Texte remanié de: Diss.--University of Nijmegen, 1995. / Bibliogr. p. 365-382. Index.

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.

La présente thèse porte sur l’acquisition du passif en français chez des enfants de 3 à 6 ans. Notre premier objectif était de tester l’effet du potentiel adjectival des passifs sur la compréhension des passives actionnelles et non actionnelles. Selon Borer et Wexler (1987), Babyonyshev et al. (2001), Hirsch et Wexler (2006) et Oliva et Wexler (2018), les enfants ne parviendraient pas à comprendre facilement les passifs verbaux, car certains principes de leur grammaire n’auraient pas atteint une certaine maturation syntaxique qui leur autoriserait la computation de ces passifs. Ils pourraient néanmoins utiliser une stratégie adjectivale pour les comprendre en analysant ces passifs comme des passifs adjectivaux, dont la représentation syntaxique serait accessible à leur grammaire. Pour tester cette hypothèse, nous avons mené une première expérimentation auprès de 98 enfants, âgés de 3 à 6 ans, et de 16 adultes, qui ont réalisé une tâche d’appariement phrase-image. Les résultats révèlent que les passives actionnelles ayant un faible potentiel adjectival sont les mieux comprises par les enfants, ce qui va à l’encontre d’une hypothèse adjectivale. Pour expliquer ces résultats, nous avons avancé que l’affectivité avait un effet facilitant sur la compréhension du passif (Nguyen et Snyder, 2018). Les passives actionnelles présentant un degré plus élevé d’affectivité seraient mieux comprises par les enfants. Les résultats de cette expérimentation appuient également l’hypothèse de Paolazzi et al. (2015, 2016) et Grillo, Alexiadou, Gehrke et al. (2019). Comme ces passives ne revêtent pas d’ambiguïté adjectivale/verbale, leur traitement serait moins complexe que les passives actionnelles présentant un potentiel adjectival élevé et qui peuvent être analysées comme des passives adjectivales ou verbales en l’absence du complément en par. Notre deuxième objectif de recherche était de mesurer l’effet du complément en par sur la compréhension des passives actionnelles et non actionnelles. Dans une deuxième expérimentation, 96 enfants, âgés de 3 à 6 ans, et 16 adultes ont effectué une tâche d’appariement phrase-image. Les résultats indiquent que la présence du complément en par n’a aucun effet sur la compréhension des passives actionnelles. Nos deux expérimentations reproduisent aussi l’effet Maratsos (Maratsos et al., 1985) : un délai acquisitionnel est observé pour la compréhension des passives non actionnelles. Les résultats de la deuxième expérimentation montrent que les passives courtes non actionnelles sont mieux comprises que les passives longues non actionnelles. Ainsi, notre recherche en conclut que l’acquisition des passives ne se fait pas d’un seul coup, mais qu’elle est largement déterminée par la présence du complément en par. Ce résultat appuie l’hypothèse de Paolazzi et al. (2015, 2016) et Grillo, Alexiadou, Gehrke et al. (2019). Les passives courtes, qui, sans le complément en par, seraient interprétées comme des passives adjectivales, seraient réanalysées en passives verbales lorsque ce complément est ajouté. Cette réanalyse serait couteuse cognitivement, ce qui expliquerait la moins bonne compréhension des passives longues non actionnelles. Notre thèse propose un ordre d’acquisition des constructions passives. Les passives courtes actionnelles seraient acquises à 3 ans, et les longues, à 4 ans. Les passives courtes non actionnelles seraient maitrisées à 5 ans alors que les longues le seraient après l’âge de 6 ans. Somme toute, nos résultats mettent en évidence l’importance du type de verbe (actionnel/non actionnel), qui est plus déterminant dans la compréhension du passif que l’effet du potentiel adjectival et du complément en par. Nos résultats remettent également en cause l’hypothèse d’une stratégie adjectivale et révèlent l’importance du type de prédicat (évènementiel/statif) et de l’ambiguïté adjectivale/verbale dans la compréhension des phrases passives. / The present dissertation focuses on the acquisition of the French passive construction by young children aged 3 to 6 years old. Our first objective was to test the effect of passive's adjectival potential on the comprehension of actional and non actional passives. Following Borer & Wexler (1987), Babyonyshev et al. (2001), Hirsch & Wexler (2006), and Oliva & Wexler (2018), children are not able to comprehend verbal passives because some principles of their grammar have not reached a certain syntactic maturity, which would allow them to compute these passives. They could however use an adjectival strategy to understand these passives by analyzing them as adjectival passives. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a first experiment with 98 children, aged 3 to 6 years old, and 16 adults, who carried out a sentence-picture matching task. Results show that actional passives with a lower adjectival potential are the ones which are the best understood by children, which do not support an adjectival hypothesis. To explain these results, we have suggested that affectivity have a facility effect on the comprehension of passives (Nguyen & Snyder, 2018). Actional passives which have a higher degree of affectivity would be the ones which are the best understood by children. The results of this experiment also support the hypothesis of Paolazzi et al. (2015, 2016) and Grillo, Alexiadou, Gehrke et al. (2019). Because these passives do not take an adjectival/verbal ambiguity, their treatment would be less complex than actional passives which have a high adjectival potential, and can be analyzed as adjectival or verbal passives without the by-phrase. Our second research objective was to measure the effect of the by-phrase on the comprehension of actional and non actional passives. In a second experiment, 96 children aged 3 to 6 years old and 16 adults did a sentence-picture matching task. Results show that the presence of the by-phrase has no effect on the comprehension of actional passives. Our two experiments reproduce the Maratsos effect (Maratsos et al., 1985): an acquisitional delay is observed for the comprehension of non actional passives. The results of the second experiment showed that short non actional passives are better understood than long non actional passives. Therefore, our research concludes that the acquisition of the passive construction does not occur at once, but is largely determined by the presence of the by-phrase. This result supports the hypothesis put forward by Paolazzi et al. (2015, 2016) and Grillo, Alexiadou, Gehrke et al. (2019): Short passives which, without the by-phrase, would be interpreted like adjectival passives, should be reanalyzed as verbal passives when this complement is added. The reanalysis would be cognitively costly, which would explain the poor comprehension of long non actional passives. This dissertation suggests an order of acquisition of passive constructions. Short actional passives would be acquired at 3 years old and long actional passives, at 4 years old. Short non actional passives would be mastered at 5 years old while long non actional passives would be acquired after 6 years old. On the whole, our results highlight the importance of verb type (actional/non actional), which is more decisive in the comprehension of passives than the effect of adjectival potential and the by-phrase. In this way, our results challenge an adjectival strategy and reveal the importance of the predicate type (eventive/stative) and of the adjectival/verbal ambiguity on the comprehension of passive constructions.

Dans cette thèse, l’étude des verbes copules ser et estar est abordée de deux points de vue complémentaires. D'une part, une analyse grammaticale d'un large corpus d’occurrences orales authentiques est réalisée afin d'évaluer la pertinence de certains outils théoriques appartenant à une approche cognitive de la question. D’une autre part, à partir d’un contexte d’enseignement des langues secondes, une recherche expérimentale est menée pour examiner l’influence que le type d’approche grammaticale utilisée lors de l’enseignement peut avoir sur les résultats des apprenants. Dans les deux cas, la priorité est donnée à la validation empirique des hypothèses de travail suivant des méthodologies appartenant, dans un cas, à la linguistique et, dans un autre cas, à la didactique des langues. De cette manière, il a été possible d’identifier le champ de spécialisation de chacune des disciplines quant à la description des copules susmentionnées, ainsi que les points de convergence entre les champs d’étude concernés. / In this thesis, the study of the Copulus verbs Ser and Estar is approached from two complementary points of view. On the one hand, a grammatical analysis of a large corpus of authentic oral occurrences is carried out in order to evaluate the relevance of certain theoretical tools belonging to a cognitive approach to the question. On the other hand, from a second language teaching context, experimental research is conducted to examine the influence that the type of grammatical approach used in teaching can have on learners' outcomes. In both cases, priority is given to the empirical validation of working hypotheses according to methodologies belonging, in one case, to linguistics and, in another case, to language didactics. In this way, it was possible to identify the field of specialization of each of the disciplines in terms of the description of the above-mentioned copulas, as well as the points of convergence between the fields of study concerned.

The present paper reports on an investigation into an English un-participle pattern that is called unpassive, or is described as an adjectival passive. The main characteristic of the pattern is an (adjectival) past participle prefixed by un-, which is used as a predicative complement to a verb. Besides the different terms used for the pattern, there is also some indeterminacy with respect to its particular form. All of the descriptions focus on the verb BE, but mention is also made of GO and REMAIN. That is, the specifications of the pattern’s formal side differ to some extent. To provide information on this issue and to get hold of potential (verb-related) differences in the pattern’s function, we conducted an empirical analysis from a usage-based construction grammar perspective. Our focus is on the form-function interplay of the pattern in order to gain information about its constructional status and its exact formal and semantic make-up. The database selected for this study is the BNC, from which all occurrences of ‘verb plus un-participle’ were extracted. The data were submitted to collexeme and covarying collexeme analyses to identify the spectrum of meanings/functions associated with these forms, and distinctive collexeme analyses were carried out to see whether the un-participles found pattern differently with the individual verbs. The results indicate that, on closer examination, the un-participle construction does not represent a homogeneous category, but must be seen as a schematic template of related, though different, usage events that may have expanded analogously from a prototype construction. On the basis of our analyses and informed by findings from developmental studies, we suggest that the related constructions form a network.

[pt] Esta dissertação investiga a aquisição das passivas, trazendo um tratamento conciliador entre métrica de computação e demandas de processamento para se pensar a aquisição dessas estruturas. As análises formais da Teoria Linguística Gerativa (Boeckx, 1998; Collins, 2005) são revisitadas sob o enfoque das distinções aventadas pelo Modelo Integrado da Computação on-line (Corrêa E Augusto, 2007; 2011), buscando-se adequá-las às peculiaridades do processamento em tempo real. Nossa hipótese é de que a maior complexidade associada à estrutura de uma passiva eventiva implicaria a existência de movimento com custo computacional mensurável, que seria responsável pela dificuldade das crianças com passivas verbais. A ausência de movimento do tipo relevante em construções como passivas adjetivas, com características copulares, explicaria como a criança é inicialmente capaz de lidar com passivas curtas agentivas, assumindo-se que esta tende a não tomar como essencial o uso de diferentes auxiliares da sua gramática alvo. Três experimentos psicolinguísticos buscaram investigar as hipóteses aventadas. Os dois primeiros apontam dificuldade em todas as passivas verbais do Português, exceto as curtas agentivas e, também, a relevância de traços aspectuais e semânticos para que o processamento de certas passivas seja licenciado na interface com o sistema conceptual-intencional como uma derivação mais simples do que as passivas verbais. O último experimento avaliou a capacidade de distinção entre os diferentes auxiliares envolvidos na derivação de sentenças passivas curtas. Os resultados são compatíveis com as hipóteses e sugerem que a criança valer-se-ia de construções adjetivas para alcançar a plena aquisição das passivas verbais. / [en] This study investigates the acquisition of the passive structure from the point of view of a conciliatory approach between computational metrics and processing demands. The formal analyses from Generative Linguistic Theory (Boeckx, 1998; Collins, 2005) are revisited and made compatible to the distinctions proposed by the Integrated Model of on-line computation (Corrêa AND Augusto, 2007; 2011) -Modelo Integrado da Computação on-line, considering the peculiarities of on-line processing. Our hypothesis is that the structural complexity associated with an eventive passive would imply the existence of measurable computational cost movement, which would be responsible for the difficulty children have on verbal passives. The absence of the relevant type of movement in adjectival passive constructions with copular characteristics would explain why children are initially capable of dealing with short agentive passives. We assume that, in Portuguese, children do not attend to the differences auxiliary selection implies in the target grammar. Three psycholinguistic experiments were conducted, in order to investigate the hypotheses proposed. The first two experiments show some difficulty on every verbal passive in Portuguese (except for short agentive passives) and highlight the relevance of aspectual and semantic features allowing a simpler derivation to be licensed in the logical form. The last experiment evaluated children´s ability to distinguish the different auxiliaries involved on the derivation of short passive sentences. The results are compatible with the hypotheses and suggest that children would take adjectival constructions into account in achieving full acquisition of verbal passives.

The Master's thesis proceeds from a corpus-based analysis and focuses on strong forms of Early Middle English adjectives. A formal distinction between weak and strong adjectival forms had disappeared during the period of Middle English, the work, therefore, aims at the transitional period between Old and Middle English, when the strong forms could still be identified, either due to the relics of inflectional endings, syntactic position, or context. A representative sample of the most frequent adjectives was chosen from the corpus comprising the extant Middle English texts with help of specific searching code. Consequently, the strong forms were manually chosen from these according to their formal characteristics and position in the sentence. This sample was then analyzed from the syntactic point of view, as well as from the point of view of functional sentence perspective. The results of the analysis show that the indication of indefiniteness was mostly expressed by the mix of syntactic and contextual means in EME. It has also been found out that the adjectives, being used both attributively and predicatively, were by rule part of the rheme.

The current research project investigates the influence of gender, age, and social class on the use of intensifiers and extreme adjectives as instruments to intensify spoken language. Employing a corpus-based approach, the study has collected data from the Spoken BNC2014 regarding the use of the common intensifiers so, very, real, and really modifying an adjective, as well as the use of synonymous extreme adjectives. Frequent intensifier-adjective pairs were retrieved from the corpus and thereafter translated into synonymous extreme adjectives using an online thesaurus. Following the data collection process, comparative analyses of the collected data were conducted. The study presents results that are in some regards coherent with previous research as well as most of the study’s hypotheses. Although the results suggest some general differences in use depending on the speaker’s gender, age, and social class, they are not as distinct as expected. Of all the sociolinguistic variables, the language use of the different social classes proved least predictable. While correlations between an overuse of intensifiers/extreme adjectives and an underuse of extreme adjectives/intensifiers have been observed in the data, this opposite relationship is not present in all social constellations.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-05T18:10:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 26 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A meta principal desta pesquisa é realizar um estudo da semântica dos adjetivos objetivando a sua representação em uma ontologia jurídica. O fato motivador desse interesse foi o estudo de ontologias e léxicos computacionais jurídicos e a constatação de que os adjetivos não recebem um tratamento sistemático nessas ferramentas computacionais de conhecimento especializado. A partir dessa constatação, partiu-se para o estudo de ontologias e léxicos computacionais de linguagem não-especializada, buscando elementos práticos e teóricos para a inclusão sistemática, e não ocasional, de adjetivos em uma ontologia jurídica. Esta pesquisa defende que a eficiência no tratamento computacional da linguagem requer uma combinação de teorias. Assim, a metodologia adotada combina diferentes abordagens teóricas. Através do estudo do corpus e construção da ontologia jurídica, percebe-se a importância dos adjetivos para a organização do conhecimento especializado. Nos domínios de conhecimento especializados, os adjetivos têm a fu / The main goal of this research is to study the semantics of the adjectives in order to codify them into a legal ontology. Through a search for legal ontologies and lexicons one verifies that adjectives are not codified systematically into specialized lexicons and ontologies. Taking the codification of adjectives into a legal ontology as the target of this work, one analyzes non-specialized language ontologies and lexicons. The purpose of such analysis is to find practical and theoretical elements for including adjectives systematically into a legal ontology. This research defends the position that integrating linguistic approaches is more fruitful to natural language processing. Therefore, the methodology applied here combines different theoretical approaches. The corpus analysis and legal ontology construction shows the importance of adjectives in organizing the specialized knowledge. In the specialized domains, adjectives have the main function of classifying entities

One of the main characteristics of German technical language is the nominal style, which includes complex pre-nominal and post-nominal extended modifiers. A commonly held view is that these are less common in Swedish due to language-specific restrictions and preferences. As such, they may pose a challenge to Swedish translators. This essay examines this particular problem and focuses on the translation of four different complex extended modifiers: adjectival, participial, genitival and prepositional.The aim of this study was to determine which syntactic structures are used when these modifiers are translated into Swedish and to identify shifts using the concept “grammatical metaphor”, thereby focusing on the degree of grammatical metaphoricity. For the purposes of this study, a chapter of the technical book Neues Bauen mit Stroh in Europa by Gruber, Gruber and Sentler was translated into Swedish and then analysed with the above-mentioned aims in mind.The study showed that out of the 117 noun phrases with extended complex modifiers in the source text 21 were transposed into a less explicit, direct structure and more metaphorical language. The metaphorization was in some cases a result of simplification/omission of less dense semantic material and/or the translation into compounds. In 46 cases, the extended modifiers showed the same degree of grammatical metaphoricity as the source language expression and thus were re-metaphorized. In the remaining cases, a verbal or more explicit structure was chosen in the translation. This especially proved to be the case with pre-nominal extended adjectival and participial modifiers.