410 Linguistik
Refine
Year of publication
- 2020 (80) (remove)
Document Type
- Part of a Book (40)
- Article (30)
- Part of Periodical (3)
- Review (3)
- Report (2)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
- Working Paper (1)
Language
- English (65)
- German (14)
- Multiple languages (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (80)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (80)
Keywords
- Spracherwerb (33)
- Sprachtest (33)
- Nominalisierung (7)
- Deutsch (5)
- Linguistik (5)
- Präposition (4)
- Verbalnomen (4)
- Analyse (3)
- Korpus <Linguistik> (3)
- Präpositionale Wortverbindung (3)
Institute
This paper introduces the Kam version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). Kam is a minority language in southern China which belongs to the Kam-Tai language family and is spoken by the Kam ethnic minority people. Adding Kam to MAIN not only enriches the typological diversity of MAIN but also allows researchers to study children’s narrative development in a sociocultural context vastly distinctly different from the frequently examined WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. Moreover, many Kam-speaking children are bilingual ethnic minority children who are “left-behind” children living in Mainland China, growing up in a unique socio-communicative environment
This thesis investigates the acquisition pace and the typical developmental path in eL2 acquisition of selected phenomena of German morphosyntax and semantics and compared them to monolingual acquisition. In addition, the influence of ‘Age of Onset’ and of external factors on eL2 acquisition is examined.
To date, the most studies on eL2 acquisition focused on language production. Based on mostly longitudinal spontaneous speech data of only small number of children, they indicate that eL2 learners acquire sentence structure and subject-verb-agreement faster than monolingual children, whereas the acquisition of case marking causes them more difficulties. Moreover, similar developmental paths to those of monolingual children are claimed. Only several studies examined comprehension abilities in eL2 learners, however overwhelmingly in cross-sectional design. The findings from comprehension studies on telic and atelic verbs, and on wh-questions indicate that eL2 children acquire their target-like interpretation faster than monolingual children. The same acquisition stages towards target-like interpretation like in monolingual acquisition are assumed as well. Taking together, to date, no study exists, that examines comprehension and production abilities in a large group of eL2 learners of German in a longitudinal design.
This thesis extends the previous results by investigating pace of acquisition, impact of factors, and individual developmental paths in a longitudinal design with large groups of participants. Language data of 29 eL2 learners of German (age at T1: 3;7 years, LoE: 10 months) and 45 monolingual German-speaking children (age at T1: 3;7) are examined. The eL2 learners were tested in six test rounds (age at T6: 6;9 years). The monolingual children were tested in five test rounds (are at T5: 5;7). The standardized test LiSe-DaZ (Schulz & Tracy, 2011) was employed to examine children’s language skills.
eL2 learners show a significantly greater rate of change, thus faster acquisition pace, than monolingual children in the following scales: comprehension of telicity, comprehension of wh-questions, production of prepositions, and production of conjunctions. These phenomena are acquired early in monolingual children. No differences regarding acquisition pace between eL2 children and monolingual children are found for comprehension of negation, production of case marking, and production of focus particles. These phenomena are acquired late in monolingual development and involve semantic and pragmatic knowledge. The findings of faster acquisition pace of several phenomena are in line with several studies that reported that eL2 children develop faster than monolingual children.
Independent on whether a phenomenon is acquired early or late, no effects of external factors on eL2 children’s performance are found. These findings indicate that acquisition of core, rule-based phenomena is not sensitive to external factors if the first exposure to L2 takes place around the age of three.
Moreover, eL2 children show the same developmental stages and error types in comprehension of telicity, comprehension of negation, production of matrix and subordinate clauses. This is also independent on how fast they acquire a structure under consideration. Thus, these findings provide a further support for similar developmental paths of eL2 and monolingual children towards target-like comprehension and production.
This paper describes the addition of Luxembourgish to the language versions of MAIN, the adaption process and the use of MAIN in Luxembourg. A short description of Luxembourg’s multilingual society and trilingual school system as well as an overview of selected morphosyntactic and syntactic features of Luxembourgish introduce the Luxembourgish version of MAIN.
French suffixations in -age, -ion and -ment are considered roughly equivalent, yet some differences have been pointed out regarding the semantics of the resulting nominalizations. In this study, we confirm the existence of a semantic distinction between them on the basis of a large scale distributional analysis. We show that the distinction is partially determined by the degree of technicality of the denoted action: -age nominals tend to be more technical than -ion ones. We examine this hypothesis through the statistical modeling of technicality. To this end, we propose a linguistic definition of technicality, which we implement using empirical, quantitative criteria estimated in corpora and lexical resources. We show to what extent the differences with respect to these criteria adequately approximate technicality. Our study indicates that this definition of technicality, while amendable, provides new perspectives for the characterization of action nouns.
The paper investigates the different productivity domains (Rainer 2005) of two Italian event denoting suffixes, -mento and -zione. These suffixes share the same eventive semantics, they are both productive and thus can be seen as rivals in the formation of event nominalizations. The aim is to obtain a better understanding of the constraints that play a role in the selection of one affix over the other. By means of a logistic regression model the contribution of different features of the base verb is investigated. The analysis is conducted on a dataset of 678 nominalizations extracted from a section of Midia, a diachronic balanced corpus explicitly built for morphological research (Gaeta 2017). Results show that the frequency, the inflectional class and the number of characters of the base verb as well as the presence of the prefix a- significantly contribute to the definition of the different domains, only partially confirming previous findings.
This paper presents an overview of the adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives in Greek, focusing on its use in Greek academic and diagnostic settings. A summary of the properties of the Greek language and the concomitant challenges these language-specific properties posed to MAIN adaptation are presented along with a summary of published studies with monolingual Greek-speaking children and bilingual children with Greek as L2, with and without Developmental Language Disorder.
This paper describes the revision of the Vietnamese version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). We first introduce the Vietnamese language and Vietnamese-speaking populations after which we describe the translation and adaptation process of the Vietnamese MAIN and present results from monolingual and bilingual children.
Nominalization in French can be done by means of conversion, which is characterized by the identity between the base and the derived lexeme. Since both noun→verb and verb→noun conversions exist, this property raises directionality issues, and sometimes leads to contradictory analyses of the same examples. The paper presents two approaches of conversion: derivational and non-derivational ones. Then it discusses various criteria used in derivational approaches to determine the direction of conversion: diachronic ones, such as dates of first attestation or etymology; and synchronic ones, such as semantic relations, noun gender or verb inflection. All criteria are evaluated on a corpus of 3,241 French noun~verb pairs. It is shown that none of them enables to identify the direction of conversion in French. Finally, the consequences for the theory of morphology are discussed.
Torwali, a Dardic language of the Indo-Aryan family spoken in the District Swat in Pakistan, is an endangered language that lacks a literary tradition. This paper gives a background on the Torwali language and people, and describes the development of an orthography for Torwali and the establishment of Torwali-medium schools by the local organization Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi ‘institute for education and development’ (IBT). Finally, the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instruments for Narratives (MAIN) to Torwali is outlined.