F.P. Weerman

Articles, adjectives and age of onset: the acquisition of Dutch grammatical gender

A comparison of the error profiles of monolingual (child L1) learners of Dutch, Moroccan children (child L2) and Moroccan adults (adult L2) learning Dutch as their L2 shows that participants in all groups massively overgeneralize [—neuter] articles to [+neuter] contexts. In all groups, the reverse gender mistake infrequently occurs. Gender expressed by Dutch attributive adjectives reveals an age-related asymmetry between the three groups, however. Whereas participants in the child groups overgeneralize one particular suffix (namely the schwa), adult participants use both adjectival forms, the schwa-adjective and the bare adjective, incorrectly. It is argued that the asymmetry observed in adjectives reflects that adult learners exploit an input-based, lexical learning route, whereas children rely on grammar-based representations. The similarity in article selection between all groups follows from the assumption that adults, like children, make use of lexical frames. Crucially, lexical frames can successfully describe the distribution of gender-marked articles, but they cannot account for gender in adjectives.

Storage and Computation in the Language Faculty

Contributing authors. Preface. Acknowledgment. 1. Minimising or maximising storage? An introduction. S. Nooteboom, et al. Part I: Setting the stage. 2. Whats in the lexicon? R. Jackendoff. Part II: Accessing regular and irregular word forms. 3. Dutch inflection: The rules that prove the exception. H. Baayen, et al. 4. Words, rules and stems in the Italian mental lexicon. T. Say, H. Clahsen. Part III: Changing the rules. 5. The balance between storage and computation in phonology. G. Booij. 6. Computation and storage in language contact P. Muysken. Part IV: Pronouncing spoken words. 7. Storage and computation in spoken word production. A. Roelofs. Part V: Buffering and computing. 8. Effects of short-term storage in processing rightward movement P. Ackema, A. Neeleman. 9. Storage and computation in sentence processing. A neuroimaging perspective. E. Kaan, L. Stowe. Part VI: Computing and storing aspects of discourse. 10. Computation and storage in discourse interpretation. N. Asher. Subject Index. Author Index.

The Balance between Syntax and Morphology: Dutch Particles and Resultatives

This paper focuses on Dutch verb-particle constructions and verb-resultative constructions. On the one hand, Dutch particles and resultatives share some properties; for instance, they mutually exclude each other. On the other hand, they show contrastive behavior with respect to, for example, movement. The similarities can be captured if to some extent, the two constructions receive the same analysis. It is argued that both particles and resultatives are base generated in a position adjoined to the verb. The differences between the constructions follow from the assumption that resultatives are adjoined to the verb at D-structure, while particles are adjoined to the verb in the morphological component. This analysis has several consequences for the syntaxmorphology interface: (i) there has to be a separate morphological component, (ii) the relation between this component and syntax is determined by generalizing metarules, and (ii) morphological structures are visible to syntactic principles such as the proposed constraint on the complexity of heads.

Pronouns and Case

Abstract Subject—object distinctions in pronominal systems of languages like Dutch and English are not similar to nominative—accusative oppositions in languages with morphological case, since pronouns do not show the syntactic effects of morphological case. This does not mean that these pronominal distinctions are only relics of earlier stages with a richer inflection. In fact, they do show a fundamental distinction between what is sometimes called head marking (here: agreement) and dependency marking (here: case marking). Consequently, subjects are DPs and objects are extended with a Case Phrase. However, in languages like Dutch and English dependency marking is not morphologically specified, i.e. the head of the Case Phrase is empty. The special property of pronouns is that they are not just nouns, since they only contain functional information. They are organized in a paradigm and correspond to (or spell out) some higher, extended nominal projection. More specifically, Dutch and English object pronouns spell out the Case Phrase, whereas the subject pronouns in these languages correspond to a DP (licensed by agreement). As a result, object pronouns differ in form from subject pronouns. Ordinary nouns, containing lexical information, correspond to N. Since N can be present in subject as well as in object position, ordinary nouns can appear in both types of argument positions. Several peculiar characteristics of Dutch and English pronouns follow from this theory.

The diachronic consequences of first and second language acquisition: the change from OV to VO

A question that concerns many historical linguists is to what extent language change can be explained in terms of first or second language acquisition. Here it is argued that recent results in first and second language acquisition research point toward an interplay of these two factors in explaining language change. This is illustrated by a discussion of the change from OV to VO that took place in English, but no in Dutch

Verb inflection in monolingual Dutch and sequential bilingual Turkish–Dutch children with and without SLI

Both children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children who acquire a second language (L2) make errors with verb inflection. This overlap between SLI and L2 raises the question if verb inflection can discriminate between L2 children with and without SLI. In this study we addressed this question for Dutch. The secondary goal of the study was to investigate variation in error types and error profiles across groups. Data were collected from 6-8-year-old children with SLI who acquire Dutch as their first language (L1), Dutch L1 children with a typical development (TD), Dutch L2 children with SLI, and Dutch L1 TD children who were on average 2 years younger. An experimental elicitation task was employed that tested use of verb inflection; context (3SG, 3PL) was manipulated and word order and verb type were controlled. Accuracy analyses revealed effects of impairment in both L1 and L2 children with SLI. However, individual variation indicated that there is no specific error profile for SLI. Verb inflection use as measured in our study discriminated fairly well in the L1 group but classification was less accurate in the L2 group. Between-group differences emerged furthermore for certain types of errors, but all groups also showed considerable variation in errors and there was not a specific error profile that distinguished SLI from TD.

Effecten van SLI op Nederlandse congruentie

Effects of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) are often visible in the inflectional system. This also holds for Dutch, where verbal and adjectival inflection are vulnerable in children with SLI. A set of experiments shows that Dutch children with SLI make the same type of overgeneralizations as typically developing children make (and that their mistakes differ from adults acquiring Dutch as a second language). On the other hand, it is shown that SLI is more than just a delay. A comparison of a group of younger and older children with SLI suggests that some effects on inflection are long-lasting. It is argued that the evidence can best be understood if it is assumed that SLI is a result of problems in the processing and interpretation of the input. The same problems may also disturb the production of inflection once the relevant rules have been acquired.

Cracking the cluster: The acquisition of verb raising in Dutch

In this paper, we argue that ascending verb cluster orders (1-2 and 1-2-3, e.g. moet eten ‘must eat’ and moet hebben gegeten ‘must have eaten’) are not only the default verb cluster orders in Standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands, but also play a crucial role in the acquisition of verb clusters. We administered a series of three sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) to a total of 120 children (2;8–5;6), and found that children, in contrast to what previous literature might predict, are much more likely to produce 1-2 orders than 2-1 orders. We propose an acquisition pathway in which we assume an OV stage (Vfin-final) and a 1-2 stage before children completely fine-tune their preferences toward adult-like behavior. We further argue that this pathway first applies to bipartite modal-infinitive clusters but is quickly expanded to include all cluster types. We believe our proposal has three advantages: it answers an important learnability question, explains the differences attested between the way children of different ages handle verb clusters, and strongly suggests that verb clusters follow one general rule, rather than several separate construction-specific ones.

Diachronic change: Early versus late acquisition

There is a long linguistic tradition in which language change is explained in terms of first language acquisition. In this tradition, children are considered to be the agents of language change, or at least the agents of changes in the underlying grammar. Since the early 1980s, this has been formulated in the (generative) terminology in terms of parameters set by children: whereas an older generation acquires one particular setting of a parameter (during childhood), a next generation of L1 children may set a parameter differently, based on the input of their parents, and this may lead to a different output. For obvious reasons this argumentation had to be built on theoretical rather than empirical work on language acquisition. There are no children acquiring Old English or Middle Dutch, and, in fact, the field of acquisition research was until recently much less developed and very often not focused on the type of facts that happened to play a role in discussions of language change.

Minimising or Maximising Storage; An Introduction

1. Why this volume? “The lexicon is really an appendix of the grammar, a list of basic irregularities”. These words, written a long time ago by Leonard Bloomfield (Bloomfield, 1933, p. 274), have set the stage for focusing linguistic and psycholinguistic research on the compositional nature of linguistic objects, a view that has culminated, from the mid-fifties until today, in generative linguistics as proposed and elaborated by Noam Chomsky (Chomsky, 1957; 1965). This attention for the computational nature of language over many decades of linguistic investigation has proven to be tremendously fruitful. Without it, our insight in the nature of human language would be much smaller than it is. Inevitably, the continually high level of attention for computational rules has led to some neglect of the possibility of massive storage not only of irregular but also of regular linguistic objects. The idea for this volume was inspired by the observation that a growing number of linguists and psycholinguists are dissatisfied with the traditional Bloomfieldian idea that the lexicon is a list of irregularities, and all other linguistic objects are computed by rules. So the question appeared to be: if Bloomfield’s view was wrong, or at least not the full truth, what then is stored in the lexicon, and what is computed by rule?