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Three experiments investigated the interpretation and production of pronouns in German. The first two experiments probed the preferred interpretation of a pronoun in contexts containing two potential antecedents by having participants complete a sentence fragment starting either with a personal pronoun or a d-pronoun. We systematically varied three properties of the potential antecedents: syntactic function, linear position, and topicality. The results confirm a subject preference for personal pronouns. The preferred interpretation of d-pronouns cannot be captured by any of the three factors alone. Although a d-pronoun preferentially refers to the non-topic in many cases, this preference can be overridden by the other two factors, linear position and syntactic function. In order to test whether interpretive preferences follow from production biases as proposed by the Bayesian theory of Kehler et al. (2008), a third experiment had participants freely produce a continuation sentence for the contexts of the first two experiments. The results show that personal pronouns are used more often to refer to a subject than to an object, recapitulating the subject preference found for interpretation and thereby confirming the account of Kehler et al. (2008). The interpretation results for the d-pronoun likewise follow from the corresponding production data.
Multilingual research could offer a unique perspective on how the languages already acquired by a person affect the online processing of a new language. But it is currently difficult to assess this issue because theoretical accounts of multilingualism have focused on acquisition rather than processing and most empirical research to date has gathered untimed (offline) evidence. To help bridge this gap, we formulate hypotheses that can help derive processing predictions from existing accounts of multilingualism. But crucially, and based on previous findings in second language processing, we identify ways in which assumptions about crosslinguistic influence may need to be revised to allow the separate treatment of lexical and syntactic processing, and to consider the role of variables such as language dominance and proficiency. In our view, the question of what's special about multilingualism is worth studying, but more research is needed before we can begin answering it.
We aim to understand whether Greek and Italian, two null subject languages, differ in the use and interpretation of null subjects, based on evidence from both a production and a comprehension experiment. The results of the two experiments show that the two languages differ in the extent to which they comply with the Position of Antecedent Strategy as formulated by Carminati (2002). In order to account for this difference, we introduce a principle which defines prominence of sentence constituents in terms of hierarchical height, elaborating on a recent proposal by Rizzi (2018). Then we show that the prominence of subject and object constituents in Greek and Italian reflects word-order differences between the two languages (Roussou & Tsimpli 2006). In more general terms, this paper argues in favour of a multi-factorial approach to reference interpretation, in that syntactic factors interact with discourse factors, leading to a gradient variety of reference possibilities.
Impairment in past tense production as well as interaction between tense and aspect have been found in both fluent and non-fluent aphasia (e.g. Dragoy & Bastiaanse, 2013). Inflection has been found to be relatively preserved in semantic dementia (SD) (Thompson et al., 2012). The aims of the present study are a) to compare the morphosyntactic abilities of patients with aphasia and SD in tense and aspect marking and b) to explore the interaction of lexical (+/- telic) and grammatical (perfective/imperfective) aspect in aphasia and SD. A sentence completion task was administered to 30 native speakers of Greek: 10 patients with aphasia (6 anomic, 2 Wernicke and 2 agrammatic), 10 age and education-matched controls, 5 patients with SD and 5 controls. The material consisted of unergative, unaccusative and transitive verbs (12 of each verb class) and the participants had to apply present (imperfective) and past (perfective) tense. Unergative and unaccusative verbs differ in terms of their aspectual properties with the unergative being [-telic], and unaccusative [+telic]. Transitive verbs vary. A principal distinction between the tested conditions was the standard ummarked combination ([+telic] verbs in past perfective and [–telic] verbs in present imperfective) vs. the marked one ([+telic] verbs in present imperfective and [–telic] in past perfective). Both control groups performed at ceiling in all conditions. Aphasic participants were significantly more impaired than the control group in all conditions. SD participants were significantly more impaired than the controls only in the production of present tense (M-W U= 1.5, p= 0.024). There was no difference between past perfective and present imperfective for neither group, but there was an interaction between verb class and tense for the aphasic participants, as performance in unaccusative verbs in past perfective (unmarked condition) was significantly better than in unergatives in past perfective (marked condition) (Z=2.512, p=0.012) but performance in unaccusatives in present imperfective (marked condition) was significantly worse than performance in unergatives in present imperfective (unmarked condition) (Z=2.680, p=0.004). In sum, aphasic participants performed significantly better in the unmarked than in the marked conditions. Such an interaction was not found for the SD group. Aphasic participants performed significantly worse than the SD subjects in past perfective tense (M-W U= 7.5, p=0.029) in total, and the difference was significant only for unaccusative verbs (M-W U= 6.5, p=0.021), although both groups performed very well in this condition. There was no difference in present, neither for each verb class separately nor for the total score. A general past tense deficit cannot be upheld for either group. Rather, SD participants appear relatively impaired in producing present tense. We argue for slight morphosyntactic impairment in SD, although with a different underlying cause than in aphasia. Moreover, our data suggest an effect of aspectual markedness in aphasia but not in SD. We discuss this finding in the light of the different neuropathology of the two populations.
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.
Corrigendum zu: Memory studies 13.2020, issue: 5, S. 861-874, doi:10.1177/1750698020943014, ISSN 1750-6999
This afterword addresses the complex temporal and global dynamics of the coronavirus pandemic. After considering some of the new social rhythms that have emerged in the wake of Covid-19 around the world, it turns to the role of collective memory before, during and after corona. The aim is to provide a basic grid for how the Covid-19 pandemic could be addressed using memory studies expertise and concepts such as premediation, memorability, memory (ab)use, national memory, colonial memory, racial stereotypes, the digital archive, generational memory, or Anthropocene time.
The present paper aims at providing empirical evidence for dialectal variation concerning the perception of the central vowel [ɐ] in European Portuguese (EP). More concretely, this study compares the perception of the contrast between [a] and [ɐ] by native speakers of two varieties of EP: 23 speakers of a northern Portuguese dialect (from the city of Braga) and 23 speakers of the Littoral Center variety of EP (from the city of Lisbon, defined as Standard European Portuguese (SEP)). Based on a discrimination test, the results show that the two groups of speakers differ with respect to the perception of the contrast between the two central vowels under investigation. The speakers of the northern variety differentiate less between the two central vowels compared to the speakers from Lisbon.
Memoirs by women (from the Global North) who have employed a gestational host (from the Global South) to become mothers are situated in a force field of intersecting discourses about gender, race and class. The article sheds light on the characteristic dynamics of this special sub-genre of ‘mommy lit’ (Hewett), labelled ‘IP memoirs,’ with a special emphasis on memoirs featuring transnational cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements in India. These texts do not only present narratives of painful infertility experiences, autopathographic self-blame, and scriptotherapeutic quests towards happiness, i.e. (a) child(ren), but also speak back to knotty issues such as potential exploitation, commodification, colonisation and disenfranchisement, as well as genetic essentialism in the context of systemic inequities.
This article investigates the L1 acquisition of different types of direct objects in European Portuguese (EP). Previous research has revealed that although children have early syntactic and pragmatic knowledge of objects across languages, the adequate use of pronouns and null objects is protracted in the acquisition of EP (Costa et al. 2012). The present study shows that children acquiring the distribution of direct objects are aware of universal pragmatic hierarchies but struggle with the interpretation and feature bundles of null objects. Assuming that arguments are linked to left-peripheral C/edge linkers (Sigurðsson 2011), we argue that children need more time to discover the adult-like feature composition of null objects in EP because they involve phi-silent features. Relative accessibility (Ariel 1991) is universal and available early, whereas the absolute accessibility of null objects, i.e. their feature content, is acquired relatively late.
Professionalization of service-learning in higher education – an academic development approach
(2018)
In an attempt to professionalize service-learning in higher education, teachers and their teaching skills are considered a determining factor and require particular attention. To promote the teaching skills necessary for service-learning courses, an academic development approach addressing these specific requirements has been implemented at Goethe University Frankfurt as part of the academic development program for teaching staff. This article presents the particularities of this approach and illustrates one of its central elements, i.e., the concept of a workshop on planning service-learning courses. Both practical and research implications are discussed.
This article serves as both an état présent of emerging scholarship in the interdisiplinary field of Memory Studies and a conference report following the first MSA Forward interactive workshop which preceded the second annual conference of the Memory Studies Association (MSA) in December 2017. MSA Forward is the postgraduate arm of the Memory Studies Association and offers a platform for exchanging ideas amongst a cohort of emerging scholars engaging with recent developments in Memory Studies and interacting with key academics in the field. The idea of engagement, with its political undertone, draws attention to the political valence and ethical sensitivity of emerging research as evidenced in this article, which contends that if Memory Studies is to be moving forwards as well as looking back, then it is important for emerging scholars as well as established academics to be at the forefront of the field.
Cellular mobile networks, in which devices constantly relay their location and their movements, are formed by the motion of end devices in relation to the position of radio towers. As a matter of principle, it is this motion that allows the location of devices to be identified within the network. The article argues that the emergence of mobile media based on cellular triangulation has introduced an ontology in which, by technical necessity, the position of every object is constantly registered and objects that do not have an address do not exist. The location and movement of all participants are, at all times, a known technical variable. With Xeros PARC’s “ubiquitous computing” as a reference case, the article scrutinizes how movement triggers the process that registers the locations of mobile phones or smartphones, a development it situates against the cybernetic imagination of determining the location and the movement of an object at the same time.
This article traces the representation of love, gender and national identity in Shani Mootoo’s creative work in general and her most recent novel Valmiki’s Daughter (2008) in particular. In all her work, Mootoo describes the phenomenon of otherness as a part of the negotiating process of the protagonists' selves.Challenging xenophobia, homophobia and all forms of prejudices the author works with the concept of lesbian and bisexual love, cross-racial relationships in order to write identity and to create a home.
The work of the artist and writer Gerald Nestler explores finance and its social implications since the mid-1990s. Based on his professional experience as a trader as well as on post-disciplinary research, he has developed a unique approach that brings together theory and conversation with installation, video, performance, text, and other art forms. Probing into the narrative structures of contemporary capitalism, Nestler offers a techno-political critique directly from the core of the financial markets. This interview addresses his reading of the derivative as a world-producing apparatus that shapes the experience of the present by preconfiguring the future, and that provokes a shift from representational to performative speech in the actualization of biopower based on the exploitation of volatility and leverage. In conversation with Christian Kloeckner and Stefanie Mueller, he argues for the formation of specific human/non-human alliances that directly attack algorithmic as well as socio- economic black-boxing (schemes that monopolize inherently non-scarce resources), so as to open our imagination to skills and tactics that would allow us to navigate the rich but volatile flows of social, political, and economic abundance.
This special issue explores how finance deploys time, structures the future, and interacts with actors and institutions that sometimes function according to very different temporal regimes. Finance capitalism’s logic of recurrence, repetitive cycles, and successive ruptures has long been with us, but the essays in this special issue are particularly interested in how recent decades of intensified financialization have restructured temporal experience. They interrogate the production and dissemination of agency in an age of acceleration, risk, and uncertainty, asking how the temporality inscribed in financial transactions emerges from and simultaneously shapes individual and social practice. Topics covered range from the logic of finance and foundational concepts of financial theory to the intersection between objective structures and social practice, the role of literature, and finally questions of social insecurity, political action, and the possibility of resistance within a context of competing temporalities. In this introduction, the editors delineate some fundamental concepts and questions for our financial times.
This article develops a reading of Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis that differentiates between two thematic and poetological axes running through the text. On the one hand, Cosmopolis explores the future-fixation of the risk regime of finance capitalism; on the other, it stages scenes of insecurity that physically threaten the protagonist and his world. Insecurity, the article argues, is a condition that throughout the text increasingly gains in appeal because it promises to offer an alternative to a world of managed risk. The concern with security emphasizes finitude and mortality, thus enabling a turn to existential matters that the virtual abstractions of finance have seemingly made inaccessible. While proposing an opposition between a logic of risk based on virtuality and a logic of (in)security based on authenticity, DeLillo’s novel also suggests that it is impossible to break out of the logic of risk management pervading late modernity. The appeal of (in)security articulated in Cosmopolis rather lies in the promise to existentially revitalize life within the confines of financialized capitalism.
A growing body of experimental syntactic research has revealed substantial variation in the magnitude of island effects, not only across languages but also across different grammatical constructions. Adopting a well-established experimental design, the present study examines island effects in Spanish using a speeded acceptability judgment task. To quantify variation across grammatical constructions, we tested extraction from four different types of structure (subjects, complex noun phrases, adjuncts and interrogative clauses). The results of Bayesian mixed effects modelling showed that the size of island effects varied between constructions, such that there was clear evidence of subject, adjunct and interrogative island effects, but not of complex noun phrase island effects. We also failed to find evidence that island effects were modulated by participants’ working memory capacity as measured by an operation span task. To account for our results, we suggest that variability in island effects across constructions may be due to the interaction of syntactic, semantic-pragmatic and processing factors, which may affect island types differentially due to their idiosyncratic properties.
Ascribing to the premise that film festivals are crucial to the production of cultural memory, this article explores different parameters through which festivals shape our reception of films. In its focus on the Asian American film festival CAAMFest, the article reveals that festivals are part of a complex network of actors whose different agendas influence the narratives produced around the film, direct its role as memory object and encourage memories to travel. What is more, it shows that festival locations—from the city in which a festival takes place to the concrete venue in which a film is screened—play a significant role in shaping our experience and understanding of films. Finally, it establishes that festivals create frames for their films, constructed through and circulated by the various festival media and live performances at the festival events. Bringing together film festival studies and memory studies, the article makes use of an interdisciplinary approach with which to explore the film festival phenomenon, thus shedding light on the complex dynamics of acts of framing, locations and networks of actors shaping the festival’s memory production. It also draws attention to the understudied phenomenon of Asian American film festivals, showing how such a festival may actively engage in constructing and performing a minority group’s collective identity and memory.