. Forward Gapping (Japanese): *[John-wa Time-o yon-de] [Sue-wa Newsweek-o [e]] 18 [John-TOP Time-ACC read-GER] [Sue-TOP Newsweek-ACC ‘John read Time and Sue Newsweek.’ d. Backward Gapping (Japanese): [John-wa Time-o [e]] [Sue-wa Newsweek-o yon-da]. [John-TOP Time-ACC] [Sue-TOP Newsweek-ACC read-PST] ‘John read Time and Sue Newsweek.’

450

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Using a five-point scale AJT, O’Grady tested bidirectional knowledge of these constraints on four groups of learners: Japanese and English native speakers, Japanese L2 learners of English, and English L2 learners of Japanese. Kanno’s acceptability judgment study (1999) only tested knowledge of the Japanese setting, but included a group of Mandarin L2 learners of Japanese in addition to the English L2 learners. (Mandarin lacks gapping altogether.) Both researchers found non-target-like judgment patterns among their L2 participants. In O’Grady’s study, for example, Japanese L2 learners correctly rejected backward gapping in English (14b), but were unenthusiastic in accepting forward gapping (14a). By contrast, English learners of Japanese failed to reject forward gapping in Japanese *(14c), indeed preferring these structures over backward mapping (14d). The Mandarin L2 learners in Kanno’s study behaved like O’Grady’s Japanese L2 learners: correctly rejecting the ungrammatical mapping in the target language, but failing to fully accept the grammatical order. (As Hwang points out (2020, p. 46), it is hard to draw useful theoretical conclusions from these two experiments, given that each L2 group is non-target-like in its own way.) No adequate survey of Ellipsis in SLA can fail to mention Jinsook Kim’s exemplary dissertation (Kim, 2012, University of Hawai’i). Kim’s four studies employ a written version of the TVJ design used in Matsuo (2007) to examine learners’ knowledge of interpretive differences between VPE and NOC~‘one-substitution’, in contexts where the antecedent clause contains some mismatching adjunct expression (attributive adjectives in NP; variously, locative, temporal or reason phrases in VP). Given space constraints, I restrict attention to Experiments #3 and #4, which investigate English native speakers vs. Korean L2 learners’ interpretations of the English color mismatch condition in (15a,b), and the locative mismatch in (15c,d): (15)

a. John bought a blue bag, and Mary did too. [ VPE = bought a blue bag] b. John bought a blue bag, and Mary bought one too. [ one = a (blue) bag] c. John read a book in the park. Mary did too.  [ VPE = read a book in the park] d. John read a book in the park. Mary read one too. [ one = a book ]

In (15a), the modifier blue must be interpreted in the ellipsis, whereas in (15b), this should be optional, depending on how one is interpreted. Hence, in a color mismatch context, the latter sentence should be acceptable, if perhaps dispreferred. Similarly with VP-adjuncts: in a non-parallel context (e.g., where Mary read a book in the library), (15c) should be rejected, while (15d) should be more acceptable. Kim’s English experiments produced apparently robust results.19 First, in Experiment 3 (15a vs. 15c), both native speakers and Korean L2 learners correctly rejected VPE in the color mismatch condition (0-1% acceptance across both groups). Interestingly, the English native speakers also clearly rejected ‘one-substitution’ in this condition (0.8%), with the Korean L2 learners producing the low level of acceptance that had been predicted for native speakers (7.5%) – a nice example of L2 learners ‘outperforming’ native speakers (cf. Duffield, 2003). Meanwhile, in Kim’s fourth experiment, which investigated the contrast between (15c) and (15d), close correspondences were observed between native speakers and Korean L2 learners with respect to the inclusion of locative adjuncts in non-parallel contexts: her results reveal clear rejection with VPE (L1-NS 0%, Korean L2E 0.8) vs. acceptances (albeit grudging) with ‘one’-substitution structures (L1-NS 47.5%, Korean L2E 52.5%). This concludes the discussion of SLA research on purely structural effects in VPE and related constructions. We turn next to consider experiments on morphosyntactic recoverability – studies by Al-Thubaiti (2009, 2018), Hawkins (2012) and Koyama (2016) – and on pronoun interpretation – Gandón-Chapela and Gallardo del Puerto (2019), and work cited therein. 451

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32.5.2  Experiments on recoverability and interpretive constraints 32.5.2.1  Morphosyntactic recoverability (Al-Thubaiti, 2009, 2019; Hawkins, 2012; Koyama, 2016) With respect to recoverability, the three studies just cited are concerned with L2-learners’ knowledge of the English contrast in (6) above, repeated below for convenience: (6) a. John washed the dishes, and Mary has [ -en [ uPERF ]], too. b. *John painted a wall, and Mary was [ ing [PROG ], too.

For Al-Thubaiti (2009, 2019) and Hawkins (2012) the unacceptability of (6b) is due to elision of interpretable features; by hypothesis, (6a) is grammatically acceptable because only uninterpretable features are deleted. Both Al-Thubaiti and Hawkins used written acceptability judgment tasks to investigate the judgments of L2 learners whose L1 lacks VPE: Arabic-speaking learners in Al-Thubaiti’s first study (early vs. late learners), and Arabic and Chinese-speaking L2 learners in the second. In Hawkins’ study, sentences such as those in (6) were further contrasted with sentences involving matching VPE, or vVPE/NOC, as in (16): (16) a. √John has washed the dishes, and Mary has, too. b. *John washed the dishes, and Mary washed [ ] too.

The results from both experiments showed that L2 learners were able to reject English sentences in the ungrammatical conditions (6b)/(16b); however, they failed to accept as fully grammatical sentences such as (6a), in which uninterpretable features are deleted. Both authors interpreted this ‘error’ as empirical support for the Interpretability Hypothesis of Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007), according to which L2 learners have difficulty acquiring uninterpretable features. A problem with this conclusion is that, once again, the theory may not match the judgments of native speakers: for most speakers I have consulted (6a) is less than perfect when compared to (16a). Again, we are dealing with gradient judgments, where L2 learners are right to be wary. Koyama’s (2016) AJT study, which involved 12 English native speakers and 14 Japanese L2 learners, reveals clearer discrepancies between the two groups. Figure 32.1, based on Koyama’s own charts, shows the acceptability judgments of English native speakers and L2 learners, respectively, on the English sentences presented to them. For present purposes, the crucial conditions are *A’ → (16b), C →(16a), C’ → (6a), and *D’ → (6b). First, in contrast to the two previous L2 studies, Koyama’s L2 learners clearly permit (ungrammatical) null-object structures, consistent with their L1 grammars: compared to native speakers’ mean 1.5 rating for Condition *A’ (16b), L2 learners gave 3.69 – their second highest overall score – to sentences from this condition. Notice that the score for *A’ was higher than C or C’, the uninterpretable vs. interpretable ellipsis conditions. Koyama does not report whether this difference is statistically significant, however, she does discuss a significant difference between the latter conditions (i.e., C and C’): while not fully accepting sentence like (16a), Koyama’s participants nevertheless correctly preferred these over (6a), and greatly preferred both over (6b) (C-3.22 > C’-2.09 > D’-1.59). This cline is exactly comparable to that found with native speakers, for whom (6a) is the least acceptable of all the grammatical conditions (C-3.75 > C’-3.25 > D’-1.21). Koyama’s results thus challenge Al-Thubaiti/Hawkins’ interpretation in two ways: first, in that the Interpretability Hypothesis does not explain her data; second, because, despite their failure to reject ungrammatical structures such as (6b), Japanese learners nevertheless converge well on the same subtle gradient judgments in the more acceptable conditions. 452

Ellipsis

Koyama (2016): Mean Ratings by Condition 4 3.5

Mean Rating

3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 Native-speaker Controls Japanese L2 Learners

A 3.85 3.72

*A' 1.5 3.69

B 3.94 3.78

B' 3.44 2.09

C 3.75 3.22

C' 3.25 2.09

D 3.38 3.63

#D' 1.21 1.59

Figure 32.1  Koyama (2016): Summary data, by sentence type

32.5.2.2  Contextual influences on pronoun interpretation Finally, we consider the issue of strict vs. sloppy interpretation of anaphors within elided VPs. Here, the issue concerns interpretive preferences, rather than acceptance or rejection of ungrammatical structures. In their two experiments, Gandón-Chapela and Gallardo del Puerto (2019) first consider whether L2 learners allow both strict and sloppy readings in regular VPE structures; they then examine whether preferences for a particular reading are altered by the addition of a biasing context (in their terms, a referential context). An example of the contrast tested in the second experiment is given in (17): (17) a. Scott has voted for himself, and Jeff has too. Jeff has always supported Scott. b. Scott has voted for himself, and Jeff has too. Jeff met his friends at a pub later.

The researchers, whose experiments are couched in the framework of Relevance Theory (RT) (Sperber & Wilson, 1986 et seq.; Wilson & Sperber, 2002 et seq.), expected speakers to show a marked preference for the strict reading in the biasing context (17a) [i.e., himself = Scott] over both a neutral ‘bare’ context (Exp. 1) and the ‘non-referential’ context (17b). They compared results from 29 native speakers of American English with those of 35 Spanish L2 learners (proficiency level range B1-B2 (CEFR)). Figure 32.2, adapted from Gandón-Chapela and Gallardo del Puerto’s results tables (2019, pp. 85–86) contrasts responses between the bare condition and those in the referential condition (Exp. 1); also, differences between the bare condition and the non-referential condition (Exp 2.). As predicted, the provision of a biasing context significantly encouraged the strict reading, for both groups. Nevertheless, the authors also found reliable differences between the two groups’ responses across all conditions: in bare contexts, native speakers showed a stronger preference for sloppy readings than did L2 learners; on the other hand, native speakers were more inclined to switch to strict interpretations in the biasing context. Another unexpected finding was that L2 learners slightly preferred strict readings in the non-referential context, which should, if anything, have elevated the sloppy preference (as was found for native speakers). The authors interpret these contrasts in terms of 453

Nigel Duffield

Gandón-Chapela & Gallardo del Puerto (2019) Preference for strict reading (%)

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 English Native speakers Spanish L2 learners of English

Bare Context

Non-Referential Context

Referential Context

22.4 30.7

16.2 38

91 72.7

Figure 32.2 Preferences for ‘strict‘ readings as a function of biasing context (based on data from GandónChapela and Gallardo del Puerto (2019))

a processing deficit: L2 learners may have greater difficulty with ‘vehicle change’, also with integrating contextual information, explaining the unpredicted increase in strict readings in non-referential contexts.

32.6  Open questions and future directions As is true of virtually every grammatical phenomenon surveyed in this handbook, ‘more research is necessary’ to gain an adequate understanding of how second language learners acquire knowledge of Ellipsis constructions in a particular target language, and how they learn how to use them in comprehension and production. The range of unresolved issues is wider than for other better studied phenomena – wh-movement, or subject omission in finite clauses – not merely because Ellipsis is less studied, but because it is more complex theoretically, the stretches of silence involved are considerably larger – by hypothesis, more highly structured – than is the case for most other grammatical dependencies. There is also much less consensus on what kind of theory offers the best treatment of ellipsis, even supposing that Ellipsis constructions form a coherent set of phenomena, within and across languages. Despite these inherent problems, there are some avenues to progress. First, we need to break some more ground: extending the empirical range of ellipsis research beyond VPE and Gapping to include the less common constructions mentioned at the outset (2, 3). Careful study of how and when second language learners acquire these constructions, and whether control of one structure predicts control of others, could tell us a lot about the generality of syntactic rules in adult learners in this area of grammar. Alongside this basic research, there is a clear need to consolidate what has already been discovered about VPE and Gapping, by applying commensurate test batteries to different groups of language learners; alternatively, by using different instruments with the same group of learners so as tease apart grammatical, processing, and developmental factors. It would also be good to shift the disproportionate emphasis on English as the target language: other varieties present learning challenges that are at least as interesting. Finally, one would like to see more active engagement with 454

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the techniques and results of sentence-processing research (4.1 above), as well as with research in neurolinguistics, two areas where data from second language learners can offer important new leads.

Notes 1 The set of DEEP ANAPHORA constructions includes Verb-Phrase Anaphora (‘do it’), Null Complement Anaphora (NCA), and propositional it constructions, possibly also ‘do so’ Anaphora; see below, also Sag and Hankamer (1984), cf. Houser (2010). 2 This is the heavily abridged version of a discussion of a draft called “Ellipsis and Control”, which covers both phenomena in more detail than is possible here. That longer article is available on request via ResearchGate. 3 Within traditional generative work, the ‘controlled’ noun-phrase is identified as a syntactic null argument PRO: I adopt this notation, noting that both Ellipsis and Control dependencies are handled in various ways by different syntactic theories. The acquisition questions concerning both phenomena are largely independent of the theoretical notation used. 4 Taken literally, the term ‘verb phrase‘ ellipsis is an anachronism; in almost every instance the elided constituent phrase is larger than the minimal projection of the root predicate √VP, subsuming at least the quasi-functional projection ‘little v’, as well as predicative (non-propositional) functional categories. In this chapter, VPE refers to ellipsis of that larger constituent, whose size may be subject to cross-linguistic variation. 5 Some kinds of stripping do not permit overt realization: beside (2b), there are examples such as ‘Mary ate apples yesterday, but not John’, which lack an acceptable overt counterpart. 6 Nominal ellipsis is much more restricted in English than in other languages; only certain demonstratives, (cardinal/ordinal) numerals, and superlative adjectives can license ellipsis; in other cases, ‘one’-substitution is required ‘the big *(one)’; see below, also Lobeck (1995). 7 Johnson (2001) proposes that VP-ellipsis structures are derived through an intermediate stage of VP-topicalization: i.e., VPE is a covert form of topicalization. If correct – though see Aelbrecht and Haegeman (2012), for a rebuttal – then pronounceability would no longer be a defining characteristic since the corresponding pre-deletion structures are typically unacceptable; see Nagatsugu (2012). 8 For some authors, including Kennedy (2002), from whom (3a) and (3b) are taken, Comparative (Sub)Deletion belongs to the set of Ellipsis constructions; for others, they are distinct, precisely because ellipsis is obligatory here. See Kennedy (2002), cf. also Culicover (1999). 9 A partial exception is found in ‘ECM’ contexts, in which PRO alternates with overt NPs: She wants [PRO/ me to leave]. Even in such contexts, however, the overt NP cannot be co-referential with the matrix subject: She wants ??herself/*her to leave (* with intended coreference). 10 The alternation in example (8b), in which the anaphor himself in the antecedent clause gets replaced either by the pronoun him or by the anaphor themselves, suggests greater flexibility than is permitted. Aoun and Nunes (2007), also Murphy and Müller (2020) point to cases such as ‘*Mary hit John and hei did [VP ⟨hit *himi / *Johni/ √himselfi> ] too.’, which should be acceptable if the antecedent John could be converted into the anaphor himself. These are the kinds of data that could profitably be tested in SLA studies, but haven’t been, to date. 11 Notice that there are also contexts, such as (10c)/(10d), where VPE is permitted, but where an alternative Ellipsis construction is excluded. Some experiments discussed here, including those of Matsuo and Duffield (2001), and Duffield and Matsuo (2009), also included investigation of these reverse restrictions for VPA/ ACD, while Hwang (2020) looked at restrictions on Gapping. 12 Li and Hu’s (2014) article discusses the sensitivity of Mandarin-speaking children (4 years) to the strict~sloppy ambiguity in two elliptical constructions: the null-object construction shi-constructions (ShiC). The results revealed a discrepancy between the children and adult controls; this was interpreted as indicating young children’s still incomplete knowledge of the lexicon-syntax interface. 13 This interpretive contrast is also observed in English, between nominal ellipsis vs. ‘one’-substitution contexts in (i): (i)a.Amy found five good solutions, but I couldn’t find even one/*a single good solution.[ one = D(num) = 1 ] b.Amy found a good solution, and I found a better *(one).[ one = N’ ] In (i.a), the ellipsis following the numeral quantifier one must be interpreted as containing the adjectival modifier (good solution); by contrast, the pronominal form one may simply mean solution in this context. 14 Matsuo’s (2007) paper, and research like it, is important for a variety of reasons. First, it challenges the subservience to theory found in most generative SLA research: the standard ‘adopt-and-test’ model that slav-

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15 16 17

18 19

ishly takes its lead from theoretical analyses, and where positive results serve only to confirm hypotheses (with negative or inconclusive results being downplayed). Even if the results proved inconclusive in this case, in principle this kind of experiment can be used to arbitrate between competing theoretical analyses. In addition, the empirical merit of such research is that it clearly shows that ‘the same phenomenon’ may have a different analysis for speakers of different languages – quite possibly, for speakers of the same language, see e.g., Han et al. (2007): this radically alters the notion of what the target grammar settings should be, whether in first or second language acquisition. All of Hwang’s studies, both L1 and L2 experiments, are reported together in her 2020 dissertation. Here, I consider the L1 and L2 studies separately. Hwang’s adult experiments include an online self-paced reading study investigating processing of the same contrasts tested with children; that study is not discussed here. Subsequent work by Cheung (2008) with 24 Cantonese speaking children (3;11–6;9) largely replicates Matsuo & Duffield’s English results. Example (13c) is suspect for various reasons. Intuitively, it is not clear that the subject reading is felicitous here, even with a biasing context. Second, from a theoretical point of view, the object reading probably does not involve gapping: more plausibly, this would seem a case of VP-coordination, where the finite verb has raised to v/Voice. Hwang’s general observation still stands, namely, that the pronounced argument must be a clausal subject in the VPE sentence. The English and Japanese examples are not precisely comparable, since the unacceptability of (14c) could be due to the fact that the sentence lacks a finite verb (yonde – 読んで – being a participial form). It proved impossible to contact the author, before going to press, to confirm the figures reported in her dissertation. Assuming the reported descriptive means and standard deviations are accurate, then the inferential statistics provide clear evidence of Korean L2 learners’ ability to distinguish the two constructions.

Bibliography Aelbrecht, L., & Haegeman, L. (2012). VP-Ellipsis is not licensed by VP-topicalization. Linguistic Inquiry, 43(4), 591–614. http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/23358023 Al-Thubaiti, K. A. (2009). The acquisition of Uninterpretable features: The case of vP ellipsis. In M. Bowles, T. Ionin, S. Montrul, & A. Tremblay (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2009) (pp. 192–200). Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Al-Thubaiti, K. A. (2018). Selective vulnerability in very advanced L2 grammars: Evidence from VPE constraints. Second Language Research, 35, 225–252. Aoun, J., & Nunes, J. (2007). Vehicle change phenomena as an argument for Move F. Linguistic Inquiry, 38(3), 525–538. https://doi:10.1162/ling.2007.38.3.525 Arregui, A., Clifton, C., Frazier, L., & Moulton, K. (2006). Processing elided verb phrases with flawed antecedents. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 232–246. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.jml​.2006​.02​.005 Cheung, L. (2008). First language acquisition of elliptical structures in Cantonese. ResearchGate. https://www​ .researchgate​.net​/publication​/254871834​_First​_Language​_Acquisition​_of​_Elliptical​_Structures​_in​_Cantonese Chomsky, N. (1993). A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In K. Hale & S. J. Keyser (Eds.), The view from building 20: Essays in honor of Sylvain Bromberger (pp. 1–52). MIT Press. Craenenbroeck, J. V., & Temmerman, T. (Eds.). (2018). The Oxford handbook of ellipsis. Oxford University Press. Crain, S. (1993). Language acquisition in the absence of experience. In P. Bloom (Ed.), Language acquisition: Core readings (pp. 364–409). Harvester/Wheatsheaf. Culicover, P. (1999). Syntactic nuts: Hard cases, syntactic theory and language acquisition. Oxford University Press. Duffield, N. (2003). Measures of competent gradience. In R. van Hout, A. Hulk, F. Kuiken, & R. Towell (Eds.), The lexicon-syntax interface in second language acquisition (pp. 97–127). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Duffield, N., & Matsuo, A. (2009). Native-speakers’ vs. L2 learners’ sensitivity to parallelism in VP-ellipsis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 31(1, 93–123. Duffield, N., Matsuo, A., & Roberts, L. (2009). Factoring out the parallelism effect in VP-ellipsis: English vs. Dutch contrasts. Second Language Research, 25(4), 427–467. Fiengo, R., & May, R. (1994). Indices and identity. MIT Press. Foley, C., Núñez del Prado, Z., Barbier, I., & Lust, B. (1997). Operator variable binding in the initial state: An argument from English VP ellipsis. In S. Somashekar, K. Yamakoshi, M. Blume, & C. Foley (Eds.), Cornell working papers in linguistics (Vol. 15, pp. 1–19). Cornell University, Ithaca NY.

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Ellipsis Foley, C., Núñez del Prado, Z., Barbier, I., & Lust, B. (2003). Knowledge of variable binding in VP–ellipsis: Language acquisition research and theory converge. Syntax, 6(1), 52–83. Gandón-Chapela, E., & Gallardo del Puerto, F. (2019). Verb phrase ellipsis and reflexive anaphora resolution in second language acquisition: A study of Spanish learners of English. Miscelánea, 59, 71–94. Goldberg, L. (2005). Verb-stranding VP-ellipsis (PhD dissertation). McGill University Montreal, Canada. Guo, F., Foley, C., Chien, Y. C., Chiang, C. P., & Lust, B. (1996). Operator Variable Binding in the Initial State. A Cross linguistic study of VP ellipsis structures in Chinese and English. Cahiers de linguistique – Asie Orientale, 25(1), 3–34. Han, C.-H., Lidz, J., & Musolino, J. (2007). V-raising and grammar competition in Korean: Evidence from negation and quantifier scope. Linguistic Inquiry, 38(1), 1–47. https://doi​.org​/10​.1162​/ling​.2007​.38​.1.1 Hankamer, J., & Sag, I. (1976). Deep and surface anaphora. Linguistic Inquiry, 7(3), 391–428. Hardt, D. (1993). Verb phrase ellipsis: Form, meaning and processing (Ph.D. dissertation). University of Pennsylvania, USA. Hawkins, R. (2012). Knowledge of English verb phrase ellipsis by speakers of Arabic and Chinese. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2, 404–438. Hiramatsu, K., & Lillo-Martin, D. (1998). Children who judge ungrammatical what they produce. In A. Greenhill, M. Hughes, H. Littlefield, & H. Walsh (Eds.), Proceedings of the 22nd Boston University Conference on Language development (pp. 337–347). Cascadilla Press. Hoji, H. (1998). Null object and sloppy identity in Japanese. Linguistic Inquiry, 29, 127–151. Houser, M. J. (2010). The syntax and semantics of Do So Anaphora (PhD dissertation). University of California, Berkeley. Hwang, H. (2020). A contrast between VP-ellipsis and Gapping in English: L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition, and L2 processing (PhD dissertation). University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Honolulu. Jackendoff, R. (1971). Gapping and related rules. Linguistic Inquiry, 2, 21–36. Johnson, K. (2001). What VP-ellipsis can do, what it can’t, but not why. In M. Baltin & C. Collins (Eds.), The handbook of contemporary syntactic theory (pp. 439–479). Blackwell. Kanno, K. (1999). Acquisition of verb gapping in Japanese by Mandarin and English speakers. In K. Kanno (Ed.), The acquisition of Japanese as a second language (pp. 159–173). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Kehler, A. (2000). Coherence and the resolution of ellipsis. Linguistics and Philosophy, 23, 533–575. Kennedy, C. (2002). Comparative deletion and optimality in syntax. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 20(3), 553–621. Kim, C. S., Kobele, G. M., Runner, J. T., & Hale, J. T. (2011). The acceptability cline in VP-ellipsis. Syntax, 14(4), 318–354. Kim, J. (2012). Comprehension of elided phrases in Korean and English: VP‐ellipsis, null object constructions, and one-substitution (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Honolulu. Koyama, S. (2016). Feature parallelism of English VP-Ellipsis in L2 grammar. In D. Stringer (Ed.), Proceedings of the 13th generative approaches to second language acquisition conference (GASLA 2015) (pp. 93–100). Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Lappin, S., & Benmamoun, E. (Eds.). (1999). Fragments: Studies in ellipsis and gapping. Oxford University Press. Li, R., & Hu, J. (2014). The strict-sloppy reading of reflexives and pronouns in child Mandarin. International Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 1(1), 35–70. https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/ijchl​.1​.1​.02li Lobeck, A. (1995). Ellipsis. Oxford University Press. Lust, B. (2006). Child language: Acquisition and growth. Cambridge University Press. Martin, A. E., & McElree, B. (2009). Memory operations that support language comprehension: Evidence from verb-phrase ellipsis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35, 1231–1239. Matsuo, A. (2007). Differing interpretations of empty categories in English and Japanese VP-ellipsis context. Language Acquisition, 14, 3–29. Matsuo, A., & Duffield, N. (2001). VP-Ellipsis and Anaphora in first language acquisition. Language Acquisition, 9(4), 301–327. McCloskey, J. (1991). Clause structure, ellipsis and proper government in Irish. Lingua, 85, 259–302. McDaniel, D., & Cairns, H. S. (1996). Eliciting judgments of grammaticality and reference. In D. McDaniel, C. McKee, & H. S. Cairns (Eds.), Methods for assessing children’s syntax. MIT Press. Merchant, J. (2001). The syntax of silence: Sluicing, islands, and the theory of ellipsis. Oxford University Press. Miller, P. (2014). A corpus study of pseudogapping and its theoretical consequences. Empirical issues in syntax and semantics, 10, pp. 73–90. Murphy, A., & Müller, G. (2020). Derivational ellipsis and vehicle change [ms.]. Universität Leipzig.

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Nigel Duffield Murphy, G. L. (1985). Processes of understanding anaphora. Journal of Memory and Language, 24, 290–303. Nagatsugu, K. (2012). Is ellipsis topicalization? English Linguistics, 37(2), 193–203. O’Grady, W. (1999). Gapping and coordination in second language acquisition. In K. Kanno (Ed.), The acquisition of Japanese as a second language (pp. 141–157). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Phillips, C., & Parker, D. (2014). The psycholinguistics of ellipsis. Lingua, 151, 78–95. Postman, W., Foley, C., Santelmann, L., & Lust, B. (1997, Null). Evidence for strong continuity: New experimental results from children’s acquisition of VP-ellipsis and bound variable structures. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 31, 327–344. Roberts, L., Matsuo, A., & Duffield, N. (2013). Processing VP-ellipsis and VP-anaphora with structurally parallel and non-parallel antecedents. An Eye-Tracking Study, 28(1/2), 29–47. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/01690965​ .2012​.676190 Ross, J. R. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. PhD dissertation MIT. Published as Infinite Syntax! Norwood, NJ: Ablex (1986). Rouveret, A. (2012). VP ellipsis, phrases and the syntax of morphology. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 30, 897–963. Sag, I. (1976). Deletion and logical form (Doctoral dissertation). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Sag, I., & Hankamer, J. (1984). Towards a theory of anaphoric processing. Linguistics and Philosophy, 7, 325–345. Saito, M., & Murasugi, K. (1990). N′-ellipsis in Japanese: A preliminary study. Japanese/Korean Linguistics, 1, 258–301. Santos, A. L. (2006). Minimal answers: Ellipsis, syntax and discourse in the acquisition of European Portuguese (PhD dissertation). Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon. Santos, A. L. (2008). Is it really what it looks like? A look at early VP ellipsis in European Portuguese. In A. Gavarró & M. J. Freitas (Eds.), Proceedings of GALA 2007 (pp. 386–396). Cambridge Scholars Press/CSP. Santos, A. L. (2009). Early VP ellipsis: Production and comprehension evidence. In P. Acrisio & R. Jason (Eds.), Minimalist inquiries into child and adult language acquisition: Case Studies across Portuguese (pp. 155– 176). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi​.org​/doi​:10​.1515​/9783110215359​.1​.155 Shapiro, L. P., & Hestvik, A. (1995). On-line comprehension of VP-ellipsis: Syntactic reconstruction and semantic influence. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24, 517–532. Shiraishi, A., & Abeillé, A. (2016). Peripheral ellipsis and verb mismatch. In D. Arnold, M. Butt, B. Crysmann, T. H. King, & S. Müller (Eds.), Proceedings of the joint 2016 conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar and lexical functional grammar. Polish academy of sciences (pp. 662–680). CSLI Publications. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition (Vol. 142). Citeseer. Tanenhaus, M., & Carlson, G. N. (1990). Comprehension of deep and surface verbphrase anaphors. Language and Cognitive Processes, 5(4), 257–280. Thornton, R., & Wexler, K. (1999). Principle B, VP ellipsis, and Interpretation in child grammar. MIT Press. Tsimpli, I. M., & Dimitrakopoulou, M. (2007). The Interpretability hypothesis: Evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 23, 215–342. Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2002). Truthfulness and relevance. Mind, 111(443), 583–632. Xiang, M., Grove, J., & Merchant, J. (2019). Structural priming in production through ‘silence’: An investigation of verb phrase ellipsis and null complement anaphora. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 4(1), 67.

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33 BINDING AND CO-REFERENCE Pronouns Eun Hee Kim

33.1 Introduction Pronoun resolution normally takes place without conscious effort or awareness, yet the processes behind it are far from straightforward. This is because a pronoun carries minimal information and is understood in relation to another element of a text or discourse, which is called an antecedent. For example, the pronouns he and her in (1) are understood in relation to John and Mary, respectively. (1) John saw Mary talking to a customer at Starbucks, and he waved at her. A pronoun’s antecedent can be in the same sentence as the pronoun, in the previous sentence, even further back in the text or discourse, or not in the discourse at all in the case of deictic uses. Due to the frequent use of pronouns in daily conversation and their important role in establishing discourse coherence, linguists have long been interested in discovering constraints on pronoun interpretation. Some constraints are related to discourse organization (see Ariel, 1990, 2001; Givón, 1983; Gordon & Hendrick, 1998), but others are imposed by the structure of individual sentences (see Chomsky, 1981, 1986; Pollard & Sag, 1994; Reinhart, 1983; Reuland, 2001, 2011). The present chapter focuses on the interpretation of overt object pronouns and the constraints on their antecedents within the same sentence and how these are acquired by native and non-native speakers (see Martín-Villena and Rothman, this volume, on acquisition of null vs. overt subject and object pronouns). Pronouns can sometimes be misinterpreted among speakers, especially among those who have not become proficient in the language, such as children or non-native speakers of the language. A particularly well-known example can be found in native/first language (L1) acquisition research. Many L1 acquisition studies have reported a developmental lag between Principles A and B of Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981, 1986). These principles are intended to account for the distribution of different types of anaphors. Principle A captures structural constraints on how reflexives search for their antecedent. It requires the antecedents of reflexives to appear in the local binding domain (which, in English, often corresponds to a single clause; see Chen, this volume, on reflexives). On the other hand, Principle B states that a pronoun may not be bound by a local c-commanding antecedent. Consequently, in (2), himself can refer to John but him cannot, because John is in the local c-commanding position. (2) John1 hurt himself1/him*1. DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-38

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The robust finding reported in L1 acquisition literature is that English-acquiring children know that a reflexive must take a local (clause-mate) antecedent by age three, yet allow a pronoun to take a local antecedent, in apparent violation of Principle B, until as late as age six (e.g., Chien & Wexler, 1990; Clackson et al., 2011). Given that interpretations of both reflexives and pronouns are under-determined and dependent on context, this developmental lag between reflexives and pronouns has been an interesting issue for L1-acquisition researchers to explore. Different approaches have been proposed to account for this phenomenon. Although the arguments differ in detail, theoretical accounts of this phenomenon all argue that the difficulty with pronoun interpretation does not come from the lack of children’s syntactic knowledge (see Thornton & Wexler, 1999; Reinhart, 2006). For the purpose of this chapter, I will mainly discuss the processing-based approach proposed by Reinhart (1983, 2006) that assumes that children’s difficulty arises from the increased processing burden associated with pronoun resolution that overloads children’s working memory capacity. In contrast to the robust findings in L1 acquisition research, only a limited number of studies have investigated adult second language (L2) learners’ interpretation of sentence-internal pronominal elements, and the findings are contradictory, with some studies but not others reporting difficulty with pronoun interpretation (see Section 33.5). The goals of this chapter are twofold. One is to provide a review of nonnative speakers’ pronoun resolution, focusing on whether they allow pronouns with local c-commanding antecedents. The other is to discuss how the non-native speakers’ performance can be explained from the perspective of the modular approach to anaphora resolution (Reinhart, 1983; Reuland, 2001, 2011) and the perspective of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2006, 2011; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006).

33.2  Theory and background 33.2.1  Modular approach to anaphora resolution Unlike Principle B of Chomsky’s classical Binding Theory, the modular approach to anaphora resolution (Reinhart, 1983, 2006; Reinhart & Reuland, 1993; Reuland, 2001, 2011) assumes that a sentence-internal pronoun can be interpreted via two qualitatively different mechanisms: variable binding and co-reference assignment. The crucial difference between the two is that the referential dependency established through binding – but not through co-reference assignment – is subject to structural restrictions. That is, a bound variable interpretation of a pronoun requires the antecedent to be located outside of the local domain in a c-commanding position. This does not apply to a co-referential reading of a pronoun, because the antecedent search process for the co-referential reading is guided by extra-structural (pragmatic and contextual) cues; a co-referential reading is obtained by the pronoun and its antecedent picking out the same reference in discourse. The bound variable reading and the co-referential reading of a pronoun usually cannot be distinguished when a pronoun takes a referential antecedent in a c-commanding position, but they can be distinguished in certain contexts, as shown in (3). (3) a. Megan1 thinks [that Jessica2 likes her1/*2]. b. Every girl1 thinks [that Jessica2 likes her1/*2]. c. Everybody hates John1. Mary hates him1, Peter hates him1, even John2 hates him1. In (3a), her can take Megan as its antecedent, and both binding and co-reference assignment are available to license the pronoun-antecedent relationship in principle. In contrast, in (3b), the antecedent for her is every girl, and this can be obtained only via binding because a quantified NP (QP) such as every girl cannot refer to one entity. (3c) illustrates how the pronoun can obtain a local coreferential reading. (3c) is grammatically well-formed even though him and John in even John hates him refer to the same entity (John) and are contained in the same clause, which should be ruled out if structural constraints are applied. The co-referential reading can be more easily explained if we think 460

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about the indices of the NPs in the sentence. An index of 1 is given to John in the first sentence of (3c), and John is co-indexed with all the instances of him in the second sentence. John in the second sentence of (3c) gets an index of 2; John and him in the second sentence are not co-indexed, yet the two elements pick out the same entity in the discourse. This shows that the grammaticality of (3c) is possible because the reading arises through co-reference which is licensed in discourse, not through binding, and hence the pronoun can take a clause-mate antecedent overriding syntactic constraints. Then, one may raise the question of why her in (3a) cannot take Jessica as its antecedent via co-reference assignment. This can be explained by a special interpretive condition proposed by Grodzinsky and Reinhart (1993), and this rule, as shown in (4), is based on an economy principle that reflects a division of labor in the linguistic system (see Reinhart, 1983 for a discussion of the rationale for Rule I). Within the linguistic system, the process of encoding a dependency using co-reference assignment is argued to be more costly, as it requires not only the computation needed for syntactic and semantic processing but also access to discourse representations. (4) Rule I: Intrasentential Co-reference NP A cannot co-refer with NP B if replacing A with C, C a variable bound by B, yields an indistinguishable interpretation. According to Rule I, pronominal co-reference is blocked in contexts where it results in the same interpretation as pronominal binding. In other words, a co-referential reading can be obtained only when it yields a different interpretation from the bound variable reading. This is because priority is given to syntactically mediated binding over discourse-based co-reference when encoding the dependency. Based on this rule, the unacceptable co-reference of her as Jessica in (3a) can be explained as follows. The bound variable interpretation of Jessica likes her corresponds to ‘x likes x’ where x is Jessica. Rule I compares this reading and its co-referential reading where her and Jessica pick out the same referent (Jessica) in the discourse. Since the two readings are indistinguishable, only the bound variable interpretation is considered. Therefore, the reading of her as Jessica licensed via variable binding is ruled out by the structural constraints. In contrast, the co-referential interpretation can surface in (3c) for the following reason. In the sentence even John hates him in (3c), the bound variable reading of him expresses the proposition of John having the property of self-hate. It is different from the co-referential reading, which expresses the proposition of John also having the property of hating John, not the property of self-hate. The addition of the context makes it clear that the co-referential reading is the relevant one, and thus the reading where John and him refer independently to the same discourse entity (John) is allowed. The core idea behind the modular approach is that pronouns require more complex computation compared to simple reflexive anaphors.1 There is one interpretive mechanism available for reflexive anaphors while there are two ways to link pronouns to their antecedents. Therefore, when interpreting a pronoun, two derivations – one through variable binding and the other through co-reference assignment – should be constructed and compared to determine the correct antecedent. This taxes more processing resources than reflexive interpretation, where only one derivation is constructed. With this in mind, I now turn to relevant SLA (Second language acquisition) theories.

33.2.2  Interface Hypothesis Pronoun resolution, with a focus on availability of the local co-referential reading of a pronoun, has not been much investigated in L2 acquisition research compared to L1 acquisition studies. Therefore, the issue of potential computational complexity associated with object pronoun resolution, as defined by Reinhart (1983) and Grodzinsky and Reinhart (1993), has not been much addressed in L2 acquisition. However, a relevant theory exists that can account for L2 learners’ potential difficulty with object pronoun resolution. 461

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The Interface Hypothesis proposed by Sorace and colleagues aims to account for the difficulty that L2 learners experience with the integration of syntax and another cognitive domain, such as discourse (Sorace & Filiaci, 2006; Sorace & Serratrice, 2009, among others). More specifically, this hypothesis posits that linguistic properties at external interfaces (such as the syntax-pragmatics interface) pose great challenges to the learners and result in indeterminacy even for bilingual speakers who reach near-native fluency in the target language. On the other hand, linguistic phenomena that lie at the internal interfaces (syntax-semantics, syntax-phonology, etc.) can be fully acquired in ultimate attainment. This hypothesis was mainly supported by the data examining near-native bilingual speakers’ interpretation of subject pronouns. There are many investigations into how non-native speakers interpret subject pronouns, especially for languages with both null and overt subject pronouns (e.g., Italian, Spanish). Anaphora resolution involves the syntax-discourse interface and hence is a typical construction that much L2 acquisition research has focused on (Belletti et al., 2007; Wilson, 2009, among others). Sorace and Filiaci (2006) used a picture verification task to investigate whether nearnative speakers of L2 Italian show native-like performance in identifying possible antecedents of null and overt subject pronouns in Italian. In Italian, both null and overt subject pronouns are available, and their distribution is subject to both syntactic and pragmatic constraints. Sorace and Filiaci found that their participants were native-like with null subject pronoun interpretation but their performance significantly diverged from the native speakers in the use and comprehension of overt subject pronouns. They tended to overuse overt subject pronouns in sentences where native speakers would prefer to use null subjects. The authors claimed that the reason for the near-native speakers’ overuse of overt subjects was that they had failed to acquire discourse constraints on overt subject pronouns. The original formulation of the Interface Hypothesis did not provide a reason for why properties lying at the external interfaces between syntax and discourse show persistent challenges even to near-native speakers. However, many studies have suggested that it may be attributed to processing multiple interfaces and integrating information from different resources (Chung, 2013; Sorace & Serratrice, 2009; Sorace, 2011, 2016; White, 2011). Much research in the field of psycholinguistics has found that integration of information from multiple sources in real-time is more costly than processing only syntactic dependencies even for monolingual speakers (Burkhardt, 2005; Piñango & Burkhardt, 2005). The challenge is even greater for bilingual speakers than for monolinguals (Roberts et al., 2008) because the learners may lack sufficient processing resources in the L2. Even if they have sufficient processing resources, their way of integrating multiple types of information may not be as efficient as native speakers’, especially when dealing with properties at the external interfaces.

33.3  Child language acquisition of pronouns As noted in the Introduction, many L1-acquisition studies have reported that children’s acquisition of pronouns is delayed in comparison with their acquisition of reflexives. To be more specific, children have difficulty in disallowing a local antecedent for a pronoun at developmental stages during which they have no problems with reflexives in terms of choice of antecedent. This phenomenon is called the Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) and has been observed in the acquisition of English, Dutch and many other languages, but not for clitic pronouns in languages with clitics (e.g., Avrutin & Wexler, 1992; Baauw, 2000, 2018; Clackson et al., 2011; Oh & Kim, 2012; Spenader et al., 2009; Van Rij et al, 2010). It has been proposed that these experimental findings may be a result of methodological flaws (see Conroy et al., 2009). However, many studies have reported that this linguistic phenomenon is real, given that it is observed in different studies using diverse measures varying from offline picture judgment tasks to online listening tasks where children’s eye-movements are monitored. The asymmetry in the acquisition of reflexives and pronouns has been explained in different ways (Reinhart, 2006; Thornton & Wexler, 1999; among others). What is common to most accounts is that an antecedent search for a reflexive is entirely structural whereas an antecedent search for a pronoun 462

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is not. This is based on the findings that children are more accurate in disallowing a clause-mate antecedent for a pronoun with a QP antecedent than with an NP antecedent. In a pioneering study, Chien and Wexler (1990) tested children’s comprehension of reflexives and pronouns with different types of antecedents by asking questions like (5) along with pictures. There were eight conditions where the picture matched or mismatched the sentence. For example, there were both pictures of Mama Bear touching herself, and Mama Bear touching Goldilocks, and for each one, children were asked a question like (5a). (5) a. Is Mama bear touching herself/her? b. Is every bear touching herself/her? Chien and Wexler reported that children around age five clearly know that reflexives must take a clause-mate antecedent regardless of whether the antecedent is a referential NP, Mama Bear as in (5a), or a QP, every Bear as in (5b). However, with pronouns, children performed differently depending on antecedent types; children allowed her to have the antecedent every bear in (5b) only 16 % of the time, but showed chance performance with the her having Mama Bear as its antecedent in (5a). Chien and Wexler interpreted this as follows: children do not have problems in the acquisition of structural constraints like Principle B, but they have acquisitional delay with the co-referential readings of pronouns. The reasoning was as follows. Only a bound variable reading is available with a QP antecedent. Moreover, only the bound variable reading is structurally constrained. Therefore, children’s asymmetrical performance with a QP antecedent vs. a referential-NP antecedent of a pronoun is an indication that children have no problem with structural restrictions imposed by reflexives and pronouns. The challenge comes from elsewhere, namely from application of additional (non-structural) knowledge and/or from computation. Wexler and colleagues proposed that the acquisitional delay with the co-referential readings of pronouns is caused by children’s immature development of relevant pragmatic knowledge (see Thornton & Wexler, 1999, for more discussion). Grodzinsky and Reinhart (1993) and Reinhart (2006, 2011) proposed an alternative account of the DPBE based on the modular approach to anaphora resolution. According to them, the source of children’s acquisitional delay with pronouns is their limited working memory capacity to complete reference-set computation. Briefly, reference-set computation is an operation performed by the parser to choose between multiple interpretations generated by the grammar. Except in the special contexts where only the bound variable reading is available (e.g., when the antecedent is a QP), both binding and co-reference are available in establishing referential dependencies. Thus, the parser should always construct two competing derivations, compare them in the given context to fulfill Rule I, and make the decision on the final interpretation. This shows that pronoun interpretation requires more complex computation than reflexive interpretation. It may be hard for children, whose working memory capacity is not yet fully developed, to perform this operation, and hence, they end up arbitrarily choosing between the two derivations, which is in line with children’s chance performance with a referential-NP antecedent of a pronoun, as reported in the literature. To summarize, L1-acquisition studies have reported an acquisition delay of pronouns in comparison to reflexive pronouns. It has been proposed that the delay may be attributed to children’s pragmatic deficiency (Chien & Wexler, 1990) or their limited working memory capacity (Reinhart, 2006, 2011).

33.4  Methodological approaches to the study of L2 learners’ pronoun resolution As discussed earlier, there are only a limited number of studies that have examined the issue of object pronoun resolution with L2 learners, and they have explored the issue mostly using context-based 463

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interpretation tasks. The Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT) is the most frequently adopted task. In this task, participants are presented with a sentence/picture pair and asked to judge if it is a match or a mismatch. Many L1-acquisition studies that have reported the DPBE also used the TVJT to tap into children’s knowledge of reflexives and pronouns (e.g., Avrutin & Thornton, 1994; Chien & Wexler, 1990; Thornton & Wexler, 1999).2 Unlike the L1-acquisition studies, where the TVJT is administered aurally with a picture or a video, the TVJT with L2 learners can be implemented either aurally or visually; the L2 learners either see or hear the target statement in the context of a story, either written or narrated by the experimenter (e.g., Kim, 2019, in press; Lee & Schachter, 1997; Slabakova et al., 2017; White, 1998). The picture selection task and the antecedent choice task are also used to test L2 learners’ pronoun interpretation (Finer & Broselow, 1986; Mejri, 2020; Patterson et al., 2014). The two tasks are very similar in that both of them explicitly ask participants to identify antecedents of pronouns. These tasks are sometimes coupled with other tasks that test knowledge more implicitly. Some recent studies have adopted online measures, using the eye-movement monitoring technique to investigate L2 learners’ pronoun processing (Kim et al., 2015; Patterson et al., 2014). The tasks are similar to the ones used in L1-studies that examine how syntactic constraints are used in real-time processing of reflexives and pronouns (e.g., Runner et al., 2006; Sturt, 2003). The tasks are described in more detail in the following section.

33.5  Findings on L2 pronoun interpretation An interesting point to note about the study of adult L2 learners’ pronoun resolution is that studies have reported mixed results, even though they have employed similar measures. In this section, I discuss such divergent findings. Finer and Broselow (1986) is a pioneering study exploring adult L2 learners’ knowledge of reflexives and pronouns. Finer and Broselow presented sentences such as (6) with a set of two pictures, one of which was a picture of Mr. Thin painting himself and the other of which was a picture of Mr. Thin painting Mr. Fat. Then, the participants were asked to indicate whether the picture matched the sentence. Six Korean-speaking learners of English whose English proficiency varied from intermediate to advanced participated in the study. (6) a. Mr. Fat/Mr. Thin thinks that Mr. Thin/Mr. Fat will paint himself/him. b. Mr. Fat/Mr. Thin asks Mr. Thin/Mr. Fat to paint himself/him. The results showed that the learners strongly preferred local antecedents for reflexives in finite clauses such as (6a) (about 92%) in accordance with Principle A, although no such strong preference for local antecedents was observed with reflexives in non-finite clauses such as (6b) (about 58%). Finer and Broselow did not discuss the learners’ performance with pronouns, but these results were included in an appendix. The reported results were that the learners preferred non-local antecedents for pronouns both in finite clauses (about 54%) and in non-finite clauses (about 79%), but the preference for non-local antecedents was not strong.3 The results should be interpreted with caution because the sample size in the study was small, but the findings that the learners were more likely to allow local antecedents for pronouns seem to be aligned with the DPBE. Lee and Schachter (1997) is another study that tested L2 learners’ knowledge of Principles A and B using a TVJT. The aim of their study was to evaluate sensitive periods in L2 acquisition, by examining the L2 acquisition of reflexives and pronouns by L2 learners who had different ages of first exposure to English. The participants were Korean-English bilingual speakers, and they were put into different groups depending on their Age of U.S. Arrival (AA). The results showed that the learners’

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performance varied based on their AA, but overall the learners performed better on reflexives than on pronouns, suggesting a DPBE with L2 learners. More recently, Kim et al. (2015) used a visual world paradigm to examine how Korean-speaking learners of English interpret English reflexives and pronouns in various syntactic contexts. The participants in this study had intermediate-to-advanced proficiency in English. In the experiment, the participants were instructed to look at the screen with different animated characters and to perform the tasks given by auditory instructions, such as (7). (7) a. Reflexive Look at Goofy. Have Mickey touch himself. b. Pronoun Look at Goofy. Have Mickey touch him. c. (Unmentioned) Name Look at Goofy. Have Mickey touch Donald. Kim et al. replicated the findings of Finer and Broselow (1986) and Lee and Schachter (1997). When the participants heard the instructions with reflexives (7a), they predominantly chose Mickey to be the antecedent, as did the native speakers of English. With pronouns (7b), the learners were less accurate than the native speakers; while the native speakers chose Goofy as the antecedent almost exclusively (97%), the learners’ choice of Goofy as the antecedent was not as high (72%) and Mickey was also chosen as the antecedent 24% of the time. Results from the eyefixation data also showed that the learners were less native-like with pronouns than with reflexives. The learners temporarily considered the clause-mate antecedent, Mickey, in the antecedent search process for pronouns, even though they chose Goofy as the antecedent of the pronoun in their final interpretation. This tendency was observed even with the advanced-proficiency learners. Based on these findings, Kim et al. claimed that pronouns cause more difficulty to the learners than reflexives because pronouns require integration of syntactic information with discourse information, which increases the processing load. Before further discussing the findings of prior studies with adult L2 learners, here I present the findings of two studies that investigated bilingual children’s L2 pronoun interpretation. Marinis and Chondrongianni (2011) investigated how sequential bilingual Turkish-English children interpret English reflexives and pronouns. They found that early bilingual Turkishspeaking children did not have difficulty in interpreting reflexives in accordance with Principle A, just like the age-matched monolingual English-speaking children. In the comprehension of pronouns, the bilingual children were less accurate than the age-matched L1-English children; the bilingual children inaccurately allowed local antecedents for pronouns while the L1-children accurately rejected them. Additionally, the well-documented asymmetry between referential vs. quantificational NPs for pronoun interpretation was even more pronounced with the bilingual children. Van Koert et al. (2013) also tested bilingual children’s interpretation of reflexives and pronouns. Their participants were Turkish-Dutch bilingual children and they tested their knowledge of Dutch reflexives and pronouns. As in Marinis and Chondrongianni (2011), the L2-Dutch children showed target-like interpretation with reflexives but not with pronouns; they were less accurate in disallowing local antecedents for pronouns. Along with the findings discussed earlier with adult L2 learners, these findings provide supporting evidence that pronouns can be more difficult to acquire than reflexives for L2 learners. In contrast to these studies, White (1998), who also used a TVJT, did not find a DPBElike performance with adult L2 learners. She examined Japanese-speaking and French-speaking L2-English learners’ performance on English pronoun binding in different syntactic contexts.

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The participants had high intermediate proficiency in English and the two groups did not differ in terms of their English proficiency. She found that the learners, regardless of their L1, were as accurate as the native speakers of English in rejecting local antecedents and allowing non-local antecedents for pronouns in tensed clauses. When the pronouns were presented in non-finite clauses, the Japanese speakers were more likely to accept local antecedents for pronouns than the native controls and the French speakers. White did not interpret this result to mean that the Japanese speakers had problems in the acquisition of Principle B, but to mean the problem was related to finiteness. This was based on earlier findings that Japanese and Korean speakers had less accuracy in disallowing non-local antecedents for reflexives in non-finite clauses (Finer & Broselow, 1986; Hirakawa, 1990). Patterson et al. (2014) also did not report adult L2 learners’ difficulty with L2 pronoun resolution. They conducted an eye-movement monitoring study on L2 learners’ processing of English pronouns. Patterson et al. tested advanced German-speaking learners of English to examine how they interpret sentence-internal pronouns in English and how they differ from native speakers of English in terms of online application of Principle B during processing. For the offline interpretation task, they used an offline antecedent choice task where the participants were explicitly asked about the interpretation of the pronoun, as shown below. (8) The boy remembered that Matthew had bought him a new computer game4. Who does “him” refer to? • The boy • Matthew • Either Results from the task showed that both native speakers of English and German-speaking learners of English preferred the non-local antecedents for pronouns to local ones. In a follow-up experiment, Patterson et al. asked their participants to read sentences as in (9), which manipulated the gender features of the potential antecedents, and recorded their eye-movements to further analyze if the learners consider the local antecedent (e.g., Mark in (9a)) during real-time comprehension of pronouns. (9) Band practice was beginning to get rather dull. a. Double match condition John remembered that Mark had taught him a new song on the guitar. b. Local mismatch condition John remembered that Jane had taught him a new song on the guitar. a. Non-local mismatch condition Jane remembered that John had taught him a new song on the guitar. That really lifted everyone’s spirits! Overall, the German-speaking learners of English read more slowly than the native speakers of English, yet the German speakers showed native-like pattern of Principle B application during pronoun resolution. Their reading times were longer when the non-local antecedent and the pronoun carried mismatched gender features (9c), than when they carried matching gender features (9a, 9b), the same pattern that was observed with the native speakers of English. Interestingly, the gender features

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of the local antecedent did not affect reading times. Based on these results, coupled with the results of other findings in the study, Patterson et al. claimed that learners can show native-like sensitivity to Principle B in L2-processing as well as in their final interpretations. Two recent studies reported interesting findings about L2-English pronoun interpretation similar to the findings of Kim et al. (2015). Following the processing approach proposed to account for the DPBE, Slabakova et al. (2017) assumed that pronouns require computational complexity, and they tested the hypothesis that computational complexity can also affect L2 learners’ pronoun interpretation, at least at lower proficiency learners. Using a TVJT with stories, they examined French-speaking and Spanish-speaking L2-English learners’ knowledge of English pronouns. Their target sentences were like (10), where antecedent types and pronoun types were manipulated. (10) a. Harry sprayed ‘m/him. b.  Every student drove ‘m/him to school. They expected to find reduced accuracy with the referential antecedent Harry and with the full pronoun him based on the findings reported in L1-acquisition studies (Chien & Wexler, 1990; Hartman et al., 2012). Slabakova et al. included a proficiency test to further explore the role of proficiency on the learners’ performance. Their results revealed a proficiency effect; the L2 learners with advanced proficiency showed accurate performance with all antecedent types and pronoun types like the native speakers, while the lower proficiency learners’ performance was comparable to L1-children’s performance. The lower proficiency learners were accurate in rejecting the local co-referential interpretation of the reduced pronoun ‘m but not of the full pronoun him. Also, their performance was accurate when the antecedents were quantificational, but not with referential antecedents. Based on the similarity between the lower proficiency L2 learners and L1-children, Slabakova et al. claimed that the computational complexity required for full pronouns and referential antecedents can be extended to account for L2 learners’ pronoun interpretation. They mentioned the possibility of transfer effects from the learners’ native languages. However, if there was any transfer from their native language, the learners should have not shown any difficulty with the experimental items. The learners’ native languages were Spanish and French, and it has been reported that the DPBE does not exist for clitic pronouns in these languages (see Baauw, 2018). Similar effects were also reported in the dissertation of Kim (2019), who examined L2-English learners’ pronoun interpretation with referential and quantificational antecedents using a TVJT with stories. Kim formulated the hypothesis that L2 learners’ pronoun interpretation would also be affected by their L1, based on the fact that most of the earlier studies that reported DPBE-like performance with L2 learners had Korean-speaking L2-English learners as participants (e.g., Finer & Broselow, 1986; Kim et al., 2015; Lee & Schachter, 1997). In Korean, local co-referential readings of overt pronouns are allowed, especially when contextually motivated. Kim (2019) proposed that this is because Rule I may not be as strict in Korean as it is in languages like English, which can be related to the general property of Korean as a discourse-oriented language (Li & Thompson, 1976). Kim tested Korean-speaking L2-English learners’ knowledge of English pronouns and their knowledge of Korean overt pronouns and explored whether there was any similarity between the two. She assumed that the learners' interpretation of English pronouns would be comparable to their interpretation of Korean overt pronouns if there was L1-transfer from Korean. An example token set for Kim’s TVJT is given in (11).

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(11)  

Target sentence FALSE

Target sentence TRUE

antecedent = Referential NP

antecedent = Quantificational NP

a. local-ref Sally, Megan and Tiffany go to the same school as Jessica. They don’t like Jessica because they think she is too confident about herself. She always considers herself to be a great person, which they don’t agree with at all. And Jessica has a rather poor opinion of the other girls, which doesn’t help. One day, their teacher asked why the three girls don’t like her and they explained why. Every girl1 said that [Jessica2 admired her1/*2]. c. LD-ref Sally, Megan and Tiffany go to the same school as Jessica. They like Jessica because they think that she is great. One day, each one of them told her why they like her. And they also admitted to having low self-esteem: they have more faith in Jessica’s abilities than in their own! Later that day, when Jessica came back home, she told her mom what she heard from the three girls. Jessica1 said that [every girl2 admired her1/*2].

b. local-quant Sally, Megan and Tiffany go to the same school as Jessica. Jessica doesn’t like them because she thinks that they are too confident about themselves. Each one of them always tells their friends how great they are, which Jessica never agrees with. And on top of that, the girls don’t think much of Jessica, they don’t even speak to her. One day, Jessica’s teacher asked why she doesn’t like them and she explained why. Jessica1 said that [every girl2 admired her1/*2]. d. LD-quant Sally, Megan and Tiffany go to the same school as Jessica. Jessica likes all of them very much because she thinks that they are great. Jessica has low self-esteem, and she has a much better opinion of these three girls than she does of her own abilities. One day, Jessica told the girls why she likes them. Later that day, when they came back home, they told their moms what they heard from Jessica. Every girl1 said that [Jessica2 admired her1/*2].

In the TVJT, each story was constructed so that the target sentence was either TRUE when the pronoun took a local antecedent and FALSE when it took a non-local antecedent, or the opposite. The participants were tested in two separate sections – one in English and the other in Korean – between which at least two weeks elapsed, to control for any priming effects from one language to the other. Results of the English TVJT showed DPBE-like performance; the Korean speakers allowed the local co-referential reading (11a) more than the native speakers of English. Their performance with Korean overt pronouns was similar in that they robustly allowed pronouns with local referential antecedents in Korean. The similarity between the Korean speakers’ pronoun interpretation in English and in Korean suggested possible L1-transfer effects, but given that there was no additional L2 group with a different L1, the results were interpreted with caution. Another finding that supported a possible L1-transfer effect was that the Korean speakers gave fewer TRUE responses with (11d). In (11d), her must be bound by every girl (resulting in a response of TRUE) because the co-reference of her as Jessica cannot survive due to the application of Rule I. For the Korean speakers, however, the local co-referential reading was often allowed due to transfer from their L1; due to the availability of the local co-referential reading (11a), many learners responded FALSE to (11d). In a follow-up study, Kim (in press) further tested Spanish-speaking L2-English learners’ performance with English pronouns using the same task, and observed findings similar to those of Slabakova et al. (2017) and Kim et al. (2015). The Spanish speakers also allowed the local coreferential interpretation of a pronoun when the antecedents were referential, but less than the Korean speakers did. Unlike the Korean speakers, the Spanish speakers' judgments of the pronoun 468

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with non-local quantificational antecedents were comparable to those of the native speakers. Kim also observed a proficiency effect, replicating Slabakova et al. (2017); the lower proficiency L2 learners were more likely to allow the local co-referential reading than the advanced learners. Between the two L2-groups, the Spanish speakers improved more with increased proficiency than the Korean speakers. The results observed in the follow-up study suggested two things. One was that pronoun interpretation in an L2 setting can also be explained using the processing explanation for children’s DPBE as argued in Slabakova et al. (2017) and Kim et al. (2015). The other was that L1-transfer effects cannot be disregarded in L2 pronoun interpretation. The two L2-groups were significantly different from each other in terms of accepting 1) the local co-referential interpretation of a pronoun with a referential antecedent and 2) the long-distance pronoun interpretation with a non-local quantificational antecedent. The difference was claimed to be an indication of the L1-transfer effect given that in Korean the local co-referential reading can surface more easily due to the weaker role of Rule I. Taken together, prior research on L2-English pronoun interpretation has reported divergent findings. Possible explanations have been put forward in recent studies that adopted the modular approach to anaphora resolution (Kim et al., 2015; Kim, 2019, in press; Slabakova et al., 2017). The modular approach is not the only way that can account for the findings, though. As pointed out in Kim et al. (2015) and Slabakova et al. (2017), the earlier findings can also be explained from the perspective of the Interface Hypothesis. The core idea behind it is that L2 learners, including advanced bilingual speakers, may struggle in mastering linguistic properties involving the integration of internal and external interfaces such as grammar and discourse. The suggested reason for such difficulty is the increased processing load. Studies on native speakers’ real-time anaphora resolution have reported that integrating different types of information from discourse and grammar requires much more processing cost than handling purely syntactic dependencies (see Koornneef, 2010; Van Dyke et al., 2011). This can be extended to bilingual speakers. Moreover, bilingual speakers are expected to experience even greater processing costs when modulating multiple types of information given that they already have increased difficulty in processing non-native language inputs. Although the processing burden/computational complexity as defined under the modular approach and the Interface Hypothesis do not align perfectly, it should be noted that the two approaches assume that the source of learners’ non-target performance with pronouns is a processing-related factor. This explanation, along with the possible L1-transfer effects for Korean speakers, can be extended to account for earlier findings in the literature.

33.6  Concluding remarks This chapter provided a review of findings exploring L2 pronoun resolution and discussed how these can be interpreted from the perspective of the modular approach to anaphora resolution and the Interface Hypothesis. This review suggests that the earlier findings can be explained by appealing to the increased processing load associated with pronoun resolution. Additionally, it suggests that L1-transfer from Korean, a language that has a discourse-prominent character, is not negligible. Despite its significance to address different issues in L2 studies, there are only handful of studies examining L2 pronoun resolution. The field would benefit from having more research on this issue. One possible direction for future research would be to examine whether L1-transfer effects can be observed with other L1s that have discourse-prominent character, like Japanese. Another possible direction is to explore more on the role of computational complexity using psycholinguistic processing measures. Although Slabakova et al. (2017) and Kim (2019, in press) reported on the role of computational complexity in L2 pronoun resolution, there could be objections that their testing methods (untimed TVJTs) do not indicate real processing costs. Future research incorporating real-time measures holds promise in resolving these concerns. 469

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Notes 1 It should be noted that there are logophors whose process of dependency formation is as costly as dependency formation of pronouns. 2 Conroy et al. (2009) have claimed that the DPBE with L1-children can be viewed as an experimental artifact that resulted from poorly designed TVJTs. However, follow-up studies that were designed to respect the condition of plausible dissent (Crain & Thornton, 1998) have reported that the effects are real (see Baauw, 2018 and Hartman et al., 2012, for more discussion). 3 Typically, the learners show greater preference for non-local antecedents in non-finite clauses than in finite clauses (see White, 1998), but Finer and Broselow’s finding is not in line with it. 4 This study also included experimental sentences that tested the learners’ knowledge of so-called “short-distance pronouns (SDP)”, which were thought to be exempt from Principle B. The typical example of an SDP is illustrated in Nick saw David put the cat beside him, where him can be interpreted as referring to either Nick or David. The results on SDP from this study are not discussed here because they are not instances of Principle B violations.

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34 BINDING AND CO-REFERENCE Reflexives Chung-yu Chen

34.1 Introduction Reflexives such as herself and themselves are pronominal forms that typically refer back to the subjects of clauses. In SLA, reflexives have been researched extensively due to cross-linguistic differences (which may result in cross-linguistic influence in acquisition) and the potential to inform linguistic theory. Three properties of reflexives have been examined in SLA: locality, orientation, and c-command, with locality being more often researched than orientation, which in turn is more often researched than c-command. In (1), himself can refer to Peter, the local antecedent, but not to John, the long-distance (LD) antecedent. In (2), both the subject John and the object Peter are possible antecedents, though John is preferred. In (3), only Peter’s father (not Peter) c-commands the reflexive and can be the antecedent (while Peter sub-commands the reflexive, because it is inside the c-commanding larger constituent). (1) John1 thinks Peter2 criticizes himself*1/2. (2) John1 told Peter2 a story of himself1>2. (3) Peter1’s father2 criticizes himself*1/2.

[locality] [orientation] [c-command]

While reflexives require c-command by their antecedents cross-linguistically,1 locality and orientation requirements differ across languages. Languages that allow LD interpretations of reflexives include Icelandic, Turkish, and East Asian languages like Mandarin Chinese (Chinese hereafter), Japanese, and Korean. Among languages that allow LD interpretations of reflexives, the present chapter focuses on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (as in (4) through (6)) as they are more studied in SLA. (4) John1 suo Peter2 hen ziji1/2   [Chinese] John say Peter hate self ‘John said that Peter hated himself/him.’ (5) John1-wa

Peter2-ga

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-39

zibun1/2-wo

kirat-teiru-to

473

it-ta.    [Japanese]

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John-top Peter-nom self-acc ‘John said that Peter hated himself/him.’

(6) John1-un Mark2-ka caki1/2-lul John-top Mark-nom caki-acc ‘John said that Mark hates himself/him.’

hate-prog-comp said

miwehanta-ko hate-comp

malhayssta.    [Korean] said

In Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, there are morphologically complex reflexives (taziji ‘he/sheself’ in Chinese, ku-casin ‘he-self’/kunye-casin ‘she-self’/caki-casin ‘self-self’ in Korean, karezisin ‘he-self’/kanojo-zisin ‘she-self’/zibun-zisin ‘self-self’ in Japanese) and morphologically simplex reflexives ‘self’ (ziji in Chinese, zibun/zisin in Japanese, caki/casin in Korean). While morphologically complex reflexives require local antecedents (like English himself/herself in (1)), morphologically simplex reflexives allow both LD and local antecedents (like ziji/zibun/caki in (4) through (6)). While ziji/caki/zibun are sometimes referred to as LD reflexives, local interpretations are also available. Regarding whether LD or local interpretations are more accepted (or preferred) in experimental studies (only native speakers’ data are discussed here), LD interpretation is clearly preferred for caki (Kim et al., 2009; Kim & Yoon, 2020; Lee, 2012; Li & Juffs, 2018) and perhaps for zibun (Orita et al., 2021; Umeda et al., 2017; with accusative case in Li & Juffs, 2018; but no preference in Yoshimura et al., 2012), but results are mixed for ziji (Chen, 2019 vs. Chen & Ionin, 2023). In terms of orientation, unlike English reflexives, which allow both subject and object antecedents (with subjects being preferred), LD reflexives ziji/zibun/caki allow only subject antecedents (though Han & Storoshenko, 2013, show some exceptions with caki). As for the interactions between locality and orientation, reflexives that allow both subject and object antecedents are locally bound (e.g., himself in English, kare-zisin ‘he-self’ in Japanese), while reflexives that allow both LD and local interpretations (ziji/zibun/caki) are subject-oriented. Note that the above implicational relationship only goes one way (e.g., Domínguez et al., 2012), so it is compatible with the fact that some locally bound reflexives are also subject-oriented (e.g., taziji/zibunzisin/caki-casin). Having introduced some basic properties of reflexives above, in what follows I will first present theoretical analyses of reflexives and SLA theories adopted to study reflexives, before moving on to discuss methodological approaches to the study of reflexives. I then briefly synthesize research with other populations before focusing on research in SLA. The chapter ends with open questions and suggestions for future research. Due to space limitations, I focus on object reflexives and discuss only intra-sentential antecedents.2

34.2  Theory and background 34.2.1  Theoretical analyses The distribution of reflexives is captured by Chomsky’s (1981) Binding Principle A, which states that a reflexive must be bound (coindexed with a c-commanding antecedent) in its binding domain (often simplified as a clause in the SLA literature). However, Binding Principle A cannot explain why the LD antecedent John in (7) and (8) is possible. Reinhart and Reuland (1993) (also see Pollard & Sag, 1992) argue that a syntactic anaphor needs to be the direct argument of a predicate, as in (1). In other words, the antecedent and the reflexive must be co-arguments (subject and object) of the same predicate. In contrast, in (7) and (8), himself is an exempt anaphor or a logophor subject to pragmatic or discourse constraints. This anaphor/logophor distinction is also related to another well-known distinction: variable binding vs. co-reference. While the former is constrained within syntax, the latter is regulated by discourse or pragmatics. Pronouns can be either bound (e.g., by quantificational 474

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antecedents) or co-referential (e.g., with extra-sentential antecedents; see Kim, this volume), but reflexives are typically bound, except in certain logophoric or exempt contexts where co-reference is possible. For a pragmatic account of reflexives, see Huang (2004). (7) John1 thinks that Ann had kept a picture of himself1. (8) John1 said that Ann invited Betty and himself1 for a drink.

While earlier analyses argued that LD interpretations of ziji/zibun/caki are logophoric (Kuno, 1972; Sells, 1987), later accounts have analyzed the three reflexives differently, and the status of these reflexives is still hotly debated (for an overview, see Charnavel et al., 2017; Chinese: Huang & Liu, 2001 vs. Reuland et al., 2020; Japanese: Abe, 1997, cited in Yoshimura et al., 2012 vs. Kishida, 2011; Korean: Cole et al., 1990; Han & Storoshenko, 2012; Kim & Yoon, 2020; Madigan, 2015).

34.2.2  SLA theories Some SLA theories adopted for studying reflexives are discussed below. Many early SLA studies on reflexives (e.g., L2-English: Cook, 1990; L2-Chinese: Ying, 1999) adopted the parametric approach (Manzini & Wexler, 1987) originally proposed for L1-acquisition. Under this approach, there are two parameters. The Governing Category (GC) parameter has five values: English has the most restrictive value that allows only local binding within the same clause, while Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have the least restrictive value that allows LD interpretations outside of the clause. The Proper Antecedent (PA) parameter has two values: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have the more restrictive value that allows only subject antecedents, while English has the less restrictive value that allows both subject and object antecedents. Applying the Subset Principle to binding (see Hirakawa, 1990), learners should initially adopt the most restrictive grammar, the one that allows only local binding and subject antecedents, until they receive positive evidence that LD antecedents are allowed in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean or that object antecedents are allowed in English. Many studies have tested both locality and orientation but failed to find supporting evidence for the Subset Principle (e.g., Hirakawa, 1990; Thomas, 1989; Zeng, 2010). For example, Shirahata (2002) hypothesized that acquiring LD interpretations should be easier than acquiring subject-orientation of Japanese reflexives by English speakers, since there is positive evidence for LD interpretation (English is a subset while Japanese is a superset in terms of locality), while disallowing object antecedents can only be learned via negative evidence (English is a superset while Japanese is a subset in terms of orientation). However, Shirahata did not find evidence for the Subset Principle: acquiring locality was not always easier than acquiring orientation. Other studies that focus on only locality (e.g., Kim & Joo, 2021) also failed to find evidence for the Subset Principle: L2-learners did not start out assuming only local interpretations. Moreover, the parameterized approach has been challenged based on its theoretical assumptions (e.g., Charnavel et al., 2017). Thus, the parametric approach is no longer considered viable. As one of the early models of L1-transfer, the Full Transfer/Full Access model (FT/FA model; Schwartz & Sprouse, 1994, 1996) continues to be adopted in many studies on reflexives (e.g., L2-Chinese: Ying, 1999; L2-Korean: Kim & Joo, 2021). The basic idea is that L2-learners fully transfer their L1-grammar to their L2 in the initial state and restructure their interlanguage grammar based on L2-input, and via access to Universal Grammar. For example, White (2003) interpreted Yuan’s (1998) finding of L1-Japanese transfer of LD interpretations of reflexives as supporting the FT/FA model but argued that the ambiguity of ziji makes L2-input insufficient to trigger the restructuring of L2-grammar. However, some studies failed to find evidence for the FT/FA model: e.g., L1-English L2-Chinese learners in Zeng (2010) did not start out with only local interpretations. 475

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A more recent framework for transfer is the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2008, 2009), which has not been extensively applied to the study of reflexives. The basic idea is that L2-learners need to reconfigure the feature values of the L1 based on L2-input and via access to Universal Grammar. For example, Domínguez et al. (2012) examined the acquisition of English reflexives via a feature-based approach, which predicted that orientation could not be acquired without locality. While Domínguez et al. found apparent acquisition of locality (which was interpreted as due to transfer from caki-casin in Korean), the fact that L2-learners did not also acquire orientation led the authors to conclude that L2-learners have not fully acquired the English binding system (i.e., learners failed to reassemble the features on English reflexives). Another theory relevant to reflexive acquisition is the Interface Hypothesis (IH: Sorace, 2011; for earlier versions, see, e.g., Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006). Under the updated IH (Sorace, 2011), only external interfaces but not internal interfaces present persistent challenges to L2-learners. The IH predicts that reflexives that are logophors (and hence involve external interfaces) should be more difficult to acquire than those that are anaphors. For example, Wu et al. (2020) classified reflexives in different structures into those involving internal vs. external interfaces; however, results from L1-Chinese L2-English learners did not fully support the IH; see also Umeda et al. (2017) and Yoshimura et al. (2012).

34.3  Methodological approaches to the study of reflexives in SLA While early SLA studies on reflexives usually asked participants to identify the antecedents in isolated sentences, recent studies often use context-based interpretation tasks. Tasks that test isolated sentences are quite explicit and require metalinguistic awareness. Some studies (e.g., L2-Chinese: Yuan, 1998; L2-English: a complementary offline identification task in Felser & Cunnings, 2012) require participants to choose one of three options (e.g., LD antecedent, local antecedent, or either), while others ask them to choose one out of the two antecedents (e.g., L2-English: Cook, 1990). For example, after reading (9), participants in Felser and Cunnings (2012) had to indicate which of the referents the reflexive refers to; they had three choices: Emma/Adam (the LD antecedent), the grandfather (the local antecedent), or either of them. As Akiyama (2002) points out, with only two options, the task probes preference rather than examining the full range of co-reference possibilities (see Akiyama, 2002 for more on methodological problems in prior SLA studies; for a methodological overview on pronouns and reflexives in experimental syntax, see Kaiser, 2021). However, if participants are given an “either/or” or a “both” option, they may overuse it to avoid making a choice or avoid it because they think that a question should have only one correct answer (see footnote 25 in Domínguez et al., 2012). (9) Emma/Adam noticed that the grandfather had explained himself carefully. (Felser & Cunnings, 2012)

Other studies that used isolated sentences require participants to accept/agree/judge whether the reflexives refer to previously mentioned names (e.g., L2-English: Demirci, 2000, 2001; L2-Chinese: Kong, 2011). Different interpretations (e.g., LD vs. local) can be tested separately (as recommended by e.g., Akiyama, 2002) or side-by-side; the latter potentially makes the tasks more explicit (e.g., Demirci, 2000, 2001; Kong, 2011). Most recent studies on reflexives have used Truth Value Judgment Tasks (TVJTs), which provide contexts and allow participants to focus on one interpretation at a time. TVJTs can be classified as picture-based (e.g., heritage/L2-Chinese: Chen, 2019, adapted from Kim et al., 2009, on heritage Korean), story-based (e.g., L2-English: Jiang, 2009; Wu et al., 2020), or both (stories illustrated with pictures, e.g., L2-Korean: Kim & Joo, 2021), where participants read (or 476

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hear) a story and/or see a picture (or a set of pictures) and decide whether the story and/or the picture match the corresponding sentence. For example, for each trial, participants in Kim and Joo (2021) see two pictures with texts; in (10), the expected answer is TRUE, indicating the LD interpretation of Korean self. Picture-based TVJTs are sometimes considered a type of picture verification task (e.g., L2-English: Marinis & Chondrogianni, 2011; heritage/L2 Korean: Lee, 2012). Domínguez et al. (2012) used another type of picture verification task (= picture selection task) in which participants chose the picture(s) that match(es) the sentence. Interestingly, White et al. (1997) found different results between a picture-based TVJT and a story-based TVJT. They speculated that the picture-based TVJT probes preferences because participants might have read the sentence first (and have a preferred interpretation) before looking at the picture. If so, results would differ if the pictures are presented before vs. simultaneously with the sentences. However, White et al.’s speculation has not been experimentally tested. Even with a story-based TVJT, Umeda et al. (2017) have speculated that the task probed preference due to below-ceiling acceptance by Japanese native speakers for some conditions expected to elicit TRUE responses. (Below-ceiling acceptance by native speakers in a story-based TVJT is also found in, e.g., Kim & Yoon, 2020, on Korean reflexives.) (10)  The first column: Here are Duck and Bee. (The picture shows Duck and Bee.) The second column: Bee is doing something. Blindfolded Rupy asks Duck what is going on. (The picture shows Bee pointing to Duck with Blindfolded Rupy on the side.) The test sentence (originally in Korean): Duck said that Bee pointed to self. (Kim & Joo, 2021)

Compared to a picture-based TVJT, a story-based TVJT is potentially more difficult because L2-learners have to read more text; e.g., Domínguez et al. (2012) noted that, after pilot testing, they replaced a story-based TVJT with a picture verification task because the former was too demanding. As for how to present the story, while presenting the story in the target language increases task difficulty, presenting the story in L2-learners’ native language (e.g., Kim et al., 2010) might increase the chance of L2-learners thinking in the L1 and being subject to L1-transfer. To examine whether pragmatic principles would override syntactic principles, some studies tested both pragmatically “neutral” and “biased” sentences; in a biased sentence, one of the antecedents is more plausible (e.g., Demirci, 2000, 2001; Thomas, 1989; Yuan, 1998). For example, in (11), since a bodyguard is expected to protect others (instead of himself/herself), the LD antecedent the president is more plausible than the local antecedent. However, prior SLA studies on reflexives often did not conduct a norming study to check for how natural or biased the sentences were. Given that biased embedded verbs are found to influence interpretation of adult native speakers, especially for LD reflexives (e.g., ziji: Li & Zhou, 2010; caki: Joo, 2014), norming studies are important (see Joo & Deen, 2019, as an example that used a norming task in studying L1-Korean acquisition). (11) The president ordered a bodyguard to protect himself carefully during the speech. (Demirci, 2000)

34.4  Research on reflexives with monolingual adults, children, and heritage speakers Sentence processing studies with adult monolinguals are briefly discussed first, as processing likely plays a role in language acquisition (e.g., Omaki & Lidz, 2015; Phillips & Ehrenhofer, 2015). In the case of reflexives, adults’ first interpretation or processing preference likely corresponds to learners’ 477

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only or first-acquired interpretation. Generally, when encountering a locally bound reflexive, adult native speakers quickly retrieve a c-commanding local antecedent even when there is an LD or nonc-commanding antecedent that matches the reflexive in gender and/or number features (e.g., Dillon, 2014; Cunnings & Sturt, 2014; but see Jäger et al., 2020, who challenge this view). When reflexive anaphors vs. logophors are differentiated based on co-argumenthood (Reinhart & Reuland, 1993; Reuland, 2011), logophors are found to be more difficult to process than syntactic reflexive anaphors in English (e.g., Harris et al., 2000; Piñango & Burkhardt, 2005) and in Dutch (e.g., Koornneef, 2010). Turning to languages with LD reflexives, processing local interpretations of Chinese ziji is generally found to be easier than processing LD interpretations (e.g., Dillon et al., 2014; Dillon et al., 2016; Li & Zhou, 2010; Jäger et al., 2015), though Lu (2011) found the opposite. Fewer studies have been conducted with Korean caki and Japanese zibun to examine whether LD or local interpretations are easier to process. While Omaki et al. (2015, cited in Umeda et al., 2019) found that LD interpretations of Japanese zibun are easier to process than local interpretations, Umeda et al. (2019) found the opposite. Matthews et al. (2021) found no clear processing preference of zibun (but an LD preference in an offline task). Similarly, no clear processing preference is found with Korean caki (Kim et al., 2014). Studies on child and heritage language acquisition are also briefly discussed, as language development in L2-learners might parallel the development in children or heritage speakers. In child language acquisition, children generally acquire reflexives earlier than pronouns (Hamann, 2011; Baauw, 2016). For example, six-year-old English-speaking children in Chien and Wexler (1990) showed near-ceiling knowledge that reflexives require local antecedents (89.4% correct answers) but had problems with pronouns (see also Kim, this volume). In contrast, children acquire LD reflexives much later. By age eight, Chinese-speaking children still do not accept LD interpretations of ziji to the same degree as adult native speakers (Chien & Lust, 2006). Children aged five to six in Su (2017) were still not adult-like on logophoric ziji, even with only one antecedent in the sentence. While some previous studies showed late acquisition of LD interpretations of caki (see Cho, 2009, for a review), six-year-old children in Joo and Deen (2019) already preferred LD interpretations of caki. In Japanese, children between ages four to six in Orita et al. (2021) preferred local interpretations of zibun, while adult controls preferred LD interpretations. However, children at age six in Shirahata and Ishigaki (2001, cited in Yoshimura et al., 2012) allowed LD interpretations at over 80% (and allowed local interpretations at 97%). In heritage language acquisition, LD reflexives have been examined in heritage Korean in the U.S. (Kim et al., 2009, 2010; Lee, 2012), heritage Chinese in the U.S. (Chen, 2019), heritage Turkish in Germany (Gračanin-Yuksek et al., 2020), and heritage Icelandic in North America (Putnam & Arnbjörnsdóttir, 2015). While heritage speakers of Korean and Turkish were found to acquire LD interpretations of reflexives, heritage speakers of Chinese and Icelandic were not.

34.5  SLA findings on reflexives Below I discuss studies by language (L2-English before L2-Chinese, Japanese, and Korean studies) and by method (offline before online studies).

34.5.1  Reflexives in L2 English In terms of locality, L2-English learners in most studies acquire the locality constraints and perform like native speakers in offline judgments and interpretation, even if their L1s allow LD reflexives (e.g., L1-Chinese L2-English: Wu et al., 2020; L1-Turkish L2-English: Marinis & Chondrogianni, 2011). However, L2-learners in some studies over-accept LD interpretations of reflexives, likely due 478

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to L1-transfer (e.g., L1-Chinese L2-English: the non-advanced groups in Jiang, 2009; L1-Turkish L2-English: Demirci, 2000, 2001). To be specific, the L2-learners in Demirci (2000, 2001) overaccepted LD interpretations of English reflexives only when the context biased interpretation towards the LD antecedents. Proficiency effects were observed in Jiang (2009) and Domínguez et al. (2012) (but not Demirci, 2000, 2001), with only the most proficient L2-groups showing native-like performance. Compared to locality, orientation is less studied and is usually tested along with locality to examine specific proposals or hypotheses (e.g., the Subset Principle and the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis discussed in Section 34.2.2). As mentioned in Section 34.2.2, Domínguez et al. (2012) found that locality was (apparently) easier than orientation for L1-Korean L2-English learners. Very few studies have examined the c-commanding property. Wu et al. (2020) found that c-command was easier than locality, which in turn was easier than orientation for L1-Chinese L2-English learners. Felser et al. (2009) also found that c-command was easier than locality for L1-Japanese L2-English learners in response time measures, though no differences were found in the offline task. However, L1-German L2-English learners in Felser and Cunnings (2012) temporarily considered nonc-commanding antecedents in their eye-tracking data, but were native-like in a separate offline task. Compared to object reflexives, reflexives in picture-NPs like a picture of himself are less studied in SLA, with two notable exceptions: Kim et al. (2015, discussed below) and Wu et al. (2020). For L1-Chinese L2-English learners in Wu et al. (2020), acquiring native-like interpretations of pictureNPs with possessors (as in (12)) was more difficult than acquiring locality and orientation, which in turn were more difficult than acquiring c-commanding properties; however, this study did not include a native English speaker control group. Cunnings and Sturt (2014) have shown that English native speakers chose possessors as antecedents only about 78% of the time when the possessors matched the stereotypical gender of the reflexives (himself in (13)). Given that judgments are not absolute among native speakers, it is unsurprising that L2-English learners might have difficulty with it. (12)  Susan likes Mary1’s photo of herself1. (Wu et al., 2020) (13) Jonathan/Jennifer was walking through the military barracks. He/She heard about the soldier’s picture of himself/herself in the middle of the mess hall. The food being served for dinner did not look very appetising. (Cunnings & Sturt, 2014)

As in L1 acquisition, L2-English learners generally perform better on reflexives than pronouns (e.g., L1-Turkish L2-English: Marinis & Chondrogianni, 2011; L1-Korean L2-English: Lee & Schachter, 1997; Kim et al., 2015). But this may be because most of these studies tested L1-Korean L2-English learners, who seem to have particular difficulties with English pronouns due to Korean transfer (see Kim, 2019, this volume). Thus, studies with other L1-groups are needed. Non-native-like interpretation of reflexives in L2-English is often attributed to L1-transfer, either at the lexical level (e.g., specific featural properties: Domínguez et al., 2012) or at the pragmatic level (Demirci, 2000, 2001). An alternative account is that L2-learners are more influenced by pragmatics/ discourse than native speakers are, regardless of the L1 (e.g., Felser et al., 2009; Felser & Cunnings, 2012, on L2-English processing, discussed below). Thus, more studies are needed to examine the role of L1-transfer vs. overall reliance on pragmatics/discourse, ideally with two (or more) groups with different L1 binding systems.

34.5.2  Reflexives in L2 Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Most studies in L2 Chinese, Japanese, and Korean focus on locality, though orientation has sometimes been examined along with locality (e.g., L2-Chinese: Dugarova, 2007; Yuan, 1998; Zeng, 479

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2010; L2-Japanese: Shirahata, 2002, discussed in Section 34.2.2). In most studies, L2-Chinese learners do not accept LD interpretations of ziji, at least not to the same degree as native speakers (e.g., Chen, 1995; Chen, 2019; Chen & Ionin, 2023; Dugarova, 2007; Ying, 1999; Zeng, 2010), though there are exceptions (e.g., Kong, 2011; Sperlich, 2013; Yuan, 1998; more below on L1-transfer). While L1-Japanese L2-Chinese learners in Yuan (1998) successfully acquired LD interpretations of ziji, they failed to acquire subject-orientation, even though it is also present with the Japanese zibun. Replicating Yuan but with different L2 groups, Dugarova (2007) found that L1-Russian L2-Chinese learners successfully acquired subject-orientation, which is present in Russian, while L1-English L2-Chinese learners did not acquire it. In L2-Japanese, while some studies found that L2-learners do not accept LD interpretations of zibun, even if the L1 has LD reflexives (e.g., L1-Chinese L2-Japanese learners in Yoshimura et al., 2012), Shirahata (2002) found that L1-English L2-Japanese child learners acquired LD and subjectoriented interpretations of zibun within 3.5 years of arriving in Japan (age of arrival: 5 to 9) (for a review on earlier studies, see Nakayama & Yoshimura, 2015). Umeda et al. (2017) examined whether L1-Chinese L2-Japanese learners acquire different kinds of LD reflexives in Japanese zibun and learn that LD interpretations are unavailable under certain contexts. Umeda et al. found that learners could not distinguish between different kinds of LD reflexives in Japanese, possibly becuase Chinese only has one LD reflexive. Several studies found that L2-Korean learners were native-like in accepting LD interpretations of caki (e.g., L1-English L2-Korean: Lee, 2012; L1-Chinese L2-Korean: Kim & Joo, 2021). However, L2-Korean learners in Lee (2012) accepted significantly more local interpretations of caki than Korean native speakers. In Kim et al. (2010), L2-learners were also not native-like when tested on caki in several positions, including non-object positions. In Kim and Joo (2021), L1-Chinese L2-Korean child learners were native-like in having a clear LD preference for caki and a local preference for caki-casin, while L1-Russian L2-Korean learners had no clear preference for caki, and a slight local preference for caki-casin. Results on the role of L1-transfer in L2 acquisition of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean reflexives remain unclear. Comparing two L2-groups with different L1 binding systems (e.g., one L1 allows LD reflexives and another does not), some studies have found clear L1-transfer (e.g., L2-Chinese: Sperlich, 2013; see also Sperlich, 2016; L2-Korean: Kim & Joo, 2021) while some have not (e.g., L2-Chinese: Chen & Ionin, 2023; L2-Japanese: Yoshimura et al., 2012). A note is in order: when we compare, for example, the acquisition of Japanese by L1-English and L1-Chinese speakers, given that English is a compulsory school subject in many countries, languages other than English are likely to be a third language (L3) or even a fourth language, after L2-English. Thus, L2-English transfer might be a factor worth examining in subsequent language acquisition (e.g., Tsang, 2009, conducted a study on L1-Tagalog L2-English L3-Cantonese reflexives). Previous analyses have attributed the difficulty acquiring LD reflexives to a variety of sources, including: insufficient positive evidence (e.g., L2-Japanese: Umeda et al., 2017); a universal preference for local interpretation in L2-learners, which could be due to processing and/or frequency (e.g., L2-Chinese: Chen & Ionin, 2023); and LD interpretations involving external interfaces (e.g., L2-Japanese: Yoshimura et al., 2012). While many studies focused on only ziji, caki, or zibun (e.g., L2-Chinese: Yuan, 1998; L2-Korean: Lee, 2012; L2-Japanese: Thomas, 1995; Umeda et al., 2017), some studies have examined both simplex and complex reflexives (e.g., L2-Chinese: Chen & Ionin, 2023; Kong, 2011; L2-Korean: Kim & Joo, 2021), allowing comparisons across different reflexive types. For example, when tested in their two languages, L1-Chinese L2-Korean learners in Kim and Joo (2021) accepted predominantly only LD interpretations of caki and ziji, and predominantly only local interpretations of caki-casin and taziji, consistent with L1-transfer. However, given that these participants’ LD preference is clearer for caki than for ziji, the authors speculate that learners might (initially) consider caki to be a pronoun 480

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and only acquire caki-casin as a reflexive (for similar speculations on L2-Chinese, see Chen, 2019; Kong, 2011; Zeng, 2010; on L2-Japanese, see Thomas, 1995). Thus, testing complex reflexives and/ or testing local interpretations of simplex reflexives is important to provide baseline conditions and to obtain converging evidence.3

34.5.3  Processing reflexives in the L2 Compared to offline studies, fewer studies have investigated L2 processing of reflexives (Felser, 2016). These processing studies are primarily conducted in L2-English with a gender/numbermatching paradigm, with a notable exception by Kim et al. (2015). Using self-paced reading, Liu and Nicol (2010) examined whether L2-English learners slowed down at the reflexives (or the post-critical regions) when the gender or the number between the antecedents and the reflexives mismatched; see (14) for an example. Results showed that L1-Chinese L2-English learners were sensitive to gender but not number. Using eye-tracking, both Felser et al. (2009) and Felser and Cunnings (2012) found that, unlike L1-processing, L1-Japanese and L1-German L2-English learners initially considered the (discourse-prominent and gender-matching) LD antecedents, even though their final interpretations were native-like (in untimed judgments). While Felser et al. showed that L2-learners temporarily considered gender-matching c-commanding LD antecedents but not gender-matching non-c-commanding antecedents, L2-learners in Felser and Cunnings temporarily considered both c-commanding LD antecedents and non-c-commanding but linearly closer antecedents. Using ERPs, Liang, Wen, and Dong (2018) found that, while Chinese speakers were sensitive to gender mismatch in L1-Chinese and L2-English reflexive processing, the brain responses differed. Using eye-tracking, Kim et al. (2015) found that L1-Korean L2-English learners were native-like on reflexives in object positions and picture-NPs (without possessors) (cf. Wu et al., 2020) but were not native-like on pronouns. (14)   a.  The shy girls forced themselves/herself to sing the part at the concert. (number agreement) b. The lonely grandfather made himself/herself a cup of tea. (gender agreement) (Liu & Nicol, 2010)

Taken together, L1 and L2 processing of reflexives seem to differ. While Felser and Cunnings (2012) adopted the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH; Clahsen & Felser, 2006) to explain the qualitatively different patterns in L1 and L2 processing, Cunnings (2017) reinterpreted the results as due to “L1 and L2 speakers differently weighting syntactic and discourse-level cues to memory retrieval”. However, Kaiser (2017) questioned whether Cunnings’ proposal is still to some degree compatible with the SSH and the IH and outlined some future directions to tease different theories apart, including specifying different discourse cues (e.g., topic, subjecthood). Dillon (2017, p. 679) also calls for more studies “de-confounding syntactic status (subject) and discourse role (topic)”. Thus, more studies with new experimental designs are needed.

34.6  Open questions and future directions Many open questions remain in L2 acquisition and processing of reflexives, including the role of L1-transfer, the involvement of different interfaces, and syntactic vs. discourse cues. Given that some results are compatible with multiple theories or explanations, different manipulations and language combinations are needed to tease different theories apart. For example, Vietnamese, a language with LD reflexives (Ivan & Bui, 2019), would be a welcome addition to studies of L2 acquisition and processing. L2 processing studies following the suggestions from Dillon (2017) and Kaiser (2017) mentioned above are desirable. Methodologically, previous limitations need to be overcome and confounding factors need to be controlled for (e.g., examining influence from previously learned languages, ensuring the embedded verbs are neutral, having baseline conditions). Moreover, due to potential task effects (White et al., 481

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1997), multiple measures are recommended to find converging evidence (e.g., Felser & Cunnings, 2012, examined both offline interpretation and online processing). In sum, while research on reflexives in SLA is extensive, many questions remain and more work needs to be done to pinpoint the sources of L1/L2 differences in judgments, interpretations, and processing.

Acknowledgments Many thanks to Tania Ionin and the reviewer for helpful comments on this chapter. Any remaining errors are my own. The author received support from the National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan (Grant No. NSTC 111-2410-H-004-228-MY2).

Notes 1 Reflexives in some languages (e.g., Chinese and Korean) allow sub-commanding antecedents if c-commanding antecedents are not possible antecedents (e.g., due to being inanimate), as in Peter1’s arrogance hurt himself1. 2 In some languages (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish), reflexives can occur in the embedded subject position and/or have extra-sentential antecedents. 3 However, having multiple anaphoric forms within a single task may lead participants to compare different forms and influence their judgments/interpretations. For example, Hamilton (1996) speculated that Thomas’s (1989) use of pronouns in the practice trials might have biased L2-learners into having LD interpretations of English reflexives, since after changing the practice trials, Thomas (1991) found fewer incorrect interpretations.

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PART VI

Interfaces

35 NULL AND OVERT PRONOUNS Fernando Martín-Villena, Khadij Gharibi and Jason Rothman

35.1  Null and overt subjects and objects Subjects and objects are arguments of the verb. In the context of the contemporary study of adult second language (L2) acquisition (or SLA) and processing, the investigation of arguments of the verb has featured prominently because how they are realized and distributed presents complex crosslinguistic variation at multiple levels. All verbs must have a subject. However, they do not always require an object: those that do are transitive (e.g., buy) and those that do not are intransitive verbs (e.g., leave). Even for traditional transitive verbs, it is often the case that under specific conditions they can alter between a transitive and what on the surface appears to be an intransitive—an unergative. For example, in Last night we ate late no overt object is realized, but it is necessarily understood that food was eaten. This is quite different from We eat, which can have a habitual reading where nothing (specific) eaten is implied. In other words, some seemingly transitive objects are not as obligatory as they might appear. How the morphosyntax of subjects and objects interacts with information across interfaces (e.g., semantics and discourse pragmatics) further distinguishes languages, even for those that are structurally similar in their underlying morphosyntax (e.g., whether or not they actually have syntactic null subjects/objects). For subjects, expressing them overtly as a pronoun or noun phrase (DP/NP) is an option constrained by discourse, although after first mention they typically take the form of referential pronouns, as she/ella in (1) and (2). (1) The woman does not eat apples in summer. She prefers to eat watermelon. (2) La mujer no come manzanas en verano. Ella/pro prefiere comer sandía. (Spanish)

In many languages, referential subject pronouns can be phonetically absent because they are licensed syntactically (known as pro licensing), as in (3), which in (4) is ungrammatical. (3) Bacheha kheili saro seda mikonand. An piremard fekr mikonad anha/pro bi adab hastand. (Persian) (4) Barna er veldig høylytte. Den gamle mannen synes de/*pro er frekke. (Norwegian) ‘The children are very loud. The old man thinks they are rude.’

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-41

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Alternatively, in languages like Norwegian and English that do not license pro, some subjects can be dropped in some contexts. For example, in English it is possible to drop a topic subject provided it is in absolute first (unstressed) position, e.g., when listing actions in diary type speech: Ø woke up, Ø brushed my teeth, Ø ate breakfast. Phonetically unrealized subjects are also possible in English coordinated clauses, such as I bought pasta and Ø cooked it. However, in languages like English, such occurrences of phonetically unrealized subjects are highly restricted (e.g., they can never appear in embedded clauses). Even when two languages are subject pro-drop—their syntax licensing true null pronouns (pro)—the way in which they recover the reference of null pronominals can vary considerably, via a rich morphological system (Spanish/Italian) or via discourse context (Japanese/Mandarin). Like subjects, not all objects in all languages are overtly pronounced even though they are understood and seemingly part of the syntactic derivation. Languages differ in how these unpronounced objects are obtained. For example, English is not considered to be a null-object language per se, although as we saw in the example using the verb eat, there are contexts in which traditional transitive verbs seemingly do not project objects (at the surface) or they do, but the object is incorporated and thus not overtly realized. However, like the case of subjects, many languages license pro in object position as illustrated in (5) and (6) below. (5) Comprou cerveja? Não pro comprou pro, não. (Portuguese) (6) Ta mai pijiu le ma? Bu, pro meiyou mai pro. (Mandarin) ‘Did he/she buy beer? No, he/she did not buy it/any.’

In some languages that license pro in object position (e.g., Spanish, Brazilian and European Portuguese), their presence is restricted by semantic feature constraints such as definiteness [±definite], specificity [±specific], or animacy [±specific]. While European Portuguese (EP) does not impose semantic restrictions on definiteness, Spanish null objects can only appear when they are coreferential with indefinite, non-specific antecedents, whereas they are ungrammatical with [+definite] antecedents (examples from Rothman & Iverson, 2013). (7) ¿Trajo Carmen el helado para la cena? ‘Did Carmen bring ice cream to the dinner?’ Sí, lo trajo. *Sí, Ø trajo. ‘Yes, she brought it.’ ‘Yes, she brought it.’ (8) ¿Sirvió Pablo cerveza en la fiesta? ‘Did Pablo serve beer at the party?’ Sí, Ø sirvió. #Sí, la sirvió. ‘Yes, he served it.’ ‘Yes, he served it.’

Unlike Spanish or EP, languages like Mandarin that do not encode definiteness morphologically allow null objects without restrictions on definiteness, specificity, or animacy. According to Chang and Zheng (2018), null objects in Mandarin can appear in three contexts: 1) in a matrix clause when it can be recovered from the preceding discourse, 2) in embedded clauses where the antecedent is in the matrix clause, and 3) in matrix and subordinate clauses. As we will see in greater detail for both subjects and objects below, cross-linguistic restrictions on how null/overt arguments get realized embody a rather interesting and complex learning task for adult L2 acquisition depending on many factors, not least pertaining to how these domains manifest in the learner’s L1.

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35.2  Null and overt subjects and objects in SLA With the cursory description of linguistic variation described above, it is easy to begin to appreciate why examining subjects and objects would be of interest in SLA. The variation that they present for non-native language learning tasks lends itself nicely to investigating fundamental theoretical questions in the field. This applies equally to debates on: (i) the potential adult learners retain to acquire and/or process novel L2 properties in a native-like manner, (ii) the role that influence or transfer from their native systems might play in development and ultimate attainment, and (iii) the extent to which various subcomponents or properties of grammar might be more or less difficult for L2 learners. For example, does evidence suggest that L2 adults can acquire new representations, e.g., license pro in the L2 where it cannot be transferred? Or, in the case where the underlying syntax is the same in the L1 and L2, how do competing representations, constraints on null and overt pronominal distribution, and processing strategies of the L1 influence acquisition of the L2? Addressing this second query has contributed significantly to our current understanding of how the L1 influences competence and performance in a non-native language. It has revealed that, while L1 influence is strongly present, there are limits to its explanatory power for L2 variation for both development and ultimate attainment. Evidence pertaining to this same question suggests that some properties related to subjects and objects are indeed more challenging for non-natives than others; for instance, integrating discourse information for selecting between a null or overt variant has a cost, even when the L1 and L2 grammars are very similar in this respect (Lozano, 2018). Interestingly, investigating the (acquisition of) representation and processing of pronominal objects and particularly subjects has been one of the most studied domains in adult SLA. More recent studies have examined the status of the underlying morphosyntax that gives rise to whether an L2 interlanguage grammar licenses null subjects/objects (i.e., pro) and/or, in the case where null subjects/objects are licensed, what constraints determine the distribution of null and overt variants in production as well as how their anaphoric dependencies are resolved in comprehension. The L2 learning task can vary depending on the starting point of interlanguage development, that is, whether or not L1 transfer applies (see Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996, 2021). Assuming L1 transfer, the task involves acquiring the morphosyntactic features of the target L2 that give rise to the licensing of pro. In the case where subject or object pro is a feature of the L1, pro licensing would have to be unlearned, i.e., the target L2 would need to provide meaningful negative evidence to warrant such restructuring. If L1 transfer does not apply—although as we will describe below, the evidence on L2 subjects and objects does not support such a view—then the learning task would arguably be similar for all learners irrespective of the target, in the sense that acquisition would simply need to take place on the basis of parsing the target input and subsequent interlanguage restructuring as a result. Yet having a grammar that licenses null subjects and/or objects is not the whole story. Even within the same type of language, e.g., within prodrop languages, the way in which subjects and objects distribute (their discourse felicitousness properties) can differ. Depending on the L1-L2 language pairing, the learning task also consists of acquiring the pragmatic constraints on how null vs. overt pronominal subjects and objects are distributed. On the processing side, how biases for interpretation of L2 pronominal subjects and objects operate, that is, tendencies and/or constraints on anaphoric resolution, i.e., assigning an antecedent to a given referential expression, is also part of the learning task. Assuming a strong potential for linguistic transfer in this domain, and particularly focusing on null/overt subjects, there are four relevant learning scenarios based on L1-L2 language pairings (Rothman, 2009): (i) L1 non-null subject (e.g., English, Norwegian, French) to L2 null subject (e.g., Spanish, Persian, Japanese), (ii) L2 null subject to L1 non-null subject, (iii) L1 non-null subject to L2 non-null subject, and (iv) L1 null subject to L2 null subject. Most of the studies examining underlying L2 representation have focused almost exclusively on (i) and (ii) above, with a heavy skew towards 491

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scenario (i). While this is also true for examining anaphoric resolution, studies that consider scenarios (iii) and (iv) also exist. Regarding null and overt objects, the learning task could arguably be further complicated in the acquisition of languages like English where, although its syntax does not license pro in object position per se, L2 learners are exposed to potentially ambiguous input. The fact that some English transitive verbs also have intransitive counterparts could seem like an instance of apparently unrealized syntactic objects in the latter. To illustrate this, the verb fight can appear in a transitive context (9) or as an intransitively biased optionally transitive verb (10).   (9)  Kim is fighting Lee. (10)  Kim is fighting.

35.3  Theoretical approaches In this section we review a few studies of subjects and objects. Given that studies on subjects far outnumber studies on objects, we take a more summative approach to the literature on subjects, contextualizing them in terms of how in their aggregate (and indeed some individual studies specifically) they relate to key theoretical queries in SLA. Starting in the early to mid-1980s, the acquisition of the morphosyntax of pronominal subjects was studied under the guise of the Null-Subject Parameter (NSP) proposed in the Principles and Parameters framework (Chomsky, 1981; Jaeggli, 1982; Rizzi, 1982). In fact, it was probably the earliest and most widely studied parameter in research on first and second language acquisition (Hilles, 1986; Hyams, 1983; Liceras, 1989; Phinney, 1987; White, 1985). The values of the NSP or its (non) pro-drop setting divide languages into those that allow overt and null referential pronominal subjects (pro-drop), and those that do not license null subjects, rather requiring subject pronouns to always be phonetically articulated (save for very specific contexts, e.g., topic-drop in Germanic languages or coordinated clause structures). It was claimed that the NSP comprises a cluster of properties (Rizzi, 1982), according to which the licensing of null pronominal subjects would entail the properties listed in Table 35.1. However, some studies such as Rothman and Iverson (2007a, 2007b) questioned the validity of the NSP cluster, claiming that it is more limited than what was originally proposed by Rizzi (1982). Rothman and Iverson proposed instead that the cluster consists of two or maximum three properties, including licensing of pro, instantiation of the OPC, and obligatory null expletives. The clustering status of the NSP has implications for SLA: if parameter resetting were possible in adulthood, it Table 35.1  Cluster of properties of the Null-Subject Parameter. Spanish

English

Co-occurrence of null and overt subject pronouns in tensed clauses Obligatorily null expletive subjects Free subject-verb inversion Lack of that-trace effects

Su amiga le dijo que pro era muy guapa.

Her friend told her *pro/she was very beautiful.

Pro llueve mucho en Galicia. La chica entró/Entró la chica. ¿Quién crees que ganará?

Instantiation of the Overt Pronoun Constraint

¿Quién piensa que pro/ella es la más inteligente de la clase?

It rains a lot in Galicia. The girl entered/*Entered the girl. Who do you think will win/*that will win? Who thinks *pro/she is the most intelligent of the classroom?

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would suggest that L2 learners (like child L1 learners) only need to develop enough knowledge of one of the properties to trigger knowledge of the rest (Rothman & Iverson, 2007a). The fact that there was not always evidence in favor of clustering (either transfer of clustered properties or apparent acquisition on a single property triggering an entire cluster, e.g., Liceras, 1989; Liceras & Díaz, 1999) in SLA generated doubts on the very potential for L2 parameter resetting. In the 1980s and 1990s, studies mainly tested various combinations of properties illustrated in Table 35.1, seeking to address the question of the NSP resetting in its two logical directions: from a non-null-subject L1 to a null subject L2 (Liceras, 1989, Phinney, 1987, White, 1985), and from a null subject L1 to a non-null subject L2 (Hilles, 1986; Tsimpli & Roussou, 1991; White, 1985). This was aligned with questions of primary importance at the time in generative L2 acquisition; namely, whether adult L2 learners have access to UG and debates regarding (degree of) L1 transfer (see Rothman & Slabakova, 2018; White, 1985, 2003). In general, this early research seemed to indicate that L1 transfer in this domain is strong at early levels of proficiency, but that null subjects can be acquired relatively quickly in adult L2 acquisition. In other words, parameter resetting in the non-null subject to null subject direction is possible. Moreover, studies show that non-null subject L1 learners of L2 null subject languages are pretty good at all properties included in Table 35.1, even if they do not cluster at the same time in development, at least at high L2 proficiency levels. Perhaps the most convincing evidence of these properties is the case of instantiation of the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) (Lozano, 2002; Pérez-Leroux & Glass, 1999; Rothman, 2009; Rothman & Iverson, 2007a), as it is argued to reflect a Poverty of the Stimulus (POS) logical learning problem whose instantiation follows from the licensing of pro (Montalbetti, 1984). Let us first explain what the OPC (Montalbetti, 1984) is and, thus, why it is a powerful tool to examine NSP resetting potential in the first place (in fact in many studies with various target L2s: Gürel, 2003; Kanno, 1997; Lozano, 2002; Rothman, 2009). The OPC describes a rather peculiar set of restrictions for interpretation of embedded pronominal subjects in Spanish (and most other pro-drop languages). Montalbetti (1984) observed that variable expressions could not be bound, i.e., quantified DP/wh-elements in matrix clause position—as opposed to non-quantified DPs or pronominals—cannot be coreferential with embedded overt pronouns, although they can with null pronouns. In the question below (example (11)), the embedded overt subject (ella) cannot corefer to the same individual as quién, a variable expression, although pro can. However, there is not an overall prohibition of overt embedded subjects coreferring with matrix DPs, since if quién were replaced by esta mujer (this woman), a regular DP, both the overt and null embedded subjects could easily corefer (depending on context). (11)  ¿Quién piensa que ella/pro es la más inteligente de todos? (Spanish) ‘Who thinks (that) she/pro is the most intelligent of all?’

Contexts for the OPC to apply are very rare in the input: this principle is never taught, and there is nothing to suggest that if someone takes a bound-variable interpretation in OPC contexts—which is the preferred one in relevant contexts in non-null subject languages like English—it is unlikely that breakdowns in communication to offer negative feedback would ensue. As a result, it is a case of a POS property, i.e., the acquisition of a property that cannot have been acquired from the input alone. As its instantiation trigger is argued to be subject pro licensing, it is a good property to test for pro representation in L2 interlanguage grammar and, simultaneously, access to UG in adulthood. While studies of the OPC have been argued to support continued access to UG and against claims of UG-impairment due to the L2 critical period approach (Bley-Vroman, 1989, 2009), from such a vantage point the evidence of parameter resetting in this direction is not surprising. After all, if an L2 learner starts with a setting that does not license pro, copious amounts of input that, in principle, should induce parsing failures will be taken in quickly, given that in languages like Spanish, Italian, 493

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Mandarin and Japanese most subjects are null. An interlanguage grammar that does not allow for null subjects will, thus, be heavily exposed with counter evidence to promote grammatical restructuring. The same is not the case in the opposite direction. If L2 learners start with a grammar that licenses pro, there is little relevant information in the input of a non-null subject grammar that could be used to “unlearn” pro licensing. Notably, grammars that license pro can optionally have overt pronominal subjects, which means that hearing them in the L2 is not ungrammatical for their transferred value. While it would be the case that the transferred discourse pragmatic constraints of overt subject use are violated by them always appearing, there is potentially ambiguous evidence from input in nonnull-subject languages that would suggest pro can exist in subject position, albeit in a much-reduced manner (e.g., instances of topic drop or clausal coordination, which syntactically are not equivalent but at the surface can be misleading). Even for theories of UG-continuity in adulthood, resetting the NSP should be more difficult, if possible at all, in the null subject to non-null subject direction. This added difficulty is indeed what the available research suggests (Hilles, 1986; Phinney, 1987), whereby resetting in this direction is delayed relative to the other, if truly possible at all. Since the early 2000s, there has progressively been a shift away from the purely morphosyntactic acquisition of null/overt subjects in L2 research. In the earlier research, there was relatively little consideration of how syntactic knowledge might interact with other components of grammar. For nearly the past two decades, however, a considerable body of SLA research has looked beyond the syntax, focusing on how different modules of the grammar (e.g., phonology, syntax, semantics, or morphology) interface with each other, as well as how the grammar interfaces with other cognitive domains (Sorace, 2011; White, 2016). One such interface is the syntax-discourse, discussed in the Interface Hypothesis (IH) proposed by Sorace and colleagues (Sorace, 2011, 2012; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006). The IH highlights how different bilingual populations seem to have difficulties in simultaneously integrating purely syntactic aspects (the grammar of overt/null pronominals) with discursive aspects (information structure constraints). As a result, L2 learners are predicted to show deficits with anaphora resolution of null and overt pronominals. Anaphora resolution is precisely constrained at the syntaxdiscourse interface since the alternation of anaphoric forms (overt/null pronominals) is syntactically licensed in null-subject languages, but their use in real discourse is constrained mainly (but not exclusively) by factors like information structure (topic continuity vs. shift). Apparent deficits in anaphora resolution in bilinguals might be due to a trade-off between inhibitory control vs. integration/updating (Sorace, 2016). While many studies in the anaphora resolution literature have shown that discourse integration can be costly/problematic for L2 learners, many studies, especially those examining other linguistic phenomena that equally involve information integration at this interface, show no predicted difficulty, demonstrating that many syntax-discourse properties are fully acquirable by L2 learners in a native-like fashion (Lozano, 2021 for a review; Rothman, 2009; White, 2011). To account for the patterns of anaphoric interpretation in null-subject languages, i.e., how anaphors link back to their antecedents, the Position of Antecedent Strategy (PAS) was proposed (Carminati, 2002). According to the PAS, the default processing strategy for pro is to corefer with an antecedent in the canonical subject position, while the overt pronoun prefers disjoint reference (an antecedent from the larger discourse). For instance, in the examples below (from Sorace & Filiaci, 2006), the null pronoun (pro) tends to refer to ‘the mother’, while the overt pronoun tends to refer to ‘the daughter’ in object position. (12)  La mamma dà un bacio alla figlia mentre pro/lei si mette il cappotto.  The mother kisses her daughter, while pro/she is wearing her coat.

Importantly, to have native-like knowledge for the interpretation of pronominal subjects, L2 learners not only need to have the syntactic representation for null subject licensing, but they also need to

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master knowledge of the discourse constraints (e.g., focus for overt subjects) and processing strategies (e.g., PAS) for interpretation. According to the IH, it is not sufficient to attain knowledge of L2 discourse constraints and converge on default processing strategies. Since the integration of this knowledge with the syntax requires cognitive resources, doing this in real time should come at a detectable cost in bilingualism. If, indeed, this is a general bilingualism cost, as the IH suggests, then one would anticipate differences between native monolinguals and L2 learners regardless of the language pairing and even when L2 proficiency is native-like, although degree of differences is likely to be more or less as a function of L2 proficiency and/or depend on the L1-L2 pairing. Much work (experimental and corpus-based) has examined this prediction in detail (Belletti et al., 2007; Keating et al., 2011; Martín-Villena & Lozano, 2020; Quesada & Lozano, 2020; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006, see Lozano, 2021 for a review).

35.4  Methodological approaches to the study of null and overt subjects and objects The study of the acquisition of null and overt subjects and objects has been approached experimentally and from a corpus linguistics perspective investigating both oral and written production (see Lozano, 2021). On the one hand, (corpus) production data have provided useful insights on the distribution of null and overt arguments as well as the factors that condition their presence or absence. Additionally, the interpretation and processing of null and overt pronouns has been tested using a wide range of experimental methodologies: e.g., acceptability judgement, truth-value judgement, picture selection, self-paced reading, or eye tracking tasks, to name a few. It is also important to note that some authors have suggested a triangulation approach to the study of different linguistic phenomena such as that of syntactic arguments to better understand late bilinguals’ interlanguage grammars (Mendikoetxea & Lozano, 2018): a connection should be established between the design of experiments based on the patterns found in real production and relevant aspects found in experiments should be further scrutinized in (semi-)spontaneous data.

35.5  Representative studies on null and overt subjects and objects 35.5.1  Null and overt subjects To illustrate some of the theoretical analyses and SLA theories described above, let us take a deeper look into Pérez-Leroux and Glass (1999) as an exemplar study testing the predictions generated within the OPC. One of the tasks they used tested whether English learners of Spanish at various proficiency levels would demonstrate knowledge of the constraint on bound-variable interpretations that does not pertain to English. The OPC task took the form of a translation experiment based on referential stories (see (13)). Some of the stories were biased for a bound-variable interpretation, which would entail that the only acceptable Spanish translation of the English sentence whose context favors a bound-variable interpretation is one with a null pronoun. This was compared to other translation contexts which did not favor a bound-variable interpretation. (13) In the O.J. Simpson trial, it is clear that the press has a negative bias against the defendant in their reporting. Some journalist said that he was a wife-beater. To translate: ‘But no journalist said that he is guilty.’ Target translation: Ningún periodista dijo que él era culpable. No journalist said that HE was guilty. (from Pérez-Leroux and Glass (1999, p. 232))

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All groups produced significantly more null subjects in their translations of OPC relevant contexts as compared to when the OPC could not apply. In fact, this pattern shifted more towards native-likeness as L2 proficiency increased, reaching native-like levels already by upper intermediate proficiency. Their results support the claim that the OPC constrains L2 interlanguage grammars, which means that it can become operative through the course of L2 acquisition. To the extent that the OPC is a true POS (see Sheen, 2000, for an alternative view and Marsden, 2012, for a rebuttal) that applies universally (see Gürel, 2003), Pérez-Leroux and Glass’s (1999) study offers convincing evidence that UG remains accessible in adulthood as well as positive evidence that adults can acquire novel L2 properties that serve to trigger POS phenomena. Additional evidence on the acquisition of pronominal resolution under theoretical approaches such as the IH comes from speakers of multiple L1-L2 combinations. L1 speakers of non-null subject languages learning a null subject language have been commonly studied in the literature on anaphora resolution. In an exemplary study on L1 English-L2 Italian speakers, Sorace and Filiaci (2006) compared the L2 learners’ interpretation of null vs. overt subjects in a picture verification task with those of native speakers of Italian. The participants had to identify the possible antecedents of null or overt subject pronouns in complex sentences consisting of a main clause and a subordinate clause. The two groups were very similar in their responses with respect to the null subject pronouns in both types of anaphora. Compared to the monolingual group, however, the near-native L2ers had a significantly higher preference for the subject of the matrix clause as a possible antecedent of overt subject pronouns. These results indicate that L2 speakers with native-like proficiency have acquired the syntactic constraints on pronominal subjects in Italian, but still have residual optionality in interpreting subject pronouns at the syntax-discourse interface. Although most studies have focused on the above L1-L2 configuration, there are studies investigating the opposite direction (L1 null to L2 non-null). For example, Contemori et al. (2019) tested the interpretation of subject pronouns in L1 Spanish-L2 English speakers. Through comprehension experiments, this study found that intermediate L2 speakers did not show increased difficulty compared to native speakers in integrating multiple sources of information (syntactic/discourse/pragmatic) to resolve ambiguous pronouns in intrasentential anaphora condition as in Cuando Yolanda conoció a Josefina, pro/ella estaba en la preparatoria ‘When Yolanda met Josefina, pro/she was in high school’ and in intrasentential cataphora condition as in Mientras que pro/ella estaba en la preparatoria, Yolanda conoció a Josefina ‘While pro/she was in high school, Yolanda met Josefina’ (Contemori et al., 2019, p. 973). However, they found that when two referents with equal prominence are introduced using a conjoined NP in the preceding context as in Carlos y Martín están en la oficina ‘Carlos and Martín are at the office’ (Contemori et al., 2019, p. 983), the learners’ performance was significantly different than the performance of the native speakers, both in intrasentential and intersentential anaphora. Even fewer are the studies that examine null and overt subject processing when the L1 and L2 are both null subject languages, despite the importance of this configuration to tease the effects of L1 transfer from potentially more general bilingualism effects on attentional resource allocation for real-time processing. In this context, Judy (2010) examined the processing of overt and null subjects by L1 Persian-L2 Spanish speakers. These near-native L2ers were examined in three discourse-constrained contexts (i.e., contrastive focus, topic-shift, and topic-continuity) through offline and online methodologies. The offline task showed that L2 speakers and Spanish controls distinguish between overt vs. null subjects according to context, displaying their knowledge of discourse-constrained distribution of referential pronominal subjects in Spanish. However, the online results showed that, while most native speakers appropriately distinguish between counterbalanced tokens within each context type, the L2 group displayed native-like processing in the topic-shift target sentences only. Keeping both the L1 and L2 status consistent, although switching to non-null subject languages, Colonna et al. (2018) tested pronoun resolution strategies in L1 German-L2 French speakers. French 496

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and German differ in antecedent preferences in ambiguous constructions (as in the postman hit the pirate before he went home, Colonna et al., 2018, p. 1), while French shows a preference for the second mentioned referent (N2, “pirate”), German shows an N1-preference (first mention, “postman”). To observe the interpretation of ambiguous subject pronouns, this study used a questionnaire where N1 was the agent of the transitive action in an active construction or the patient in a passive construction. The results showed that German learners prefer the N1 more often than the French natives in the active condition. Crucially, the number of N1 choices increased in both groups in the passive condition. These results suggest that L2ers might have difficulties acquiring strategies based on the frequency and availability of alternative constructions in the L2 and provide further evidence for the importance of information-structure-based strategies in pronoun resolution.

35.5.2  Null and overt objects Interestingly, data on the acquisition of null objects are available from several L1s, which (dis) allow non-overt objects to different degrees (e.g., general object drop: Korean, Mandarin, Japanese; restricted object drop: EP, BP [Brazilian Portuguese]; or no object drop: English). Thus, this section will summarize previous evidence addressing the question of whether L2 Spanish, L2 English and L2 Mandarin learners can acquire syntactic and semantic restrictions on object drop depending on their L1 configuration. Considering studies on L2 Spanish, Bruhn de Garavito and Guijarro-Fuentes (2002) investigated whether intermediate L1 English and L1 European Portuguese (EP) learners had knowledge of the syntactic and semantic restrictions of object drop in L2 Spanish. Importantly, unlike English, where null objects are disallowed, EP allows for null objects but does not impose semantic restrictions on definiteness as Spanish does. However, similarly to Spanish, since EP (differently from Brazilian Portuguese) is an instance of object pro, null objects are subject to the same subjacency (island) constraints. Using a scalar grammaticality judgement task, Bruhn de Garavito and Guijarro-Fuentes (2002) found that both learners of L1 English and L1 EP were successful in acquiring L2 knowledge of object drop. Even if there was an advantage for the EP group, L2ers showed sensitivity to subjacency constraints—i.e., locality constraints on syntactic movement—and the semantic distinction between definite and indefinite objects, accepting indefinite object drop to a higher extent. However, whereas L1 EP-L2 Spanish learners distinguished between (un)grammatical instances in both complex DPs, sentential CPs, and adjuncts, L1 English learners failed to do so in the latter. Using the same methodology, Bruhn de Garavito et al. (2009) explored the acquisition of L2 Spanish syntactic and semantic restrictions on null objects in intermediate and advanced L1 BP learners. In BP, dropped objects are not subject to the same semantic (i.e., definiteness) or syntactic (i.e., subjacency) constraints (i.e., they are not true null objects in that they are not pro). Intermediate learners were found to transfer their native grammar since they did not obey semantic or syntactic restrictions of the L2. By contrast, although advanced L2ers were sensitive to the definiteness constraint, they only showed native-like trends when judging DP islands, which might indicate that they had acquired the novel L2 Spanish syntax without removing previously transferred L1 syntactic configurations (otherwise known as the preemption problem/effect: see Trahey & White, 1993). Following up on these studies, Rothman and Iverson (2013) tested the acquisition of null objects in L2 Spanish learners of L1 BP, which, as mentioned above, does not impose restrictions on definiteness in inanimate objects and dropped objects are not subject to island constraints. They adapted the scalar grammaticality judgement task from Bruhn de Garavito and GuijarroFuentes (2002) to additionally examine the acquisition of the L2 Spanish definiteness restriction. Comparing their data to Bruhn de Garavito and Guijarro-Fuentes (2002), they studied whether acquiring new syntactic structures that are on the surface shared by the L1 and the L2 proves to be more difficult. The results showed that the L2ers demonstrated sensitivity to definiteness for each 497

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island type (see Rothman and Iverson (2013) for examples). Interestingly, even though L2 Spanish learners did not fully reject dropped objects in islands, their responses seemed to be conditioned by Spanish constraints on definiteness, i.e., null-object sentences with definite referents were rated lower and thus less acceptable in all contexts. The authors then claimed that the L2ers had targetlike acquisition of L2 semantics, but their acquisition of L2 syntax had been obscured by an L1 preemption effect. Zyzik (2008) analyzed the relationship between null-object production in oral speech and acceptance of null objects in a grammaticality judgement task in beginner to advanced L1 English-L2 Spanish learners. Results report low production of null objects (see also Arche & Domínguez, 2011) and, when produced, they were easily recoverable from the discourse context. The data presented are in line with a developmental pattern in the rejection of ungrammatical null objects with increasing proficiency. Additionally, the negative correlation between acceptance and production of null objects was found to be highly mediated by clitic production in the oral task. According to Zyzik (2008), the results from the grammaticality judgement task suggest that learners make use of different strategies: beginners rely more on semantic knowledge to evaluate the sentences and as learners become more proficient, they make use of their syntactic knowledge. In another study, Cuza et al. (2013) employed a battery of tasks consisting of a question-after-story, a truth-value judgement, a sentence-completion, and an acceptability task to test whether L1 Mandarin-L2 Spanish learners can acquire mastery of the semantic restrictions regulating alternation between object clitic and object drop in Spanish. Particularly, the L1 Mandarin adult immigrants to Peru were not able to reject null objects with a referential interpretation and failed to distinguish the interpretation of null objects and clitics. In addition, adults relied on overuse of null objects and DPs and accepted ungrammatical null objects in specific contexts in the acceptability judgement task. Thus, adult learners were relying primarily on L1 transfer when it comes to the acquisition of null objects. On par with research on L2 Spanish, several studies have investigated the acquisition of null objects in learners of L2 English, a non-null object language, with null object L1s like Mandarin, Korean or Japanese, where dropped objects are allowed. In this case, L2 English learners need to unlearn the null object configuration of their L1 since dropped objects are ungrammatical in their L2. Initially, the study by Zobl (1994) focusing on markedness and prior L1 grammar knowledge in the acquisition task explored, among other properties, the asymmetry in the acquisition of null subjects vs. objects. The results from the study report that L1 Mandarin-L2 English learners were better at spotting ungrammaticality of null subjects than of null objects in English sentences. Following up on this study, Yuan (1997) also investigated the asymmetry in the acquisition of null subjects vs. objects in L1 Mandarin-L2 English learners across proficiency levels. Results from an acceptability judgement task testing knowledge of object drop in L2 English showed that adult L2 learners could not developmentally detect ungrammaticality in sentences containing null objects when compared to the controls. Yuan claimed that there was no clear evidence to suggest that L1 Mandarin-L2 English learners can unlearn null objects when acquiring L2 English. Additionally, he found an asymmetry between null subjects vs. objects, which was explained based on the presence vs. absence of positive evidence in the input. Kim (2015) examined whether L1 Korean-L2 English adults can learn that obligatorily transitive verbs in English do not allow null objects. Learners completed an acceptability judgement task whereby the sentence type (transitive vs. intransitive) and the verb type (obligatorily transitive vs. intransitively biased optionally transitive) were manipulated. Highly proficient L1 Korean adults gave the expected acceptability ratings in L2 English in line with native speakers: they rated transitive sentences with ungrammatical null objects low. Moreover, L1 Korean adult L2ers were also sensitive to the syntactic requirements of English verbs when processing sentences as shown by an interaction effect. A recent study by Hwang (2019) has used a grammaticality judgement task to explore whether L1 Korean learners can overcome L1 transfer of topic prominent properties in L2 English. Learners 498

Null and overt pronouns

were not able to detect ungrammaticality of sentences with null objects, but they could reject ungrammatical sentences with null subjects. Hwang then argued that L1 Korean-L2 English adults did not unlearn the topic prominence transferred from their L1 neither from positive evidence focusing on L2 English nor negative evidence targeting ungrammaticality of null arguments. Finally, there are also studies on the acquisition of Mandarin null object properties in advanced learners of null (Japanese) and non-null object (English) languages. Notably, Chang and Zheng (2018) examined the role of the L1, animacy and syntactic position in the use of both null subjects and null objects. The results from their analysis of written compositions reveal that advanced L2 Mandarin learners failed to use null arguments in a native-like manner with no differences between the two groups. They also found that learners produced higher rates of inanimate null objects and that there was no effect of syntactic position in the production of dropped objects. The authors argue that, given that objects are more likely to convey new information and due to their lower saliency when compared to subjects, there appeared to be fewer omissions in production. Regarding the L1, learners were found to be generally non-native-like with no major differences. Taken together, corpus and experimental evidence on the acquisition of null objects in languages with different configurations points in the direction that learners find it difficult to fully acquire both syntactic and semantic restrictions that regulate their interpretation and use. Transfer from null and non-null object L1s seems to be active even at advanced stages and this thus leads to non-native-like acquisition of dropped objects. The acquisition of null objects appears to be less straightforward than that of null subjects, arguably due to their restricted positive evidence in the input.

35.6  Future directions This chapter has provided an overview of the main challenges posed by the acquisition of null and overt subjects and objects for L2ers in languages with similar or distinct (syntactic/semantic/discourse) configurations. Although existing studies have uncovered key factors in the acquisition/processing of this domain of morphosyntax, all relevant questions—those that are specific to L2 verbal argument acquisition and processing as well as those of more general theoretical relevance for which these domains of grammar have the potential to offer unique insights—have not (yet) been exhausted. Further research is warranted to tease apart the specific constraints imposed by different languages for the realization of null or overt subjects/objects with a greater emphasis on distinctions in the learning task imposed by specific (and more varied) language pairings. In truth, we know very little regarding the role that individual-level factors play in these domains, e.g., how differences in working memory predict L2 variation where it can be expected to matter, such as in anaphoric processing/comprehension of verbal arguments. Issues pertaining to individual differences in quality and quantity of input and its conversion to intake and how various affective, metacognitive, and metalinguistic factors that differ across individual L2ers are also severely understudied in these domains. This has been so despite the fact that probing beyond aggregate trends has become increasingly emphasized in SLA theories, even the most formal linguistic ones, over the past two decades (Rothman & Slabakova, 2018). Employing increasingly more granular online, even neurolinguistic, methodologies typically used for processing can also offer insights for acquisition theories when appropriate and would be very welcome in the near future.

References Arche, M. J., & Domínguez, L. (2011). Morphology and syntax dissociation in SLA: Evidence from L2 clitic acquisition in Spanish. In A. Galani, G. Tsoulas, & G. Hicks (Eds.), Morphology and its interfaces (pp. 291–320). John Benjamins.

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Martín-Villena, Gharibi and Rothman Belletti, A., Bennati, E., & Sorace, A. (2007). Theoretical and developmental issues in the syntax of subjects: Evidence from near-native Italian. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 25, 657–689. Bley-Vroman, R. (1989). What is the logical problem of foreign language learning? Linguistic Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition, 4, 1–68. Bley-Vroman, R. (2009). The evolving context of the fundamental difference hypothesis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 31(2), 175–198. Bruhn de Garavito, J., & Guijarro-Fuentes, P. (2002). L2 acquisition of indefinite object drop. In J. Costa & M. J. Freitas (Eds.), GALA 2001 proceedings (pp. 60–67). Associação Portuguesa de Linguística. Bruhn de Garavito, J., Guijarro-Fuentes, P., Iverson, M., & Valenzuela, E. (2009). From Romance to Romance and why it might not be so straightforward: Null objects in the L2 Spanish of Brazilian Portuguese natives. Paper presented at the GALA 2009 conference, Lisbon, Portugal. Carminati, M. N. (2002). The processing of Italian subject pronouns [Unpublished PhD thesis]. University of Massachusetts. Chang, H., & Zheng, L. (2018). Asymmetries of null subjects and null objects in L1-English and L1-Japanese learners’ Chinese. Linguistics, 56(5), 1141–1166. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/ling​-2018​-0021 Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding. Foris. Contemori, C., Asiri, O., & Perea Irigoyen, E. D. (2019). Anaphora resolution in L2 English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 41, 971–998. Colonna S., Schimke S., de la Fuente I., Kuck S., Hemforth B. (2018). Effects of exposure and information structure in native and non-native pronoun resolution in French. Linguistics Vanguard, 4(s1), 20160093. Cuza, A., Pérez-Leroux, A., & Sánchez, L. (2013). The role of semantic transfer in clitic drop among simultaneous and sequential Chinese-Spanish bilinguals. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35(1), 93–125. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0272263112000691 Gürel, A. (2003). Is the overt pronoun constraint universal? Evidence from L2 Turkish. In J. Liceras, H. Zobl, & H. Goodluck (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th generative approaches to second language acquisition conference (pp. 130–139). Cascadilla Press. Hilles, S. (1986). Interlanguage and the pro-drop parameter. Second Language Research, 2, 33–52. Hwang, S. (2019) Effects of construction grammar-based instruction on unlearning topic prominence of Korean EFL learners’ interlanguage. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics, 19(3), 347–370. Hyams, N. (1983). The Pro drop parameter in child grammars. Proceedings of the west coast conference on formal linguistics, vol. 2, Stanford University. Jaeggli, O. (1982). Topics in Romance syntax. Foris. Judy, T., & Rothman, J. (2010). From a Superset to a Subset grammar and the Semantic Compensation Hypothesis: Subject pronoun and anaphora resolution evidence in L2 English. In K. Franich, K. M. Iserman, & L. L. Keil (Eds.), BUCLD 34: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Boston University conference on language development (pp. 197–208). Cascadilla Press. Kanno, K. (1997). The acquisition of null and overt pronominals in Japanese by English speakers. Second Language Research, 13, 265–287. Keating, G. D., VanPatten, B., & Jegerski, J. (2011). Who was walking on the beach? Anaphora resolution in Spanish heritage speakers and adult second language learners. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33(2), 193–221. Kim, K. (2015). Sensitivity to ungrammatical object drop in English by Korean young and adult L2 learners. Linguistic Research, 32, 57–81. Liceras, J. (1989). On some properties of the “pro-drop” parameter: Looking for missing subjects in non-native Spanish. In S. M. Gass & J. Schachter (Eds.), Linguistic perspectives on second language acquisition (pp. 109–133). CUP. Liceras, J., & Díaz, L. (1999). Topic-drop versus pro-drop: Null subjects and pronominal subjects in the Spanish L2 of Chinese, English, French, German and Japanese speakers. Second Language Research, 15(1), 1–40. Lozano, C. (2002). The interpretation of overt and null pronouns in non-native Spanish. Durham Working Papers in Linguistics, 8, 53–66. Lozano, C. (2018). The development of anaphora resolution at the syntax-discourse interface: Pronominal subjects in Greek learners of Spanish. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 47(2), 411–430. https://doi​.org​/10​ .1007​/s10936​-017​-9541-8 Lozano, C. (2021). Anaphora resolution in Second Language Acquisition. In M. Aronoff (Ed.), Oxford bibliographies in linguistics. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0-19-977281-0 Marsden, H. (2012). Poverty of the stimulus and UG in Japanese L2 acquisition: A response to Sheen (2000). Durham Working Papers in Linguistics, 8, 67–80. Martín-Villena, F., & Lozano, C. (2020). Anaphora resolution in topic continuity: Evidence from L1 English–L2 Spanish data in the CEDEL2 corpus. In J. Ryan & P. Crosthwaite (Eds.), Referring in a second language:

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Null and overt pronouns Studies on reference to person in a multilingual world (pp. 119–141). Routledge. http://doi​.org​/10​.4324​ /9780429263972-7 Mendikoetxea, A., & Lozano, C. (2018). From corpora to experiments: Methodological triangulation in the study of word order at the interfaces in adult late bilinguals (L2 learners). Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 47(4), 871–898. http://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s10936​-018​-9560-0 Montalbetti, M. M. (1984). After binding: On the interpretation of pronouns [Unpublished PhD thesis]. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pérez-Leroux, A. T., & Glass, W. R. (1999). Null anaphora in Spanish second language acquisition: Probabilistic versus generative approaches. Second Language Research, 15(2), 220–249. Phinney, M. (1987). The pro-drop parameter in second language acquisition. In T. Roeper & E. Williams (Eds.), Parameter setting (pp. 221–238). Reidel. Quesada, T., & Lozano, C. (2020). Which factors determine the choice of referential expressions in L2 English discourse? A multifactorial study from the COREFL corpus. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 42(5), 959–986. http://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0272263120000224 Rizzi, L. (1982). Issues in Italian syntax. Foris. Rothman, J. (2009). Pragmatic deficits with syntactic consequences?: L2 pronominal subjects and the syntax– pragmatics interface. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(5), 951–973. Rothman, J., & Iverson, M. (2007a). On L2 clustering and resetting the Null Subject Parameter in L2 Spanish: Implications and observations. Hispania, 90(2), 329–342. Rothman, J., & Iverson, M. (2007b). Input type and parameter resetting: Is naturalistic input necessary? International Review of Applied Linguistics, 45(4), 285–319. Rothman, J., & Iverson, M. (2013). Islands and objects in L2 Spanish: Do you know the learners who drop___? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35(4), 589–618. http://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0272263113000387 Rothman, J., & Slabakova, R. (2018). The generative approach to SLA and its place in modern second language studies. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(2), 417–442. Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the Full Transfer/Full Access model. Second Language Research, 12(1), 40–72. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/026765839601200103 Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A. (2021) The Full Transfer/Full Access model and L3 cognitive states. Keynote article. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 11, 1–29. Sheen, R. (2000). A response to Kanno’s ‘The stability of UG principles in second language acquisition: evidence from Japanese’. Linguistics, 38(4), 799–816. Sorace, A. (2011). Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1(1), 1–33. Sorace, A. (2012). Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism: A reply to peer commentaries. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2(2), 209–216. Sorace, A. (2016). Referring expressions and executive functions in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 6(5), 669–684. Sorace, A., & Filiaci, F. (2006). Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Language Research, 22, 339–368. Trahey, M., & White, L. (1993). Positive evidence and preemption in the second language classroom. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 15(2), 181–204. Tsimpli, I. M., & Roussou, A. (1991). Parameter resetting in L2? UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 3, 149–169. White, L. (1985). The acquisition of parameterized grammar: Subjacency in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 1(1), 1–17. White, L. (2011). Second language acquisition at the interfaces. Lingua, 121(4), 577–590. White, L. (2016). Pro-drop then and now: Changing perspectives on null subjects in second language acquisition. In A. Fuente, E. Valenzuela, C. Sanz, & J. Liceras (Eds.), Language acquisition beyond parameters: Studies in honor of Juana M. Liceras (pp. 17–35). John Benjamins. White, L. (2003). Second language acquisition and universal grammar. Cambridge University Press. Yuan, B. (1997). Asymmetry of null subjects and null objects in Chinese speakers’ L2 English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 467–497. Zobl, H. (1994). Prior linguistic knowledge and the conservation of the learning procedure. Grammaticality judgments of unilingual and multilingual learners. In S. Gass & L. Selinker (Eds.), Language transfer in language learning (pp. 176–196). John Benjamins. Zyzik, E. C. (2008). Null objects in second language acquisition: Grammatical vs. performance models. Second Language Research, 24(1), 65–110. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0267658307082982

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36 INFORMATION STRUCTURE Topic and focus Tania Leal

36.1 Introduction One of the most basic facts about language is that there are constraints on the form utterances can take, with constraints on grammaticality being an obvious example (Stevens & Roberts, 2019). Beyond grammaticality, utterances can also be more or less (in)felicitous, depending on how the constituents of a sentence relate to the surrounding discourse context and the speakers’ beliefs, needs, and perception of the world (Krifka, 2008a). Within linguistics, the study of Information Structure explores how language users structure (or “package,” following Chafe’s (1979) terminology) their utterances into “blocks” of different types (Féry & Ishihara, 2016). I will concentrate on two such types, topic and focus, while reviewing the literature on how speakers of second and additional languages (L2/Ln) acquire these information-structure types.

36.2  The notion of focus Focus has been defined as one of several universal categories of information structure (Zimmermann & Onea, 2011). According to Krifka (2008a), the most successful definition of focus derives from Rooth (1992), who defines it as that which “indicat[es] the presence of alternatives […] relevant for the interpretation” (Krifka, 2008a, p. 247). Krifka finds this definition appealing, in part, because it is compatible with different types of focus marking, which indicate pertinent alternatives for interpretation. Lambrecht (1996, p. 207) defines focus as the part of the proposition that “cannot be taken for granted […], the unpredictable or pragmatically non-recoverable” part of the proposition. Given these definitions, many researchers equate focus with “new information,” which is unpredictable, non-recoverable, and indicates alternatives. Consider, for instance, the sentence: “Lily held the tarantula.” It could be the answer to a question such as: “Which of my daughters held the tarantula?” ([Lily]F held the tarantula), or “What did my oldest daughter hold?” (Lily held [the tarantula]F). These answers ([Lily]F held the tarantula vs. Lily held [the tarantula]F) do not differ in their propositional content—only in their alternative meanings.1 Although several focus types exist, here I examine only those most relevant in L2/Ln acquisition research: information (or presentational) focus and contrastive (or fronted) focus. These types have been argued to constitute different pragmatic uses of focus, rather than different semantic types because both represent sets of alternatives (Hartmann & Zimmermann, 2007, p. 366).

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DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-42

Information structure

36.2.1  Information focus Following the above definition, information focus denotes the non-presupposed part of the sentence that is relevant for interpretation and, in a given discourse context, closes an open variable (see n. 2) (Jackendoff, 1972; López, 2009).2 One common way to identify it is through question–answer pairs, as in (1A-B), where the constituent that corresponds to the wh-word quién ‘who’ is the focus. (1)

A:

¿Quién fue tu inspiración al who was your inspiration to-the ‘Who was your inspiration when writing this character?’

B:

Indudablemente, fue [mi abuelo]F. undoubtedly was my grandfather ‘Undoubtedly, it was my grandfather.’

escribir este personaje? (Spanish) write.INF this character

As this example shows, the DP mi abuelo ‘my grandfather’ constitutes the focus because it resolves the variable opened by the wh-operator quién ‘who’. Information focus is typically associated with prominence, although the ways prominence is encoded vary across languages and can comprise one or more strategies, including syntactic movement to a salient position (e.g., a sentence’s left/right edge); prosody (e.g., increased stress, special pitch accents); or morphological markings. Spanish, for instance, has been argued to use syntactic movement to the right edge of the phrase to realize focus (Zubizarreta, 1998, but see Hoot & Leal, 2020), as in example (1B), while languages like English have been argued to use prosody, marking focal constituents with in-situ stress (Ward & Birner, 2004). Finally, languages such as Korean and Japanese use morphological markings. A further classification of information focus involves scope. When information focus falls on a single constituent, we speak of narrow focus. Broad focus, conversely, describes a type where the whole sentence is in focus, as would be any answer to questions such as ‘What happened?’. For instance, example (1B) exemplifies narrow focus on the subject. Narrow focus on other constituents, including objects or predicates, is also possible. In fact, it has been argued that languages display asymmetries in focus marking depending on which constituent is in focus: Marking focus with special constructions is more frequent for subjects than for objects (Skopeteas & Fanselow, 2010). Zimmerman (2016) further argues that languages can be categorized into symmetrical and asymmetrical marking languages, depending on whether languages “consistently employ one and the same strategy for realizing focus on all kinds of grammatical categories” (Zimmerman, 2016, p. 323).

36.2.2  Contrastive focus We have seen that information focus introduces new (non-presupposed) information into the discourse, closing a variable. Contrastive focus, however, simultaneously opens and resolves a variable, as shown in (2)—a combination of functions that has been argued to define it (López, 2009). (2) A: I can’t believe you went out with Xavier.  B: I went out with [his brother]F, if you must know.

The context in (2A) leaves no open variables, yet the answer includes non-presupposed information— the focus of the utterance. Contrastive focus has been associated with distinct interpretations, including exhaustivity, contrast, and correction (Zimmerman, 2008). As with information focus, contrastive focus can be encoded through different means of linguistic/prosodic prominence—marked in (3B) via caps, 503

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as is customary in the literature. In Spanish, one of the ways contrastive focus can be marked is through displacement to the left periphery, as well as by a specific stress pattern. Given the definitions presented in §36.2.1 and 36.2.2, it should be unsurprising that focus has been loosely defined as contributing “new” or non-presupposed information to the discourse. However, a note of caution: This shorthand description can blur important distinctions between focus types, which may mark new information explicitly (e.g., information focus) or implicitly (e.g., contrastive focus) (Zimmerman & Onea, 2011).

36.3  The notion of topic Following several information-structure theorists, my presentation highlights generalizations about topic, focus, and contrast across languages. This section mirrors the previous one in being divided into non-contrastive (thematic) topic and contrastive topic (Neeleman et al., 2009).3 Coincidentally, these topic types have been at the forefront of L2/Ln research (see §36.5).

36.3.1  Thematic topic Notions of “aboutness,” “old knowledge,” “discourse referent,” “discourse oldness,” or “shared knowledge” are often invoked when defining thematic topic. Usually, topics are identified as the constituent x in a frame such as “Tell me about x” or “What about x?” Notoriously difficult to define, thematic topics have been described as having such multiple—and disparate—properties that some researchers have pleaded with the field to cease using the term except with “great caution,” calling for the properties of topic in a given language to be established independently (Büring, 2016). Even so, Casielles-Suárez (2004) considers the following description less controversial: A topic tends to be what the sentence is about; what the speaker takes as the point of departure for the sentence; that which is not part of the focus […], often active or salient in the discourse; and often expressed by pronominal or unaccented lexical phrases. (p. 22) As with most information-structure types, the expression of topic varies widely among languages, which can mark topic lexically, phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, or with a combination of strategies. For instance, many Romance languages employ dislocations (constituents at the clause’s periphery) to encode topicality (or, as we will see in §36.5, discourse anaphoricity, in López’s (2009) view). Example (3)—data from Spanish—is an expression of topicalization known as a Clitic Left Dislocation (henceforth CLLD). Examples in (4), also from Spanish, show that CLLD can be iterative—an interesting possibility since no interpretive differences between (4a–4b) have been documented. (3)

Estas condiciones laborales no las acepta these conditions working NEG CL.ACC.3.FEM.PL accept-PRES ‘Nobody can accept these working conditions.’

(4a)

Plata, a ese mentiroso no le money to that liar NEG CL.DAT ‘I will not lend that liar money (again).’

vuelvo return​.pres​.​1sg

504

a prestar. to lend.INF

nadie. nobody

Information structure (4b)   A ese mentiroso, plata no le vuelvo a prestar. ‘I will not lend that liar money (again).’

As we see in (3), Spanish uses syntax to encode topic by setting the phrase Estas condiciones laborales apart, dislocating it to the left periphery. Morphology is also involved: The dislocated phrase is doubled by the accusative clitic pronoun las, matching the dislocated phrase’s φ feature features (FEM.PL).4 Languages such as Japanese, on the other hand, use morphological markers such as the particle -wa to encode topicality, as in (5). (5) Talking about John… John wa gakusei desu Kuno (1973)5 John WA student is ‘(Speaking of) John, he is a student.’

The sentence in (5) communicates information about John without necessarily implicating anyone else, thus being non-contrastive (Heycock, 2008) while indicating the theme of the sentence.

36.3.2  Contrastive topic Unlike the case of thematic focus, we associate contrastive topics with propositions not used exhaustively, meaning a hearer can find these alternatives relevant because they are not explicitly excluded (Büring, 2016). Krifka (2008a) considers them a combination of topic and focus, showing properties of both because we have a case of an aboutness topic that also contains a focus, thus indicating an alternative (Krifka, 2008a, p. 268). To distinguish (contrastive) focus from contrastive topic, Büring argues that focus relates declarative sentences to alternative propositions, whereas contrastive topic relates declarative sentences to alternative questions (Büring, 2016, p. 65). Thus, one function of contrastive topics is “to shift the topic of discourse from one item to another” (Neeleman et al., 2009, p. 31). An example from Japanese is shown below (example (6)), where Bill-wa constitutes a contrastive topic (it shifts the topic from John to Bill). (6) A: What did John eat at the party yesterday? B: Hmm, John-wa dooka sira-nai-kedo, Well, I don’t know about John, but…

(Neeleman et al., 2009, p. 31)

Bill-wa 8-zi-goro MAME-O tabeita Bill-WA 8-o’clock-around beans-ACC was​.eati​ng ‘As for Bill, he was eating beans around 8 o’clock.’

(yo) (PRT)

Büring (2016) further notes that answers to multiple wh-operators, as well as wh-questions including plurals, allow for contrastive topic answers, as shown in (7) for multiple wh-questions and (8) for questions including plurals. (The examples below were modified for space purposes.) (7) A:   What did Persephone and Antonio bring?    B:   [Persephone]CT brought the [gaspacho]F, but I don’t know about Antonio.

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(Constant, 2014, p. 12)

Tania Leal (8) A: Where do your siblings live? B: [My sister]CT lives in [Stockholm]F.

(Büring, 2016, p. 68)

Constant (2014) indicates that the context in (7A) ensures that the portions bracketed in (7B) will be marked with a particular intonation pattern or sentence-level stress. Constant also notes that speakers perceive a pause after the contrastive topic, although this pause may be reduced in fast speech. Analogously, the answers in (8B) are also more prominent. Other phenomena associated with contrastive topic are topic shifts (Constant, 2014), implicational topics, and scope inversion (Büring, 2016). Of these, topic shift is the most well represented structure in the L2/Ln literature, especially regarding the L2/Ln acquisition of nullsubject languages, which allow finite verbs to combine with unexpressed subjects (e.g., Italian, or Turkish). Enç (1986) notes that in null-subject languages, overt subjects and null subjects do not change the truth value of the sentence, so these can be ‘semantically redundant’ unless they appear in specific discursive contexts. Typically, overt pronouns are used in contexts when the subject has a contrastive/corrective function, an emphatic function, when a new referent is introduced, or in ‘yes/no contrasts’ (Enç’s (1986) terminology). An example of overt subject use from Turkish is found in (9). (9)

Araba-yι Ahmet yι-ka-ma-dι car ACC Ahmet wash.NEG-PAST ‘Ahmet didn't wash the car, I did.’

ben I

yιka-dι-m. wash.PAST-1SG

(Enç, 1986, p. 204)

In example (9), the overt pronoun ben serves a specific function: to contrast this referent with the DP Ahmet. For comparison, because English is a non-null-subject language, English speakers would use contrastive stress on the DP instead. Having reviewed the essential facts about (contrastive) topic and focus, let’s now survey two prominent analyses in the literature. For reasons of space, I focus on two analyses that have been defined as syntactic approaches to information structure. However, the reader is referred to Zubizarreta (2016) for a prominent account that carves a special role for prosody.

36.4  Theoretical analyses of focus and topic Because focus- and topic-marking strategies vary crosslinguistically, many theoretical accounts of these information-structure notions have been linked to specific languages or language families. However, there exist multiple calls for crosslinguistic explanations (e.g., Neeleman et al., 2009). A practical implication of this state of affairs is that most literature reviews must be selective by necessity.

36.4.1  Rizzi’s cartographic approach: the structure of the left periphery Rizzi (1997, 2004) proposed that the left periphery of the clause is the structural zone where discourse-related structures, including topic and focus, are articulated in multiple functional projections within the complementizer phrase (CP) layer. In Rizzi’s view, this proposal is a needed parallel to the articulation of verb phrase (VP) and tense phrase (TP), the other two main layers in the structural representation of the clause. The (expanded) left periphery thus represents an intermediary layer between propositional content expressed by TP and the superordinate structure articulating discourse notions. Rizzi proposes that the latter includes the specification of Force as well as other phrases, as specified in the tree structure below (10).

506

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(10)

Briefly, as (10) shows, ForceP specifies clause type, while Topic Phrase (TopP) can host topics such as CLLD in many Romance languages. Lower in the structure, Focus Phrase (FocP) hosts foci (such as fronted focus) and wh-phrases, whereas FinP marks finiteness. The asterisk by TopP indicates that this phrase can be recursive—unlike FocP, which can only appear once. This accommodation is necessary because many languages allow for multiple topics, whereas only one focus per sentence is possible. Rizzi claims iterative topics can occur because the phrase hosted by the second TopP is part of the comment of the first—a crucial assumption we will return to in the next section. Although the influence of Rizzi’s cartography is vast, the approach has been criticized for encouraging a dramatic proliferation of CP layers—a consequence antithetical to Minimalist views (e.g., Kempchinsky, 2013). Edmonds (2004) has even argued that layer proliferation has the negative repercussion of making notions such as topic and focus mere ad-hoc statements.

36.4.2  Lopez’s featural approach: the syntactic derivation of information structure López (2009) assumes that the language faculty is composed of syntax—the computational system combining sets of symbols into new sets and whose output is object Σ—and pragmatics—a computational module that takes syntactic object Σ as input and yields the annotated structure Σ[p]. Thus, Σ[p] constitutes the original syntactic object augmented with relevant pragmatic features: the information structure of Σ. Crucial to López’s approach is the place in the derivation where the pragmatic module intervenes, assigning its features to the syntactic object. Following phase theory (Chomsky, 2001), López proposes that the points of contact between syntax and pragmatics are the edges of so-called phases: vP and CP (FinP). López rejects the traditional definitions of topic and focus (as in Reinhart, 2006; Rizzi, 1997, inter alia), labeling them inadequate to coherently describe classes of constructions (López, 2009, p. 24). Instead, he suggests that (discourse) “anaphor” and “contrast” are the crucial features of information structure ([±a(naphor)]/[±c(ontrast)]). The two characteristics of discourse anaphors are: (i) they obligatorily take a local discourse antecedent (Villalba, 2000),6 and (ii) they are in a discourse-structural asymmetry with respect to their dependent. The second feature, contrast, opens up a variable in the quantification domain (Vallduví & Vilkuna, 1998). Table 36.1 shows how the combination of these features defines four constructions related to information structure.

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Tania Leal Table 36.1 Feature combinations and syntax-discourse structures in López’s (2009) database

[+anaphor] [–anaphor]

[+contrast]

[–contrast]

Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) Fronted (Contrastive) Focus

Clitic Right Dislocation (CLRD) Rheme (Information Focus)

This approach appealingly avoids treating focus and topic as syntactic categories, which otherwise must constitute lexical-functional items in the universal lexicon. The notion of topic is therefore replaced with the features associated. López sets out to improve on Rizzi’s model: An additional problem with Rizzi’s cartography is that of multiple (or iterative) topics, which, as we saw in examples (4a) and (4b), have interchangeable orders with no interpretive differences among them; this is unexpected if one follows Rizzi’s assumption that the second TopP constitutes a comment of the first. López’s approach avoids this issue by avoiding such assumptions. Although more research is needed to falsify the predictions made by Rizzi’s and López’s approaches to information structure, these have been used to determine linguistically principled learning tasks for L2/Ln learners.

36.5  L2/Ln theories of the acquisition of topic and focus A perennial concern in L2/Ln research is determining why certain linguistic modules, interfaces, operations, or even particular constructions are—comparatively—more difficult to acquire (Slabakova, 2009). An open question, then, is, what can account for this relative difficulty? Researchers in the generative L2/Ln tradition have proposed that difficulty arises in linguistically constrained ways; one such constraint concerns the linguistic interfaces involved. Since, in many languages, topic and focus involve the syntax–discourse interface, I review two proposals that hypothesize that this interface is particularly effortful, albeit for different reasons. The Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011) capitalizes on the theoretical distinction between modules internal to the grammar (e.g., syntax, morphology) and modules external to the grammar (e.g., pragmatics) to propose that structures at this interface will be particularly effortful. Sorace suggests that protracted acquisition at external interfaces is due to limited processing resources—rather than to differences in mental representations—on the part of bi-/multi-linguals. Importantly, the Interface Hypothesis does not predict this difference will be modulated by L1 transfer, meaning these differences should hold irrespective of L1–L2/Ln pairing. The second hypothesis proposes a significant role for an L2/Ln learner’s L1. Predating the Interface Hypothesis, Müller and Hulk (2001) have proposed that the similarity in the L1–L2/Ln pairing plays a role in the acquisition of external interface structures. As opposed to the Interface Hypothesis, Müller and Hulk suggest that when a bilingual’s languages “overlap” in their surface realizations of syntax–pragmatics structures, potential for misanalysis is heightened, such that the learner can show negative transfer. Following Kupisch (2012), I refer to this proposal as the Overlap Hypothesis. According to the Overlap Hypothesis, the way this negative influence takes place is constrained in specific ways: If a given language X contains a structure that can be analyzed in multiple ways, but language Y provides evidence for only one of these analyses, the learner can end up with the wrong analysis; the option present in both languages will be used inappropriately in the dual-option language. Though this proposal was intended for child bilinguals, other researchers have tested it with adult bilingual populations (e.g., Kupisch, 2012; Hoot & Leal, 2022). 508

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In what follows, I first review several studies that have investigated the acquisition of information and contrastive focus. In broad terms, this research demonstrates that the acquisition of focus structures is attainable, if difficult. The following section, analogously, centers on studies investigating the acquisition of topic realizations.

36.6  L2/Ln acquisition of (information and contrastive) focus 36.6.1  The L2/Ln acquisition of information focus Much of the research on L2/Ln acquisition of information focus has concerned the acquisition of Romance languages; L2/Ln Spanish is central to many of these investigations.7 Collectively, this work shows that the acquisition of focus is possible at higher proficiency levels, whether in terms of production (e.g., Leal et al., 2019), judgments (e.g., Gupton, 2017; Pladevall-Ballester, 2010), or processing (e.g., Hopp, 2009; Leal & Hoot, 2022; Reichle & Birdsong, 2014). This is surprising because integrating syntactic and pragmatic information has been argued to lead to protracted acquisition, as predicted by the Overlap Hypothesis (Müller & Hulk, 2001), or even insurmountable residual optionality, as the Interface Hypothesis claims (Sorace, 2011). Earlier studies, however, (e.g., Hertel, 2003; Lozano, 2006), did associate difficulty with these structures, raising the question of whether other factors are at play, such as the methodology employed (see §36.8), the proficiency of participants, or the particular L1+L2/Ln language pairing. One of the tasks in the often-cited study by Belleti et al. (2007) (VS Videos) also showed that near-native L2 Italian learners (English L1) overproduced in-situ focus ([S]FV), while L1 Italian speakers produced a majority of VS to indicate focus. Thus, in terms of the hypotheses tested, while early investigations did provide support for the Interface Hypothesis, more recent investigations have failed to confirm that information focus is particularly effortful. An investigation (Hoot et al., 2020) researching object focus by comparing three tasks (acceptability judgments, speeded production, and self-paced reading) found that methodology did not appear to be an important factor. The results from all tasks echoed each other, leading the authors to conclude that information focus marking on objects was not exceptionally hard to master. As we have seen, one key aspect of marking information focus is that it often involves not only syntax and pragmatics but also intonation—an underexplored aspect in the investigation of information focus. The studies noted above all focused on the syntax–pragmatics interface without testing any prosodic correlates of information focus, so open questions remain regarding prosody. One of the few inquiries into this aspect is a study by Fujimori et al. (2022), which studied the development of prosody when acquiring L2 English focus. Using three different instruments that investigated comprehension, perception, and production, Fujimori and colleagues show that L2 learners of English (L1 Japanese) display a developmental pattern. To wit, only the most advanced learners behaved in ways comparable to the L1 English speakers, while low-proficiency learners showed difficulty with perception and production alike. Yet even advanced learners evidenced difficulty with the production task, leaving open questions regarding ultimate attainment.

36.6.2  The L2/Ln acquisition of contrastive focus While investigations devoted to contrastive focus are somewhat less substantial than those regarding information focus, they show, overall, that contrastive focus does not appear to be a site of inexorable optionality either. As with information focus, previous work explores languages like Spanish, English, and French, which mark focus either syntactically or prosodically; there has been less research on languages that mark contrastive focus morphologically. Including a battery of information-structure constructions, Slabakova et al. (2012) used López’s (2009) featural framework to test the acquisition of contrastive (fronted) focus (FF) alongside con509

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structions like CLLD in L2 Spanish using a bi-modal (text/audio) acceptability judgment task. CLLD and FF show interesting similarities and differences in Spanish: CLLD occurs in contexts where the dislocated phrase is a topic, while FF has a dislocate that has not been previously mentioned (and hence constitutes the focus). As we saw in §36.3.1, CLLD requires a doubling clitic, while FF does not. Learners in Slabakova et al.’s study showed that FF did not overly challenge learners, who showed a significant distinction between contexts licensing CLLD and FF. A similar investigation of L2 Bulgarian (Ivanov, 2012) concluded similarly, as advanced learners behaved like their L1 counterparts when comparing clitic-doubled and no-clitic structures, corresponding to CLLD and FF. Furthermore, an investigation by Leal (2016) showed that L2 Spanish learners (L1 English) evince knowledge of the ordering restrictions in the Spanish left periphery. As reviewed earlier, topic and focus can co-occur, but when they do, they generally follow the order topic > focus. The learners in this study (n=120) showed no difficulty with this audiovisual rating task, though these structures are not taught in the L2 classroom. Judy (2015), using a context-matching felicitousness task, found that L1-Farsi/L2-Spanish learners converged with L1 speakers on their judgments of contrastive focus. The L2 learners’ behavior in an online task also displayed sensitivity to contextual distinctions, albeit a delayed one. In a self-paced reading task about contrastive focus, Judy found the L2 learners were sensitive to contextual felicity in the post-critical region. Further evidence comes from Reichle and Birdsong (2014), who investigated the acquisition of contrastive focus in L2 French using ERPs—a methodology through which researchers measure voltage changes in a participant’s scalp, reflecting electrical activity in the brain cortex. Crucial is the authors’ assumption that contrastive focus places a greater cognitive burden because, unlike information focus, it requires that a set of referents be active in working memory—a difference they predicted would be reflected in different ERP signatures. The authors used focus-marking c’est clefts, a common way to mark both information and contrastive focus in French. Participants were presented with pictures of household items as contextual prompts, followed by question-and-answer pairs presented visually. Stimuli for information focus c’est clefts followed a wh-question such as C’est quoi qu’on voit sur la table? (‘What is it that we see on the table?’), while contrastive focus answers were presented under a question such as C’est un journal ou un marteau qu’on voit sur la table? (‘Is it a newspaper or a hammer that we see on the table?). Results showed, as predicted, a significant effect of focus condition at the midline and lateral regions (evident in an early increase in negativity for contrastive focus), but no significant effect of group or interactions: learners behaved like the L1 group. Thus, L2 French learners (L1 English) evinced L1-like processing signatures for these focus types. Finally, evidence that the prosodic correlates of contrastive focus can be acquired comes from a study from Takahashi et al. (2018), regarding the L2 acquisition of contrastive focus by L2 Mandarin Chinese speakers. Via processing and production tasks, their results showed that learners could use prosodic cues in their processing and production of focus, although their production—mirroring the results of Fujimori et al. (accepted)—differed from L1 prosodic marking of contrastive focus. If focus structures don’t seem to pose exceptional complications in L2/Ln acquisition, then what about topic?

36.7  L2/Ln acquisition of (thematic and contrastive) topic 36.7.1  The L2/Ln acquisition of thematic topic Studies about the acquisition of thematic topic have concentrated on dislocations, such as CLLD or its much-less-frequent counterpart, CLRD (Clitic Right Dislocation). This research, conducted in L2/ Ln French (Donaldson, 2011), Bulgarian (Ivanov, 2009), Italian and Romanian (Smeets, 2019), and Spanish (Leal, 2016, 2018; Liceras et al., 1992; Slabakova et al., 2012), has demonstrated that this construction is not particularly difficult to acquire, even when comparing L2 learners to L1 speak510

Information structure

ers in their processing signatures (Leal et al., 2017) and under high- and low-processing pressure (Sequeros-Valle et al., 2020). One investigation, using a written production task and a selection task, stands out in this context because the author concluded that CLLD was a site of optionality for L2 Spanish learners (Valenzuela, 2006). Slabakova and Ivanov (2011), however, attribute this difference to the learners’ lack of sensitivity to a semantic contrast calculated at the syntax–semantics interface (i.e., specificity), rather than lack of knowledge of discourse-related distinctions. Previous investigations on the L2/Ln acquisition of CLLD shed some light on additional factors. One of the interesting findings of Leal et al. (2017) was that, although proficiency modulated the target-like processing of CLLD, length of Spanish study did not. More interestingly, perhaps, study abroad (measured in months) did show a correlation with RTs, modulating the magnitude of the effect. This finding raised questions about the types of input L2 learners receive in the classroom, as opposed to what happens in more naturalistic situations such as study abroad. In a follow-up study, Leal and Slabakova (2019) recorded and tallied instances of CLLD in three advanced Spanish L2 classrooms, finding that rates of CLLD were lower than those recorded in native-speaker corpora (Brunetti et al., 2011). Additionally, they found only a couple of examples of CLLD in eighteen textbooks (nine beginning, eight intermediate, one advanced), and no substantial grammatical explanations, showing that, although classroom input provided fewer exemplars of CLLD, the construction could still be acquired successfully. While none of the structures examined so far suggest that acquiring syntax-discourse structures involving topic and focus is inexorably destined for optionality, evidence from contrastive topic structures, such as topic shift, paint a more complicated picture.

36.7.2  The L2/Ln acquisition of contrastive topic As mentioned in §36.3.2, among the structures that instantiate contrastive topic is topic shift—a structure that has been studied in the context of null vs. overt pronoun use. To summarize: null pronouns appear in non-contrastive contexts, whereas overt pronouns are used in contrastive/corrective, emphatic, or ‘yes/no’ contrast contexts. Evidence that acquiring topic shift can present challenges comes from Gürel (2006), who investigated end-state L2 learners of Turkish (L1 English) who had been living in Turkey for at least a decade. Gürel used four tasks, one of which investigated contrastive topics (picture selection task). While L2 Turkish learners were able to learn the pragmatic constraints of the null pronoun pro, they chose overt subjects in contrastive contexts at a significantly lower rate than L1 Turkish speakers did. Another study showing difficulty in the acquisition of contrastive topics is Paradis and Navarro (2003), who provide some of the few studies we have on child L2/Ln acquisition. Using the CHILDES database, the authors analyzed, in a longitudinal fashion, the production of two Spanish monolingual speakers and one bilingual child (Spanish-English). Paradis and Navarro found the two monolingual children could already approximate an adult-like percentage of null vs. overt pronouns at two years of age and, moreover, their production of overt subjects accorded with the aforementioned pragmatic factors supporting overt pronouns. The bilingual child, however, overproduced overt subjects; of those produced, many did not conform to said pragmatic determinants. These results are echoed in research by Pinto (2007), who in her analysis of two Dutch-Italian child bilinguals (1;9–4;1 and 2;9–3;9) found that they were late in producing overt subjects and, when they did, produced them (especially first- and third-person singular) in contexts where these were not pragmatically adequate.8 Pinto, who used Müller and Hulk (2001) as a departure point, also raised an interesting methodological issue: Given that children’s theory of mind differs from adults’, it is challenging to determine “pragmatically adequate” uses, even when the researcher has access to the relevant conversational turns. Sorace et al. (2009) also documented difficulty producing topic shift. Focusing on child L1/L2 Italian with two types of child bilinguals (English-Italian and Spanish-Italian), Sorace and colleagues 511

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found that children in both groups accepted a greater percentage of null subject pronouns in [+topic shift] conditions, showing that contrastive topics are challenging. Notably, they also documented that monolingual Italian children between 6 and 7 years of age were still significantly different from adult controls: they chose more overt pronouns in topic maintenance [–topic shift] contexts, echoing similar results with monolingual Spanish children (Shin & Cairns, 2009). By contrast, Rothman’s investigation of L2 Spanish (2009) used three tasks, two testing the suitability of overt subjects in situations where the overt subject is expected because it was emphasized (context-matching felicitousness judgment task) or because it appeared in a contrastive topic situation (pragmatic context translation task). Participants included Spanish L1 speakers, and intermediate and advanced L2 learners of Spanish (L1 English). In both tasks, advanced learners performed within the range of natives, while intermediate learners struggled with the distribution of overt vs. null pronouns. This suggests that L2 development plays a role in acquiring structures that instantiate contrastive topic. Other studies also suggest that topic shift can be acquired at advanced proficiency levels (Bel & García‐Alcaraz, 2015; Jegerski et al., 2011). Moreover, research using variationist approaches has also unveiled links between topic shift and the effects of verbal Tense-Mode-Aspect on the expression of subjects in L2 Spanish (e.g., Gudmestad & Geeslin, 2010) and, crucially, showed that L2 Spanish learners, like L1 Spanish speakers, show sensitivity to discourse constraints (Geeslin & Gudmestad, 2011). Thus, in the context of contrastive topic, the research shows that producing overt subjects in pragmatically appropriate contexts can challenge learners, although evidence exists suggesting that this difficulty is not insurmountable.

36.8  Methodological issues in investigations of information structure So far, we have seen that studies employing a variety of methodologies have shown evidence that acquiring information structure is possible, with proficiency often playing an important role in L2/Ln development. This is not to say that methodological issues are not at play. As Uth and García-García (2018) note, many researchers believe methodology (both the use of divergent methodologies among studies and the lack of appropriate methodological discussion within theoretical investigations) lies behind many issues central to the theorizing and empirical investigation of information structure. Add to this the fact that the database of L1–L2/Ln pairs is relatively small, and there is a need to research less-studied languages, especially those marking focus morphologically. Furthermore, although we do have some evidence of processing from self-paced reading tasks (Leal & Hoot, 2022) and ERPs (Reichle & Birdsong, 2014), there is room for more investigations exploring both prosodic and temporal aspects of acquiring and processing focus structures, including using methodologies such as eye-tracking or ERPs. As Ionin and Luchkina (2018) aptly note, studies focusing on interface phenomena such as information structure should be highly controlled. In their study, they show that, although (offline) acceptability judgments of scope in Russian agreed with introspections from the literature, more controlled experiments show divergence with these data. While this is not to say that acceptability judgments cannot capture interface phenomena, triangulation of methods is particularly important when investigating information structure (see Hoot et al., 2020 for a thorough discussion of the benefits of triangulation).

36.9  Conclusion and future directions We reviewed how acquisition of topic and focus unfolds in L2/Ln acquisition. The four phenomena sampled in this chapter were information focus, contrastive focus, thematic topic, and contrastive topic. This literature survey shows that research on information structure is no longer an underexplored area in L2/Ln acquisition. Related research has increased substantially in the last two decades, partly in response to proposals like the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011). 512

Information structure

An insight we gain from this review concerns gaps in the literature. First, outside the investigation of contrastive topic, we have little evidence of how child bilinguals acquire and process other information-structure types. This is also true in terms of L1 acquisition, which can help us determine whether there is (dis)continuity in the acquisition of these structures. Second, there is a need for research with a wider language database (Spanish and English being overrepresented in the literature) and with learners in non-classroom contexts. Specifically, there is a paucity of studies involving languages that mark information structure morphologically, such as L2/Ln Japanese, Korean, or Chadic. Finally, there is a need to expand the database in terms of methodologies that can account for the integration of prosodic information as well as how topic and focus are processed. In terms of ultimate attainment, the data from these studies shows that, overall, the instantiations of topic and focus that have been investigated in the L2/Ln literature do not seem to be associated with inexorable optionality or non-convergence—a remarkable outcome because these structures require integrating information across linguistic modules (e.g., syntax, pragmatics, phonology). Furthermore, many of these structures and word orders are vanishingly rare (e.g., CLRD, or VOS/ VSO in Spanish) and rarely taught in the L2/Ln classroom (e.g., Leal & Slabakova, 2019). As it pertains to the hypotheses tested, the results are somewhat mixed because, although convergence has been documented for each of these focus and topic types, the literature review reveals that not all instantiations of topic and focus are acquired at the same rates; some areas show more discrepancies than others. Results from information focus and, especially, contrastive topic are more divided, leaving open questions regarding ultimate attainment and the influence of other factors. These results pose challenges for the Interface Hypothesis, since acquisitional difficulty is proposed to affect all syntax-interface structures and has been documented for internal interfaces such as syntax–morphology (White, 2011). Although it remains an open question whether it is possible fully acquire (external) interface phenomena, researchers such as Laleko (2021) have suggested that focus increases activation of the focused element in short-term memory, thus facilitating processing. Future research using triangulated methodologies might help us determine whether focus is indeed facilitatory, while also determining what other factors play a role in acquiring these structures. Additionally, as has been claimed for L1 studies, this methodological emphasis might go a long way into resolving some of the discrepancies found at the present time (Uth & García-García, 2018).

Notes 1 See Krifka (2008b) for further (not arachnid-centric) examples. 2 To illustrate how the term ‘variable’ is used in the literature, take the following question-answer pair (from López, 2009): A: What did John buy? B: John bought furniture.

3 4 5 6 7

Note that the wh-word “what” in context in A left a variable (x) open ({x | John bought x}), which is resolved by B (x=furniture). Neeleman and colleagues (2009) claim contrast “is conditional upon the presence of either [topic] or [focus].” (p. 16). Prosody is also implicated—Feldhausen (2016) has shown that such dislocations in Spanish are marked by a high-edge tone and occasionally accompanied by a pause. Kuno (1973) notes the two uses of -wa, one of which is thematic use (see (2)), while the second use is contrastive. We will return to this in section 36.3.2. Briefly, anaphors should be explicitly mentioned in the discourse or else be abundantly prominent in the context. They cannot serve as answers to wh-questions. A confounding factor when investigating L2/Ln Spanish concerns discrepancies between descriptions in the syntactic literature and experimental results. For space reasons, I don’t survey this situation here. Interested

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Tania Leal readers are encouraged to read Hoot and Leal (2020) for extensive discussion of the subject, which shows that in-situ orders (e.g., SVO) can be used to mark (narrow) focus on the subject. 8 Lozano (2009), using an L2/Ln corpus with adult learners, also found that third-person contexts—particularly those that involved [+human] referents—were especially difficult for learners in a written retelling task.

Works cited Bel, A., & García-Alcaraz, E. (2015). Subject pronouns in the L2 Spanish of Moroccan Arabic speakers. In T. Judy & S. Perpiñán (Eds.), The acquisition of Spanish in understudied language pairings (pp. 201–232). Benjamins. Belletti, A., Bennati, E., & Sorace, A. (2007). Theoretical and developmental issues in the syntax of subjects: Evidence from near-native Italian. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 25(4), 657–689. Brunetti, L., Bott, S., Costa, J., & Vallduví, E. (2011). A multilingual annotated corpus for the study of information structure. Paper presented at the Grammar and Corpora 2009 conference. Büring, D. (2016). (Contrastive) topic. In C. Féry & S. Ishihara (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of information structure (pp. 64–85). Oxford University Press. Casielles-Suárez, E. (2004). The syntax-information structure interface: Evidence from Spanish and English. Routledge. Chafe, W. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In C. N. Li (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 25–55). Academic Press. Chomsky, N. (2001). Derivation by phase. In M. Kenstowicz (Ed.), Ken Hale: A life in language (pp. 1–52). MIT Press. Constant, N. (2014). Contrastive topic: Meaning and realizations [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation]. University of Massachusetts Amherst. Donaldson, B. (2011). Left dislocation in near-native French. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33, 399–432. Emonds, J. (2004). Unspecified categories as the key to root constructions. In D. Adger, C. de Cat, & G. Tsoulas (Eds.), Peripheries: Syntactic edges and their effects (pp. 75–120). Kluwer. Enç, M. (1986). Topic switching and pronominal subjects in Turkish. In D. I. Slobin & K. Zimmer (Eds.), Studies in Turkish linguistics (pp. 195–208). John Benjamins. Feldhausen, I. (2016). Inter-speaker variation, optimality theory and the prosody of CLLDs in Spanish. Probus, 28(2), 293–334. Féry, C., & Ishihara, S. (2016). Introduction. In C. Féry & S. Ishihara (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of information structure (pp. 1–15). Oxford University Press. Fujimori, A., Yamane, N., Yoshimura, N., Nakayama, M., Teaman, B., & Yoneyama, K. (2022). Development of L2 prosody: The case of information focus. In T. Leal, E. Shimanskaya, & C. Isabelli (Eds.), Generative SLA in the age of minimalism: Features, interfaces, and beyond (Proceedings of GASLA 15) (pp. 137–156). John Benjamins. Geeslin, K., & Gudmestad, A. (2011). Using sociolinguistic analyses of discourse-level features to expand Research on L2 Variation in forms of Spanish subject expression. In L. Plonsky & M. Schierloh (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 2009 second language research forum: Diverse contributions to SLA (pp. 16–30). Cascadilla Press. Gudmestad, A., & Geeslin, K. (2010). Exploring the roles of redundancy and ambiguity in variable subject expression. In C. Borgonovo, M. Español-Echevarría, & P. Prévost (Eds.), Selected proceedings from the 12th Hispanic linguistics symposium (pp. 270–283). Cascadilla Press. Gupton, T. (2017). Early minority language acquirers of Spanish exhibit focus-related interface asymmetries: Word order alternation and optionality in Spanish-Catalan, Spanish-Galician, and Spanish-English bilinguals. In F. Lauchlan & M. C. Parafita Couto (Eds.), Bilingualism and minority languages in Europe (pp. 212–239). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Gürel, A. (2006). L2 acquisition of pragmatic and syntactic constraints in the use of overt and null subject pronouns. In R. Slabakova, S. A. Montrul, & P. Prevost (Eds.), Inquires in linguistic development: In honor of Lydia White (pp. 259–282). Benjamins. Hartmann, K., & Zimmermann, M. (2007). In place – Out of place: Focus in Hausa. In K. Schwabe & S. Winkler (Eds), On information structure, meaning and form (pp. 365–403). John Benjamins. Hertel, T. (2003). Lexical and discourse factors in the second language acquisition of Spanish word order. Second Language Research, 4, 273–304.

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37 SCALAR IMPLICATURES Shuo Feng

37.1 Introduction Scalar implicatures are inferences that arise when a speaker utters sentences such as (1a) and (2a). Each of the two utterances can have two interpretations, as in (1b-c) and (2b-c). (1) (2)

a. b. c. a. b. c.

Some students passed the exam. Not all students passed the exam. Possibly all students passed the exam. We ate three cookies. We didn’t eat more than three cookies. We ate at least three cookies.

In (1b), some is interpreted with an additional boundary that excludes all. This is an example of a scalar implicature arising from the scale , in which the informational strength ranges from weak to strong (Horn, 1972). According to Grice (1975, 1989), interlocutors are expected to be cooperative and provide as much information as needed, but no more than necessary (Quantity Maxim). Thus, if the speaker believes (1c) to be true and communicates cooperatively, the speaker should utter the more informative sentence All students passed the exam. The fact that the speaker chooses the weaker quantifier some suggests that this is a situation where the stronger quantifier is not true. The some but not all inference is called upper-bounded (pragmatic reading) since an additional boundary is imposed on the upper end of the scale. Interpretations such as (1c) are lower-bounded (logical reading) since there is a lower boundary but no upper boundary. Example (2) with numerals works in similar ways. Sentence (2a) rests on the scale (Horn, 1972). Numerical expressions have two interpretations: an “exact” or upper-bounded reading and an “at-least” or lower-bounded reading, as shown in (2b) and (2c) respectively. One interesting feature of scalar implicatures is the way they are influenced by the entailment properties of linguistic contexts. An upward entailing context licenses inferences from subsets to supersets (3a entails 3b), whereas a downward entailing context licenses inferences from supersets to subsets (4a entails 4b) (Chierchia, 2004; Ladusaw, 1979). It has been discovered that the “exact” interpretation of numerals is preferred in upward entailing contexts and that the “at-least” interpretation arises preferentially in downward entailing contexts (Panizza et al., 2009).

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Scalar implicatures (3) (4)

a. b. a. b.

If I go home, I’ll eat pizza with anchovies. If I go home, I’ll eat pizza. If I eat pizza, I’ll get sick. If I eat pizza with anchovies, I’ll get sick.

37.2  Theoretical accounts of scalar implicatures As we have seen from the examples above, the relationship between what is said and what is not said but implied is complicated when interpreting scalar implicatures. Different accounts of scalar implicature derivation have been proposed regarding different sequences of processes, as well as the cognitive costs of computing scalar implicatures. According to the default approach within the neo-Gricean framework (Chierchia, 2004; Gazdar, 1979; Horn, 1972; Levinson, 2000), pragmatic inferences are computed automatically as the default meaning, and they can be cancelled only if the context calls for it. In fact, scalar implicatures are a representative case of generalized conversational implicatures (GCIs), which are generally valid and can be derived without considering the context (Levinson, 2000). In other words, scalar inference is a one-step calculation and is relatively easy to compute. Moreover, Chierchia and colleagues argue that scalar implicatures are computed as an output of grammar (Chierchia et al., 2012; Fox, 2007). They propose that an implicit grammatical operator (either only or exhaustivity) is responsible for scalar implicatures. The only implicature generalization states that “a sentence, S, as a default, licenses the inference/implicature that (the speaker believes) only S’, where S’ is a modification of S with focus on scalar items” (Fox, 2007, p. 79). For example, the utterance Three apples are red licenses the inference that the speaker believes that Four apples are not red. In contrast, the nondefault approach proposed by post-Griceans (Carston, 1998; Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995; Wilson & Sperber, 2004), often labeled as the Relevance Theory account, claims that a successful interpretation of meaning is context-driven, i.e., deriving scalar implicatures is largely dependent on contextual relevance. Relevance is a matter of degree, i.e., the degree of how relevant an utterance is as well as how much corresponding processing effort is required. The less relevant an utterance is, the more processing effort is needed. What truly matters for this framework is that contextual factors must be considered when determining the relevance of an utterance and the need for a pragmatically enriched interpretation. Consequently, pragmatic enrichment is cognitively effortful and costly and is derived only if required to meet certain levels of relevance in the context. Much empirical evidence from children and adults appears to support the Relevance Theory account (e.g., Bott & Noveck, 2004; Breheny et al., 2006; Huang & Snedeker, 2009; Noveck & Posada, 2003; but see Grodner et al., 2010). A more recent context-driven framework, namely, the constraint-based approach, is proposed by Degen and Tanenhaus (2015, 2016). Unlike the default and the nondefault approaches, which assume that some information (e.g., literal or pragmatic meaning) is more privileged, the constraint-based account suggests that “the speed and probability with which an implicature is computed is a function of the contextual support it receives” (Degen & Tanenhaus, 2019, p. 24). The constraint-based account emphasizes that the processing cost is determined by probabilistic support in the linguistic and discourse context. That is, in the process of deriving implicatures, listeners integrate and weight various sources of information. When there is robust support from multiple cues, listeners compute scalar implicatures more rapidly and easily. When there is less support, listeners will take longer to derive an inference. Examples of contextual cues that affect the integration of multiple sources of information are the question under discussion and properties of the speaker (Degen & Tanenhaus, 2019).1 In addition to deriving scalar implicatures in the matrix clause, the computation of scalar implicatures in embedded clauses has become an important issue (Chierchia, 2004; Chierchia et al., 2012;

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Horn, 2005; Magri, 2011). Chierchia and colleagues argue that, contrary to the Gricean model, when an implicature is derived in an embedded clause “locally”, that implicature is calculated in the determination of the literal meaning of the embedding expression. Grammatical rules are responsible for scalar implicatures, and, therefore, “global” inference about the communicative intention of the speaker is not allowed. For example, the implicature in (5) is derived by a silent exhaustivity operator, which gives rise to the meaning in (6). (5) Fred thinks that John ate some of the apples. (6) Fred thinks that John ate some of the apples, and Fred thinks that John didn’t eat all of the apples.

However, according to the Gricean model, (5) cannot generate embedded implicatures such as (6), and the implicature of (5) is that Fred doesn’t think that John ate all of the apples. Although some empirical studies argue against the grammatical view of implicatures (e.g., Geurts & Pouscoulous, 2009), more empirical evidence is needed to better understand embedded implicatures.

37.3  Experimental research on the processing of scalar implicatures 37.3.1  Research methods for investigating scalar implicature derivation The most typical method of studying the derivation of scalar implicatures is sentence verification (also called evaluation or judgment) tasks, which were initially adopted by Noveck (2001) and continued to be a favored method in subsequent studies (Bott & Noveck, 2004; Bott et al., 2012; Feeney et al., 2004; Guasti et al., 2005; Papagfragou & Musolino, 2003, among others). The core of this classic method is to design test sentences in which a stronger scalar item would be informative and optimal, but a weaker scalar item is used. More importantly, such test sentences allow two identifiable outcomes (e.g., Agree or Disagree). For instance, Noveck (2001, Experiment 3) asked Englishspeaking children and adults whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement Some giraffes have long necks, which is pragmatically infelicitous, but logically possible. If the participants interpreted the sentence literally, they would agree with it; if they enriched the pragmatic reading, they would disagree. The results showed that approximately 87% of the children’s responses agreed with the sentence, whereas only 41% of the adults agreed, suggesting that the children were less likely to derive the pragmatic implicature of some than the adults were. This finding and the experimental paradigm have inspired many scholars to further investigate scalar implicature derivation with some modifications to the design. For example, one variation of this paradigm is to include training prior to the verification task in order to enhance participants’ awareness of pragmatic infelicity. Papafragou and Musolino’s training (2003, Experiment 2) included a puppet named Minnie who sometimes said “silly things”, and child native speakers were asked to help the puppet to say it better. If the puppet said, “This is a little animal with four legs” to describe a dog, the children were expected to offer a correction. If the children failed to correct the puppet, the experimenter would eventually correct the puppet by providing the appropriate description: “Minnie didn’t say that very well. This is a dog.” Compared with Experiment 1, in which the children received no training, the children with training in Experiment 2 were found to reject under-informative statements 52.5% of the time, a much higher proportion than the 12.5% in Experiment 1 but still less often than the adults. The results revealed that once the children were aware of the goals of the experiment and provided with contextual information that targeted the pragmatic inferences under investigation, their capability of deriving scalar implicatures improved considerably. Another modification is to record participants’ mouse movement in making different responses (e.g., Tomlinson et al., 2013). A typical setup for a mouse-tracking experiment is to place two response options in the top left and right corners. The cursor starts at the bottom of the screen in 520

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the center. Upon hearing or seeing a sentence, participants move the cursor to click on the desired response. Trajectory of the cursor from the bottom of the screen to the response is recorded. If the participants are confident in their response, the mouse paths would progress directly to the target. In contrast, if the participants have difficulty or hesitate about the target response, their mouse paths deviate from the direct trajectory toward the target. By employing the mouse-tracking method, Tomlinson et al. (2013) discovered that mouse paths were directed toward the target response when participants computed a lower-bounded reading for the scalar pair . However, for an upper-bounded reading, participants headed toward the lower-bounded response option prior to moving toward the upper-bounded response option. The results revealed that there were perhaps two steps in generating upper-bounded readings but only one step in generating lower-bounded readings. Although the classic sentence verification task is common, it has not escaped criticism. One such criticism involves the use of factually universal statements as test sentences, e.g., Some giraffes have long necks. This type of sentence is argued to be problematic because participants lack sufficient information to derive the implicature (Guasti et al., 2005). Some people may conjure up a subset of giraffes without long necks and accept the statement, whereas others may reject the statement due to having prototypical giraffes in mind. The relevant information regarding whether to derive an implicature or not is left to participants to evaluate, and consequently, the computation of the implicature becomes peripheral. Therefore, it is important to present information to participants with respect to the truth value of an all-statement in an experimental context, ensuring that sentences are assessed in the same domain. An example of such an experimental setup is the under-informative statement Some soldiers are riding a horse provided in a context where all five soldiers are riding a horse (Guasti et al., 2005). The truth value of All soldiers are riding a horse is explicit to the participants, making the pertinent information for deriving or not deriving the implicature readily available. Another criticism concerns the binary responses often found in verification tasks, i.e., participants are asked to respond either “Yes/Agree/Good” or “No/Disagree/Bad” to an under-informative sentence. Binary response tasks are argued to be problematic because of the restricted choices (Katsos & Bishop, 2011; Sikos et al., 2019). Interlocutors in natural conversation might respond to underinformative statements with “Yes, but…”, “No, but…”, or “Not quite” because an under-informative statement is neither entirely true nor false but pragmatically infelicitous. The binary options force interlocutors “to make a complex metalinguistic judgment about where to place the threshold for acceptability” (Sikos et al., 2019, p. 3). An answer of “Yes” or “No” in a binary judgment task can be very largely dependent on whether such a pragmatic violation can be forgiven or is severe enough to be rejected rather than, or in addition to, the participants being able to compute scalar implicatures. Empirical research has reported that both child and adult native speakers’ derivation of scalar implicatures is affected by the binary response tasks (Davies & Katsos, 2010; Katsos & Bishop, 2011; Katsos & Smith, 2010; Sikos et al., 2019). The two theoretical approaches discussed in Section 37.2, namely, the default and the nondefault approaches, make different predictions in terms of the temporal priority of semantic and pragmatic processing that should be evidenced in empirical studies. There is a line of research that measures participants’ reaction/response times to True or False answers to under-informative sentences in a binary response task (Bergen & Grodner, 2012; Bott & Noveck, 2004; Bott et al., 2012; Breheny et al., 2006; Feeney et al., 2004, among others). For example, Bott and Noveck (2004) discovered that deriving scalar inferences was not effortless and required extra cognitive effort, as shown by longer response times. Feeney et al. (2004) predicted that rates of logical responses would be correlated with cognitive capacity because suspending pragmatic inference is proposed to be cognitively effortful. The results confirmed this prediction and showed that logical responses to under-informative sentences were significantly slower than those to felicitous sentences containing some. The extra processing time revealed that undoing pragmatic inferences was cognitively demanding. 521

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Studies with high-temporal-resolution measures, such as visual-world eye-tracking studies, can provide a more fine-grained picture of how interpretation unfolds over the time course of online processing. In a typical eye-tracking study with the visual-world paradigm, participants’ realtime eye movements in response to visual displays of pictures or objects are recorded via an eye tracker, as they listen to or read the stimuli. Eye-tracking research with the visual-world paradigm has shown divergent results regarding the speed of deriving scalar implicatures: some scholars have found delays when integrating pragmatic interpretation, compared to semantic interpretation (Huang & Snedeker, 2009, 2011), whereas others have reported a rapid computation of the pragmatic reading (Breheny et al., 2013; Degen & Tanenhaus, 2015, 2016; Grodner et al., 2010; Sun & Breheny, 2020). In addition to the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm, another indirect and high-temporal-resolution measure that can shed light on incremental language comprehension is event-related potentials (ERPs), which measure electrical activity (voltage fluctuations) recorded on the scalp that are a direct result of a specific sensory, motor or cognitive event. In this paradigm, N400, a negative-going centro-parietal ERP effect, refers to negativity peaking around 400ms after the onset of a word; its amplitude decreases in size when the word fits the sentence better. For instance, unexpected words elicit larger N400s than expected words, e.g., the final word in John cut the ham with a sweater relative to John cut the ham with a knife. Thus, N400 has often been used to investigate semantic processing and integration. ERP studies on scalar implicatures have focused mainly on whether logically true but pragmatically infelicitous under-informative sentences elicit a larger N400 than optimal sentences that are both pragmatically and logically acceptable (Hunt et al., 2013; Nieuwland et al., 2010; Noveck & Posada, 2003). For example, Noveck and Posada (2003) found that underinformative sentences prompted a flatter N400 than optimal sentences and logically false sentences, indicating little semantic integration for processing under-informative sentences. However, a larger N400 in response to under-informative sentences was reported to be depended on external factors, e.g., individual pragmatic abilities and experimental context. Nieuwland et al. (2010) found that participants with high pragmatic abilities (measured by the Autism Quotient Communication subscale) showed a larger N400 in response to under-informative sentences.

37.3.2  The cost and time course of scalar implicature processing A large body of research on scalar implicatures has focused on children’s abilities to derive them (Feeney et al., 2004; Guasti et al., 2005; Huang & Snedeker, 2009; Noveck, 2001; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003, among many others). Studies have shown that preschool children often fail to derive scalar implicatures in sentences involving some at adult-like rates. Different accounts of children’s difficulties with scalar implicature derivation have been proposed. Processing accounts claim that children’s lower rates of scalar implicature computation does not stem from a lack of pragmatic competence, but from a lack of cognitive resources (Chierchia et al., 2001; Pouscoulous et al., 2007; Reinhart, 2004). From the traditional Gricean perspective, upon hearing an utterance containing some, as in Some giraffes have long necks, processing resources are needed at least to: 1) generate the basic meaning; 2) activate other unmentioned alternative readings (e.g., utterances with most or all); 3) evaluate the informativeness of the current situation; and 4) decide whether to negate the stronger statement in favor of the interpretation “not all”. In Pouscoulous et al. (2007), the availability of processing resources was manipulated by simplifying the complexity of the task. Specifically, in Experiments 2 and 3, in addition to removing distractors, participants’ response in the task was an action (instead of a verbal metalinguistic judgment), and the linguistic complexity of the scalar item was reduced by using a more frequent scalar item that had only a simple existential reading.2 The results demonstrated that once the processing burden was mitigated, children’s rates of rejecting under-informative sentences increased. 522

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In opposition to processing accounts, lexicalist accounts argue that limited processing resources cannot account for children’s difficulties in deriving scalar implicatures given children’s pragmatic sophistication in other areas and successful derivation of contextual alternatives (Barner & Bachrach, 2010; Barner et al., 2011; Foppolo et al., 2012; Guasti et al., 2005). According to lexicalist accounts, although children may know the meaning of some and all, what they still need to acquire is a prerequisite for the derivation, i.e., associating the two words on the same scale. That means that upon hearing an utterance with some, children do not attempt to search for the alternative reading with all since they have not yet lexicalized the scale. Barner et al. (2011) provided the first direct evidence in favor of lexicalist accounts over processing accounts. The crucial condition had three animals (a cat, a dog and a cow) that were all sleeping, and children were asked to answer two types of under-informative questions: “Are only some of the animals sleeping?” and “Are only the cat and the dog sleeping?” The results showed that the children tended to answer “Yes” to the first question; however, they did reject the second question. The children were able to compute the pragmatic inference when the focus element only and contextual alternatives were provided. The results suggested that the children’s failure to derive implicatures was due to their inability to generate relevant alternatives for the scale. According to pragmatic accounts (Davies & Katsos, 2010; Katsos & Bishop, 2011; Katsos & Smith, 2010), children’s high acceptance of under-informative sentences is misrepresented by binary response tasks. As mentioned previously, the acceptance or rejection of an under-informative statement depends on how tolerant the participants are of pragmatic violations of informativeness rather than, or in addition to, the computation of scalar implicatures. By adopting a ternary judgment task, Katsos and Bishop (2011) found that under-informative utterances were rated higher than false statements, but lower than felicitous sentences. This finding revealed that the children were sensitive to informativeness but tolerant of pragmatic violations. In other words, for the child participants, pragmatic violations of under-informativeness were not severe enough for a complete rejection. Studies on scalar interpretations with adults have focused on whether deriving scalar implicatures is effortful and demanding. Many studies have reported that computing scalar implicatures is costly due to increased cognitive effort (Bergen & Grodner, 2012; Bott & Noveck, 2004; Breheny et al., 2006; Huang & Snedeker, 2009; Noveck & Posada, 2003). This finding has been strengthened in a series of studies that used a dual-task paradigm to directly test the influence of cognitive load (Cho, 2020; De Neys & Schaeken, 2007; Dieussaert et al., 2011; Marty & Chemla, 2013). An example of the dual-task paradigm is, as in De Ney and Schaeken (2007), asking participants to judge a sentence (True or False) and simultaneously memorize dot patterns in a 3x3 matrix with three or four dots. The results showed that participants with increased memory load (e.g., four dots with a complicated pattern) were less likely to interpret sentences pragmatically than those who were not under cognitive source pressure. The authors concluded that deriving scalar implicatures was dependent on working memory and associated with more cognitive effort.

37.3.3  Deriving different types of scalar inference One notable feature among empirical studies of scalar implicature computation is that most of these studies have focused on the scalar expressions , while only a handful have investigated other scales, such as (Breheny et al., 2006; Chemla & Spector, 2011; Noveck et al., 2002), (Noveck, 2001), or (Papagragou & Musolino, 2003). The underlying assumption behind research using is that the derivation of this scalar implicature is representative of all scalar expressions (see Table 37.1 for an overview of a variety of scalar expressions). This assumption of uniformity among scales was not questioned until recently in work by Doran and colleagues and van Tiel and colleagues (Doran et al., 2009, 2012; van Tiel et al., 2016, 2019). Van Tiel et al. (2016) explored the rates of deriving scalar inference in 43 pairs of scalar items (adjectives, 523

Shuo Feng Table 37.1 Examples of a variety of scalar items (adapted from van Tiel et al., 2016, 2019) Category

Adjectives Adverbs Connectives Determiners Nouns Verbs

Examples Positively scalar

Negatively scalar













main verbs, auxiliary verbs, adverbs, and quantifiers). The category of positively and negatively scalar words is based on scalarity, which refers to the different types of boundedness elicited by the scalar words. Positively scalar words, such as some, have a lower-bounded reading, and the scalar inference not all contains a negative proposition. Negatively scalar words, such as not all, have an upper-bounded reading, and the scalar inference is positive. The authors presented participants with sentences including a weaker scalar item (e.g., intelligent on the scale < intelligent, brilliant >) and asked whether they were able to infer from the sentence that the corresponding sentence with the stronger scalar item was true or false. Their results showed that there were striking variations in the derivation rates among the 43 pairs, ranging from 4% for seven adjective pairs (e.g., and ) to 100% for and . The issue of whether the costly scalar inference can be generalized to other types of scalar words is further examined in van Tiel et al. (2019), which included seven pairs of scalar words (i.e., , , , , , , and ). Loosely modeled after De Neys and Schaeken (2007), van Tiel et al. (2019) manipulated memory load using a task that required participants to memorize different patterns of squares and divided participants into three groups (no-load, low-load, and high-load). The results showed that deriving the scalar inference of might, some and most (but not low, scarce and try) was affected by increased cognitive load. The authors attempted to explain the results by drawing on the notion of scalarity. According to this idea, positively scalar words, e.g., , introduce a lower bound, whereas negatively scalar words such as bring in an upper bound. The inference not all of the positively scalar word some involves a negation of the meaning of the utterance. Given that processing negative information is effortful (Geurts et al., 2010; Moxey, 2006), inferences based on positively scalar expressions are argued to be cognitively more demanding than those based on negatively scalar expressions. The conclusion is that not all scalar words behave in the same way, since the cognitive costs associated with deriving scalar implicatures are dependent on the type of scalarity and, thus, should not be generalized to all scalar expressions.

37.4  How do second language speakers interpret scalar implicatures? The issue of how L2 speakers interpret and process scalar implicatures has drawn attention from researchers during the last decade. On the one hand, unlike child native speakers, L2 speakers have mature mental representations of language-universal semantic and pragmatic forms because they have developed a full cognitive system. In other words, their L1 and the universality of pragmatic 524

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principles are likely to assist L2 speakers in deriving and calculating pragmatic inferences. On the other hand, according to the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011), the semantics–pragmatics interface is an external interface involving an interaction between grammar and extralinguistic domains—an interface that is argued to be problematic, even for L2 speakers at the phase of ultimate attainment. Sorace attributes learning difficulties at external interfaces to processing difficulties due to the limited cognitive resources of L2 speakers. Under the assumption that deriving scalar implicatures is effortful, L2 speakers might experience challenges in scalar implicature computation. Recent studies investigating learnability at the semantics–pragmatics interface have shown that, contrary to the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis, L2 speakers are successful in scalar implicature computation with various language pairings, at different proficiency levels, and with lexical items of different complexity (Feng & Cho, 2019; Miller, et al., 2016; Slabakova, 2010; Snape & Hosoi, 2018). In fact, L2 speakers have been found to be more likely than native adults to generate pragmatically enriched readings. For example, Slabakova (2010) tested how L1-Korean L2-English learners interpreted the scalar expressions some and all in two experiments. The first experiment used universal factual statements (e.g., Some elephants have trunks). The results showed that Korean learners of English computed the pragmatic reading of some more frequently in L2-English than in their native language, and they did so more often than native speakers of English. The appearance of a story context in the second experiment reinforced L2 speakers’ preference for scalar implicature derivation, as their percentage of pragmatic reading in the second experiment increased to approximately 90% (compared to 60% in the first experiment). Slabakova argued that L2 speakers’ bias for pragmatic readings was due to the difficulty of the logical calculation, which was challenging for L2 speakers. The logical calculation involves constructing alternative contexts to make the pragmatically infelicitous sentences acceptable, e.g., some elephants do not have trunks because of injury or inborn deficits. Unlike native speakers, Korean learners, with purportedly limited processing resources, were less able to conjure up alternative contexts to suspend the implicature and to accept some as some and possibly all. Hence, they rejected it more often. The ability of L2 speakers to suspend scalar implicatures was empirically tested in Feng and Cho (2019), who investigated L1-Mandarin Chinese L2-English speakers’ computation and suspension of the time adverbial scalar words sometimes and (not) always.3 Feng and Cho adopted the covered box paradigm (Huang et al., 2013), as shown in Figure 37.1. The participants were told that a picture was hidden underneath the black box. If the visible picture did not match the test stimulus, the match was expected to be under the box, and participants should select it. The authors found an asymmetry of interpretation between the two scalar expressions: L2 speakers computed and suspended the inference of sometimes at a native-like level, whereas they suspended the inference of (not) always more frequently and rapidly than native speakers. The findings

Figure 37.1 A test trial of the sentence stimulus Thomas sometimes went to school last week. (reprinted with author permission from Feng & Cho, 2019, p. 6)

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suggested that L2 speakers took different routes to suspend the two scalar expressions and that the computation of more alternative readings and recalculation in comprehending (not) always was cognitively demanding for L2 speakers. Chinese and Korean speakers’ successful derivation of scalar implicatures is not entirely surprising because they could be positively influenced by an approximate one-to-one mapping of the scalar quantifiers in Chinese/Korean and English (one lexical word in Chinese and Korean corresponds to the English some). What if scalar expressions in a speaker’s L1 negatively affected L2 acquisition of scalar implicatures, e.g., subtle cross-linguistic differences or the absence of a one-to-one mapping? For example, unlike the English some, which has both a partitive (some but not all) and a nonpartitive (some and possibly all) reading, the Japanese ikutsuka ‘some’ has only a nonpartitive reading and, thus, is more likely to be interpreted as some and possibly all. Influenced by the nonpartitive reading from L1, Japanese learners of English were predicted to be more likely than English native speakers to accept under-informative sentences by Snape and Hosoi (2018). Using a picture-based acceptability judgment task, Snape and Hosoi (2018) tested intermediate and advanced L1-Japanese learners of English, who were asked to respond “Yes” or “No” to questions such as “Are some of the strawberries in the red circle?” when a picture showed that 14 out of 14 strawberries were inside the red circle. The results suggested that, contrary to the prediction, both groups of L2 speakers were even more likely to provide a “No” response than English native speakers, indicating an absence of L1 influence. Spanish has two scalar expressions that are superficially comparable to the English some, i.e., algunos and unos. Algunos has an inherent partitive feature and usually triggers the pragmatic reading not all, whereas unos traditionally encodes the logical reading possibly all. For instance, in (7), if all the four dogs barked at the postman, the logical interpretation is desired. Thus, it is felicitous to use unos, as in (7a), but infelicitous to use algunos, as in (7b). (7) Context – All four dogs bark at the postman. a. Unos perros ladraron al cartero.  ‘Some dogs barked at the postman.’ b. *Algunos perros ladraron al cartero.  ‘Some dogs barked at the postman.’

(Miller et al., 2016, p. 131)

It was expected that English speakers might experience challenges in deriving scalar implicatures in L2-Spanish because Spanish and English do not have a one-to-one mapping of some. However, this turned out not to be the case. Despite having different scalar quantifier systems in their L1 and L2, L1-English L2-Spanish learners were found to be native-like in their offline interpretation of the two Spanish quantifiers (Miller et al., 2016), consistent with other L2 experimental work reporting L2 speakers’ successful derivation of scalar implicatures (Feng & Cho, 2019; Slabakova, 2010; Snape & Hosoi, 2018). However, the results from online tasks using ERP showed that bilingual SpanishEnglish speakers were insensitive to pragmatic violations online (Miller & Rothman, 2020). Cho (2022) also reported L1-Korean L2-English speakers’ online insensitivity to under-informative sentences in a self-paced reading task. Behavioral discrepancies arise when comparing data from studies that assess real-time processing and offline comprehension outcomes. Future studies should consider combining online and offline methodologies to better understand how language is represented in the mind. Slabakova’s (2010) pioneering work on L2 acquisition of scalar implicatures has been further discussed regarding the methodology (Dupuy et al., 2019; Mazzaggio et al., 2021). Dupuy et al. (2019) claimed that L2 speakers’ preference for the pragmatic reading of some was due to an experimental artifact. L2 speakers’ pragmatic bias was present in their experiment with a within-subject design in which the participants were tested in both their L1 and L2; however, with a between-subject design 526

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in which participants were tested in only one language, the pragmatic bias disappeared. The authors argued that being tested in both languages (using a within-subject design) stimulated L2 speakers’ awareness of pragmatic cues and increased their likelihood of deriving pragmatic inferences. In addition to the test design, L2 participants’ immersion experience in Slabakova’s study is argued to be another factor that contributed to the high rates of pragmatic readings (Mazzaggio et al., 2021). The Korean participants in Slabakova’s study were university students in the U.S. As a result of using English daily, they might have had more rapid access to the pragmatic reading and had stronger executive functions than monolinguals and unbalanced L2 speakers (Bouton, 1992; Bialystok et al., 2009). Therefore, Mazzaggio et al. tested L2 speakers who lived in the mother-tongue country under the assumption that this would make their L2 processing more effortful. The results showed that L2 speakers tested in their L1 were more likely to produce the pragmatic reading of under-informative sentences than when tested in their L2, suggesting that deriving scalar implicatures required additional cognitive effort.

37.5  Conclusions and future directions Recent years have seen a steady growth of L2 empirical studies on phenomena related to scalar implicatures at the semantics–pragmatics interface, and progress has been made in improving the methodologies used to test implicatures and scrutinizing the experimental results. Several pieces of evidence support the conclusion that L2 speakers can derive scalar implicatures regardless of different L1~L2 language pairings, proficiency levels, and complexity of scalar expressions. Nevertheless, the current state of the art calls for a thorough investigation on the variety of scalar implicatures in L2 acquisition. Specifically, more research is needed to explore L2 acquisition of different types of implicatures (e.g., numerals), various pairs of scalar words other than , and derivation of scalar implicatures in different languages. Additionally, further research should be undertaken in a larger context involving, e.g., common ground, perspective taking and the question under discussion, with careful control of the contextual aspects of the experimental stimuli. Methodologically, online research using a variety of empirical methods (e.g., eye-tracking and ERPs) could be useful to explore how processing resources play a role in L2 speakers’ derivation of scalar implicatures.

Notes 1 The derivation of implicatures depends on whether the implicature is relevant in the context of the question under discussion (QUD). For instance, in a context with five red apples, a QUD that focuses on all, i.e., “Are all the apples red?” would encourage the not all implicature more than the interpretation “Are any of the apples red?”. Properties of the speaker refers to the speaker’s epistemic state, especially the speaker’s knowledge and ability to assess the truth of informative statements. 2 Pouscoulous et al. (2007) investigated the computation of scalar implicatures in French, and the simpler quantifier is quelques. Although both certains and quelques in French are equivalents of some in English, certains is more complex than quelques since it is partitive, whereas quelques is simple existential (for further discussion, see Corblin (2001)). 3 The two scalar words belong to two types of scalar implicatures on the scalar . Generating an implicature from a weaker term is sometimes referred to as direct scalar implicature. An implicature inferred from the stronger term under negation, i.e., not always, is indirect scalar implicature.

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38 THE SYNTAX-PHONOLOGY INTERFACE Heather Goad and Lydia White

38.1 Introduction In generative linguistic theory, the grammatical domain is considered to be modular: it consists of autonomous components, including the lexicon, syntactic component, semantic component, and phonological component (Chomsky & Lasnik, 1977). The grammar is structured such that the syntactic component generates expressions that are interpreted by the grammar-internal components of phonology (PF) and semantics (LF) (Chomsky, 1995), as well as by grammar-external domains such as discourse. A mapping between different components or domains implies an interface, or point of interaction, between them. In second language (L2) research, there has been considerable interest in interfaces and the acquisition challenges attributable to them. For example, problems integrating material at the syntax-lexicon interface (e.g., Lardiere, 2000; Prévost & White, 2000), the syntax-semantics interface (e.g., Ionin et al., 2004), and the morphology-semantics interface (e.g., Slabakova, 2019) have been argued to underlie the seemingly intractable difficulties that L2ers have with functional morphology. Problems at the syntax-discourse interface have been argued to underlie difficulties that L2ers have with pronoun interpretation (e.g., Belletti et al., 2007; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006). In this paper, we consider the syntax-phonology interface in L2. This interface has been less well studied, despite the significant body of research that has been devoted to it in native speaker grammars (see Section 38.3.1). We will suggest that failure to acquire and/or use the L2 grammar in a native-like manner often reflects difficulties arising at this interface, resulting in phonological effects on both morphosyntax and clause-level syntax. Our goal is to highlight the importance of taking phonology into account when considering sources of explanation for non-target-like behavior in L2 (morpho)syntax.

38.2  Description of the linguistic phenomenon When learners are faced with a morphosyntactic element that is not overtly expressed in their first language (L1), they must make adjustments to one or more components of the grammar

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-44

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(functional syntax, phonology) as well as to the interface between these components, notably, how the morphosyntactic element is prosodically represented. Taking tense as an example, as far as the core syntactic component is concerned, when L2ers from a language like Mandarin without overt tense marking are exposed to a language like English, they must determine that English requires the feature [past] to be overtly expressed, unlike in the L1 grammar. As for the core phonological component, to appropriately produce past tense morphology in English, Mandarin speakers must adjust their L1 grammar to accommodate coronal stops ([t/d]) and consonant clusters in word-final position. Turning to the interface between these components, Mandarin speakers must discover that strings at the right edge of monomorphemic words are subject to different constraints from inflected words in English. For example, while monomorphemic [bænd] ‘band’ and inflected [bænd] ‘banned’ are superficially alike, the segment expressing past tense does not require place agreement with a preceding nasal, unlike in monomorphemic words; thus, [bæŋd] ‘banged’ is well-formed as an inflected form, but monomorphemic words ending in [ŋd] are illicit. Such differences indicate that English inflection is prosodically organized differently from the final segments in monomorphemic words. In Mandarin, inflection (aspect only) is not represented in the same manner as it is in English. This can lead Mandarin speakers to omit tense marking in English, even if L1 constraints on core components of the grammar (e.g., functional structure, syllable structure) have been overcome. In the case of clause-level syntax, one challenge is ambiguity resolution, as covert structural differences generated by the syntax must be identified. Relative clause (RC) constructions provide a case in point. In the English sentence Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony, the RC (who was on the balcony) can modify either the first noun (NP1: servant), referred to as high attachment (HA), or the second noun (NP2: actress), known as low attachment (LA). Languages differ in their preferred interpretation (Fodor, 2002; Jun, 2003), as well as in the strength of this preference; English, for example, has a weak preference for LA, while Spanish has a stronger preference for HA (e.g., Bergmann et al., 2008; Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988). Languages also differ in their default prosody, which correlates with their preference for LA or HA (Jun, 2003). Finally, phrasing can be impacted by rhythmic factors (Fodor, 1998; Gee & Grosjean, 1983) and speech rate (Jun, 2003). The challenge for L2 learners is to detect and appropriately interpret the prosodic cues to constituency in spoken language, given the contexts in which potentially ambiguous sentences are uttered. In sum, the linguistic phenomena described above illustrate how the syntax-phonology interface has implications for different aspects of the grammar and, as we detail below, for acquisition.

38.3  Theory and background 38.3.1  Theoretical analyses A body of work at the syntax-phonology interface in native speaker grammars has observed that phonological activity is sensitive to prosodic domains that are mapped from – though not necessarily isomorphic with – syntactic domains (Chomsky & Halle, 1968). This observation forms the core of Prosodic Phonology (Hayes, 1989; McCarthy & Prince, 1995; Nespor & Vogel, 1986; Selkirk, 1978, 1986), which posits that sentences, which typically form Phonological Utterances (Utt), are organized into prosodic domains like those in (1).

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The syntax-phonology interface (1) Phonological Utterance (Utt) | Intonational Phrase (IP) | Phonological Phrase (PPh) | Prosodic Word (PWd) | Foot (Ft) | Syllable (σ) | Mora (μ)

Prosodic Phonology will be central to our discussion of the syntax-phonology interface in L2 (Section 38.3.2), in part because there are robust differences in phonological profile depending on the functional versus lexical status of morphemes and words (Nespor & Vogel, 1986; Peperkamp, 1997; Selkirk, 1996). To illustrate, in most languages, a lexical word must meet a minimal size requirement to be a well-formed prosodic word (PWd) (McCarthy & Prince, 1995). English respects this constraint: lexical words cannot be smaller than a bimoraic foot: (μμ)Ft, as shown in (2a). Articles, however, do not satisfy this constraint, suggesting that they do not form PWds. Rather, they are clitics, organized directly by the Phonological Phrase (PPh) that contains their lexical host, shown in (2b) (Selkirk, 1996). Consistent with this representation, articles are not stressed. (2) a. b.

[(pɪ́μtμ)Ft]PWd ‘pit’ [(pɪ́μtiμ)Ft]PWd ‘pity’ *[(pɪ́μ)Ft]PWd [əμ [(pɪ́μtiμ)Ft]PWd]PPh ‘a pity’

Functional elements are prosodified in different ways, reflected, in part, in their phonological behavior (Selkirk, 1996). Further, the same morphosyntactic element can be prosodified in different ways across languages (e.g., Zec, 2005). For example, articles are often phonological clitics but they differ in how closely bound they are to their hosts. In English, articles are free clitics; they link directly to PPh (Selkirk, 1996), as shown in (3a). As a result, an adjective can appear between the clitic and noun. In Turkish, indefinite bir, which has been analyzed by some researchers as an article (e.g., Kornfilt, 1997), is an affixal clitic: it is adjoined to the PWd of the nominal host (Goad & White, 2009), as shown in (3b). Consequently, the clitic-noun sequence cannot be interrupted by an adjective. Turning briefly to inflection, in English, inflectional morphology is organized as an affixal clitic, but in Mandarin, it appears inside the PWd of its host, as an internal clitic (Goad & White, 2006; Goad et al., 2003); see (4a–b). (3) Articles:  a. English: Free clitic: b. Turkish: Affixal clitic: [ə [gʊd]PWd [bʊk]PWd]PPh   [[iyi]PWd [bir [kitap]PWd]PWd]PPh a good  book good  a book ‘a good book’ ‘a good book’

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Heather Goad and Lydia White (4) Inflection: a. English: Affixal clitic: b. Mandarin: Internal clitic: [[bæŋ]PWd d]PWd   [bɑŋ1 lə0]PWd bang past help perf ‘banged’ ‘helped’

Concerning the interface between clause-level syntax and phonology, syntactic ambiguity is resolved at PF, via prosodic cues to phrasing. Consider the syntactic representations for the RC constructions discussed earlier: the RC is either attached low, embedded within the complex NP, as in (5a); or it is attached high, as a sister to the NP that contains both nouns, (6a). The relevant prosodic domain for resolving the ambiguity is the Intonational Phrase (IP), the right edge of which is marked by a boundary tone, final lengthening, and often a pause (Jun, 2003). Jun (2003) shows that when an IP boundary follows NP1, as in (5b.i), or when the sentence is produced with default prosody (no boundary after NP1 or NP2), as in (5b​.​ii), the sentence is judged by English speakers to involve LA.1 In contrast, when an IP boundary follows NP2, as in (6b), the sentence is judged to involve HA. (5) Low attachment: a. Syntactic phrasing: Someone shot [NP the servanti of the actressj [RC whoj was on the balcony]] b. Phonological phrasing: i.  [Someone shot the servanti]IP [of the actressj whoj was on the balcony]IP ii. [… the servanti of the actressj whoj …]IP (6) High attachment: a. Syntactic phrasing: Someone shot [NP the servanti of the actressj] [RC whoi was on the balcony] b. Phonological phrasing: [Someone shot the servanti of the actressj]IP [whoi was on the balcony]IP

In sum, prosodic domains allow for principled expression of morphosyntactic differences between lexical words and function words, as well as between different kinds of functional morphemes. They also allow for the expression of syntactic differences between the interpretations of ambiguous sentences. As we shall see, these differences can be critical in accounting for the behavior of L2 learners.

38.3.2  Relevant SLA theories In SLA research, difficulties with many of the constructions we examine from the syntax-phonology interface have been explored from the perspective of other interfaces. In the case of the syntaxlexicon interface, apparent problems with L2 morphology have been attributed to lexical retrieval or mapping problems of various kinds (e.g., Lardiere, 2000; Prévost & White, 2000). In the case of the syntax-discourse interface, issues relating to interpretation have been shown to arise even in near-native speakers (e.g., Belletti et al., 2007; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006). In both cases, it has been argued that properties pertaining to interfaces are subject to more persistent difficulties or are harder to acquire than properties relating to non-interface domains, such as core syntax. This same conclusion was arrived at for the syntax-phonology interface, beginning with research in variationist sociolinguistics (Bayley, 1996; Wolfram & Hatfield, 1984). This work focuses on the intersection of t/d deletion and past tense inflection in English. Native speakers variably delete t/d from the right edge of words, but deletion is disfavored when t/d marks tense. Surprisingly, both Vietnamese- (Wolfram & Hatfield, 1984) and Mandarin-speaking (Bayley, 1996) learners of English show the opposite pattern: higher t/d deletion rates in past tense contexts than in monomorphemic words. These researchers propose that the challenge for learners lies in their need to acquire an 534

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obligatory morphosyntactic rule for past tense marking along with a variable phonological rule for t/d deletion, with the latter including conditions that curb its application in inflectionally complex words. Although Wolfram and Hatfield (1984) and Bayley (1996) propose that integrating material at the syntax-phonology interface is the source of the acquisition problem under study, their account is confined to explaining L2ers’ behavior when syntax and phonology collide: inflection that is marked with t/d involves the same segments implicated in t/d deletion. The Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH) (Goad & White, 2004; Goad et al., 2003; see Goad & White, 2019, for a review) is broader in scope. The PTH proposes that integrating material at the syntax-phonology interface is a source of acquisition problems, particularly relating to inflection, rather than such problems being attributable to the syntax alone (e.g., claims for the absence of tense; Hawkins & Liszka, 2003) or to the phonology alone (e.g., stemming from the absence of clusters or phonotactic complexity at the right edge of words; Lardiere, 2003; Young, 1991) (see Section 38.6.1). At the core of the PTH is the theory of Prosodic Phonology (Section 38.3.1): transfer of L1 prosodic representations impacts the realization of functional morphology in the interlanguage grammar. L2 prosodic representations which are disallowed in the L1 are particularly challenging to acquire. As a result, even when L2 morphosyntax can be demonstrated to have been acquired and correctly represented, the transfer of L1 prosodic constraints may make it difficult for learners to produce functional morphology in a target-like manner. In other words, the interface between syntax (appropriate for L2) and prosody (constrained by L1) leads to non-target production (omission, variable suppliance of inflection tied to phonological context, infelicitous stressing of function words, etc.; see Section 38.6), such that it looks as if learners have not acquired the L2-appropriate morphosyntax when, in fact, they have.

38.4  Methodological approaches We briefly address three issues relating to methodology that arise when investigating the syntaxphonology interface. The first concerns the need for aurally presented stimuli. In Section 38.3.1, we mentioned that prosodic cues to phrasing can resolve syntactic ambiguity. Most studies in sentence interpretation, however, employ written stimuli. Although Fodor (2002) proposes that readers impose a default prosody when responding to written stimuli, we cannot actually tell what prosody readers assume (default or otherwise) and, in the case of L2ers, we also do not know whether their default prosody reflects the L1 or the L2. For this reason, it is essential to use aural stimuli where the researcher can control the prosody and thus, ideally, the expected interpretation. The second issue concerns the fact that, at the syntax-phonology interface, it is not just the phonology that needs to be assessed but also the syntax. If one relies on oral production data alone, omission of inflection may be seen, potentially misleadingly, as a reflection of defective syntax (see, e.g., Lardiere, 2000, and Prévost & White, 2000, for discussion). Thus, it will often be appropriate to rely on a combined task or multiple tasks. For example, Goad and White (2006) investigate past tense inflection in Mandarin-speaking learners of English. As mentioned, tense is not morphologically expressed in Mandarin. Regular English tense and participles (e.g., cleaned, have cleaned) share the same prosodic representation ([[kliːn]PWd d]PWd), so both should be impacted if prosodic transfer is implicated. In contrast, Hawkins and Liszka’s (2003) proposal for defective tense predicts problems only with tense. Goad and White’s experiment included a sentence completion task, where a written lead-in provided a context for completion and participants had to choose which completion was appropriate. This provided a baseline for their morphosyntactic knowledge. Participants then memorized what they had chosen and were subsequently required to produce it without orthographic input, allowing for an analysis of the prosodic factors influencing their productions. A similar two-pronged task designed to assess syntactic and phonological knowledge of tense was employed by Cabrelli Amaro et al. (2018) for Mandarin, Spanish, and Japanese learners of English. 535

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The final issue relating to methodology concerns the phonological shape of stimuli (e.g., length and segmental profile of word-final rhymes). Whether one is dealing with comprehension or production, stimuli need to be carefully controlled, depending on the precise phenomena to be investigated and the hypotheses as to how syntax, phonology, and prosodic structure intersect. Spontaneous production data are usually insufficient, since the relevant properties cannot be controlled for. Instead, elicited production may be required. Consider, for example, Austin et al. (2022) who examine prosodic transfer effects in Korean speakers’ productions of English agreement morphology. Korean does not mark agreement and Austin et al. show that the affixal clitic representation required for English is not employed elsewhere in the language. Tense, on the other hand, is overtly realized as an internal clitic: [mʌk-ʌss]PWd ‘eat’-past. If the PWd-internal representation for tense is transferred into the interlanguage grammar, learners should variably inflect stems, depending on their shape (see Section 38.6.1). Accordingly, the verbs employed by Austin et al. control for rhyme length, namely short stems (VC-final; e.g., [tæp] ‘tap’) versus long stems (VCC-final; e.g., [slʌmp] ‘slump’). Monomorphemic items that are segmentally parallel in shape to short-stemmed inflected forms (e.g., [læps] ‘lapse’; cf. [tæps] ‘taps’) were also included, since the former are, by definition, single PWds. Austin et al. report asymmetries in suppliance of agreement on short and long stems (in favor of short stems), supporting redeployment of the L1 representation for tense to represent agreement in the L2. Further, final [s/z] was produced more robustly in monomorphemic parallels, which suggests that the locus of the problem is prosodic transfer (syntax-phonology interface, affecting only inflected forms), rather than phonotactic transfer (core phonology, affecting uninflected and inflected forms alike).

38.5  Studies from other learner contexts The relationship between phonology and syntax has long been discussed in L1 acquisition research, with variable production of functional morphology tied to prosodic context (see Demuth, 2014, for a review). While the literature does not explicitly probe children’s prosodic representations of inflection, some findings suggest that prosodic differences between inflected forms and monomorphemic parallels may be implicated in the patterns displayed. For example, Song et al. (2013) observe that two-year-old English acquirers produce final clusters differently in plurals and monomorphemic parallels (rocks vs. box), leading the authors to propose that the main articulatory targets of the clusters in these words are distinct, inflectional /s/ in the former case and stem-final /k/ in the latter. In later work, Demuth (2014) suggests that this may indicate that children understand that inflection is not prosodified in the same manner as rightedge consonants in monomorphemic words, building on Selkirk (1996) and Goad et al. (2003). Prosodic representation may also be implicated in the results of Marshall and van der Lely (2006) on tense morphology in the productions of English-speaking children with SLI. Suppliance of -ed was much higher with inflected verbs ending in a phonotactically legal cluster (i.e., also found in monomorphemic words; e.g., [pækt] ‘packed’, cf. [fækt] ‘fact’) than with verbs ending in an illegal cluster (e.g., [hʌɡd] ‘hugged’). This may suggest that the children employ a PWd-internal representation for inflection, which is only possible when the inflected form could be a well-formed monomorphemic word (i.e., [pæk-t]PWd, parallel to [fækt]PWd). As for function words, Gerken and McIntosh (1993) observe that two-year-old acquirers of English have some understanding of distributional constraints on articles, even when they fail to produce them spontaneously. Gerken (1996) attributes omission to prosodic factors, demonstrating that children’s production of articles is higher when the article follows a monosyllabic verb (e.g., kicks) than when it follows a bisyllabic verb, with stress on the penult (e.g., catches). Gerken proposes that the article can be incorporated into a binary left-headed foot in the former case: (kícks the)Ft (píg)Ft, but that it is stranded outside the foot in the latter case: (cátches)Ft the (píg)Ft. Demuth and McCullough (2009) find the same pattern in spontaneous production data from four out of five English-learning 536

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children. The remaining child stressed articles, thereby allowing the article to form its own PWd, a pattern similar to one adopted by some L2ers (see Section 38.6.2). In sum, children face challenges with functional morphology that stem from prosodic limitations on their developing grammars. As we shall see below, the difficulties faced by L2ers are similar.

38.6  Critical review of SLA studies We first consider studies that propose phonological accounts for difficulties that L2ers experience with the production of inflectional morphology and function words. We then consider prosodic effects on sentence interpretation in L2 acquisition and use.

38.6.1  Inflection Problems with the production of L2 inflectional morphology are well documented (see Zobl & Liceras, 1994, for a summary). Target-like suppliance is variable, with omission reported to be the most commonly observed error. Omission can persist, even when other measures indicate that learners have attained a high level of proficiency in the L2, including target-like syntax (e.g., Lardiere, 1998, 2000; White, 2003). For many inflectional morphemes in English (the most commonly examined L2), protracted omission is somewhat surprising, as the contexts calling for past tense and plural marking are frequent in the input, and agreement and plural morphology are both marked by a perceptually salient consonant ([s/z]). Moreover, classroom learners are explicitly taught contexts for the marking of inflection in English (e.g., Cabrelli Amaro et al., 2018). In the absence of faulty syntax, other explanations for omission must be sought. We focus on studies that reveal phonological patterns in the contexts where functional morphology fails to be supplied, considering two sources of phonological effects. The first is the phonology proper: low suppliance of inflection stems from a problem at the level of syllable structure, which thereby impacts production of both inflected and similarly shaped non-inflected forms. In other words, the phonology impinges on morphosyntax without implicating an interface. The second is the syntax-phonology interface: low suppliance of inflection stems from the unavailability of the prosodic representation required for inflectional morphology in the L2. Lardiere (2003) provides a phonological account of production data from Patty, a fluent L2 English speaker whose L1s are Mandarin and Hokkien. Patty’s suppliance of tense and agreement morphology on lexical verbs is low (less than 6% for agreement and regular past). Lardiere proposes that omission of inflection is due to transfer of an L1 constraint against clusters, which Patty regularly fails to produce at the right edge of both monomorphemic words and inflected verbs. An account along these lines was challenged by Hawkins and Liszka (2003), who observe that omission of past tense t/d is much higher than omission of t/d from clusters in monomorphemic words in Chinese-speaking learners of English (data from Bayley, 1996, and Liszka, 2002). Hawkins and Liszka argue that this supports a syntactic deficit over a phonological deficit: according to them, the uninterpretable feature [upast] is absent from the interlanguage grammar of Chinese learners of English. Divergent results such as these may suggest that phonology is not the appropriate place to seek explanations for learners’ problems with inflection. We contend, though, that the solution lies at the syntax-phonology interface. According to the PTH, the manner in which inflectional morphology is prosodically represented in the L1 grammar impacts the ability to produce certain forms in the L2. To exemplify, Goad et al. (2003) and Goad and White (2006) argue that Mandarin and English differ in the way that inflection is prosodically organized: in Mandarin, it is represented as an internal clitic, whereas in English, it is an affixal clitic, shown earlier in (4). One consequence of the latter is that inflection is insensitive to the length of the rhyme in the final syllable to which it attaches, namely, short (VC-final; e.g., [[lʊk]PWd s]PWd ‘looks’) or long (VVC/VCC-final; e.g., [[haɪk]PWd s]PWd ‘hikes’, [[θɪŋk]PWd s]PWd ‘thinks’). We discuss the significance of this below. 537

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In an experiment targeting English agreement, Goad et al. (2003) found two patterns of production by Mandarin speakers. The first group showed variable suppliance of inflection, tied to stem length. Learners produced agreement morphology on average 68% of the time after short stems but only 9% after long stems. Although not target-like for English, inflection could be organized PWd-internally after short stems (i.e., [lʊks]PWd ‘looks’), using the representation that is available from the Mandarin grammar. As expected from this, suppliance of clusters at the right edge of monomorphemic words which, by definition, employ the same representation (e.g., [fæks]PWd ‘fax’) was similar (68%). The second pattern of behavior was across-the-board deletion of inflection. Learners in this group were sensitive to the need for a unified analysis of English inflection (i.e., one representation for stems of all shapes). However, since their L1 grammar does not permit inflection to be adjoined to the PWd, as required for English, inflection was deleted in all contexts, in contrast to clusters in monomorphemic forms (57% target-like). In short, the productions of L2 learners in both groups were constrained by the prosodic representation for inflection available in the L1 grammar. Similar findings have been reported in the nominal domain. Here, we focus on omission errors in the production of English plural inflection by Korean and Mandarin speakers. There are complex syntactic/ semantic conditions under which the morphemes used to express plurality in Korean and Mandarin (-tul and -men, respectively) can appear; both languages are more restricted than English (see, e.g., Hwang & Lardiere, 2013, for Korean; Li, 1999, for Mandarin; and Su, 2019, for comparison of the two languages). As with tense and agreement morphology, plural is often omitted in the L2 English of Korean and Mandarin speakers. An obvious source for omission is syntactic mismatches between the L1 and target grammars. However, Lardiere (2009) finds that Mandarin-speaking learners who have overcome L1 syntactic constraints on plural marking continue to omit plural from obligatory contexts in the L2. This leads us to ask whether the difficulty may, instead, lie at the syntax-phonology interface. Austin et al. (2022) explore this question. In addition to agreement morphology, they examine prosodic transfer effects in Korean learners’ production of English plural morphology. Asymmetries between short and long stems are observed in L2ers’ plural outputs (again, showing greater accuracy with short stems), supporting transfer of the L1 PWd-internal representation for tense for use in plural constructions in the L2. In sum, we have considered two phonological alternatives for the difficulties that learners experience with the production of inflection, one which attributes the problem to the phonology proper, and the other to the syntax-phonology interface. We have suggested that the second kind of account provides a better explanation of learner output. We turn next to function words where, in addition to errors of omission, we find errors of commission, some of which, again, motivate locating the problem at the interface between phonology and syntax.

38.6.2  Function words A wide literature has documented the types of difficulties that learners face with articles when their L1 grammar lacks them (see contributions to García-Mayo & Hawkins, 2009). As with inflection, omission is the most common pattern observed, and such errors have been attributed to challenges at multiple levels of the grammar: semantics (e.g., Huebner, 1985; Ionin et al., 2004), syntax (e.g., Trenkic, 2007), as well as to the grammar interfacing with discourse/pragmatics (e.g., Robertson, 2000; Trenkic, 2007). Alongside omission, we observe substitutions: one article for another (primarily definite for indefinite; Ionin et al., 2004), demonstratives and numerals for definite and indefinite articles (Goad & White, 2008; Robertson, 2000), and stressed articles for unstressed (Snape & Kupisch, 2010; Ueyama, 2000). While phonology plays no role in accounting for substitution of one article for the other, it may be implicated in the other types of substitution: stressed articles, demonstratives and numerals all form independent PWds; this representation provides learners with a way to circumvent the free clitic representation required for articles in English (see (3a)), if the latter is not available in the L1 grammar. 538

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Goad and White (2009) argue that this is the case for Turkish. Indefinite constructions in Turkish optionally contain bir which, when unstressed, is interpreted as the indefinite article and, when stressed, is interpreted as the numeral one (Kornfilt, 1997). Word order differences in DPs with adjectives indicate that unstressed bir does not employ the same representation as English articles (compare (3a) and (3b)). The canonical word order for Turkish is determiner + adjective + noun (e.g., bír iyi kitap ‘one good book’), but unstressed bir (bĭr) must follow the adjective (e.g., iyi bĭr kitap, good a book, ‘a good book’), indicating that it must prefix onto the noun that it modifies (as an affixal clitic): [[iyi]PWd [bĭr [kitap]PWd]PWd]PPh. In English, where adjectives have no impact on the location of articles in the DP, articles are organized higher in the structure: [ə [gʊd]PWd [bʊk]PWd]PPh. Goad and White (2009) used a story telling task to explore Turkish speakers’ productions of English articles. The following patterns were robustly observed, especially in DPs with adjectives: omission of articles; stressing of articles; and insertion of pauses or fillers immediately after articles, which interrupts the prosodic structure of phrases, thereby avoiding the target representation. In sum, Turkish speakers’ production of English function words is constrained by L1 prosodic structure. As was the case for inflectional morphology, this results in the inability to produce targetsounding (unstressed) articles in certain phonologically defined contexts.

38.6.3  Clause-level syntax So far, our examination of the syntax-phonology interface has considered how L1-based prosodic representations are implicated in problems that learners display with L2 functional morphology. Prosody also affects higher levels of structure, with interpretive consequences, at least for native speakers (e.g., Jun, 2003). However, prosodic effects on sentence interpretation in L2 have been relatively little studied, with some exceptions discussed below. We consider two areas where prosody has been argued to impinge on sentence interpretation: relative clauses and pronoun interpretation. In both cases, structures that are potentially ambiguous can be disambiguated by means of prosody (Section 38.3.1).

38.6.3.1  Relative clause ambiguity In research on relative clause attachment, the emphasis has been on ambiguous sentences like (5)–(6) above, where the RC can refer to either NP1 or NP2. As mentioned, there are crosslinguistic differences as to which interpretation is preferred: HA languages (e.g., Spanish, French) prefer NP1; LA languages (e.g., English, Basque) prefer NP2. Numerous studies have investigated the situation where the L1 and L2 differ in their attachment preferences, mostly using reading tasks (e.g., Dussias, 2003; Fernández, 2002; Frenck-Mestre & Pynte, 1997). Few studies have explored whether L2ers use prosody for disambiguation, in interpretation or in production. Concerning interpretation, two exceptions are Dekydtspotter et al. (2008) on Englishspeaking learners of French and Goad et al. (2021) on Spanish-speaking learners of English. Both studies manipulated constituent length and position of the prosodic break, as these have been shown to affect native speaker judgments (Fodor, 2002; Jun, 2003). For example, in a sentence like (7) (from Dekydtspotter et al.), a longer relative clause (with au centre-ville) prefers HA, in contrast to a shorter RC (without au centre-ville); in addition, a break after NP1 (secrétaire) favors LA while a break after NP2 (psychologue) favors HA. (7)

Nous adorons le secretaire du psychologue qui se promène (au centre-ville). we adore the secretary of​.t​he psychologist who SE walks in​.t​he center-town ‘We adore the secretary of the psychologist who is taking a walk (downtown).’

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Dekydtspotter et al. found no effect for RC length, nor for position of the break. However, one-third of participants, with higher proficiency in the L2, did show sensitivity to the break (see Liljestrand Fultz, 2007). Goad et al. found that both position of the break and constituent length had a significant effect on attachment preference, the latter to a lesser extent. Turning to production, de la Cruz-Pavía and Elordieta (2015) observed that L1 Basque speakers who are highly proficient in Spanish favored HA in sentences produced with default prosody, like native speakers; however, they produced significantly fewer breaks after NP2 (especially before longer RCs) and a high proportion of sentences with unexpected pitch contours. Fernández (2005) reported that bilingual Spanish-English speakers, regardless of language dominance, marked prosodic breaks differently in their two languages, but neither pattern was exactly like that of monolinguals. Taken together, these studies suggest that L2ers can come to understand that there is a relationship between prosody and syntax; specifically, that when a sentence is pronounced in a particular way, this favors a particular syntax, and hence a particular interpretation. They may, however, fail to achieve native-like prosody in production.

38.6.3.2  Pronoun interpretation A topic on which there has been considerable research at the syntax-discourse interface is pronoun interpretation in null subject languages like Italian. Native speakers prefer null pronouns to take subject antecedents and overt pronouns to take object antecedents (e.g., Carminati, 2002), as seen in (8) (indices reflect preferred interpretations). (8)

Monicai ha telefonato a Claudiaj quando Øi/leij era in ufficio. Monica has telephoned to Claudia when she was in office ‘Monica phoned Claudia when (she) was in the office.’

L2ers’ interpretations have been shown to differ somewhat from those of native speakers. In their examination of L2 Italian, Belletti et al. (2007) and Sorace and Filiaci (2006) argue that difficulties arise from L2ers not being able to fully integrate syntactic and discourse properties of the L2, such that they choose subject antecedents for overt pronouns to a greater extent than do native speakers. Stimuli in earlier experiments have not been presented auditorily, but their results may have been influenced by silent prosody, which participants assign in reading (Fodor, 2002). In this case, it could involve assignment of contrastive stress to an overt pronoun, which can lead to an ‘overturning’ effect, that is, to an increase in subject antecedents, as shown in (9). (9)

Monicai ha telefonato a Claudia quando LEIi era in ufficio. Monica has telephoned to Claudia when SHE was in office ‘Monica phoned Claudia when SHE was in the office.’

White et al. (2002) experimentally probe this in English learners of Italian. By manipulating prosody, they observe that changes can result in the expectedness of the antecedent, namely, a decrease in choice of object antecedents when the pronoun is stressed. Gargiulo and Tronnier’s (2020) study on L1 attrition of Italian under L2 Swedish influence shows that production of the same structures is impacted by prosody: the longer the attriters had been living in Sweden, the less they used the prosodic prominence patterns of L1 Italian. Instead, L2 Swedish patterns predominated. Once again, such results suggest that it is important to include consideration of the syntax-prosody interface when examining sentence interpretation. 540

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To summarize, a number of different syntactic and/or morphological problems exhibited by L2 learners receive an explanation when prosody is taken into consideration. Prosodic transfer at the level of the PWd and PPh influences the acquisition of inflection and function words. Clause-level prosody has consequences for sentence interpretation.

38.7  Open questions and future directions Most of the research on the syntax-phonology interface in L2 has addressed issues relating to the production of functional morphology. There has been little examination of whether and how L1 prosodic structure constrains L2ers’ comprehension. Lieberman (2012) hypothesized that if the L1 grammar lacks the appropriate representation for inflection, learners may either fail to comprehend the inflection altogether or use whatever structure they can transfer from the L1, leading to comprehension failure in certain circumstances and success in others. He examined interpretation of 3sg agreement in French- and Spanish-speaking learners of English. Assuming that both L1s organize agreement as an internal clitic, he shows that English agreement is more accurately comprehended after short stems than after long stems, parallel to the differences in production discussed earlier. These findings, however, are preliminary and much more needs to be done to investigate the extent to which prosodic factors constrain comprehension. At the clausal level, the issue is, perhaps, the opposite. That is, while some research has addressed issues of interpretation attributable to the syntax-phonology interface, less is known about production in this context. Finally, like L2 research in general, most of the work on the syntax-phonology interface has involved English as the L2 (but see, e.g., Jin et al., 2009, for functional morphology in L2 Norwegian; Dekydtspotter et al., 2008, and de la Cruz-Pavía & Elordieta, 2015, for clause-level prosody in L2 Romance). While several languages have been investigated as L1s, to appropriately evaluate the challenges that learners face at this interface, a range of L2s must be considered.

38.8 Conclusion In conclusion, the syntax-phonology interface has been somewhat neglected in the L2 literature. Recent research has suggested that consideration of this interface has the potential to explain aspects of L2ers’ behavior that have previously been attributed to syntactic or phonological problems or to problems at other interfaces, particularly the syntax-lexicon and syntax-discourse interfaces. As we have shown, some difficulties with inflectional morphology and function words can be accounted for in terms of transfer of L1 prosodic structure; at the clausal level, presumed problems with ambiguity resolution are explained, in part, once prosodic factors are taken into consideration.

Acknowledgements Thanks to John Archibald for helpful comments. This work was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Fonds de recherche du Québec-Société et culture.

Note 1 In (5b​.​ii), some text has been elided because there may be an IP boundary in a location other than after NP1 or NP2, consistent with Gee and Grosjean’s (1983) observation that longer sentences tend to be phrased as two domains.

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39 SEMANTICS AND COGNITION Spatiotemporal metaphors and time perception in L2 users Panos Athanasopoulos and Emanuel Bylund 39.1 Introduction Time is a fundamental construct of human experience. Language makes available a plethora of lexical and grammatical devices to encode temporal relations (Evans, 2013). A hallmark of temporal language is that it essentially utilises analogies from another fundamental domain of human experience: space. While we cannot see or touch time, we talk about it as if we could. Consider the following expressions: 1a) The table is behind us. 1b) The meeting is behind us. 2a) The table was pushed past the window. 2b) The meeting was pushed past the deadline. 3a) a long table 3b) a long meeting Temporal expressions of this kind are examples par excellence of conceptual metaphors, whereby concepts from a more tangible domain (in this case space) are used to denote abstract phenomena (in this case time) (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Despite the fact that most languages use spatiotemporal metaphors, languages vary considerably in the specific spatial configurations encoded in these metaphors (Boroditsky, 2011). Furthermore, evidence is accumulating that the grounding of time in terms of space has consequences for time construal outside of the overt use of language, such that speakers of languages utilising different space–time mappings understand temporal relations differently and experience temporal sequence and duration in accordance with their native language’s linguistic encodings (Athanasopoulos et al., 2017). This raises an important question for L2 acquisition: if spatiotemporal metaphors influence the construal of time, then to what extent does acquisition of an L2 that conveys temporal relations differently from the L1 change L2 user temporal cognition?

39.2  Theoretical background In their seminal publication on conceptual metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) posit the metaphor TIME IS SPACE, thus suggesting that our mental representation of time is based on spatial represen-

DOI:  10.4324/9781003412373-45

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tations. Systematic studies reveal that space is indeed central for the linguistic construal of time (e.g., Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008). Spatial metaphors may be applied to the core distinctions of deictic (D) time, sequence (S) time, and temporal (T) span, as identified by Núnez and Cooperrider (2013). D-time and S-time have in common that they refer to the order or sequence of a given set of events (as in examples 1b and 2b above), but they differ in their anchoring of events, with D-time assuming a temporal landmark (the deictic now), and S-time instead linking the events between themselves. T-span is different from these concepts in that it relates to the duration or temporal magnitude of an event (as in example 3b above), with no reference to any other temporal entity. The theoretical background that underpins the studies described in Sections 39.4 and 39.5 is organised into three related themes: Motion through time, referring to D-time metaphors split into ego-moving metaphors (i.e., motion of the observer’s context along a timeline) and time-moving metaphors (i.e., motion of events along a timeline) on the construal of time as moving or stationary; temporal succession (S-time), referring to the conceptualisation of time on the specific spatial axes (horizontal and/or vertical) used to sequence events; and lastly, temporal duration (T-span), focusing on the metaphors used to describe the temporal extension of an event.

39.3  Second language and cognition Early traces of the question of whether learning a second language may affect cognition may be found in the writings of von Humboldt (1836/1963) and Whorf (1956), who speculated as to whether learning a new language entails learning a new way of observing reality. Von Humboldt put forward two extreme positions in what scholars like Pavlenko (1999), Athanasopoulos (2011) and Cook, in his theory of Multi-competence (2002; Cook & Li Wei, 2016) construe as a continuum of cognitive restructuring. At one end, the shift or restructuring position assumes complete internalisation of, and shift towards, L2-specific concepts: “The learning of a foreign language should mean the gaining of a new standpoint toward one’s world-view” (von Humboldt, 1836/1963, p. 294). At the other end of this continuum is situated the position of conceptual entrenchment: “If it is not always purely felt as such, the reason is one so frequently projects one’s own world-view, in fact one’s own speech habits, onto a foreign language” (von Humboldt, 1836/1963, p. 294). More recent scholars like Slobin (1996) echo this position by suggesting that cognitive patterns already established in the L1 are exceptionally resistant to restructuring later in life. Lucy (2016) adopts a less radical position, in his discussion of the idea of semantic or conceptual accents. An individual may carry the semantic or conceptual accent of their native language concepts, in the same way that an individual may carry the speech accent of their native language when they speak a second. Behaviourally, this may entail that cognitive patterns may resemble an amalgamation of language-specific patterns from the two languages, that is, an ‘in-between’ pattern of behaviour that is never native-like. Besides long-standing speculation, recently the question of whether learning a second language may restructure cognitive patterns has begun to attract serious empirical attention (Athanasopoulos et al., 2016). In general, there are three main research questions that scholars are trying to address: a) To what extent do L2 users shift towards the cognitive patterns of native speakers of the L2, if at all? b) To what extent may L2 users flexibly switch between language-specific thought patterns as a function of language context of operation? c) What are the factors that underlie any observable cognitive restructuring in the mind of the L2 user? Several scholars (Athanasopoulos et al., 2015; Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2014; Casasanto, 2008; Kersten et al., 2010) put forward the theory of Associative or Attentive Learning as the main theoreti546

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cal basis driving the above questions, and more generally, language-cognition interactions. According to this hypothesis, the frequent co-activation of linguistic categories (be they lexical or grammatical) and their conceptual referents (be they discrete percepts like objects, colours, and space, or more abstract domains of experience like motion and time) strengthens the link between them. For the domain of time and space, this would entail that over time stable associative links are formed between linguistic metaphors and their corresponding spatial configurations. Specifically, Casasanto (2008) proposes that usage of a specific linguistic expression for time activates the corresponding conceptual metaphor in the mind of the language user. As people use the dominant and less-dominant metaphors in their language, they activate one conceptual metaphor more frequently than the other(s). In doing so, they would strengthen this particular associative mapping. One possible outcome of this associative mapping is entrenchment. The network specialises over time, such that early acquired representations interfere with the learning of novel representations later in life. Specifically, drawing on principles of Hebbian learning (Hebb, 1949), the assumption is that once a network has been specialised to interpret stimuli in a specific way, it achieves an attractor state (MacWhinney, 2017). Such states lead to efficient processing, but they also stabilise the networks to the extent that these become impervious to change and unaffected by new information (Brooks & Tomasello, 1999). However, associative learning accounts leave open the possibility that representational space can be modulated as a function of extensive changes in experience, such as prolonged exposure. Indeed, results from laboratory training experiments (see Section 39.5) highlight the ease with which a short period of induced training with metaphoric structures not common in the participant’s L1 could cause lifelong biases in native speakers to shift towards the biases of native speakers of the L2. Consequently, it appears that the effect of a lifelong experience with language-based metaphor bias may be easily overcome in the short term, something which has yet to be systematically tested in the long term, by utilising L2 user populations. Associative learning then may account for L1 language and conceptual development, but the same mechanism can be assumed to be operative in additional language learning/acquisition. Specifically, because we are continuously exposed to novel events throughout our lifetime, representation may be subject to restructuring. The individual may constantly update the relative statistical weighting of the recurring associations against new contexts and new instances of associations (Ellis, 2008). From an L2 acquisition viewpoint then, the question of theoretical and empirical focus concerns the extent to which (temporal) cognition may be affected by the acquisition of novel form–meaning associations in the L2, and the factors that may underpin internalisation of these associations.

39.4  Temporal cognition in monolinguals While, as expected, no language-derived cognitive differences between pre-linguistic infants are documented (e.g., Hespos & Spelke, 2004), studies from L1 development provide empirical support for the idea that over time, repeated exposure to the ambient language environment has specific consequences for how infants learn to categorise e.g., objects, colour, and space, based on statistical regularities in the input (Levinson, 2001; Lucy & Gaskins, 2001; Roberson et al., 2004). While there are no studies, to the best of our knowledge, that investigate the influence of language-specific spatiotemporal metaphors on temporal cognition in L1 development, there are many studies that do so in adult monolingual or native speaker populations. We provide an overview of these studies here. For reasons of space, we focus only on those studies whose methodology or theoretical assumptions bear relevance to studies looking at L2 user populations, reviewed in the next section. We organise our coverage according to the theoretical framework described in Section 39.2, namely studies that look at motion through time (D-time), sequencing (S-time), and duration (T-span). 547

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39.4.1  Motion through time (D-time) The two main metaphors of motion through time (in English) are ego-moving and time-moving (Figure 39.1). For example, one can say ‘we are coming up to Winter’ (ego-moving) or ‘Winter is coming’ (time-moving). Boroditsky (2000) sought to reveal whether the way English speakers thought about time depended on which type of spatial metaphors were primed. A questionnaire was given to participants with spatial scenarios that primed either ego-moving or time-moving frames of reference and required “true” or “false” responses immediately prior to seeing an ambiguous sentence (e.g., ‘next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days’). Participants subsequently indicated on which day the meeting would occur. The results showed that the metaphor structure that had been primed influenced the way participants responded in 71.3% of participants (ego-moving priming led to more “Friday” responses and time-moving priming led to more “Monday” responses; Rothe-Wulf et al., 2015, report in more detail on variation within English native speakers in the comprehension of the temporal expressions forward and back). Implementing a cross-linguistic approach, Lai and Boroditsky (2013) examined the extent to which ego-moving (‘we are approaching the deadline’) and time-moving (‘the deadline is approaching’) metaphors affect temporal cognition in Mandarin Chinese and English speakers. Unlike in English, time-moving metaphors appear to be more frequent in Mandarin than ego-moving metaphors. One experiment utilised the meeting question in Boroditsky’s earlier study (Boroditsky, 2000) described above: ‘The meeting originally scheduled for next Wednesday has been moved forward two days’. Participants were then asked when the event in question would occur. Lai and Boroditsky (2013) found that English monolinguals provided the ego-moving answer (“Friday”) 68% of the time, while none of the Mandarin monolinguals adopted such a perspective: 100% of respondents took the time-moving (“Monday”) option. Another question in the same experiment utilised the ‘clock’ dilemma: ‘Suppose the clock says it is 1pm now. You need to move it one hour forward. What time will it be adjusted to?’ Here, 12pm is the time-moving perspective answer, and 2pm is the ego-moving perspective answer. Results here showed that 100% of English monolingual respondents gave an ego-moving answer, while only 13% of Mandarin monolinguals did so (87% giving the time-moving answer instead). These findings are compatible with the authors’ hypothesis that Mandarin monolinguals would be more prone to take a time-moving perspective than would English monolinguals.

(a)

PAST

FUTURE

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PAST

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Figure 39.1  Ego-moving (a) vs. time-moving (b) conceptions of time

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39.4.2  Temporal succession (S-time) Sequencing events in order of occurrence is part and parcel of time construal. It appears that crosslinguistic differences exist in the direction of order, which may have consequences for mental representation of temporal succession. While English speakers predominantly use horizontal space–time sequencing metaphors (e.g., the forward/back metaphors discussed in the previous section), Mandarin speakers frequently use vertical terms to refer to the temporal order of events, in addition to horizontal ones. The word xia (down) is used to talk about future events, so when referring to the ‘next day’ a Mandarin Chinese speaker would literally say ‘down day’. The word shang (up) is used to talk about the past, so ‘yesterday’ becomes ‘up one day’. Boroditsky (2001), based on these cross-linguistic differences, implemented a semantic verification task with priming. Participants had to say whether a temporal statement was true or false, utilising two different types of target statements: ones that included a spatiotemporal metaphor (e.g., ‘March comes before/after April’), and ones that included a purely temporal expression (e.g., ‘March comes earlier/later than April’). These were fully crossed with two different types of pictorial primes: one type arranged horizontally (a white fish followed by a black fish to its right) and one type arranged vertically (a white fish appearing to follow a black fish presented on top). Results showed that for targets that expressed sequencing via a spatiotemporal metaphor, both Mandarin and English speakers answered faster after horizontal primes than after vertical primes. Both English and Mandarin utilise horizontal metaphors, after all. It should be noted, however, that Mandarin speakers in this study were in fact students at a US university, and they were tested in English with English instructions. One cannot therefore rule out the possibility that native Mandarin speakers’ behaviour in this task was influenced by their English L2. Nonetheless, for targets containing a purely temporal expression, Mandarin speakers were faster after a vertical prime than after a horizontal one, unlike English speakers who continued to be primed more by horizontal than vertical pictorial primes. This shows an effect of vertical metaphors in Mandarin speakers that becomes apparent when processing temporal succession outside of overt metaphor comprehension. However, this may be also reinforced, or alternatively be ultimately rooted in, reading/writing direction as well, since Mandarin speakers also utilise a vertical (traditional) reading/writing direction in addition to a horizontal one. Subsequent studies, however, yielded inconsistent results, with some failing to replicate Boroditsky’s (2001) original findings (e.g., Chen, 2007; January & Kako, 2007; Tse & Altarriba, 2008). Boroditsky, Fuhrman and McCormick (2011) sought to address these replication inconsistencies by improving upon the methodology of Boroditsky’s (2001) original paradigm. One methodological improvement was to utilise stimuli that depict changes of state over a period of time, in order to capture the fact that events do not just appear before or after a time anchor, but rather move along a timeline (back to front, left to right, or upwards/downwards). Therefore, stimuli represented a variety of different temporal succession themes (e.g., a banana being eaten; filling a cup of coffee; a young, middle aged, and older Woody Allen), typically including the earlier, middle, and later time-points (e.g., whole banana, half-eaten banana, just the peel). On each trial, participants saw two pictures, one after the other. The first picture always showed the middle time-point (e.g., half-eaten banana) and the second picture showed either the earlier time-point (e.g., whole banana) or the later time-point (e.g., empty banana peel). The researchers asked the participants to decide whether the second picture showed an earlier or later time-point relative to the first picture. Mandarin and English monolinguals were assigned to one of two conditions. In one condition, participants had to use response buttons that were arranged horizontally on the left/right axis (so that in one block the left button represented earlier and the right button later, and in another this mapping was reversed). In the other condition, the response buttons appeared in a vertical orientation, one on top of the other, by mounting the keyboard vertically so that the top key represented earlier and the 549

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bottom key represented later (this mapping was reversed in another block). Results showed that all participants, regardless of language background, responded faster when the “earlier” response key was on the left than when it was on the right. The authors attributed this to the fact that both English and Mandarin speakers employ a horizontal left-to-right reading/writing direction. However, given that Mandarin speakers knew English and were tested in the US with English instructions, one cannot rule out influence of the L2 in their behaviour. Behavioural differences between the two populations of speakers emerged in the vertical condition. Mandarin speakers exhibited faster response times when the “earlier” response key was on top (compatible with the Mandarin use of vertical metaphors which places earlier events as “up”) than when it was on the bottom (incompatible with the Mandarin use of vertical metaphors which places later events as “down”). English speakers did not show such a discrepancy. While such differences in behaviour may reflect differences in the conceptual representation of spatiotemporal metaphors, it remains a possibility that they are alternatively or additionally rooted in writing direction patterns. The relative influence of metaphor/writing direction has yet to be definitively disentangled in this line of investigation, although results from laboratory training paradigms may hold some promise in this regard (see Section 39.5).

39.4.3  Temporal duration (T-span) Estimating the duration of an event constitutes another fundamental aspect of temporal cognition. Like motion through time and temporal succession metaphors, duration expressions also seem to be grounded in the TIME IS SPACE conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; see also examples 3a and 3b). Casasanto and Boroditsky (2008) tested the psychological salience of talking about duration in terms of long/short spatial schemas in a series of experiments that presented participants with straight lines that ‘grew’ from left to right on a screen. They were asked to indicate how much time it took for the line to reach its full length. Nine different physical lengths (varying from 100 to 500 pixels in 50 pixel increments) were fully crossed with nine different durations (varying from 100 milliseconds to 900 milliseconds in 100 millisecond increments) to yield 81 stimuli. Lines that grew longer were perceived to have taken a longer time to grow (irrespective of the actual time it took for them to grow). Casasanto (2008), using the same paradigm as the one described above, investigated the cognitive consequences of cross-linguistic differences in how languages employ the TIME IS SPACE metaphor for duration. While English and Indonesian speakers typically use distance metaphors to express temporal duration (e.g., a long meeting; a party of short duration), Greek and Spanish tend to more frequently express duration by utilising quantity expressions (e.g., a big meeting; a party of small duration). These tendencies in language usage were derived from the ratio of collocations on a Google search. In this very large corpus, the frequency of quantity expressions to refer to duration was overwhelmingly greater than the frequency of time-as-distance expressions in Greek speakers, and vice versa for English speakers, who instead presented with many more time-as-distance collocations than time-as-quantity ones. Casasanto (2008) then employed a ‘filling container’ version of the growing lines experiment described earlier to create a ‘quantity’ interference task (see Figure 39.2). Here, participants had to indicate the time it took for the container to fill. Casasanto (2008) found that speakers of English and Indonesian, who use distance spatial metaphors of time, showed greater spatial interference in the ‘growing line’ task than the Spanish and Greek speakers, who in turn exhibited greater spatial interference in the ‘filling containers’ task than the English and Indonesian speakers. Using the same paradigm as Casasanto (2008), Bylund and Athanasopoulos (2017) replicated and extended the original research with monolingual speakers of Spanish (a quantity metaphor language) and Swedish (a distance metaphor language like English and Indonesian). However, the authors’ find550

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(a)

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Figure 39.2 Schematic representations of time as either distance (a) or volume (b). Based on stimuli used in Bylund and Athanasopoulos (2017)

ings also qualified the scope of the initial research in two important ways. Firstly, the language-specific spatial interference effect was found for stimuli that were harder to process. Recall that the paradigm utilises nine different line growths/container fill levels, and nine different durations, fully crossed to yield 81 experimental stimuli. Bylund and Athanasopoulos (2017) divided their stimuli into ‘medium’ and ‘extreme’ stimuli. The latter consisted of the two longest and two shortest spatial displacements and durations. The former consisted of the five spatial displacements and durations in-between the extreme ones. Bylund and Athanasopoulos (2017) established in an independent task that the extreme stimuli were easier to process than the medium stimuli. Bylund and Athanasopoulos (2017) found the predicted cognitive differences between Spanish and Swedish speakers only for these medium, harder to process stimuli. There was no difference between the groups in the extreme, easy to process stimuli. The authors concluded that the role of language in this task is akin to that of a cognitive tool to solve duration estimations that are more difficult. Language appears to aid rather than shape temporal cognition. Secondly, the original experiments reported in Casasanto and Boroditsky (2008) and in Casasanto (2008) included a verbal prompt before each duration estimation trial instructing the participant to estimate time. In a version of the experiment with the verbal prompts removed, Bylund and Athanasopoulos (2017) found no behavioural differences between Swedish and Spanish monolinguals, in contrast to the experiment where the verbal prompts were present. This finding also speaks against the role of language as permanently shaping the conceptual representation of time. Instead, the effect of language, or linguistic spatiotemporal metaphors, in this instance, seems to be online or in-the-moment, likely as a function of top-down feedback that is modulated by the difficulty of the task and the presence of verbal labels.

39.5  Temporal cognition in L2 users As illustrated in the previous section, there does appear to be some measurable influence of spatiotemporal metaphors on time perception in monolingual/native speaker populations, with most studies attributing such effects to the frequency with which each type of metaphor may be used by speakers of the respective language. Presumably, for L2 learners, the construct of frequency of exposure or experience can be manifested in even more complex ways. One potential outcome of exposure to or experience with an L2 whose native speakers predominantly use a different type of spatiotemporal metaphor than that typically used by native speakers of the L1 is that cumulative expertise or increasing proficiency in the second language may result in cognitive changes in time construal. But such increasing expertise can be affected, directly or indirectly, by many other operationalisations of experience, such as: frequency of usage of the L2 (either in production or mere exposure/comprehension, or both); context of learning and use (naturalistic vs. instructed) and language setting (L1 vs. L2 speaking contexts); length of immersion in a specific speaking environment; and so on (Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2014). 551

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Systematic research on the possible cognitive consequences of L2 acquisition of a language with different spatiotemporal metaphor preferences from the L1 has only recently begun to be conducted. Some early studies included L2 users in an incidental or peripheral manner (e.g., Boroditsky, 2001; Boroditsky et al., 2011). Many studies utilised short-term training tasks in the laboratory, in an effort to demonstrate a causal link between spatiotemporal usage/exposure and changes in temporal cognition (e.g., Casasanto, 2008). Such studies do have relevance from an L2 acquisition perspective because they speak not only to questions about causality, but also about learning and plasticity as well. In what follows, we review such studies alongside studies that have recruited L2 users for the purposes of addressing relevant questions from an L2 theoretical perspective. We once again utilise the theoretical framework adopted and described in Section 39.2 and in Section 39.4, organising our coverage in three main sections: studies that look at motion through time (D-time), temporal succession (S-time), and temporal duration (T-span).

39.5.1  Motion through time (D-time) The study by Lai and Boroditsky (2013) on ego-moving and time-moving metaphors described in the previous section found effects of language proficiency on L2 users’ temporal perspective. Recall that time-moving metaphors in Mandarin (‘the deadline is approaching’) are more frequent than ego-moving metaphors (‘we are approaching the deadline’). Utilising the ‘meeting question’ and the ‘clock question’ (see Section 39.4.1), Lai and Boroditsky (2013) showed that L2 users’ temporal perspective was predicted by language proficiency. Participants who were more proficient in English were also more likely to adopt an ego-moving perspective. The researchers also manipulated language testing context, posing the ‘meeting question’ in English (L2) and the ‘clock question’ in Mandarin (L1). In both cases, L2 users displayed preference patterns that were ‘in-between’ those of their monolingual peers. Specifically, 38% of L2 users adopted an ego-moving perspective when tested in the L2, compared to 0% of Mandarin monolinguals, and 68% of English monolinguals. Similarly, 41% of L2 users adopted an ego-moving perspective when tested in Mandarin, compared to 13% of Mandarin monolinguals and 100% of English monolinguals. Such ‘in-between’ distribution of L2 users participants was interpreted by the authors as effect of the L1 on the L2, in the experimental context where participants were tested in the L2, since many L2 users still were utilising the L1 time-moving construal even when operating in the L2. Conversely, the authors interpreted the ‘in-between’ distribution of L2 users in the L1 testing experimental context as reverse transfer, or effects of the L2 on the L1, since many of them adopted an ego-moving perspective even when tested in the predominantly time-moving leaning L1. However, it is not clear in this study which variable, L2 proficiency or language experimental context may exert a more pervasive influence on L2 user behaviour, since no relevant statistical tests were undertaken.

39.5.2  Temporal succession (S-time) Boroditsky’s (2001) study was the first to look at the influence of L2 acquisition on temporal construal. Recall that Boroditsky (2001) employed a semantic verification task with vertical or horizontal visual priming and found that Mandarin speakers were faster after vertical primes than horizontal ones, whereas English speakers were primed more by horizontal than vertical primes. Boroditsky (2001) also examined whether the age of onset of L2 acquisition of English in Mandarin native speakers may have an effect on their apparent verticality bias, and found a positive correlation: the greater the participant’s verticality bias, the later the age of L2 acquisition of the participant. In other words, those Mandarin speakers who started learning English later also tended to exhibit temporal construal more in line with their L1 Mandarin. Interestingly, the length of exposure to English had no effect. Boroditsky (2001) drew parallels between these findings and the findings of age effects reported in the seminal study of Johnson and Newport (1989). However, Boroditsky (2001) stopped 552

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short of proposing a critical or sensitive period for cognitive restructuring in L2 acquisition. This is not surprising, given that the age of L2 acquisition in this sample of L2 users ranged from 3 to 13 years, mostly lacking post-puberty L2 learners. In a follow-up experiment, Boroditsky (2001) sought to establish a causal link between usage of vertical metaphors and temporal cognition utilising a laboratory training paradigm. English native speakers were trained to talk about time using vertical terms. The training group showed very similar patterns of temporal cognition to the Mandarin monolingual speakers, that is, a vertical bias, which was not found in a control group of English native speakers who hadn’t received vertical metaphor usage training. This finding is important in two respects. Firstly, it gives weight to the role of linguistic metaphors, rather than some other variable like writing direction, as the primary driving force behind temporal cognition. Secondly, it suggests that it is possible to internalise novel patterns of temporal construal even in adulthood, at least in the short term. This would speak against any postulation of hard entrenchment of the system (see Section 39.3), pointing rather towards a view of dynamic plasticity, with the caveat that the longevity of these apparent cognitive changes is still unknown, as no delayed post-tests were employed in this study. Lai and Boroditsky (2013) further probed the possible influence of horizontal and vertical metaphors on temporal succession in Mandarin L2 users of English. The task required participants to locate weeks and months by way of finger pointing vertically (up/down week/month) and horizontally (front/back week/month) relative to this week/month (see also Section 39.4.2). The researchers found effects of language testing context on the Mandarin speakers’ propensity to use the vertical orientation to situate temporal events. L1 Mandarin L2 English users placed future events below and past events above (the pattern consistent with Mandarin metaphorical encoding) more frequently when tested in Taiwan than in the USA. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, language proficiency did not predict temporal construal patterns in this task, probably because all participants had very advanced L2 proficiency already. Miles, Tan, Noble, Lumsden, and Macrae (2011) attempted to find effects of spatiotemporal metaphors on time perception that were more implicit in nature, by moving away from paradigms that utilised actual temporal events as stimuli (e.g., days, weeks, months). Their study focused on the cross-linguistic differences between English and Mandarin in the horizontal/vertical orientation of temporal succession. In one experiment, L1 Mandarin L2 English users and monolingual English speakers saw images of buildings from the past (e.g., buildings from Classical antiquity) or future (e.g., science-fiction scenes) and had to respond whether the scene belonged to the past or the future by pressing a button on the computer’s number keypad. The experiment design utilised four blocks of stimuli, crossing two conditions (horizontal vs. vertical) with two types of response formats (compatible vs. incompatible). In the horizontal condition, past and future were located on either the left and right of the screen respectively (compatible), or the right and left respectively (incompatible), and the keys to be pressed were to the left (4) and right (6) of the central ‘5’. In the vertical condition, past and future were located at the top and bottom of the keypad respectively (compatible) or bottom and top respectively (incompatible) and the keys were above (2) or below (8) the central ‘5’. English monolingual speakers were found to be faster on compatible than incompatible trials on the horizontal axis but not the vertical. The L1 Mandarin L2 English users responded faster on compatible than incompatible trials across both horizontal and vertical conditions, and were overall faster on the horizontal than the vertical condition. The authors interpreted these findings as bilinguals possessing “two mental time lines”. However, without data from a monolingual Mandarin speaking group, the L2 user patterns could also be a manifestation of the fact that Mandarin also employs the horizontal time axis in metaphorical space–time mappings, alongside the vertical one. In another experiment, Miles et al. (2011) asked L1 Mandarin L2 English users to arrange three pictures of a famous person into a self-chosen order. The pictures were chosen to prime a specific cultural context. The pictures were of Jet Li (a famous Chinese actor, priming a Chinese cultural 553

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context) and Brad Pitt (a famous American actor, priming a Western cultural context). Each was a depiction of the actor at a younger age, a more mature age, and an intermediate age between the two. The intermediate picture was placed in the middle of a square board, and the participant was invited to place the other two pictures (younger and older) on the board relative to this intermediate picture any way they saw fit. The researchers found that L1 Mandarin L2 English users tended to arrange the pictures of Brad Pitt horizontally from left (younger) to right (older), and Jet Li vertically, from top (younger) to bottom (older). The authors claim that this is an effect of linguistic metaphor on temporal cognition rather than an effect of writing direction, because the L2 users came from Singapore, and Singaporean Chinese is written horizontally. However, in a footnote they concede that Singaporeans are exposed to the traditional vertical arrangement of Chinese letters in their daily lives. Given that L2 cognitive restructuring may come about rapidly as a function of short-term targeted training (cf. Boroditsky, 2001), one cannot discount the possible effects of long-term exposure to vertical writing/reading direction in the sample of L2 users examined by Miles et al. (2011). Furthermore, a subsequent replication study by Yang and Sun (2016) found a similar change of behaviour as a function of culture-specific stimuli in Mandarin monolinguals, reflecting the fact that Mandarin utilises both vertical and horizontal temporal representations. So it is difficult to separate effects of L2 acquisition per se in Miles et al.’s (2011) otherwise well-designed experiments, from what may already be the initial state of the L2 learner before L2 spatiotemporal metaphorical patterns are internalised.

39.5.3  Temporal duration (T-span) As mentioned previously (39.5.2), laboratory training techniques aim to establish a causal link between exposure to metaphorical space–time mappings in language and temporal cognition. Such an approach has also been implemented in duration estimation paradigms. Casasanto (2008) reports on a laboratory training experiment, where English monolinguals were trained to use quantity duration metaphors of the type that prevail in Greek and Spanish. Two groups of English native speakers underwent either distance (the English preference) or quantity (the Greek/Spanish preference) metaphor training. A third (control) group consisting of monolingual native English speakers received no training at all. All participants then performed the filling container task, where they had to estimate how much time it took for a container to be filled, systematically manipulating the fill level of the containers (see 39.4.3). Results from this training paradigm revealed that the quantity training group showed a significant quantity interference effect (thinking that the more a container was filled the more time it took for the filling event to occur), while minimal quantity interference was observed in the distance training group, and in the control group. This finding suggests that the conceptual representation of duration is malleable, and can be restructured, at least temporarily in the short term. Bylund and Athanasopoulos (2017) explored the long-term effects of such putative cognitive restructuring phenomena by looking at Swedish L2 users of Spanish (recall that Spanish is a quantity metaphor language and Swedish is a distance metaphor language). The authors utilised the version of the time estimation task with verbal prompts, which had been found to induce maximal cognitive differences between Swedish and Spanish monolingual populations (see Section 39.4.3). In a withinsubjects design, Bylund and Athanasopoulos (2017) varied the language of the verbal prompts, such that in half of the trials they appeared in Swedish, and in half of the trials they appeared in Spanish within the same individual. The findings showed that spatial interference from line length or container volume varied with the language of the prompts. Specifically, Spanish prompts induced more quantity interference in time estimations for containers than Swedish prompts, and conversely, Swedish prompts induced more distance interference in time estimations for lines than Spanish prompts did. These results suggest that while L2 users have internalised the L2 dominant pattern, the resulting conceptual representation points to coexistence of the new pattern alongside the L1 dominant pat554

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tern, with language context modulating the relative influence of the L1 or L2 conceptual pattern on temporal cognition. In a more recent study, Athanasopoulos & Bylund (in press) showed that L1 Spanish L2 Swedish bilinguals living in Sweden shifted their duration estimation of growing lines (the dynamic spatial configuration analogous to L2-specific temporal metaphors) as a function of increasing proficiency in the L2. Under an associative learning account, increasing proficiency in the L2 would strengthen the links between L2-specific space–time associations, especially given that such metaphors are highly frequent in everyday language usage, time being a central point of reference and topic of engagement in everyday human activity. In contrast, duration estimation of filling containers (the spatial configuration analogous to L1-specific temporal metaphors) was modulated by the age of L2 acquisition. The later the bilingual individual had started learning their L2, the more they were influenced by their L1 in their duration estimation for filling containers. The authors suggest that L2 acquisition entails that individuals start out by receiving input in a system that is already statistically biased towards the L1-specific conceptual metaphor. It is possible that later acquisition of the L2 allows more opportunity for the L1-based metaphoric pattern to be established and potentially entrenched. This would also imply that early L2 acquisition enables learners to statistically receive a mixture of language inputs highlighting language-specific time schemata in both languages, resulting in more equally weighted cues for temporal cognition, as shown in Athanasopoulos & Bylund’s (in press) study.

39.6  Open questions and future directions As can be seen from the range of studies reviewed in this chapter, cognitive restructuring in second language acquisition in the domain of time is still in its infancy. None of the studies focused exclusively on L2 users/bilinguals, and often such populations were included as an afterthought, as part of a main investigation focusing on cross-linguistic comparisons between native speaker/monolingual populations. There has yet to be a systematic investigation of the conceptual representation of time in bilingual/L2 user cognition. Such an investigation may focus on pinpointing the likely developmental factors that may underpin temporal cognition in L2 users, systematically ferreting out the relative influence of variables that previous studies have shown to underpin L2 user cognition in isolation. Such variables include but are not limited to increasing L2 proficiency, frequency of usage, age of onset of L2 acquisition, length of stay in the L2 speaking country, and language experimental context, as promising starting points in the exploration of developmental trajectories. Focusing on L2 user variables in correlation or regression type analyses, rather than on crosssectional/direct comparisons between L2 users and their monolingual counterparts, likely holds the greatest promise in elucidating and gaining empirical support for or against some of the core theoretical assumptions that are taken to underpin temporal cognition specifically, and languagethought interactions more generally. For instance, if increasing L2 proficiency or frequency of usage of a specific language is found to correlate with temporal cognition, then the associative learning account would gain substantial empirical heft. If, on the other hand, we find that factors like age of L2 acquisition may best predict cognitive outcomes, then we can also consider cognitive entrenchment accounts, and examine whether they may be rooted in biological or maturational constraints. Another question that is worth exploring in this investigation is L1 conceptual attrition, that is, the question of whether cognitive patterns already established by an L1 remain stable and unchanging, or whether there is a discernible degree of cognitive attrition of L1-derived cognitive patterns under the influence of the L2 (in cases where L2 metaphoric structures differ from those of the L1). Looking at both L2 and L1 cognitive patterns would be in line with influential theories of SLA, such as Multi-competence, which emphasise the need to consider not only what L2 users do and don’t acquire in a L2, but how the whole language and cognitive system may be affected by 555

Panos Athanasopoulos and Emanuel Bylund

acquiring a new language with different conce​ptual​/gram​matic​al/le​xical​/orth​ograp​hic/p​honol​ogica​ l properties from the first. We can conclude, from the existing scarce studies on L2 semantics and cognition in the domain of time, that this research area is a potentially fruitful avenue for the systematic investigation of L2 acquisition of novel concepts, offering insights both to our understanding of how L2 user variables contribute to a dynamic conceptual system, as well as more generally of how the human conceptual system may display malleability as a function of additional language learning.

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557

AUTHOR INDEX

Abeillé, A. 442 Abutalebi, J. 53 Acquaroni-Muñoz, R. 28 Adger, D. 430 Agathopoulou, E. 261 Ahern, A. 318 Aissen, J. 228, 229 Akbar Jabbari, A. 174 Alba de la Fuente, A. 435 Aldwayan, S. 374, 375 Alexiadou, A. 65, 178, 361 Alferink, I. 17–19 Allen, S. 68 Allport, A. 53 Alotaibi, A. M. 176, 177 Alotaibi, M. A. 176, 177 Al-Thubaiti, K. A. 443, 452–453 Ambridge, B. 112, 116 Anagnostopoulou, E. 430 Andersen, R. W. 273, 274 Anderson, B. 178, 390, 394 Anderson, C. 414 Anderson, S. 428 Andrews, A. 399, 400 Androutsopoulou, A. 176–178 Annaz, D. 27 Antinucci, F. 264 Antonova-Ünlü, E. 217, 331 Arche, M. J. 7, 287, 290, 326, 327, 433 Aristotle 271 Arizono, S. 29 Armon-Lotem, S. 123 Arnbjörnsdóttir, B. 363 Arregui, A. 287, 445 Arteaga, D. 345 Atance, C. M. 302 Athanasopoulos, P. 4, 9, 546, 554, 555 Austin, G. 536, 538



Austin, J. 234 Avram, L. 231 Ay, S. 418 Aydın, Ö. 418 Ayoun, D. 264, 303, 304, 318, 346, 347 Babcock, L. 259 Babyonyshev, M. 81, 82 Baker, C.L. 113 Balcom, P. 84 Barbosa, P. 432 Barcelona, A. 4, 25, 26, 29 Bardel, C. 392 Bardovi-Harlig, K. 7, 274, 303, 304 Barner, D. 146, 147, 523 Bartning, I. 318 Barton, D. 205 Baten, K. 232 Bayley, R. 534 Bayram, F. 133, 135 Beatty-Martínez, A. L. 54, 55 Beck, M. L. 258, 259 Becker, L. 103 Becker, M. 81, 329 Bel, A. 329 Belikova, A. 370 Belletti, A. 509, 540 Bellucci, G. 116, 217 Benazzo, S. 253 Benmamoun, E. 442 Beréndi, M. 28 Bergs, A. 300 Berman, R. A. 40, 67 Bertinetto, P. M. 270, 271 Bettoni, C. 376 Bever, T. 83 Bice, K. 52, 53, 55 Bickerton, D. 7, 183, 184, 187, 263

559

Author Index Bidgood, A. 67, 68, 73 Birdsong, D. 510 Bishop, D. V. M. 523 Bittar, J. 5 Blasco, M. 431 Bley-Vroman, R. 114, 116, 383 Blondeau, H. 301, 306 Bloom, L. 264 Boers, F. 28 Bohnacker, U. 7, 234, 360, 361, 364 Bonet, E. 430, 435 Bonilla, C. L. 265 Bonnesen, M. 373 Borer, H. 128 Borgonovo, C. 317, 401 Boroditsky, L. 548, 552 Bos, P. 103 Bott, L. 521 Bowden, H. W. 260 Bowerman, M. 15, 67, 68 Bowles, M. 101, 235 Braine, M. D. S. 68 Bresnan, J. 112, 117, 398 Bronckart, J. P. 264 Broselow, E. 464, 465 Brovetto, C. 259 Brown, A. 42, 44 Brown, R. 264 Bruhn de Garavito, J. 130, 135, 176, 177, 316, 328, 334, 497 Burt, M. 99 Busby, J. 302 Bybee, J. L. 312 Bylund, E. 4, 9, 41, 43, 554, 555 Cabrelli, J. 29, 234, 535 Cabrera, M. 71 Cadierno, T. 41, 42 Cairns, H. S. 447 Camacho, J. 174 Cancino, H. 250 Cardinaletti, A. 426, 432 Carlson, G. N. 328, 444 Carroll, S. 147 Casasanto, D. 547, 554 Casielles-Suárez, E. 504 Castañeda Castro, A. 29 Chae, G.-E. 217 Chafe, W. 502 Chambers, C. G. 202 Chan, H. L. 263 Chan, Y.-H. C. 405 Chang, H. 498 Chang, X. 134 Chen, B. 289 Chen, D. 5, 97, 99, 102, 103 Chen, L. S. A. 290 Chen, X. 265

Chen, Y. 401, 406 Chen, Y. C. 29 Cherepovskaia, N. 217 Cherici, A. 408 Cheung, C. C. 102 Cheung, P. 147 Chien, Y. C. 463 Chierchia, G. 143, 519, 520 Chilla, S. 373 Cho, J. 186, 190–192, 525, 526 Choi, S. H. 15, 143, 148, 149, 151 Chomsky, N. 394, 400, 442, 474 Chondrogianni, V. 5, 289, 465 Chrabaszcz, A. 185, 190 Christianson, K. 117 Chu, C.-Y. 418 Chun, E. 117 Chung, E. S. E. 231, 235, 420–422 Chung, S. 271 Çimen, Ş. S. 28 Cinque, G. 170, 398–400 Clahsen, H. 251, 261, 262, 374 Clifton, C. 374 Collentine, J. 316 Colonna S. 496 Comajoan-Colomé, L. 274 Comrie, B. 273, 407 Conradie, S. 361 Constant, N. 506 Contemori, C. 496 Cook, S. 260 Cooperrider, K. 546 Coppieters, R. 279 Corbet, J. 290 Correa, M. 321 Coşkun Kunduz, A. 217 Covey, L. 375 Craenenbroeck, J. V. 442 Crain, S. 128, 401, 403, 442 Croft, W. 65, 68 Csábi, S. 28 Cuadrado, A. S. 29 Cuervo, C. 109, 115 Cunnings, I. 402, 476, 479, 481 Cuza, A. 71, 174, 290, 432, 433, 498 Dahl, A. 361, 370, 394 Dahl, Ö. 297 Dal Pozzo, L. 116, 217 Deen, U. K. 478 Degen, J. 519 Dekydtspotter, L. 383, 388, 389, 394, 402, 406, 407, 539 de la Cruz-Pavía, I. 540 Delfitto, D. 270 Demirci, M. 479, 481 Demirdache, H. 286, 292 Demonte, V. 170

560

Author Index Demuth, K. 536 De Neys, W. 523, 524 Déprez, V. 344 de Swart, H. 286, 287, 383 de Vries, M. 400 Di Biase, B. 233 Diessel, H. 402 Dijkstra, T. 49 Dillon, B 481 Dimitrakopoulou, M. 370 Dimroth, C. 6, 249, 251 Di Venanzio, L. 432 Dixon, R. M. W. 178 Doetjes, J. 383 Doherty, S. 131 Doiz, A. 271 Dominguez, L. 7, 290, 291, 433, 476, 477, 479 Dong, Y. 481 Doran, R. 523 Dosi, I. 290 Dracos, M. 315 Dudley, A. 7, 318 Duffield, N. 447–450 Dugarova, E. 480 Dupuy, L. 526 Dussias, P. E. 374 Edmonds, A. 304, 306 Eide, K. M. 363 Elliott, J. R. 313 Elordieta, G. 540 Emirkanian, L. 115 Emonds, J. 342, 507 Enç, M. 506 Endo, M. 176 Escandell-Vidal, M. V. 302 Eubank, L. 346 Fábregas, A. 170, 178, 328 Falk, Y. 392 Fallah, N. 174 Fang, S. 71, 118 Farley, A. P. 233, 320 Feeney, A. 521 Felser, C. 374, 402, 476, 479, 481 Feng, S. 525 Fernald, A. 159, 161 Fernández, C. 320 Fernández, E. 540 Fernandez Cuenca, S. 320 Fernández Fuertes, R. 116, 329 Ferreira, F. 67, 127 Filiaci, F. 462, 496, 540 Finer, D. 464, 465 Fletcher, P. 290 Flores, C. 321, 363, 432 Flores, L. 30 Flynn, S. 350, 392

Fodor, J. D. 183, 535 Foley, C. 392 Frazier, L. 374 Frenck-Mestre, C. 219 Friedmann, N. 81, 82 Frisson, S. 27 Fuchs, M. 285 Fujimori, A. 509 Fujita, H. 402 Fukuda, S. 87 Gabriele, A. 288, 291 Gallardo del Puerto, F. 453 Gandón-Chapela, E. 453 Ganuza, N. 362 García-García, M. 512 García Mayo, M. D. P. 391, 392 García Sánchez, I. 174 García-Tejada, A. 71, 73 Gargiulo, C. 540 Gass, S. 3 Gathercole, V. C. M. 18 Gavarró, A. 432 Gavruseva, E. 329 Gee, J. 302 Geeslin, K. L. 301, 318 Gelfand, M. P. 260 Gelman, S. 200, 202 Genesee, F. 344 Gerken, L. 536 Gess, R. 171, 176 Ghezlou, M. 175 Giacalone Ramat, A. 275 Ginelli, G. 376 Giorgi, A. 287, 315 Glass, W. R. 495, 496 Gleason, J. 190 Goad, H. 9, 407, 535–537, 539 Goldberg, L. 442 Gómez Soler, I. 71, 72, 99–101 González, P. 285, 288 Gonzalez, R. H. 101, 103 Gor, K. 218, 219, 260 Gordon, P. 117 Green, D. W. 53, 54 Grice, P. 518 Gries, S. T. 115 Grimshaw, J. 398 Grodzinsky, Y. 461, 463 Grondin, N. 347 Gropen, J. 109 Grüter, T. 161, 376 Gubala-Ryzak, M. 349, 352 Gudmestad, A. 301, 305, 306, 318 Guijarro-Fuentes, P. 173, 176–178, 233, 330, 373, 497 Gullberg, M. 17, 44 Gullifer, J. W. 55

561

Author Index Gunawardena, C. 351, 433 Guo, F. 446 Gürel, A. 6, 218, 511 Guzmán Naranjo, M. 103

Ivanov, I. 434, 511 Iverson, M. 492 Izquierdo, J. 275 Izumi, S. 130

Hafitz, J. 264 Håkansson, G. 359 Halloran, B. 434 Hamburger, H. 401, 403 Han, C. H. 423 Hankamer, J. 441, 444 Harbour, D. 430 Hardt, D. 443 Harner, L. 302 Harrington, M. 373 Hartshorne, J. K. 104 Haspelmath, M. 63 Hatfield, D. 534 Hatipoglu, Ç. 331 Hattori, H. 370 Hawkins, R. 188, 189, 347, 370, 401, 405, 406, 443, 453, 535, 537 Haznedar, B. 218 Heap, D. 430 Hendriks, H. 42 Hengeveld, K. 326 Herschensohn, J. 171, 345 Hervé, C. 204 Hickmann, M. 42 Hijazo-Gascón, A. 28 Hinger, B. 233 Hirakawa, M. 86, 87, 176 Hiramatsu, K. 447 Hjelde, A. 363 Hoang, H. 28 Hochberg, J. G. 68 Hoji, H. 447 Hollander, M. A. 201 Hopp, H. 157, 160–162, 376, 388, 403 Hosoi, H. 526 Housen, A. 263 Howard, M. 303, 306, 318, 319 Hsieh, F.-T. 332 Hu, X. 402, 404 Huang, Y. Y. 332 Hudson, J. A. 302 Hudson Kam, C. L. 437 Hulk, A. 508 Hurtado, I. 118, 434 Hwang, H. 443, 447, 448, 450 Hwang, S. H. 150, 498

Jackendoff, R. 13 Jaeger, J. J. 259 Jäschke, K. 112, 117, 118 Jensen, I. N. 361, 362 Jessen, A. 402 Jesus, A. 315 Jiang, L. 479 Jiang, N. 14, 15, 146, 149, 151, 185, 190 Jisa, H. 125 Johannessen, J. B. 363 Johnson, J. 145, 552 Johnson, K. 442 Johnson, M. 25, 545 Joo, H.-R. 114, 116 Joo, K. J. 477, 478 Jordens, P. 251 Ju, M. K. 85 Juchem-Grundmann, C. 28 Judy, T. 6, 173, 174, 176–178, 496, 510 Juffs, A. 5, 71, 97, 99, 102, 114–116, 118, 373, 374, 378, 402 Jun, S.-A. 534

Imai, M. 16–18 Inagaki, S. 116, 146, 147, 151 Ionin, T. 5, 149, 151, 183–185, 187–192, 205–207, 332, 333, 418, 422, 512 Irani, A. 69 Irizarri van Suchtelen, P. 235

Kaan, E. 117 Kaiser, E. 481 Kaku-MacDonald, K. 291 Kalyuga, M. 28 Kalyuga, S. 28 Kamp, H. 170 Kang, S. K. 29 Kannada 415 Kanno, K. 450–451 Kanwit, M. 100–103, 301, 304, 305, 307, 318, 319 Kasem, A.-H. 331 Kasparian, K. 402, 405 Katsos, N. 523 Kayne, R. S. 428 Keenan, E. L. 407 Kehler, A. 443 Kempchinsky, P. 317 Kihlstedt, M. 275 Kim, C. S. 143, 445 Kim, E. H. 465, 467–469 Kim, H. 116, 118, 179 Kim, J. 450–451 Kim, J.-H. 480 Kim, J. J. 262 Kim, K. 477, 480, 498 Kim, L. K. 184 Kimura, T. 423 Kiparsky, C. 99 Klavans, J. L. 428 Klein, E. C. 378

562

Author Index Klein, W. 250, 284, 286, 300, 303 Kolb, N. 362 Kömür, Ş. 28 Kondo, T. 85 Kong, S. 129 Konstantzoua, K. 290 Koyama, S. 443, 453 Krifka, M. 502, 505 Kroll, J. F. 4, 48, 49, 52, 53, 55 Kühl, K. 363 Kupisch, T. 6, 174, 203, 508 Kush, D. 370, 394 Lai, H. L. 29 Lai, V. T. 548, 553 Lakoff, G. 25, 545 Lakshmanan, U. 130, 184 Laleko, O. 513 Lambrecht, K. 502 Landau, I. 103 Langacker, R. W. 26, 65 Lappin, S. 442 Lardiere, D. 150, 184, 205, 218, 237, 332, 348, 351, 538 Larrañaga, M. P. 330, 373 Larson, R. K. 102 Larsson, I. 363 Lau, E. 407, 408 Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, D. 202 Leal Méndez, T. 370, 510, 511 Lebkuecher, A. L. 17, 18 Lee, D. 464, 465, 480 Lee, J. F. 131 Lee, N. 332 Lee, S. 420 Lee-Ellis, S. 401 Lehmann, C. 400 Lemée, I. 301, 306 Lemmerth, N. 160 Leung, Y.-K. I. 350 Levelt, W. J. M. 40, 376 Levin, B. 64, 65, 128 Lew-Williams, C. 159, 161 Liang, L. 289, 481 Liceras, J. 8, 329, 332 Lidz, J. 421 Lieberman, M. 541 Lifter, K. 264 Lillo-Martin, D. 447 Lindqvist, C. 18 Listhaug, K. F. 351 Liszka, S. 289, 291, 535, 537 Littlemore, J. 28–30 Liu, C. 404 Liu, D. 4, 19, 189, 190 Liu, M. 102 Lleó, C. 174 Lobeck, A. 442

Lohndal, T. 361 López, L. 229, 507 López-Beltrán, P. 127, 133 López Otero, J. C. 234 Lord, C. 67 Lorusso, P. 82 Lozano, C. 83 Lu, H. Y. 478 Luchkina, T. 512 Lucy, J. A. 44, 546 Lumsden, J. 553 Lustres Alonso, E. G. 71 Lyons, C. 188 Ma, F. 52 MacDonald, D. 147 Mackey, A. 3 Macrae, C. N. 553 Maloof, C. J. 259 Malt, B. C. 17, 18 Marantz, A. 214 Marcotte, J. P. 68 Marin, R. 7, 334 Marinis, T. 134, 465 Marsden, H. 8, 417, 423 Martin, F. 292 Martín-Gascón, B. 4, 29 Martohardjono, G. 8, 288, 378, 385, 386 Matsuo, A. 447–450 Matthews, J. 478 Matthews, S. 404 May, A. 29 Mazzaggio, G. 527 McClelland, J. L. 257 McCloskey, J. 442 McClure, W. 288 McCollam, K. 233 McCullough, E. 536 McDaniel, D. 447 McDonough, K. 115, 117 McIntosh, B. 536 McLaughlin, J. 52 McManus, K. 319 McNeill, D. 39 Meisterheim, M. 329 Mendikoetxea, A. 83 Merchant, J. 442 Messenger, K. 104 Meuter, R. F. I. 53 Mikulski, A. M. 320 Miles, L. K. 553, 554 Miller, L. 290 Miller, R. 264 Mitchell, R. 319, 320 Mitsugi, S. 253 Moawad, R. A. 18 Mohammadi, S. 234 Montalbetti, M. M. 493

563

Author Index Montrul, S. 6, 70, 72, 88, 99, 101–103, 115, 118, 129, 130, 135, 205, 232, 233, 235, 288, 290, 291, 321, 434 Moranski, K. 71 Moses, J. G. 301, 303 Muāgututiʻa, G. T. 232 Müller, G. 394 Müller, N. 508, 511 Murasugi, K. 442 Murphy, V. A. 261, 262, 444 Musolino, J. 421, 520 Mwansa, J. M. 431 Nagano, T. 67, 70 Nakayama, M. 403 Navarro, S. 511 Neubauer, K. 262 Newport, E. L. 145, 437, 552 Nikitina, T. 117 Nistov, I. 361 Noble, G. D. 553 Noveck, I. A. 520–522 Núñez, R. 546 Obenauer, H.-G. 383 O’Grady, W. 401, 414, 450–451 Oh, E. 116 Olsen, M. K. 115 O’Neill, D. K. 302 Opsahl, T. 361 Orfitelli, R. 190 Ortega, L. 70, 73 Osch, B. van 321 Oshita, H. 85, 129 Osterhout, L. 51 Özçelik, Ö. 419, 421 Papadopoulou, D. 218, 233, 261 Papafragou, A. 39, 520 Paradis, J. 14, 15, 344, 511 Park, S. H. 116, 118 Parker, D. 446 Park-Johnson, S. K. 69, 73 Parodi, T. 176, 251 Parodi-Lewin, C. 98 Partee, B. 170 Pascual y Cabo, D. 233 Patterson, C. 466 Pavlenko, A. 14, 546 Perdue, C. 250 Perez-Cortes, S. 321 Pérez-Leroux, A. T. 174, 200, 202, 204, 333, 430, 432, 433, 495, 496 Perlmutter, D. 428, 430 Perpiñán, S. 7, 321, 334, 335, 436 Pescarini, D. 430 Petersen, J. H. 363 Pettibone, E. 174, 177 Phillips, C. 446

Pianesi, F. 287, 315 Pickering, M. J. 27 Picoral, A. 334 Pierantozzi, C. 203 Pierce, A. 344 Piñar, P. 374 Pinker, S. 112, 116, 117, 261, 263 Pirvulescu, M. 430 Plag, I. 112, 117, 118 Polinsky, M. 190, 290, 404 Pollock, J.-Y. 342, 352 Portner, P. 313 Posada, A. 522 Pouscoulous, N. 522 Pozzan, L. 373 Prada Pérez, A. D. 305 Prasada, S. 258, 259, 261 Prévost, P. 251, 317, 347, 378 Pustet, R. 326, 327 Pylkkänen, L. 89, 111, 115 Qiu, Y. 289 Quesada, M. L. 100–103 Quintana, H. L. 288 Quirk, E. 373 Raman, L. 200, 202 Ranjan, R. 232 Rankin, T. 349, 375 Rappaport Hovav, M. 64, 65, 128 Rastelli, S. 275, 277 Reichenbach, H. 286 Reichle, R. V. 510 Reinhart, T. 460, 461, 463, 474 Reuland, E. 474 Ritchie, W. C. 385 Rizzi, L. 492, 506, 508 Rizzi, S. 174 Roberge, Y. 430 Roberts, L. 289, 291, 443, 445 Robertson, D. 184 Rocca, S. 263, 265 Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, M. 230, 231 Rohde, A. 263 Rooth, M. 502 Rosén, C. 360 Ross, J. R. 385 Rothman, J. 134, 173, 176–178, 317, 434, 492, 497 Rumelhart, D. E. 257 Rundblad, G. 27 Sabourin, L. 161 Saddy, D. 134 Sag, I. 183, 441, 444 Saito, M. 442 Saji, N. 16–18 Salaberry, M. R. 7, 264, 265, 275 Salsbury, T. 303 Sanchez, L. 433

564

Author Index Sánchez Calderón, S. 116 Sánchez Walker, N. 130, 135, 235 Sano, T. 82 Santoro, M. 435 Sanz, C. 260 Sanz, M. 83 Sato, Y. 99 Savasir, I. 302 Savchenko, U. 101, 102 Schachter, J. 401, 404, 464, 465 Schaeffer, J. 81 Schaeken, W. 523–526 Schimke, S. 249, 252 Schlyter, S. 303 Schmid, M. S. 363 Schreiber, T. 388 Schwartz, B. D. 113, 253, 349, 352 Sera, M. D. 329, 330 Serratrice, L. 203, 204, 207 Shibatani, M. 64 Shibuya, M. 176 Shimada, H. 82 Shin, J.-A. 117, 420 Shirahata, T. 475, 478, 480 Shirai, Y. 6, 263–265, 275 Silva, R. 261 Sinclair, H. 264 Slabakova, R. 29, 115, 118, 205, 215, 286–288, 291, 318, 370, 391–393, 434, 467, 469, 509, 511 Slavkov, N. 371 Sleeman, P. 321 Slobin, D. I. 37–41, 43 Smith, C. 270, 284 Smith, G. 436 Snape, N. 6, 148, 199, 200, 206, 207, 526 Snedeker, J. 146 Snyder, W. 113, 115, 118 Solon, M. 301, 304 Song, E. J. 117, 151 Song, J. Y. 536 Sorace, A. 86, 129, 392, 462, 494, 496, 511, 540 Sprouse, J. 394 Sprouse, R. A. 8, 113, 383, 388, 389 Srivastav, V. 399 Stam, G. 43 Starke, M. 426 Stauble, A. E. 250 Stefanowitsch, A. 115 Steiner, J. 331 Steinhauer, K. 405 Steward, E. 48, 49 Stowe, J. C. 259 Stowell, T. A. 108, 286, 292 Stringer, D. 8, 111, 113, 176, 177 Stromswold, K. 113, 115 Sturt, P. 479 Su, J. 150 Su, Y.-C. 478

Suárez-Campos, L. 28 Suddendorf, T. 302 Sugaya, N. 265 Sun, Y. 554 Sung, M. C. 117 Sung, Y. T. 403 Suzuki, K. 89 Svane, R. P. 302 Takagaki, T. 125 Takahashi, C. 510 Talmy, L. 42, 65 Tan, L. 553 Tanaka, N. 407, 408 Tanenhaus, M. K. 444, 519 Tang, W. 149 Tavakolian, S. L. 401, 403 Temmerman, T. 442 Thornton, R. 446 Thyre, T. 383 Ticio, E. M. 178 Timberlake, A. 271 Titone, D. 55 Tode, T. 331 Tomescu, V. 231 Tomlinson, J. M. 521 Tong, X. 265, 275 Toth, P. D. 101 Trahey, M. 349 Trenkic, D. 184, 188, 189, 192 Trimasse, N. 18 Tronnier, M. 540 Tryzna, M. M. 188, 431 Tsimpli, I. M. 370 Turco, G. 253 Ullman, M. T. 259, 260 Umeda, M. 207, 476–478 Uribe-Etxebarria, M. 286 Uth, M. 512 Vainikka, A. 250, 333 Vainio, S. 218 Valenzuela, E. 130, 135, 334 van Hout, A. 290 VanPatten, B. 131, 333, 335 van Tiel, B. 523, 524 Varlokosta, S. 431 Vasquez-Carranza, L. M. 203 Velasco-Sacristán, M. S. V. 28 Vendler, Z. 271 Verbeke, S. 232 Verkuyl, H. 270, 271 Vinnitskaya, I. 392 Wackernagel, J. 428 Walkden, G. 361 Wang, P. 134 Wei, L. 217

565

Author Index Wen, Y. 481 Wen, Z. 149, 151, 253 Westergaard, M. 7, 231, 350, 351, 357, 361–363 Wexler, K. 128, 332, 446, 463 White, L. 7, 9, 98, 99, 104, 155, 176, 177, 251, 343, 345, 347, 349, 352, 370, 378, 465, 475, 535–537, 539, 540 Whorf, B. L. 546 Wiberg, E. 301, 307 Wierzbicka, A. 14 Williams, J. 374 Wolfram, W. 534 Woolford, E. 228 Wu, M.-J. 422, 423, 476, 479 Yakhabi, M. 116 Yang, C. 118 Yang, K. 291 Yang, W. 554 Yap, F. 279 Year, J. 117 Yip, V. 404 Yoshimura, N. 474, 476

Yoshinaga, N. 116 Young-Scholten, M. 250, 333 Yuan, B. 87, 116, 345, 347, 480, 498 Yusa, N. 85 Zagona, K. 286 Zalbidea, J. 71 Zeng, L. 475 Zeng, X. 265 Zhang, H. 191 Zhang, J. 289 Zhang, M. 302 Zhang, Y. 289 Zhao, Y. 101, 102, 116 Zheng, L. 498 Zhong, S. 19 Zhou, X. 289 Zibin, A. 29 Zimmermann, M. 503 Zobl, H. 332, 498 Zubizarreta, M. L. 506 Zwicky, A. M. 427 Zyzik, E. C. 5, 67, 69, 71, 498

566

SUBJECT INDEX

Page numbers in italic indicate figure and bold indicate table respectively acceptability judgement tasks (AJTs) 129, 145, 186, 345, 384, 401, 415, 448, 498 accusative clitics 431, 432, 436, 437 accusative-marked objects 213 A-chain deficit hypothesis (ACDH) 128 actional verbs 125, 134 active filler-gap strategy 374 adaptive control hypothesis 53 adjectival passives 124, 126, 130, 131, 135 adjective placement 167–178 adpositions 212 adult native speakers 145, 235, 260, 450, 477–478, 521; sentence processing by 82–83 adverbial phrases 272, 278, 280 adverb placement 347–350 adverbs 7, 19, 103, 150, 195, 302, 304, 305, 307, 312, 315, 319, 341, 342, 345, 347, 349–352, 360, 364 agglutinative language 211, 217 agreement errors 157, 176, 249, 331, 332 anaphora resolution 460–463, 469, 494, 496 anaphoric temporal adverbials 43 antecedent choice task 464, 466 anticausative pairs 63 article choice parameter 183, 188 artificial languages 361, 437 aspect hypothesis 6, 7, 257, 287 associative learning 547, 555 atomic count nouns 148 atomic object-mass nouns 148, 149 auditory lexical decision task 260 author causation 65 auxiliaries verb 428 auxiliary change 86, 87 auxiliary selection hierarchy 79, 80, 85, 86 auxiliary verb 79, 244, 246, 252, 299, 315, 326 AX-continuous performance task 54



backward binding 93–95, 98, 103 bare nouns (BNs) 196 bilingual acquisition 198, 202, 207, 328, 329 Bilingual Interactive Activation Model (BIA) 49 bilingualism 1, 2, 50, 55, 171, 235, 404 bilingual lexicon 50, 51, 53, 55, 56 bilingual lexicosemantic organization 14 bilinguals 2, 3, 6, 16–18, 43, 47–51, 54–56, 88, 174, 196, 203–208, 321, 328, 358, 404, 433, 436, 495, 508, 511, 555 bilingual speakers 18, 20, 48, 51, 53–55, 232, 334, 437, 462, 464, 469 bottleneck hypothesis 144, 151, 205, 207, 215 case: differential object marking 233–235; differential subject marking 231–233; future directions 235–236; non-structural case see nonstructural case Catalan language 127, 217, 234, 329, 334, 430, 432, 436 causative errors 67–70 causative/inchoative alternation 71 child bilinguals 174, 196, 508, 511, 513 CHILDES database 81, 97, 402 childhood bilingualism 344, 405, 408 child language acquisition 3, 67, 159, 202–204, 301–302, 405, 478 Chinese 13, 15; change-of-state verbs 118; ChineseEnglish bilinguals 17; Chinese psych verbs 102; Chinese-speaking learners of Korean L2 116; English copula 332; GC languages 142; Korean and Japanese learners of 16, 101; L1-Chinese speakers 192; materials 27; reflexives  in L2 Chinese 479–480; SpanishChinese bilinguals 433; unaccusative/ unergative distinction 87; verbs 14 classroom teaching and research 13

567

Subject Index clause-initial subjects 356, 357 clause-level syntax 7–8, 531, 534 clitic left dislocation (CLLD) 8, 427, 429, 433– 434, 504 clitics: accusative, dative, oblique and subject clitics 428; clitic climbing and clitic clusters 429–430; clitic doubling 429; clitic left dislocation (CLLD) 429; phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic properties of 427–428; placement 428 Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) 44 complementizer phrase 356, 372 comprehension tasks 8, 101, 158, 190, 288 concept-oriented approach 277, 300 Congruence Principle 274 constraint-based approach 519 construction grammar approaches 68, 117 contemporary computerized corpora 19 context-based collocation tasks 174, 176 context-dependant acceptability tasks 288 contrastive analysis hypothesis (CAH) 404 contrastive semantic analysis 20 corpus-search software 401 correlatives 399 co-speech gestures 39, 43 cross-linguistic variation 8, 66, 141, 143, 489 cue transparency 155 Danish language 41 default forms 156, 157, 159, 251 default past tense hypothesis (DPTH) 264–265, 275 defective syntax 535 Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) 462 denominal verbs 262 dependency 327 dependent case theory 214 derivational complexity hypothesis (DCH) 371 determiner phrase (DP) 175 developmental language disorder (DLD) 437 differential object marking (DOM) 6, 224–226 differential subject marking (DSM) 6, 224, 228, 231–235 direct object dative (DOD) 108, 109 discourse anaphors 504, 507 discourse constraints 191, 462, 474, 495, 512 discourse-pragmatic features 217, 333 distributed morphology (DM) 156, 230 Distributional Bias Hypothesis 274 domain-general learning strategies 250 double-copula systems 326, 329, 335 dummy auxiliaries 252 Dutch language 17–18, 49–50, 80, 84, 103, 104, 127, 154–155, 159, 161–162, 232, 235, 243, 244, 251, 252, 263, 279, 328, 355, 419 dynamicity 270, 271, 288, 327, 328, 334, 335 elicited imitation task (EIT) 73, 185, 190, 331, 446 elicited production tasks 83, 84, 97, 134, 135, 185–186, 201–202, 345, 401, 436

English language 81, 127; English past tense see tense; English plural inflection 538; figurative language 29; infinitives 244; locative alternation 109; plural morphology 538; transitive verbs 132; verb movement in 341–342 ergative-absolutive languages 213, 220, 225 European Portuguese (EP) language 81, 315, 321, 430, 446, 490, 497 event-related potential (ERP) 51, 158, 193, 216, 289, 397, 402, 522 event-related spectral perturbations (ERSPs) 402 Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) verb constructions 434 external causation 65, 85 external interfaces 2, 231, 434, 436, 462, 469, 476, 480, 525 eye-movement monitoring technique 464 eye-tracking methods 27, 145, 157, 186, 187, 479, 522 Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) 100, 144, 150, 184–185, 215, 287, 318, 416, 417, 479, 230, 236, 476 “filler-gap” dependency 369, 397, 444 finite auxiliary verbs 244, 246, 252 finite verbs 249, 342, 356 Finnish language 6, 55, 116, 210, 217, 218, 226, 307 First Noun Principle (FNP) 127, 131 fluctuation hypothesis 183–185, 187, 188 focus: contrastive focus 503–504; information focus 503 forced choice tasks 114, 114, 119, 119 form learning 13 form-meaning mapping 13 French: infinitives 244; periphrastic future 305; quantification at a distance (QAD) 383; SVO clause structure 244; verb movement in 341–342 frequency of exposure 20 full transfer/full access 129, 144, 156, 230, 236, 343, 417 functional elements 533 Generalized Classifier (GC) L1 141 generalized conversational implicatures (GCIs) 519 generative grammar models 356 generic statements 195 German language 7, 38, 40, 80, 86, 110, 117, 123, 127, 133, 134, 141, 142, 159–161, 174, 195, 203–205, 211, 212, 219, 225, 226, 235, 243, 244, 249–254, 261–263, 291, 302, 307, 328, 334, 355–364, 368, 372–374, 376, 386–388, 402, 403, 466; infinitives 243; miniparadigms 249; passives 133, 134 Governing Category (GC) parameter 475 Government and Binding theory 343 grammaticality judgment task (GJT) 68, 88, 98, 100, 102, 145, 158, 172–175, 192, 217, 232–234, 288, 331, 401, 434, 435, 447 Gricean model 520 Guaraní 226

568

Subject Index Hebbian learning 547 Hebrew language 81, 82, 127, 159, 226, 230, 328, 400 heritage speakers (HSs) 3, 6, 50, 69, 71, 72, 87, 88, 103, 133, 135, 171, 174, 204, 231, 232, 235, 236, 290–291, 320–322, 362–364, 372, 401, 432, 433, 436, 477–478 Hindi/Urdu language 225, 227, 229–232, 235, 236, 285, 399; case markers, thematic roles, and syntactic distribution in 225; DOM in 226; ergativity 225 indicative versus subjunctive mood 312–313 informative quantifiers 421 intensional adjectives 167, 168 Interface Hypothesis (IH) 99, 231, 235, 317, 416, 460, 462, 469, 476, 494, 508, 512, 525 interlanguage development 491 interlingual homographs 49, 50 internal causation 64, 65, 85 internal clitic 533, 536, 537, 541 interpretability hypothesis (IH) 129, 156, 215, 370, 452 interrogatives 8, 389, 405 Intonational Phrase (IP) 532, 534 intransitive verbs: unaccusative hypothesis and diagnostics 77–80; unaccusativity and levels of representations 80–81 intransitivization errors 69 inverse scope 8, 412–424 inversion errors 372, 373 Japanese language 78, 79, 81, 82, 84–89, 98, 99, 101, 102, 129, 142, 147, 188, 197, 206, 207, 212, 217, 253, 264, 265, 279, 285, 288, 291, 329; verbs 63 Kannada 415 Korean language 6; reflexives in 479–481; transitive verbs 132 left anterior negativity (LAN) 402 lexical aspect hypothesis (LAH) 273 lexical functional grammar 376 Lexical Gender Learning Hypothesis (LGLH) 157, 161 lexical insensitivity hypothesis (LIH) 264–265 lexicalist accounts 523 lexical semantics 4, 5, 13, 80, 147, 227 lexical verbs 244, 246, 251, 252, 305, 342, 345, 348, 349, 356, 357 linguistic knowledge 3, 29, 103, 176, 236, 247, 335 linguistic models 2, 2 linguistic proximity model 231 Lithuanian 127, 230 locative alternation 109–111 locatives 329–335 Longman Learners Corpus 83, 85 Mandarin Chinese language 14, 42, 142, 144, 147–150, 184, 188, 189, 275, 446, 510, 525, 548, 549

markedness 113 masked priming 216, 218, 260, 261 matrix clause 7, 314, 316, 404, 490, 493, 496, 519 memory-based lexical storage 261 mental lexicon 156 metaphor 27–28; spatial metaphors 546, 548; spatiotemporal metaphors 9, 545, 549–551 metonymy: in grammar 26; in L2 pedagogy 29–31; psycholinguistic studies 27 Mexican Spanish language 431 Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency 188 minimalist program (MP) 214, 314, 370 missing surface inflection hypothesis (MSIH) 156, 215, 332 modal verbs 428 Modern Greek language 211, 212 Modern Irish language 442 Modularity Matching Hypothesis 403 Mongolian 226 monolingual acquisition 328 monolingual children 160, 202, 233, 315, 321, 330, 511 monolingual native speakers 50, 207, 233, 288 monolingual speakers 43, 158, 462, 511, 550, 555 monomorphemic words 532, 534, 536–538 Mood Phrase (MoodP) 315 Morphological Congruency Hypothesis (MCH) 144, 185 morphological errors 101, 159, 435 mouse-tracking method 521 multi-competence 546, 555 multilingual acquisition 1, 231 multilingualism 1, 37, 235 Nakh-Dagestanian languages 211 narrow range rules (NRR) 68, 112, 116–117 native speakers (NS) 258, 301; count and mass nouns by 146–147 neurocognitive models 402 neurolinguistics 3 neuroscientific paradigms 158, 159 nominative-accusative languages 108, 225, 230 nominative-accusative system 213 non-actional verbs 125 non-alternating unaccusative verbs 70, 124, 128, 129 non-atomic substance-mass nouns 148, 149 noncanonical past tense 130 non-canonical word orders 8, 382, 384, 387, 391, 393 nonfinite default forms 251 non-intersective context 173 non-native speakers (NNSs) 258 non-structural case: differential  object  marking 226– 228; differential  subject  marking 225–226 nonverbal tasks 302 non-voice-bundling languages 89 Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) 399 noun phrases (NP) 108, 124, 125, 174, 195 null-subject parameter 492 number phrase (NumP) 176

569

Subject Index object-mass nouns 142 online listening tasks 462 optimality theory (OT) 228 overlap hypothesis 509 overpassivization 70, 85, 128–130 parallel distributed processing (PDP) model 257 passive: verb unaccusativity 124; verbal and adjectival passives 124–125; verbs 125 patient-oriented questions 68 pedagogical interventions 21 person-case constraint (PCC) 435 phonological phrase (PPh) 533 phonological utterances (Utt) 532 phonology 1–3, 8, 9 picture-based acceptability judgment task 526 picture-based interpretation tasks 288 picture-identification tasks 158 picture matching task (PMT) 130, 200, 448 picture selection task 464 placement verbs 20 plural: plural-marking and GC languages 142–143; semantics of plurality 143 plural-denoting morphemes 197 plural nouns 197 polarity subjunctive 317 Polish language 127 Position of Antecedent Strategy (PAS) 494 postnominal ambiguity approaches 177 Poverty of the Stimulus (POS) logical learning problem 493 Prader-Willi Syndrome 437 pragmatic felicity judgment task (PFJ) 100 preference tasks 174, 301, 345 prepositional dative (PD) 108 prepositional phrase (PP) 108, 110 pre-verbal negation (neg-V) 251 preverbal position (SV) 87 primary linguistic data (PLD) 382 priming studies 134 Principles and Parameters theory 343, 357 Processability Theory (PT) 232, 376 processing instruction (PI) 131 process-oriented research 21 production tasks 114, 301 prominence hypothesis (PH) 376 pronoun interpretation 540–541 proper antecedent (PA) 475 prosodic phonology 532, 533 prosodic transfer hypothesis (PTH) 535 prototype theory 274 psycholinguistic methods 53, 83, 289, 369 psycholinguistics 2, 3, 462 qualifying adjectives 167 qualitative methods 30 quantification at a distance (QAD) 383 quantity judgment task 144–145

reading times (RTs) 158, 258 recoverability constraint 443 reference grammars 356 reference-set computation 463 referential dependency 460 relative clauses (RCs) 532; ambiguity 539–540; crosslinguistic influence 404–405; L1 acquisition and L1 attrition 403–404; syntax and semantics 397–400 Relevance Theory (RT) 453, 519 representational deficit hypothesis (RDH) 156, 215 representational deficits 431 restrictive context 174 restrictive relative clauses 314 revised hierarchical model (RHM) 48 Romance languages 8, 38, 154, 160, 167, 174, 176, 195, 197, 204, 329, 426, 428 Rumelhart and McClelland (R–M) model 258 Russian language 6, 14, 26, 37, 81, 82, 101–103, 141–143, 142, 149, 159, 160, 162, 183, 187, 188, 190, 202, 205–207, 217, 218, 259, 260, 326, 328–330, 418 scalar implicatures 9; cost and time course of 522– 523; different types of 523–524; theoretical accounts of 519–520 scalar items 524 self-pace moving window (SPMW) task 132 semantically based case: L1 acquisition of 230; L2/L3 and heritage language acquisition 230–231 semantics 1, 63, 170–171; bias 6; boundaries 15; constraints 5; development 20; distinction 14, 19; domains 14, 20; entailment and pragmatics 414; entrenchment 20; and interface phenomena 2; primitives 5; representations 4; restrictions 490; semantic judgment (SJ) 102; structures 15–17, 20, 110–112, 114, 116, 416, 422; transfer errors 19 semantics–pragmatics mappings 191 sentence comprehension 83, 402 sentence processing 56 Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) 374, 481 short-term memory 249, 431 singular nouns 197 Spanish language 43, 88, 504; clitic-climbing in 429; clitic doubling 109; DOM in 226; VS order 83; passive 126; periphrastic future 305; referential pronominal subjects in 496; sepassives in 127; verbal passive in 131 spatiotemporal metaphors 9 specific language disorder (SLI)/developmental language disorder (DLD) 290 Specific Language Impairment (SLI) 128, 437 stative passives 328 structural parallelism 443, 447 structure-building approaches 249, 250

570

Subject Index structured input activities 131 subject antecedents 475 Subject-Aux Inversion (SAI) 369, 372 Subset Principle 475 substance-mass nouns 142 Super High Applicative phrase (SHAppl) 101 surface-scope interpretation 414 Swedish language 38 synonym selections, in situations 19 syntax-phonology interface: clause-level syntax 539–541; function words 538–539; learner contexts 536–537; linguistic phenomenon 531–532; methodological approaches 535–536; SLA theories 534–535; theoretical analyses 532–534 temporal boundednes 334 temporality: defined 257; permanence and 328 tense: aspect hypothesis 262–263; defined 257; irregulars 258–261 tense errors 332 tense phrase (TP) 224, 315 Tense-to-Complementizer movement 372 thematic hierarchy 108, 226 thematic verbs 125, 135 topics 9; contrastive topic 505–506; Lopez’s featural approach 507–508; Rizzi’s cartographic approach 506–507; thematic topic 504–505 transfer of reference: applications of 27–31; psycholinguistic studies on 27 transience 328 transitivity 327 transitivization errors 69 translation interference 52 translation recognition 49, 52 truth value judgement tasks (TVJTs) 199–200, 384, 401, 415, 446, 464, 476 Turkish language 6, 197, 211, 212, 213; case inflection in 212; DOM in 226, 227; passives 133, 134 Typological Primacy Model 231

unaccusative hypothesis 88–89, 128 unaccusative intransitive verb 124 unaccusative trap hypothesis 88, 129 unaccusative verbs 124, 128, 129; and unergatives 128 unergative verbs 124, 128 Universal Grammar (UG) 8, 129, 369, 382, 387, 405 unpaired ergative/non-alternating unaccusative verbs 124 valueless features hypothesis 129 verbal morphology 277, 280 verbal passive 123 verb-framed languages 38, 39 verb morphology 109, 110 verb movement 7; analyses of 342–343; in French and English 341–342; transfer and resetting 347 verb phrase (VP) 108, 224, 356 verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) 441 verb placement 344 verb second (V2) word order 7; definition and description 355–356; standard theoretical analyses 356–357 verb syntax 248 Verb to Infl movement (V-to-I) 372 viewpoint aspect: defined 284–286; methodological approaches 288–290; theoretical acquisition analyses of 287–288; theoretical analyses 286–287 visual probe-recognition task 83 visual word recognition 49 visual-world eye-tracking paradigm 522 visual world paradigm (VWP) 159, 187, 369 vocabulary acquisition 13, 28 voice-bundling languages 89 V-stranding VPE (vVPE) 447 word marker phrase (WMP) 176 word monitoring 145 working memory 498, 510 WriCLE 133

571