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
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.
This article examines French Verb-Noun compounds with Means value (couvre-pied 'blanket', lit. cover-feet), derived from stative bases. It shows that they are generally ambiguous between Means and Instrument reading. The regularity of this double value discards an analysis relying on verbal homonymy, in favor of Rothmayr's (2009) hypothesis of bi-eventive verbs. We assume that the presence of an agentive as well as a stative component in the verbal bases accounts for the double Means/Instrument value of the VNs studied here. We also examine "pure" Instrument VNs, available with similar verbal bases. We show that the distribution of the Instrument vs. Means/Instrument values relies on the state of the referent of the noun involved in the compound after the event described by the verbal base occurred. A permanent state entails a "pure" Instrument reading, whereas Means/Instrument reading obtains if the state of N is reversible (Fábregas & Marín 2012).
Simple Event nominals with Argument Structure? – Evidence from Irish deverbal nominalizations
(2020)
Deverbal nominals in Irish support Grimshaw's (1990) tripartite division into complex event (CE-), simple event (SE-) and result nominals (R-nominals). Irish nominals are ambiguous only between the SE- and R-status. There are no CE-nominals containing the AspP layer in their structure. SE-nominals (also found in Light Verb Constructions) are number-neutral and incapable of pluralizing and are represented as [nP[vP[Root]]]. R-nominals are devoid of the vP layer and behave like ordinary nouns. The Irish data point to v as the layer introducing event implications and the vP or PPs as the functional heads introducing the internal argument (Alexiadou and Schäfer 2011). Event denoting nominals in Irish can license the internal argument but aspectual modification and external argument licensing are not possible (cf. synthetic compounds in Greek (Alexiadou 2017)), which means that, counter to Borer (2013), the licensing of Argument Structure need not follow from the presence of the AspP layer.
We investigate deverbal zero-derived nominals in English (e.g., to walk > a walk) from the perspective of the lexical semantics of their base verbs and the interpretations they may receive (e.g., event, result state, product, agent). By acknowledging that, in the absence of an overt affix, the meaning of zero-nominals is highly dependent on that of the base, the ultimate goal of this study is to identify possible meaning regularities that these nominals may display in relation to the different semantic verb classes. We report on a newly created database of 1,000 zero-derived nominals, which have been collected for various semantic verb classes. We test previous generalizations made in the literature in comparison with suffix-based nominals and in relation to the ontological type of the base verb. While these generalizations may intuitively hold, we find intriguing challenges that bring zero-derived nominals closer to suffix-based nominals than previously claimed.
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 on deverbal nominalizations from Ktunaxa, a language isolate spoken in eastern British Columbia, Canada. Deverbal nominalizations are formed uniformly with a left-peripheral nominalizing particle k (Morgan 1991). However, they do not form a single homogenous class with respect to various syntactic properties. These properties are illustrated with novel data, showing that deverbal nominalizations fall into at least two classes, which are analyzed here as nominalization taking place at either vP or VP, where vP-nominalizations include the external argument and VP-nominalizations do not. Evidence for this division comes from how possession is expressed, the interpretation of the passive (and passive-like constructions), and the licensing of verbal modifiers. As both classes of deverbal nominalizations are constructed uniformly with the nominalizing particle, these properties are derived syntactically from the size of the verbal constituent being nominalized.
In the typology of West African languages, tone has been noted to play crucial grammatical and lexical roles, but its function in word formation has been less systematically explored and remains to be fully understood. Against this backdrop, the present study seeks to examine the form and function of tonal morphology in the formation of action nominals in four Kwa languages spoken in Ghana, namely Akan, Gã, Lεtε, and Esahie, a relatively unexplored language of the Central Tano subgroup. Relying on data from both secondary and primary sources, we argue that tone raising is an important component of Kwa action nominalization, as it is found across different languages and derivational strategies. Specifically, while across the Kwa languages considered, tone raising tends to be an epiphenomenon of phonological conditioning, sometimes tone is the sole component of the nominalization operation or, as in Esahie, it concurs with the affix to the derivation, hence playing a morphological function.
In Japanese, direct combination of verbs or adjectives by coordination (with to 'and') or juxtaposition (with its empty counterpart) can form a NP, if the conjuncts are antonymous to each other; the coordinator to 'and' can combine only NPs elsewhere. We claim that this is because there is a phonetically empty nominalizer that can nominalize each conjunct, and that the new nominal construction has been gradually developing in the history of Japanese. An acceptability-rating experiment targeting 400 participants shows that the younger speakers were likely to judge this construction more acceptable than the older ones, that this tendency is slightly weaker in the Nominative condition than in the Genitive condition, and that the coordination condition was significantly worse than the juxtaposition condition.
Nominalization has been at the forefront of linguistic research since the early days of generative grammar (Lees 1960, Vendler 1968, Lakoff 1970). The theoretical debate as to how a theory of grammar should be envisaged in order to capture the morphosyntactic and semantic complexity of nominalization, initiated by Chomsky's (1970) Remarks on nominalization, is just as lively today, after five decades during which both the empirical scope and the methodology of linguistic research have seen enormous progress. We are delighted to be able to mark this occasion through our collection, next to the anniversary volume Nominalization: 50 Years on from Chomsky's Remarks, edited by Artemis Alexiadou and Hagit Borer, soon to appear with Oxford University Press.
DeriMo is an international meeting dealing with derivational morphology from the perspective of data analysis. Its second edition DeriMo 2019 was held at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague. The local organizers are researchers of the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL = Ústav Formální a Aplikované Linguistiky) at the Computer Science School of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Chairs of the program committee were Magda Ševčíková (ÚFAL), Zdeněk Žabokrtský (ÚFAL), Eleonora Litta Modignani Picozzi (CIRCSE, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan), and Marco Passarotti (CIRCSE, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan).
The relation between word-formation and syntax and whether they form distinct domains of grammar or not has been discussed controversially in different theoretical frameworks. The answer to this question is closely connected to the languages under discussion, among other things, because languages seem to differ considerably in this regard. The discussion in this paper focuses on nominal compounds and phrases. On the basis of a great variety of data from a total of 14 European languages, it is argued that the relation between compounds and phrases, and, more generally, between word formation and syntax, should be characterized not in terms of a categorical but instead in terms of a gradient distinction.
This article deals with the development of -igen verbs in German since the Old High German period, demonstrating that this can be regarded as a process in which the adjective formation morpheme -ig gradually develops into a component of a word formation pattern that derives transitive verbs from nouns. An -igen-verb can be descended not only from an -ig-adjective (würdig – würdigen) but also from a noun without an intermediary -ig-adjective (Pein – *peinig – peinigen). In this article, it is claimed that a word formation pattern with -ig develops over time. The emergence of this word formation pattern can be described as a "reanalysis" of the verb structure accompanied by a "resegmentation" of the original word structure and a semantic "remotivation" of the established unit. It is also pointed out that this development is particularly evident in the Middle High German period.
This systematic review investigated how successful children/adolescents with poor literacy skills learn a foreign language compared with their peers with typical literacy skills. Moreover, we explored whether specific characteristics related to participants, foreign language instruction, and assessment moderated scores on foreign language tests in this population. Overall, 16 studies with a total of 968 participants (poor reader/spellers: n = 404; control participants: n = 564) met eligibility criteria. Only studies focusing on English as a foreign language were available. Available data allowed for meta-analyses on 10 different measures of foreign language attainment. In addition to standard mean differences (SMDs), we computed natural logarithms of the ratio of coefficients of variation (CVRs) to capture individual variability between participant groups. Significant between-study heterogeneity, which could not be explained by moderator analyses, limited the interpretation of results. Although children/adolescents with poor literacy skills on average showed lower scores on foreign language phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and reading comprehension measures, their performance varied significantly more than that of control participants. Thus, it remains unclear to what extent group differences between the foreign language scores of children/adolescents with poor and typical literacy skills are representative of individual poor readers/spellers. Taken together, our results indicate that foreign language skills in children/adolescents with poor literacy skills are highly variable. We discuss the limitations of past research that can guide future steps toward a better understanding of individual differences in foreign language attainment of children/adolescents with poor literacy skills.
Als eines der "treibenden Kräfte" des Internets kann das populäre Videoportal YouTube angesehen werden, das täglich von Millionen von Internetnutzern besucht wird. Es ist nicht nur ein Online-Feld, in dem Menschen aus aller Welt Videos aus den unterschiedlichsten Weltbereichen oder ihrer Interessen teilen, sondern auch aus sprachlicher Sicht handelt es sich um einen faszinierenden Ort. Dies spiegelt sich in der sog. YouTube-Sprache wider, die das Hauptthema dieses Beitrags ist. Das Hauptziel des Beitrags ist es dabei, auf das Phänomen "YouTube-Sprache" aufmerksam zu machen und sie in Bezug auf die Merkmale der Internetsprache zu behandeln. Das zusammenhängende Ziel ist es, durch konkrete Beispiele darauf hinzuweisen, wie sich diese "Sprache" im Deutschen, bzw. im deutschsprachigen YouTube-Bereich, manifestiert. Ein weiteres Ziel besteht in der Klärung einiger angeführter Beispiele der YouTube-Sprache, d.h. der Wörter, bzw. Wortverbindungen, die zum gesamten Charakter dieser Sprache beitragen.
Die vorliegende kontrastive Analyse stützt sich auf das heuristische Verfahren des PREPCON-kontrastiv Moduls, das am Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim entwickelt worden ist. Das deutsch-slowakisch-spanische PREPCON-Projekt mit insgesamt drei linguistischen Modulen (PREPCON explorativ, temporal und kontrastiv) reflektiert ein breites Forschungsspektrum der sog. Präposition-Nomen-Verbindungen (kurz PWVs). Das Modul PREPCON explorativ bietet eine exhaustive Liste der PWVs im Deutschen entweder aus der Präposition- oder aus der Nomenperspektive. PREPCON temporal nimmt die temporalen PWVs ins Visier und erweitert die Angabe der KWIC3-Belege für die PWVs um verwandte Wörter und Wortgruppen, die Häufigkeit der PWVs im Korpus, ihre typischen Partnerwörter und Muster. Die Vorgehensweise des dritten, d.h. des kontrastiven Moduls, nimmt die PWVs "am Anfang", "auf Anhieb", "mit Genugtuung", "nach Belieben" im interlingualen Kontext unter die Lupe. Das Analysewerkzeug lexpan, das bei der Kontrastierung zum Einsatz gebracht wird, enthüllt wertvolle Muster und typische Kollokationspartner der untersuchten präpositionalen Wortverbindungen und kondensiert die Ergebnisse für eine benutzerfreundliche Verwendung. Eine detaillierte Beschreibung des Modells, Methoden und Formen der Onlinepräsentation der analysierten lexikalisch geprägten Mus-
ter ist in Steyer 2018 zu finden. Die linguistische Aufmerksamkeit wird im Rahmen dieses Beitrags der PWV "bez váhania" (wörtlich "ohne Zögern") geschenkt, bei der sich neben der primär beobachtbaren modalen Ausprägung auch eine hypothetische temporale Ladung zeigt. Der Grund für die Auswahl der konkreten Wortverbindung liegt in der unzureichenden Reflektion der temporalen Bedeutung aus lexikografischer Sicht und in der bemerkenswerten, eventuell nicht auf Anhieb erkennbaren "Bipolarität" (modal-temporal) dieses Minimalphrasems.
"Vor Ort" im Sprachgebrauch : eine kontrastive korpusbasierte Untersuchung (Deutsch-Slowakisch)
(2020)
[...] wird im vorliegenden Beitrag auf die Präposition-Nomen-Wortverbindungen (PNW) als Untersuchungsgegenstand eingegangen, wobei die Exemplifizierung am Beispiel der deutschen PNW "vor Ort" erfolgt. Aus Perspektive des Muttersprachlers stellen die Präposition-Nomen-Wortverbindungen Mehrwort-Einheiten mit einem bestimmten kombinatorischen Potenzial dar. Analog zu den (Einwort-)Lexemen lassen sich auch hier seine Grenzen nur schwer endgültig festlegen, auf Grund der Ko-Vorkommenshäufigkeit können aber die Präferenzen, bzw. Restriktionen bezüglich bestimmter Kookkurrenzpartner ermittelt und die sich daraus ergebenden Schlüsse im Hinblick auf das Funktionieren der PNW im Gebrauch gezogen werden. Obwohl sie im Sprachgebrauch keine Randposition besitzen, gibt es kaum eine zugängliche lexikographische Quelle mit einer detaillierteren Verarbeitung der Kombinatorik dieser Mehrworteinheiten. Ein weiterer Grund für die Notwendigkeit, das Augenmerk auf die Präposition-Nomen-Wortverbindungen zu richten, resultiert aus der Einbeziehung der Nicht Muttersprachler-Perspektive in die Untersuchung. Da die verglichenen Sprachen typologisch unterschiedlich sind, können bestimmte Divergenzen auch mit Rücksicht auf die gegebene Problematik erwartet werden.
Im Beitrag wird die Problematik rekurrenter, strukturell und semantisch sehr heterogener Wortverbindungen fokussiert. Es geht um in der Mehrwortforschung eher vernachlässigte Konstruktionen, die man als binäre Präposition-Substantiv-Verbindungen bezeichnen kann. Die Analyse lexikalisch-syntagmatischer Kombinatorik von minimalen Wortverbindungen eröffnet neue Ergebnisse, denn auch Funktionswörter sind restringiert im Gebrauch. In diesem Artikel wird versucht, die Problematik der Äquivalenz dieser Wortverbindungen näher zu bringen und durch reiche Belege auf die Wichtigkeit kontrastiver Analysen aus der sprachpraktischen und didaktischen Perspektive hinzuweisen. Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema der präpositionalen Wortverbindungen aus der kontrastiven Sicht stellt ein Desiderat in der bisherigen Forschung dar.
Das Thema fokussiert die Problematik der binären Präposition-Substantiv-Wortverbindungen (PWV) und -Wortverbindungsmuster (PWVM) mit ihren rekurrenten Kollokationspartnern und syntagmatischen Kontextmustern. Untersucht werden deutsche präpositionale Wortverbindungen, bei denen die interne Stelle zwischen der Präposition und dem Nomen überproportional häufig nicht mit einem Artikel besetzt ist. Solche Kombinationen kann man als autonome Einheiten auffassen und als feste Wortverbindungen untersuchen. Die Analyse stützt sich auf die Daten in der PRECON Datenbank, die vom Projekt Usuelle Wortverbindungen (UWV) modular erarbeitet wurde. Der im vorliegenden Artikel präsentierte empirische Zugang wirft ein neues Licht auf die Bestimmung der Äquivalenz, was bisher bei der Festlegung des sogenannten Systemäquivalents gar nicht oder nur annähernd beschrieben werden konnte. Das methodologische und lexikographische Novum beim Kontrastieren ist die Erweiterung der Beschreibung der Kernbedeutung(en) und ihrer Kernäquivalente um die Gebrauchsspezifika der Verwendung der äquivalenten PWV(M). Die korpusempirischen Analysen bestätigen die heute vertretene These, dass sich die Bedeutungs- und andere Gebrauchsaspekte nur schwer trennen lassen. Für die adäquate Beschreibung einer fremdsprachigen Einheit sind somit die verfestigte sprachliche Struktur, die verfestigte sprachliche Umgebung, die verfestigten situativ-kontextuellen Gebrauchsspezifika und die usualisierten Kontextmuster wichtig, in die die kontrastierten PWV eingebettet sind.
Im Rahmen dieser Beispielanalyse werden Aspekte und Phänomene der Textgrammatik (vgl. Rickheit & Schade 2002, Stede 2007) veranschaulicht. Am Beispiel einer privaten E-Mail wird gezeigt, wie ein satzgrenzenüberschreitender Zusammenhang und damit Textkohärenz hergestellt werden kann. Dabei werden vor allem die Besonderheiten eines konzeptionell mündlichen Textes (vgl. Schwitalla 2006) der neuen Medien in Bezug auf Kohärenzherstellung herausgearbeitet.
Die vorliegende Beispielerhebung erfasst und analysiert die Sprachbiographien von Freiburger Studierenden mit Migrationshintergrund. Sprachbiographien dienen der Darstellung eines Lebens bzw. einer Lebensspanne unter dem Gesichtspunkt der Sprachentwicklung mit dem Ziel der Rekonstruktion eines Gesamtbildes der sprachlichen Entwicklung einer Person in ihrem gesellschaftlichen Umfeld. Mithilfe der Sprachbiographien lassen sich Rückschlüsse auf die sprachliche und soziale Identität der Personen sowie auf den Zusammenhang zwischen der individuellen Sprachentwicklung und den für sie relevanten Lebensbedingungen ziehen. Besondere Bedeutung kommt hierbei der Rolle von (sprachlicher) Identität beim Integrationsprozess zu.
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.
Four main informational elements have been suggested and studied as central aspects of narrative discourse: causality, character, location, time. The research that scholars have previously undertaken on these aspects has been primarily on Indo-European languages, and more specifically on the European side of that language family. The linguistic limitations have indicated that character is the aspect of narrative that readers/listeners attend to most closely. However, in examining narrative discourses from non-Indo-European languages, challenges to the presumed primacy of character emerge. In a partial report on field work conducted in Borneo in 2012-2015, I compare and contrast patterns in the rankings of the four main aspects of narrative in three languages, English, Hobongan and Daqan. I also note the strategies by which the languages make their respective rankings clear, including focus particles (Hobongan), specificity of description (each), and amount of information provided about the aspects (each). I suggest that analyses of the patterns and rankings of information in narrative be included in typological categorizations and linguistic descriptions of languages.
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.
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), an assessment tool in the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery, aims to improve the assessment of bilingual children. This paper describes the process of adapting MAIN to Urdu. Given the lack of language assessment tools for Urdu-speaking children, the Urdu MAIN is an important new instrument that is made widely and freely accessible to researchers and practitioners, allowing them to examine the narrative abilities of children acquiring Urdu as a first, heritage, second, or additional language.
This paper presents a short overview of Turkey and the Turkish language, and then outlines the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to Turkish and how the Turkish MAIN has been used with monolingual and bilingual children. The grammatical features of Turkish, the critical points in the adaptation process of MAIN to Turkish and our experiences of extensive piloting of the Turkish MAIN with typically developing monolingual children are described.
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.
This paper briefly presents the current situation of bilingualism in the Philippines, specifically that of Tagalog-English bilingualism. More importantly, it describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) to Tagalog, the basis of Filipino, which is the country’s national language. Finally, the results of a pilot study conducted on Tagalog-English bilingual children and adults (N=27) are presented. The results showed that Story Structure is similar across the two languages and that it develops significantly with age.
In this paper, we present some features of the European Spanish adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN), most of them related to specificities of the Spanish grammar as compared to English, the source language of the original MAIN (Gagarina et al., 2012). These two languages differ in e.g. 1) the use of 3rd grammatical person to address the hearer; 2) the ways of maintaining nominal cohesion: English (non-pro drop) vs. Spanish (pro-drop); 3) the verbal paradigm with regard to morphological tense and aspect morphology. Finally, preliminary results for micro- and macrostructure measures in the narratives of children with Spanish as L1 and L2 confirm their consistency across MAIN stories and procedures.
Using MAIN in South Africa
(2020)
South Africa is a country marked by cultural and linguistic diversity with 11 official languages. The majority of school children do not receive their formal schooling in their home language. There is a need for language assessment tools in education and rehabilitation contexts to distinguish between children with language learning problems and/or SLI, and language delay as a result of limited exposure to the language of learning. The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) provides clinicians and researchers with an appropriate and culturally relevant tool to assess bilingual children in both languages. So far MAIN has been widely used in Afrikaans-English bilingual children. However, translating and adapting MAIN to our other nine official languages to achieve functional and cultural equivalence is more challenging.
The adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) for use with Slovak speaking children is a vital step in the process of creating a transparent evaluation of children’s narrative abilities. Since its first translation and adaptation in 2012, new pilot data from different groups of children has been collected in Slovakia. This paper describes the process of adapting the instrument to fit the Slovak language and reports on analyses of narrative production in monolingual (103 Slovak-speaking children) and bilingual (37 Slovak-English speaking) pre-school children. Within a pilot study, the story elicitation method was also compared (telling vs. retelling) within a small sample of 10 monolingual Slovak-speaking children. All results show transparent and detailed possibilities in terms of finding a meaningful evaluation that can evaluate a child’s complex narrative abilities.
This paper provides the background to the process of translation and piloting of the Serbian version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN), Multilingvalni Test za Procenu Narativa (MTPN). Our review of the sparse research literature on Serbian children’s narrative abilities reveals a need for a well-designed narrative instrument, which will enable researchers and practitioners to assess the production and comprehension of narratives in children of a wide age range, typically and atypically developing, monolingual and bilingual, crucially allowing for cross-linguistic comparisons. We encountered two kinds of challenges during the process of translation and adaptation of the instrument from English into Serbian. The first concerned the lack of established Serbian technical terminology needed to describe test administration to the future users of the test: researchers and practitioners working in different disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, Speech and Language Therapy. The second challenge concerned the translation of linguistic structures required to produce a successful rendition of the narrative: in contrast to English, but in line with other Slavic languages, Serbian relies heavily on verbs marked for perfective aspect in story-telling. Our discussion of preliminary data from four Serbian monolingual children, aged 5;5-10, demonstrates that MTPN is a successful tool in assessing narrative abilities in children acquiring Serbian.
A translation process is often seen as only a simple code exchange, but, in fact, it always requires an adaptation of terms, expressions, and structures, which is not exactly straightforward. This paper describes the process of translating and adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) to Brazilian Portuguese. A brief description of the project, concerning both historic and linguistic aspects, was done in order to emphasize the cultural and linguistic challenges faced during the process.
This paper describes in detail the development of the Polish version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). We first describe its two earlier versions, the unpublished version and the published version, developed in 2012, as well as the revised version. We also justify the differences between the unpublished Polish version developed in 2012 and the original MAIN. Then we summarize the results from studies that used the unpublished version of the Polish MAIN. We end with outlining a study that could be conducted to compare the two slightly different procedures in order to examine whether the results obtained with MAIN are resistant to changes in the procedure details.
This paper describes the experience of using the Norwegian and Russian versions of LITMUS-MAIN to elicit narrative data from bilingual Norwegian-Russian children as well as from Norwegian- and Russian-speaking monolinguals (Rodina 2017, 2018). The paper reports on the slight adaptations to the standardized design, procedure and analysis that were done to make the tasks more suitable for this specific population. It highlights the advantages, challenges, and potential associated with the task against a backdrop of the research conducted with Norwegian-Russian bilinguals in Norway.
This paper introduces the Mandarin version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) and describes the adaptation process. The Mandarin MAIN not only extends the empirical coverage of MAIN by including one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, but also offers an important tool to assess the narrative abilities of monolingual and bi-/ multi- lingual children acquiring Mandarin as a first, heritage, second, or additional language across the globe.
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.
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 paper presents the Italian version of the Multilingual Assessment tool for Narratives (MAIN), describes how it was developed and reports on some recent uses of MAIN within the Italian context. The Italian MAIN has been used in different research projects and for clinical purposes; results have been presented at conferences and in peer reviewed papers. The results indicate that MAIN is an appropriate assessment tool for evaluating children’s narrative competence, in production and comprehension from preschool age (5 years) to school age (8 years) in typical language development, bilingual development and language delay/disorders.