This is a mini typological study of predicate nominals, predicate adjectives and locative predicates, existentials and possessive predicates in seven native North American languages. This study...Show moreThis is a mini typological study of predicate nominals, predicate adjectives and locative predicates, existentials and possessive predicates in seven native North American languages. This study discusses per language the strategies used for predicate nominals according to the typological overview given in Payne (1997); where adjectives are a separate word class the strategies for predicate adjectives are compared to those for predicate nominals. Lastly, the constructions for locative clauses, existentials, and locative predicates and the relations between them are discussed according to Clark (1978). It was found that some strategy types for predicate nominals were much more common than others and predicate adjectives, where applicable, were usually constructed in the same way. Locative constructions, existentials, and locative predicates were not always formed nonverbally, but a relationship between them was often found.Show less
Dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a BA degree in Taalwetenschap (Linguistics) This thesis investigates how West-African tone languages assign tones to loanwords from...Show moreDissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a BA degree in Taalwetenschap (Linguistics) This thesis investigates how West-African tone languages assign tones to loanwords from intonational languages. The languages discussed in this thesis are Yoruba and Hausa. For Yoruba the assignment of tone on English borrowings is discussed and for Hausa on English and French borrowings. The assignment of tones is based primarily on the stress patterns of the source languages.Show less
This thesis provides evidence for a perceived overextension of labialisation of coda consonants following rounded vowels in the speech of (Saigon) Vietnamese speakers in the Netherlands. The...Show moreThis thesis provides evidence for a perceived overextension of labialisation of coda consonants following rounded vowels in the speech of (Saigon) Vietnamese speakers in the Netherlands. The regular labialisation of velar codas after rounded vowels seemed to appear in alveolar codas as well. Sixteen speakers participated in a picture-naming task designed to elicit words containing both types of codas following rounded and unrounded vowels. The speakers were either second generation/heritage speakers, first generation/baseline speakers or homeland speakers. Although the data were limited, evidence was found that the overextension is a change in progress (at least in the Netherlands). This change has made most progress in heritage speakers, followed by baseline speakers and homeland speakers show the fewest signs of the overextension. The overextension is also limited to codas following two of the three rounded vowels of Vietnamese, whereas the original labialisation occurs after all rounded vowels. It was thus concluded that the overextension is a change in progress, possibly limited to speakers of Vietnamese in the Netherlands. The fact that heritage speakers show the greatest change, provides new perspectives in the field of the phonologies of heritage languages.Show less
In previous studies, linguistic anticipatory processes in the brain have been investigated extensively, but mostly in a monolingual environment where native speakers of a certain language were...Show moreIn previous studies, linguistic anticipatory processes in the brain have been investigated extensively, but mostly in a monolingual environment where native speakers of a certain language were listening to native speakers of the same language. In this study, we investigated the effect of non-native speech on predictions made by native listeners of Dutch, in a within-subjects design. We used highly predictive sentence contexts in combination with mismatched articles in order to measure the anticipatory effects before the occurence of the predicted noun. We found both an early (120 - 300 ms) and a late (400 - 600 ms) ERP negativity which were affected independently by the speaker accent variable: when participants listened to foreign-accented speech, the early negativity disappeared. However, behavioural performance, as measured by a subsequent lexical recognition task, was not affected by speaker accent. We argue that the results from our experiment have implications for the interpretation of the N400 as well as the proposed Phonological Mismatch Negativity effects and consequently provide an interesting view on the specifics of top-down sentence comprehension.Show less
Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) is a powerful experimental paradigm for testing specific hypotheses about language acquisition but is limited because of its reliance on meaningless grammatical...Show moreArtificial Grammar Learning (AGL) is a powerful experimental paradigm for testing specific hypotheses about language acquisition but is limited because of its reliance on meaningless grammatical structures. Meanwhile, formal and computational semantics provide rigorous ways to define and calculate meanings for formal languages, but are typically only used to describe or simulate the linguistic competence of adult speakers. This thesis attempts to connect these two fields by proposing a new type of AGL experiment that uses a language with both a context-free syntax and a formally defined semantics which can be used to express spatial relationships between objects. Moreover, using a computer simulation in which an Intelligent Agent (IA) acquires such a language, it shows how this new paradigm can be used to test psycholinguistic hypotheses about the acquisition of both syntax and semantics.Show less
Talmy’s (1985;2007) typology classifies languages into satellite-framed (S) languages, that express Manner of motion in the main verb and Path of motion in a satellite to the verb, and verb-framed ...Show moreTalmy’s (1985;2007) typology classifies languages into satellite-framed (S) languages, that express Manner of motion in the main verb and Path of motion in a satellite to the verb, and verb-framed (V) languages, that express Path of motion in the main verb and express Manner only when explicitly foregrounded for some reason. Given this background, how do late second learners of Portuguese, whose L1 (Dutch) is characterized as an S-language, lexicalize spontaneous dynamic Motion events in their L2, which is characterized as a V-language? In this study we investigate Slobin’s Thinking For Speaking (TFS) hypothesis (1996a), which states that the language we speak influences the way we are thinking during the mental processes of preparing content for speech and that restructuring these TFS patterns during second language acquisition may be difficult. As the L2 learners are acquiring a language that differs typologically from their L1, we investigate if they restructured their TFS patterns to those of the L2, or still use the TFS patterns of their L1. To do this, we look into the lexicalization patterns of Portuguese L2 (Dutch L1) learners and compare them to both Portuguese native speakers’ and Dutch native speakers’ performance. This study makes use of data gathered by the Leiden Learner Corpus (LLC) [http://hum.leiden.edu/lucl/llc], a collection of spoken and written data of Dutch learners of Romance languages. In total 42 participants were selected for this study: 11 native speakers of Dutch; 11 native speakers of Portuguese; and 20 second language learners of Portuguese. Participants’ linguistic patterns in encoding Motion events were examined by presenting them a selection of fifteen images taken from the picture book Frog where are you? (Mayer, 1969), which is regularly used in data elicitation for Motion event research. The participants were told to produce a narrative, describing as complete as possible what is happening with the boy, the dog and the frog in the pictures. The oral data was transcribed using the software Praat. The speech was divided into clauses. All the clauses that contained a spontaneous 6 dynamic Motion event, if the figure moves self-contained from one location to another (e.g. ‘The boy falls into the water’), were extracted. All verbs and modifiers were classified into the following motion categories: Manner verb (manner of motion); Path verb (direction or trajectory of motion); Manner+Path verb, (intermediate position between ‘pure’ Manner verbs and ‘pure’ Path verbs and has both a manner and a path component); Neutral verb (verb that expresses motion, but does not provide information about the manner or trajectory of motion). Native speakers of Dutch and Portuguese performed as I expected, with the Dutch speakers using more Manner verbs and the Portuguese showing a preference for Path verbs. L2 learners’ patterns of motion event lexicalization do not resemble those of either Dutch or Portuguese native speakers. This in-between pattern found in L2 learner’s production suggests two possible explanations: the first explanation builds on the theory of ‘Interlanguage’ as first proposed by Selinker in 1972 (Slabakova, 2016), which claims that the L2 system should be considered a system in its own right and not a defective copy of the target language. The second explanation builds on practical constraints of. This explanation builds on the fact that L2 learners did not possess the same amount of grammatical and lexical knowledge as the native speakers, and therefore they did not perform as native speakers of the target language.Show less
This thesis looks into the meaning of verb reduplication in Tuareg, which seems to indicate pluractionality. Tuareg has both partial and full reduplication of the verb. During my research, I...Show moreThis thesis looks into the meaning of verb reduplication in Tuareg, which seems to indicate pluractionality. Tuareg has both partial and full reduplication of the verb. During my research, I focussed on fully reduplicated verbs only. I collected a corpus of 287 reduplicated verbs using the Tuareg-French dictionary compiled by Karl-G. Prasse, Ghoubeïd Alojaly and Ghabdouane Mohamed (2003). I discuss the relation between the reduplicated verbs and their non-reduplicated counterparts and I will look deeper into the occurring sub-types of pluractionality in Tuareg.Show less
This research attempts to investigate the planning process of an utterance. Two experiments have been conducted one with an online speech production task and one with a reading aloud production...Show moreThis research attempts to investigate the planning process of an utterance. Two experiments have been conducted one with an online speech production task and one with a reading aloud production task. The first produced word from the utterances is analysed to give an answer of the research question: how to plan an utterance during online vs reading-aloud speech production? It turned out that at syntactic planning the phrase for both experiments is the preferred unit of planning. Speech onset latencies and initial F0 peaks form evidence for this planning process. Within the first phonological word of the utterances no main effect was found for onset latencies in the reading- aloud task, while this was found in the online speech production task. Furthermore, no main effect was found for the initial F0 peaks in the online speech production task, while this was found for the reading- aloud task. Thus, the planning at phonological level seems to be different for both speech productions tasks.Show less
This thesis aims to discuss the distinction between nouns and verbs (and other word classes) in Wakashan and Salish languages. I will be discussing this distinction with specific reference to the...Show moreThis thesis aims to discuss the distinction between nouns and verbs (and other word classes) in Wakashan and Salish languages. I will be discussing this distinction with specific reference to the two main approaches in flexible languages – categorial and precategorial classification. For the categorial approach, I will be looking at how well Hengeveld’s (1992) PoS system, and its revisions (Hengeveld et al. 2004, Hengeveld & Van Lier 2010), can be applied to the six Wakashan and Salish languages. For the precategorial approach, I will be working with Don & Van Lier's (2013) precategorial approach and notion of syntactic flexibility to determine how well it can be applied to the Wakashan and Salish languages. The resulting data and analysis indicates that neither approach is particularly suitable. Categorial classification is shown to be slightly too restrictive, whereas precategorial classification can be viewed as not restrictive enough. Additionally, a recurring issue is that word classes aren’t always mutually flexible, a problem which neither approach seems to account for.Show less
