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This dissertation explores a typological puzzle within the Romance language family: How is it that French could have evolved so divergently from the rest of the family that it has apparently lost two of the most characteristic features of Romance languages, i.e., (1) a highly inflected verb paradigm and (2) optional nominal and pronominal subjects? Using a ±60,000-word corpus of Everyday Spoken Swiss French (ESSF), comprising 14 educated, middle-class speakers conversing with family and friends, I examine the subject clitics and subject NPs from the theoretical framework of grammaticalization, since the data are gradient and represent change in progress. This type of data collection is crucial given the increasingly diglossic situation that exists between Spoken and Written French. The corpus shows that the subject clitics have fully morphologized 100% into prefixes in all but a few, predictably trailing, environments of the 3rd person. Thus the former clitics are no longer subject pronouns but person/number inflectional morphemes on the verb. To fill the void in the subject pronoun paradigm, a set of true, personal pronouns (moi, toi, lui, etc.) has moved in. But they, like other full NP subjects, are highly optional. Just as in Spanish and Italian, these overt subjects are used only sparingly, i.e., for contrast, emphasis, and disambiguation. When they do appear, they are most likely to occur pre-verbally, thus maintaining the traditional SVO word order of French, although alternate word orders also occur. The redevelopment of a highly inflected verb paradigm, albeit prefixal, not suffixal, and the consequent restructuring of the personal pronoun paradigm has allowed for the reemergence of null pronominal and nominal subjects in ESSF. The corpus also reveals a new, markedness-driven, morphological change starting in certain 3Sg. impersonal verbs, i.e., the development of a zero-morpheme. Based on these findings, two classic tests from generative grammar, Montalbetti's (1984) Overt Pronoun Constraint and Chomsky's (1981, 1982) Pro-drop Parameter are applied and show that ESSF behaves like other Romance pro-drop languages. This reanalysis of ESSF is discussed from the perspective of Romance typology, French Creoles, and first and second language acquisition. Finally, pedagogical implications are proposed.

This study examined children's performance on a decontextualization task requiring the ability to deduce the meaning of unknown words from verbal context and their ontological knowledge structure as indicated by their judgments about both anomalous and sensible statements containing the unknown words. A comparison was made between performance on the decontextualization task and verbal and nonverbal ability and between the subjects' ontological knowledge structures and verbal and nonverbal ability. It was hypothesized that performance on the decontextualization tasks would be positively correlated with both ability measures, but ontological knowledge structure would remain constant across ability levels. First, third and fifth grade subjects' participated in the study. Performance on the decontextualization task correlated positively with verbal ability for all three grade level and with nonverbal ability for grade one. Presence of the M-constraint (Keil, 1979) was evident across ability levels as well as grade levels. Greater differentiation in ontological knowledge was indicated across grade levels but not across ability levels within a grade level. Results supported previous research of Keil (1979, 1983a, 1983b).

While late talkers (LTs) are defined by their atypically small expressive vocabularies, far less is known about their receptive vocabularies or how they acquire new words. Some LTs, at least, appear to have receptive deficits (Dale et al., 2003), and in tasks of novel noun learning, LTs are less successful than their typically developing peers (TDs: Ellis Weismer, Venker, Evans, & Moyle, 2013). This dissertation explores LTs’ receptive vocabularies and word-learning, focusing on verb vocabulary. In verb learning, children rely on the linguistic context of the verb as a cue for its meaning (e.g., Naigles, 1990), but children who cannot parse the linguistic context do not learn (He, Kon, & Arunachalam, under revision). This may be particularly challenging for LTs, who are slower lexical processors than TDs (Fernald & Marchman, 2012). The first study (Chapter 2) compares LTs and TDs’ receptive verb vocabularies as measured through eye-tracking and dynamic scene stimuli. It was hypothesized that, as compared to TDs, LTs would know fewer verbs and be slower to process them; however, results of the study do not support either hypothesis. Other group differences were noted, though: As compared to TDs, LTs took longer to demonstrate knowledge of the target vocabulary items, spent less time looking to the target scene, and had greater rates of track loss. Together, these findings indicate subtle differences between LTs and TDs. The second study (Chapter 3) explores children’s capacity to learn novel verb meanings given variable linguistic processing demands. LTs and TDs were introduced to a novel verb, surrounded either only by content nouns or by both content nouns and pronouns. Variability benefits word-learning, and content nouns and pronouns each facilitate different aspects of the acquisition process (Childers & Tomasello, 2001; Hadley, Rispoli, & Holt, 2017; Mintz, 2003). However, variability also incurs a higher processing demand, which was hypothesized to be too great for LTs. Regression analysis revealed that LTs performed significantly worse given variable input as compared to consistent input. This indicates that LTs struggle to learn verb meaning when processing demands are high. The final study (Chapter 4) compares children’s performance on the receptive verb vocabulary task with their performance on the novel verb-learning task. Children who had larger receptive verb vocabularies and faster processing were expected to have learned more verbs during the verb-learning task as compared to children with smaller receptive vocabularies and slower lexical processing. Results of correlation analyses indicate no statistically significant correlations after Bonferroni correction, contrary to prediction. However, they do suggest areas for future research with a priori hypotheses about the relationship between concurrent language abilities and word learning. Taken together, the studies from this dissertation provide new insights into LTs’ verb vocabularies. Future research should continue to explore both between- and within-group differences. This work may ultimately provide insights into why LTs have poorer outcomes as compared to TDs (e.g., Rescorla, 2002; 2005; 2009), and may help identify which LTs are at greatest risk for developmental language disorder (Paul, 1996). / 2021-06-18T00:00:00Z

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University N.B.:Page 234 is missing.

The purpose of this field linguistics research is threefold: (1) To identify the different linguistic structures and the language functions the speakers of Miami Cuban Spanish produce to communicate a given semantic content in a stated social context, (2) to establish the degree of occurrence of these structural realizations and language functions, and (3) to determine the degree of influence of the English language on the Spanish form. / The language data, which have yielded the linguistic corpus for this research, were provided by 200 informants that are speakers of Cuban Spanish living in the city of Miami. / Four demographic variables are considered in this study: age group of arrival in the United States, geographical area of origin (Camaguey, La Habana, Las Villas, Matanza, Oriente, Pinar del Rio), year of arrival in the United States, and sex. / An interview-schedule of 21 notional categories of language was constructed to elicit the grammatical realizations of the language functions performed by the respondents. The utterances were recorded on tape to account for the intonation patterns, the hesitations, self-corrections, pauses, and digressions. The language data have been coded and transcribed verbatim, and in each instance the selected examples have been glossed into English. / Analysis of the language data reveals the following: In only two notional categories is there a direct relationship between a grammatical form and a language function. Additionally, there are some unanticipated language functions performed by the informants in response to a specific language situation. / Of the four demographic variables considered in this research, namely age group, geographical origin, sex, and year of arrival in the United States, the data reveal that sex and age group classification are the dominant variables in the variation of grammatical patterns, communicative functions, and influence from English. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-05, Section: A, page: 1296. / Major Professor: James L. Wyatt. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University.

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