Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
While monitoring eye movements during visual world paradigm studies, earlier research showed that the appropriate second noun phrase (NP2) is anticipated as upcoming referent before this NP is...Show moreWhile monitoring eye movements during visual world paradigm studies, earlier research showed that the appropriate second noun phrase (NP2) is anticipated as upcoming referent before this NP is auditorily encountered, when enough information is available to guide the anticipation process. Anticipatory effects are determined in both SVO-languages (e.g. English) and verb-final languages using case-markers (e.g. Japanese). Dutch lacks case- marking but allows verb-second SVO and verb-final SOV sentences. The aim of this study was to determine whether participants anticipate an upcoming NP2 object in Dutch SVO and SOV sentences. As SOV sentences are embedded clauses that cannot occur on their own, they were preceded by a main clause. Since we wanted to compare sentence constructions that were contentwise as equal as possible we did the same for the main SVO clauses. While linguistically encountering the two preceding main clauses, the different structure and prosody indicated already the word order of the upcoming critical sentence, i.e. SVO or SOV. For the SVO sentences, the preceding main clause, the subject NP1 and the verb provided information for object NP2 anticipation. In the SOV case, the information provided by the subject NP1 becomes extra important, as it was the only linguistic element that could be used as a guider of what element was coming next. To investigate whether the NP1 can lead NP2 anticipation, concrete and abstract NP1s preceded the NP2, such as the abstract NP1 ‘girl’ and the concrete NP1 ‘pilot’. It was hypothesized that if the NP2 was concrete, the lexical semantics of the NP provided enough information to come up with an upcoming NP2 object in SOV sentences, without the need of a verb. Overall, results showed that participants primarily preferred to look at the NP1 image during the spoken sentence. After sentence offset, a wrap-up effect of fixations to the NP2 was determined in all conditions, possibly indicating a late interpretation and integration of the NP2 with the previous constituents. Across all conditions, the NP2 image received proportionally as much fixations as the distractor images until sentence offset. This demonstrates that in both SVO and SOV sentences, upcoming NP2s were not anticipated. A possible explanation is that Dutch listeners are less pro-active anticipators because of the flexibility of Dutch word orders. The anticipatory process becomes too costly as the risk of anticipating upcoming constituents incorrectly is too high.Show less
The thesis tried to examine the influence of word order and pro-drop of the native language on the acquisition of Dutch by learners with a Romance and Chinese mother tongue. The LLC-corpus has been...Show moreThe thesis tried to examine the influence of word order and pro-drop of the native language on the acquisition of Dutch by learners with a Romance and Chinese mother tongue. The LLC-corpus has been used to answer the research question. Spoken and written tasks have been analysed to examine the influence of the mother tongue on the acquisition of Dutch.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
closed access
The current thesis discusses the topic of partial agreement between a coordinated subject and the agreeing verb in Russian. Previous accounts have pointed out the relevance of word order for the...Show moreThe current thesis discusses the topic of partial agreement between a coordinated subject and the agreeing verb in Russian. Previous accounts have pointed out the relevance of word order for the related agreement phenomena in languages like Arabic, Slovenian and Dutch. No proposal has gone beyond describing this factor, and offered an explanation for the role of word order. In this thesis, I present a formal analysis explaining the relevance of word order from the perspective of Information Structure considerations. I show that the structures facilitated by the discourse-related operations enable the establishment of additional agreement, namely agreement in definiteness. Definiteness-driven agreement affects the syntactic and semantic weight of the conjuncts, which poses consequences for the standard phi-feature agreement.Show less
The origin of the research idea of this thesis comes from a feature discovered through fieldwork on Bugis, a Western Malayo-Polynesian language. In this language, two different word orders are...Show moreThe origin of the research idea of this thesis comes from a feature discovered through fieldwork on Bugis, a Western Malayo-Polynesian language. In this language, two different word orders are possible: in the basic order, different affixes occur on the verb and the arguments, while the non basic order receives no marking. The goal of this thesis is to examine some unrelated languages in order to find out if, with different word orders, there is any difference in marking. Seven languages belonging to different families and areas have been chosen for this purpose: Tuvan (South Siberian Turkic), Lao (Tai, Tai-Kadai), Figuig Berber (Berber, Afroasiatic), Itonama (Amazonian isolate), Savosavo (Papuan), Madurese (Western Malayo-Polynesian, Austronesian) and Santali (Munda, Austroasiatic). The obtained results indicate that most languages show some different marking with different word orders, and a few languages that do not, have a rigid word order that does not allow changes. The changes in marking are not as obvious as in Bugis except in Madurese, which shows a high interaction between marking and word order. Moreover, the fact that clauses with the basic word order receive more marking occurs also in Figuig Berber. Further research with many more languages would be needed in order to discover if this feature may be common cross linguistically, given that the low number of the studied languages does not allow cross linguistic generalisations.Show less
