Antonella Sorace

Magnitude Estimation of Linguistic Acceptability.

Judgments of linguistic acceptability constitute an important source of evidence for theoretical and applied linguistics, but are typically elicited and represented in ways which limit their utility. This paper describes how MAGNITUDE ESTIIMATION, a technique used in psychophysics, can be adapted for eliciting acceptability judgments. Magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability is shown to solve the measurement scale problems which plague conventional techniques; to provide data which make fine distinctions robustly enough to yield statistically significant results of linguistic interest; to be usable in a consistent way by linguistically naive speaker-hearers, and to allow replication across groups of subjects. Methodological pitfalls are discussed and suggestions are offered for new approaches to the analysis and measurement of linguistic acceptability.*

Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian

This study presents data from an experiment on the interpretation of intrasentential anaphora in Italian by native Italian speakers and by English speakers who have learned Italian as adults and have reached a near-native level of proficiency in this language. The two groups of speakers were presented with complex sentences consisting of a main clause and a subordinate clause, in which the subordinate clause had either an overt pronoun or a null subject pronoun. In half of the sentences the main clause preceded the subordinate clause (forward anaphora) and in the other half the subordinate clause preceded the main clause (backward anaphora). Participants performed in a picture verification task in which they had to indicate the picture(s) that corresponded to the meaning of the subordinate clause, thus identifying the possible antecedents of the null or overt subject pronouns. The patterns of responses of the two groups were very similar with respect to the null subject pronouns in both the forward and backward anaphora conditions. Compared to native monolingual speakers, however, the near-natives had a significantly higher preference for the subject of the matrix clause as a possible antecedent of overt subject pronouns, particularly in the backward anaphora condition. The results indicate that near-native speakers have acquired the syntactic constraints on pronominal subjects in Italian, but may have residual indeterminacy in the interface processing strategies they employ in interpreting pronominal forms.

First language attrition and syntactic subjects: a study of Greek and Italian near-native speakers of English

In this paper we present some results from an experimental study that we have been conducting into the effects of syntactic attrition on the L1 of Greek and Italian speakers who have achieved near-native proficiency in their L2 (English) but still use their L1 on a regular basis. In particular, we test the hypothesis, developed on the basis of assumptions regarding syntactic modularity, that the changes in L1 syntax will be restricted to the interface with the conceptual /intentional cognitive systems. The area of investigation is the domain of grammatical subjects in Greek and Italian. More specifically, we tested the participants on the production and interpretation of null and overt subjects, and of preverbal and postverbal subjects. We also elicited grammaticality judgments on subject extraction and subject position in various syntactic contexts. In this paper we report on the results of one of the production tasks (of preverbal and postverbal subjects) and two interpretation tasks. Attrition effects are found in the production of preverbal subjects in the Greek group whereas Italian speakers show attrition effects in the interpretation of overt pronominal subjects. We argue that these results are in the right direction, that is, that semantic features are vulnerable in language attrition whereas syntactic options remain intact.

Internal and external interfaces in bilingual language development: Beyond structural overlap:

This article deals with the interface between syntax and discoursepragmatics/semantics in bilingual speakers. Linguistic phenomena at the interface have been shown to be especially vulnerable in both child and adult bilinguals; here we explore four variables that contribute to this vulnerability to different extents depending on the nature of the interface: underspecification, cross-linguistic influence, quantity and quality of the input, and processing limitations. We investigate the role played by the aforementioned variables in two recently completed studies. One compares the performance of English— Italian and Spanish—Italian bilingual children, monolingual English- and Italian-speaking children and adults on forced-choice grammaticality tasks on the distribution of overt and null subject pronouns in Italian and in English. The second explores bilingual and monolingual speakers’ sensitivity to the presence of definite articles in specific and generic plural noun phrases in Italian and in English. We show that over and above structural overlap, other factors must be We show that over and above structural overlap, other factors must be included to account for differences in the behavioural data in the two tasks and in different populations of bilinguals and monolinguals. We argue that processing factors play a non-trivial role in the difficulty encountered by bilinguals in coordinating syntax with contextual discourse-pragmatic information, regardless of the absence or presence of partial structural overlap. In the case of the internal coordination between syntax and semantics, processing factors may be less likely to affect bilinguals’ performance, while the extent of structural overlap and the associated internal formal features seem to play a more important role.

Gradients in Auxiliary Selection with Intransitive Verbs.

The primary purpose of this study is to present evidence, based on experimental data from Western European languages, that there is orderly variation in the choice of perfective auxiliary with intransitive verbs. Specifically, auxiliary selection is sensitive to a hierarchy of aspectual/thematic verb types: some verbs require a given auxiliary categorically, whereas others allow both auxiliaries to a greater or lesser extent depending on their position on the hierarchy. It is argued that this gradience has potentially important implications for the UNACCUSATIVE HYPOTHESIS, and more generally for theories of the lexicon-syntax interface.

Crosslinguistic influence at the syntax–pragmatics interface: Subjects and objects in English–Italian bilingual and monolingual acquisition

The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime candidates to test the interaction between syntax and pragmatics, and we compared the distribution of subjects and objects in the Italian and English of a bilingual child (1;10–4;6) with that of two groups of MLUw-matched monolinguals. All arguments were coded for syntactic function and for a number of discourse pragmatic features predicted to affect their realisation. Our main prediction was that unidirectional crosslinguistic influence might occur for the English–Italian bilingual child with respect to pronominal subject and object use after the instantiation of the C system. Specifically we predicted that in Italian the bilingual child might use overt pronominal subjects in contexts where monolinguals would use a null subject, and that he might use postverbal strong object pronouns in Italian instead of preverbal weak pronominal clitics. Conversely, we did not expect the overall proportion of overt objects, whether noun phrases or pronouns, to vary crosslinguistically as objects are always obligatorily overt in both languages regardless of discourse pragmatics. Our results confirmed these predictions, and corroborated the argument that crosslinguistic influence may occur in bilingual first language acquisition in specific contexts in which syntax and pragmatics interact.

Native language attrition and developmental instability at the syntax-discourse interface: Data, interpretations and methods

Montrul’s study is an important contribution to a recently emerged research approach to the study of bilingualism and languages in contact, characterized by its sound theoretical basis and its reliance on data from different – and traditionally non-integrated – domains of language development: bilingual first language acquisition (M¨ and Hulk, 2001; Paradis and Navarro, 2003; Serratrice, 2004; Serratrice, Sorace and Paoli, in press), adult second language acquisition (Filiaci, 2003; Sorace, 2003), and native language attrition (Gurel, 2002; Tsimpli, Sorace, Heycock and Filiaci, 2003). The generalization that is emerging from this approach is that interfaces between syntax and other cognitive systems (i.e. discourse pragmatics, lexical-semantics) exhibit more developmental instability than narrow syntax. For L1 attrition, which is the specific focus of the paper, this means that aspects of grammar at the syntax–discourse interface are more vulnerable to attrition than purely syntactic aspects. The identification of restrictions on the domain of occurrence of attrition is consistent with much previous descriptive research on this topic (e.g. Seliger and Vago, 1991). More recently, the same conclusion has been reached by a study on individual language attrition by Tsimpli et al. (2004), who investigated knowledge of Q1 the referential pronominal system in Greek and Italian in very advanced speakers of English. In this paper, Montrul tests the generalization on second-generation speakers of Spanish – or “heritage speakers” – a bilingual group that presents different characteristics from the adult L2 speakers investigated in Tsimpli et al.’s study. In addition to referential subjects, she also focuses on a different interface area of grammar – direct objects – that had not been investigated before. In these respects, Montrul’s study is a welcome development. In other respects, however, the data are less than convincing and do not allow a straightforward interpretation. My commentary focuses on three fundamental questions raised not only by this study, but also by this type of research in general. The main focus will be the expression of referential subjects since this aspect of grammar has been investigated in other studies and therefore offers the possibility of direct comparison among results. The first and most important issue to be considered is the difference between attrition in individual speakers and attrition in language communities. In order to determine the effects of attrition, it is essential to ascertain what speakers knew when the attrition process began, since by definition attrition can only affect what was within the speaker’s knowledge. As Montrul herself points out, there is a fundamental ambiguity with respect to heritage speakers, many of whom are “incomplete learners” who grew up in a situation of reduced or non-target input and therefore never completely learned Spanish. The ambiguity is further compounded by Montrul’s distinction between speakers who have low proficiency in Spanish and those who have high proficiency. Her claim that the most marked evidence of attrition comes from the low-proficiency group reinforces the suspicion that the phenomena exhibited by these

Syntactic optionality in non-native grammars

The existence of optionality is well attested in mature grammars and particularly in transitional stages of development (of both child and adult grammars). A complete explanatory account of optionality, however, has not yet been reached. Such an account is needed for two main reasons. First, optionality poses a challenge for contemporary formal models of generative grammar which, unlike their predecessors (e.g., classic transformational grammar, Government-Binding), assume competition for well-formedness and rule out optional syntactic operations. Secondly, and more specifically relevant to this volume, optionality can be found not only at intermediate stages of second language (L2) acquisition, but also at advanced stages and even in the end-state grammars of nonnative speakers who have reached the stage of ultimate attainment: it can therefore become a permanent, or ‘stabilized’ feature in L2 acquisition (Robertson and Sorace, 1999; Sorace, 1999). Residual optionality in the end-state grammars may therefore be regarded as a type of divergence from the corresponding native grammar. Whether ‘stable’ optionality in mature L1 grammars and ‘stabilized’ optionality in end-state L2 grammars have the same etiology, and whether developmental optionality in adult L2 grammars is a phenomenon of a different nature from that of developmental

Unaccusativity and auxiliary choice in non-native grammars of Italian and French: asymmetries and predictable indeterminacy

In the diachronic development of the modern Romance languages, reflexes of the Latin verb habere have replaced reflexes of esse , to a greater or lesser extent in particular languages. In this article it will be argued that the distribution of esse -reflexes is determined by a hierarchy of unaccusativity based on the semantic distinctions concreteness/abstracteness and movement/staticity , and that habere -reflexes have been spreading systematically from the periphery of this hierarchy towards the core. This process has affected Italian and French to different degrees: Italian has largely retained a syntactically and semantically consistent auxiliary system, whereas the French system, at a more advanced stage of the evolution, shows greater variation and inconsistency. Evidence is presented from the linguistic intuitions of very advanced Italian non-native speakers of French and French non-native speakers of Italian about equivalent unaccusative verbs, and it is argued that the unaccusative hierarchy conditions both the degree and the directionality of difficulty in second language acquisition. The findings reveal an asymmetric pattern: it is easier for the French learners to fully acquire the facts of essere -selection than for the Italian learners to internalize the facts of etre-selection, and the degree of difficulty experienced by the Italian learners with individual unaccusative verbs is correlated to their position along the hierarchy.

Crosslinguistic influence and language dominance in older bilingual children

The point of departure of this study is the well-known hypothesis according to which structures that involve the syntax–pragmatics interface and instantiate a surface overlap between two languages are more vulnerable to crosslinguistic influence than purely syntactic domains (e.g. Muller and Hulk, 2001). In exploring the validity of this hypothesis for later stages of bilingual acquisition, the study aims to establish whether crosslinguistic influence occu only in one direction, i.e. from English to Greek, which structural factors can account for the directionality of crosslinguistic effects, and whether language dominance plays a role in determining the occurrence and the strength of these effects in older bilingual children. Experimental data are presented from 32 English–Greek eight-year-old simultaneous bilinguals – 16 Greek-dominant living in Greece and 16 English-dominant living in the UK – and monolingual control groups. A number of syntax–pragmatics interface and narrow syntax structures were investigated and the results showed that both types of structures were found to be selectively vulnerable to crosslinguistic influence in the predicted direction, but only in the grammar of the English-dominant bilinguals.