This study provides a syntactic analysis of the Senufo Nafara Determiner Phrase. It aims at investigating two major questions that are the status of definite markers, and the underlying structure and derivations leading to the surface word order [N AP Def Dem Num] observed in the language. I argue that the (indefinite) markers occurring in DPs are clitics attaching to the rightmost AP element, and spelling out the fused heads of several functional categories (gender, number, definiteness, and possibly others). In a cartographic approach to DP structure, I argue in favor of multiple Functional Projections occurring above NP. More particularly, I consider AP, DemP, and NumP as their own FPs in which adjectives, demonstratives, and numerals are all functional heads. While A and Dem show overt agreement in definiteness, gender, and number, cardinals do not. I argue that the surfacing word order is the result of roll-up movement with pied-piping, motivated and limited by agreement. Phrasal movement only occurs when required for agreement purposes, and more particularly in order to check uPhi features (and therefore EPP features). For that reason, numerals do not participate in movement, and surface in phrase-final position.

This dissertation is a first look at English-speaking children’s acquisition of the syntax of the partitive. It presents four experiments that contrast three types of structures and examines how they interact with adjectival modification: the partitive, the pseudopartitive and complex nouns with prepositional adjuncts. The experimentation investigates whether children recognize that the Determiner Phrase (DP) in the partitive is a barrier to adjectival modification. The partitive is contrasted with the pseudopartitive –a minimal pair structure that lacks an internal DP. The data shows that children under the age of six do not distinguish between the partitive and the pseudopartitive. They allow adjectives preceding the partitive to modify the second noun; this is standardly considered licit for the pseudopartitive structure, but not the partitive. This result is evidence that children are under-representing the syntax of the partitive and of DP. Syntactic representations of minimal DP and minimal partitive structures are suggested and it is argued that these structures may persist as an option in the adult grammar. Chapter 2 discusses multiple layers in DP, DP’s status as a barrier/phase and how children acquire its syntax (Abney 1987, Cinque 1994, de Villiers & Roeper 1995, Kupisch 2006, Bošković 2008). This chapter also includes evidence for an underrepresented DP in the grammar of some adult English speakers (Schafer & de Villiers 2000, Carlson et al 2006). Chapter 3 presents background literature on the syntax of the partitive (Jackendoff 1977, Hoeksema 1996), introduces the pseudopartitive structure (Selkirk 1977, Stickney 2004 and Alexiadou, Haegeman & Stavrou 2007) and presents acquisition hypotheses. Chapters 4 & 5 present a pilot experiment and three picture choice tasks. The experimental data shows that children and a subset of adults do not distinguish between partitive and pseudopartitive and yet they maintain a clear distinction between pseudopartitive and other similar complex nouns. Chapter 6 presents two syntactic analyses of the data. One uses a split-DP structure (Zamparelli 2000, Laenzlinger 2000) to explain the lack of barrier in children’s partitives. The other suggests a reduced partitive structure (Rutkowski 2007). Both analyses require a reanalysis of the features of DP in children’s partitives.

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Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2016-03-22T11:42:28Z No. of bitstreams: 1 daniellenovaisuchoa.pdf: 1181307 bytes, checksum: 63df2d7f7f776f75f785a71fcacbc79d (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2016-04-24T02:19:05Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 daniellenovaisuchoa.pdf: 1181307 bytes, checksum: 63df2d7f7f776f75f785a71fcacbc79d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-24T02:19:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 daniellenovaisuchoa.pdf: 1181307 bytes, checksum: 63df2d7f7f776f75f785a71fcacbc79d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-04-05 / CNPq - Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Este estudo tem como objetivos investigar a sensibilidade à forma fônica dos determinantes e analisar se essa sensibilidade ajudaria bebês de 13 meses, adquirindo o português, a segmentar o sintagma determinante (DP) em unidades menores (determinante + nome). A perspectiva teórica adotada busca conciliar um tratamento psicolinguístico para aquisição de língua com uma teoria linguística, através da integração entre o modelo de Bootstrapping Fonológico (MORGAN & DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE ET AL., 1997) e o Programa Minimalista, no que se refere, sobretudo, à sua concepção de Faculdade da Linguagem (HAUSER, CHOMSKY & FITCH, 2002), entendida sob duas perspectivas: no sentido estrito (FLN – Faculty of Language in the narrow sense) e no sentido amplo (FLB – Faculty of Language in the broad sense). Essa conciliação permite-nos explicar como a criança chega à sintaxe da sua língua a partir de pistas distribucionais e prosódicas disponibilizadas na interface fônica. Estudos conduzidos em diversas línguas, inclusive em português (Name, 2002), sugerem que, por volta dos 10 meses de idade, as crianças já seriam capazes de reconhecer os itens funcionais no fluxo da fala, a partir de suas características acústicas e distribucionais, utilizando-os como pistas para o acesso lexical e sintático. As hipóteses assumidas são de que (i) aos 13 meses, a criança é sensível à forma fônica dos determinantes, distinguindo, assim, os determinantes reais dos pseudodeterminantes, sendo capazes, (ii) de segmentar o DP formado por um determinante real + pseudonome. Nossos resultados sugerem que aos 13 meses, o bebê é sensível à forma fônica dos determinantes da língua, reagindo diferentemente quando apresentados aos determinantes (o / um/ este / aquele) ou aos pseudodeterminantes (ône / ór / ugi / ófupi). Além disso, sugerem também que as crianças foram capazes de segmentar o DP em unidades menores, já que reagiram diferentemente aos pseudonomes familiarizados quando antecedidos por determinante real ou pseudodeterminante. / This study aims at investigating the sensitivity to phonetic form of determiners and analyzing whether this sensitivity would help 13-month-old Brazilian babies to segment the Determiner Phrase (DP) into smaller unities (determiner + noun). The theoretical approach adopted seeks at conciliating a psycholinguistic treatment for the language acquisition with a linguistic theory, through the integration between Phonological Bootstrapping (MORGAN and DEMUTH, 1996; CHRISTOPHE et al., 1997) and the Minimalist Program, in relation, especially, to its conception of Language Faculty (HAUSER, CHOMSKY & FITCH, 2002), seen through two perspectives: in its narrow sense (FLN) and in its broad sense (FLB). This conciliation allows us to explain how the child reaches the language syntax from distributional and prosodic cues available at the phonic interface. Studies conducted in different languages, including Brazilian Portuguese (Name,2002) suggest that, around the age of 10 months, children would already be able of recognizing function words in the speech stream, from their acoustic and distributional characteristics, using them as cues for syntactic and lexical access. The hypothesis are that (i) at 13 months, the child is sensitive to the phonic form of determiners, distinguishing the real determiners from the nonsense determiners, being able of (ii) segment the DP consisting of a real determiner + a nonsense noun. Our results suggest that, at 13 month-old, babies are sensible to the phonic form of their language determiners, reacting differently when they are presented either to the determiners (o / um / este/ aquele) or the nonsense determiners (ône / ór / ugi / ófupi).It also suggests that the children were able of segmenting the DP into smaller unities, since they reacted differently to the familiarized nonsense nouns when they were preceded by a real determiner or a nonsense determiner.

Code-switching (CS) between French and Arabic is common across North Africa and in parts of the Middle East. Many researchers have examined this phenomenon in Tunisia (Belazi 1991, Lawson & Sachdev 2000, Belazi et. al 1994) and Morocco (Abbassi 1977, Bentahila 1983, Bentahila & Davies 1983, Lahlou 1991, Redouane 2005.) Corpus and elicited data from these two countries has helped form the basis of proposed universal constraints on code-switching, specifically the Functional Head Constraint (FHC) (Belazi et al 1994) and the Complement Adjunct Distinction (CAD) (Mahootian and Santorini 1996). However, CS between French and Moroccan and Tunsian dialects has not been directly investigated within a single study. This study is a step in filling that gap. Using a web-based survey, the present study examines native dialect speakers’ ratings of authenticity of sentences that contain both French and Arabic with a switch occurring in the Determiner Phrase (DP). The syntactic structure of the DP in the dialects examined is the same, (DP = D (D) N (A)). This is similar to the DP in French (DP = D (A) N (A)) with a few key differences that make it possible to test the FHC and CAD within the DP alone. An example of one of the eight possible switch types, between an Arabic Demonstrative Determiner and a French Definite Determiner, is seen here between Moroccan Arabic and French: Men dima had l’homme n’aime pas les chiens. (Since always this the man doesn’t like dogs.) A mixed-model ANOVA performed on the participants’ ratings reveals main effects for dialect, sex and switch type. Significant interactions also exist, including an interaction between switch type, sex and dialect. While further research is needed, the results indicate that syntactic constraints may not be the only way to understand the practice of CS. Instead, a typological approach, as suggested by Muysken (2000), may lead to a more complete understanding of why and how communities use multiple languages. / text

The nature of the bilingual mental lexicon and how the L1 and the L2 interact in language production and processing has been the focus of decades of research from linguistic, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic perspectives. In spite of this significant body of evidence, the degree to which the L1 influences L2 production and processing remains an area of debate, especially with respect to formal features such as grammatical gender. While it is clear that non-nativelike production and processing of L2 grammatical gender persist even in highly-proficient adult bilinguals, the underlying representation of the L1 and L2 gender features and how this representation affects the use of gender in the L2 is currently unclear. Furthermore, there is no evidence at present regarding the nature of the L1-L2 grammatical gender system when the L1 and the L2 have asymmetric gender systems (in other words, differ in number of gender values), as is the case with German, which bears three gender values (masculine, feminine and neuter), and Spanish and French, which each display two gender values (masculine and feminine). This dissertation investigates the representation of and interactions between the L1 and the L2 at the level of the formal gender feature, with a particular focus on language pairings with asymmetric gender systems. Through complementary data from L2 production and processing, I examine the representation of the asymmetric grammatical gender systems in the mental lexicon of L1 Spanish-L2 German and L1 French-L2 German bilinguals and the consequences this asymmetry between the L1 and L2 gender systems has on gender use strategies in the L2. From the perspective of bilingual lexical access, this research contributes new evidence to inform existing psycholinguistic theories of L1-L2 gender interactions and also proposes the Asymmetric gender representation hypothesis, a new model to account for the unique integrated nature of the gender system in bilinguals with L1-L2 asymmetric gender systems. From a language acquisition perspective, the present study provides new data on L2 gender use strategies with asymmetric gender systems, formulating the L1 transfer continuum, which extends existing proposals to include the degree of (a)symmetry between the L1 and the L2. This research also connects theoretical proposals regarding gender agreement in functional-lexical code-switches (specifically, switches within the Determiner Phrase such as dieGER-F mesaSPA-F or elSPA-M TischGER-M) to bilinguals’ preferences in code-switching between two languages that display formal gender. Taken together, all of these complementary perspectives addressed in this dissertation offer a well-rounded perspective of grammatical gender in asymmetric gender systems specifically, and contribute novel evidence regarding the interactions between the L1 and the L2 in the bilingual mental lexicon in general.