Johan Rooryck

Licensing Wh- in situ

This article examines French wh-in-situ. We argue that wh-in-situ in French is licensed by an intonation morpheme, which also licenses yes/no questions. Movement of a Q-feature of an in-situ wh-word is required to disambiguate the underspecified intonation morpheme. The underspecification nature of this intonation morpheme leads to limited distribution of French wh-in-situ. We further compare French wh-in-situ with Chinese and Portuguese, showing that wh-in-situ in different languages can in fact have different properties.

Dissolving binding theory

1. Introduction 2. Binding, Agree, and the Elsewhere Principle 3. The Syntax of Simplex Reflexives 4. Self-Reflexives as Floating Quantifiers 5. Extending the Analysis 6. The Semantics of Simplex and Complex Reflexives: the case of zich and zichzelf 7. The Syntax of Spatial Anaphora 8. Conclusion References

Configurations of Sentential Complementation : Perspectives from Romance Languages

1. Raising 2. Pseudo-raising 3. Control 4. Enclitil ordering in imperatives and infinitives 5. Clitic climbing 6. Negative and factive islands 7. On two types of underspecification: evidence from agreement in relative clauses 8. A unified analysis of French interrogative and complementizer qui/que

Atomism and Binding

This book contains several chapters dealing with Binding Theory, that is the theory dealing with the distribution and interpretation of definite descriptions, pronouns and reflexives. The general procedure by which a model is built out of various relatively independent submodules is referred to by the term Atomism.

Negative and Factive Islands Revisited.

Several restrictions on successive cyclic wh -movement appear not to be exclusively linked to general principles of the grammar, but seem to be in some sense lexically determined. It has been pointed out repeatedly that wh -movement of subjects and adjuncts out of complement CPs of factive verbs strongly contrasts with wh -movement of internal arguments out of these CPs (Rouveret, 1980; Kayne, 1981; Zubizarreta, 1982; Adams, 1985): (1) (a) *Who do you regret/understand/forget likes this book? (= Adams, 1985: (4b)) (b) *How did he deeply regret that his son had fixed the car? (c) ?Which article did you regret/understand/forget that I had selected?

Genetic predisposition and sensory experience in language development: Evidence from cochlear-implanted children

Recent neurobiological studies have advanced the hypothesis that language development is not continuously plastic but is governed by biological constraints that may be modified by experience within a particular time window. This hypothesis is tested based on spontaneous speech data from deaf cochlear-implanted (CI) children with access to linguistic stimuli at different developmental times. Language samples of nine children who received a CI between 5 and 19 months are analysed for linguistic measures representing different stages of language development. These include canonical babbling ratios, vocabulary diversity, and functional elements such as determiners. The results show that language development is positively related to the age at which children get first access to linguistic input and that later access to language is associated with a slower-than-normal language-learning rate. As such, the positive effect of early experience on the functional organisation of the brain in language processes is confirmed by behavioural performance.

The Syntax of Spatial Anaphora

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive Minimalist analysis of the apparent free variation between pronouns and anaphors in snake-sentences. Three sets of data provide the basis for the analysis: hitherto unobserved restrictions on quantifier-pronoun relationships, classical observations about the role of perspective or point of view (Cantrall 1974), and interpretive effects concerning the nature of the locative relationship (Kuno 1987). We propose an analysis of spatial prepositions in terms of Svenonius’ (2006) AxPartP. Spatial interpretations may be object-centered or observer-centered. We correlate these two interpretations with two distinct grammatical representations. The object-centered interpretation involves an Agree relation between AxPart and the complement of P, the observer-centered interpretation is the result of a binding relationship between AxPart and the Speaker, represented in MoodEvid P. An Agree relation requires the presence of the complex anaphor himself, whereas binding of AxPart by the Speaker is only compatible with the pronoun him.

RESTRICTIONS ON DATIVE CLITICIZATION IN FRENCH CAUSATIVES

Causative constructions in French display restnctions as to the chticization of lexical datives onto the causative In altogether different frameworks, Fauconnier (1983), Burzio (1986) and Goodall (1987) have related this restnction to the ergative-inergative distinction However, the inability to formally define ergative verbs in French, as well as further restnctions on the chticization of datives in causative constructions show that this hypothesis fails to account for the data observed Α thematic condition on dative chticization in causatives adequately descnbes the lestnctions noted

The Relation Between Early Implantation and the Acquisition of Grammar

Cochlear implantation gives many profoundly deaf children access to auditory input and enables them to develop spoken language. Cochlear implanted (CI) children develop language faster than when they had been fitted with hearing aids alone (HA) (Svirsky et al., 2000). Previous research by our team shows that children implanted before 15 months show even faster-than-normal language learning rates. This has led us to hypothesize that, by the age of 3, early implanted children will have closed the initial gap with their typically developing (TD) peers (Coene et al., in press). From this age onwards, more complex morphosyntactic development begins. The acquisition of grammatical elements is particularly dependent on sufficient auditory access, as these elements are acoustically non-salient. Possible deficits in the perception of grammatical elements may explain why profoundly deaf children with hearing aids are often severely delayed in the acquisition of inflection morphemes (Brown, 1984; Norbury et al., 2001). When comparing the HA children with the CI children, the latter group uses more inflectional endings in their conversational speech. Moreover, benefits are observed for children with longer implant experience (Spencer et al., 1998). The objective of the present study is to investigate the verbal morphosyntactic development of CI children compared to their TD and HA peers. Possible long-term beneficial effects of early implantation will be given close attention.

Linguistic assessment tools for the Digisonic® Dual electric-acoustic speech processor

Introduction. It is well known that cochlear implants enable profoundly deaf patients to reach high levels of speech intelligibility. They are, however, suboptimal for the perception of melody in music and speech. The reason for this is that implants are conceived to code for the mid and high frequencies of sound, where phonemic information is contained. Low frequencies contain information related to tonality, timbre, etc. ,but cochlear implants do not code low frequencies well. In new hearing rehabilitation strategies, such as electric-acoustic stimulation (henceforth EAS), standard amplification via hearing-aid technology is combined with electric stimulation via cochlear implant technology. This strategy aims at exploiting the complementary benefits of acoustic and electric stimulation of the low and high frequency auditory cues, respectively. Potential candidates for EAS are hearing impaired individuals with residual hearing at low frequencies and a severe hearing loss at high frequencies, who do not benefit from classical hearing aids. Low frequency auditory cues are essential in pitch perception, the primary acoustic cue to speech prosody. Prosody covers the properties of speech that cannot be explained by the intrinsic properties of the speech sounds that were uttered. It includes acoustic variation in e.g., fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity. Such variation can carry meaning, and therefore is crucial for spoken communication. In this report, we describe the development and use of a new module of the Auditory Speech Sound Evaluation test (A§E ®, Govaerts e.a. 2009), as part of the FP7 European research project “DUAL PRO”, which aims at assessing the perception of speech prosody across languages by means of discrimination and identification tasks. By means of this prosody test battery the use of current generation of cochlear implants and classical hearing aids can be assessed, as well as that of new, hybrid EAS strategies.