Maria Luisa Zubizarreta

Mental representation of morphologically complex words and lexical access

We present in this article a certain number of linguistic and psycholinguistic arguments supporting the hypothesis whereby derived lexical items are listed in the lexicon as autonomous but related lexical items. Some experimental data obtained in French concerning the recognition of derivational affixed words reveal a difference in processing between prefixed and suffixed words. This difference in processing is attributed to the linear organization of these words and to the left-to-right nature of the perceptual parser. It is suggested that only suffixed words are accessed via the lexical entry for the root. In sentence context, accessing the root means that the end part of suffixed words is treated as a unit. We propose that such a procedure of affix detection can be very useful by way of facilitating syntactic parsing and lexical-syntactic integration in on-line language processing. This hypothesis provides a plausible explanation for why syntactically relevant affixes tend to appear at the end of words,

Acquisition of article semantics by child and adult L2-English learners

This paper examines article use in the L2-English of adult and child speakers of Russian, an article-less language. In earlier work on articles in adult L2-English, Ionin, Ko and Wexler (2004) proposed that speakers of article-less L1s fluctuate between dividing English articles on the basis of definiteness vs. specificity, as a result of direct access to semantic universals. The present paper examines whether similar fluctuation is present for child L2-English learners. Results of an elicitation study with L1-Russian child and adult learners of English show that both groups of learners exhibit sensitivity to definiteness as well as specificity. At the same time, it is found that the behavior of child L2-learners is more consistent with natural language data than that of adult L2-learners. It is proposed that both children and adults have domain-specific knowledge of semantic universals, but that adults, unlike children, also use explicit strategies. This proposal is considered in light of the literature on explicit vs. implicit knowledge.

Word Order in Spanish and the Nature of Nominative Case

Much of the research on word order in Romance languages lump Spanish and Italian together and contrast them with French. Spanish and Italian, but not French, are said to allow “free inversion” of the subject. This view is based on the fact that “subject post-posing” in French is only possible in the presence of a triggering element, namely an operator in Comp (a wh-word or its trace) or a subjunctive mood (which might also be analyzed as an operator in Comp). Such a construction, illustrated in (1c-e), is known as stylistic-inversion.1

On the lexicon–syntax interface in Romance languages

Probus 22 (2010), 149 0921–4771/10/022-0149 DOI 10.1515/prbs.2010.005 ©Walter de Gruyter The present collection of papers aims to illustrate the contribution of Romance linguistics to the study of event and argument structure in a diverse set of core syntactic constructions, such as the dative and locative alternations, the directed motion and resultative forms, as well as the causative, anti-causative/inchoative, and conative constructions. With their rich clitic systems and their principled and systematic differences with Germanic, the Romance languages provide a unique window into the complex interaction between the meaning of verbal stems and the syntactic form (as encoded in the (semi) closed class vocabulary of the grammar), and sheds light on their respective contributions to the propositional content of the sentence. Research into the lexicon-syntax interface in the last decade has shifted its explanatory power from the lexicon to the syntax, thus clarifying the role of functional categories while constraining the form of syntactic mechanisms. The articles in this volume provide further support for this new perspective. Yet, the import of the lexical meaning of open class items (even in its most minimal sense) and its relation to the meaning contributed by the construction itself to the overall interpretation of the sentence continue to be ongoing topics of debate. This volume also partakes of this debate.