It has long been theorized that, after the so-called critical period has passed, acquiring language becomes a more difficult enterprise. While general differences between adult second language (L2) learners and normally developed child (L1) acquirers have been more or less empirically established, a strand of recent L2 accounts have focused on the specific locus of these differences. The main goal of this dissertation project is to test the predictions of one such account: Clahsen and Felser's Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH; Clahsen & Felser 2006a, 2006b). The SSH places emphasis on the empirical testing of native/non-native language processing asymmetries, which are argued to be due to less detailed L2 grammatical representations. This dissertation tests the predictions of the SSH using a long-distance dependency: Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) in L2 Spanish. The study includes on-line and an off-line tasks, which were completed by a control group of native speakers of Spanish and an experimental group constituted by L2 learners of Spanish whose first language was English. In view of the well-known fact that L2 learning outcomes vary widely across individuals, a secondary goal of this dissertation project is to determine whether variability in individual learning abilities, such as inhibitory control and statistical learning predicts variability in L2 learning. Part of L2 learning involves detecting the probabilistic patterns of a language (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996), such that individuals who are better pattern learners may be better able to learn the structural regularities of the L2 input. Results were analyzed in order to determine whether the predictions of the SSH could account for the patterns present in the data. These results suggest that although the acquisition of long-distance dependencies is a protracted process, both intermediate and advanced L2 learners of Spanish could anticipate (predict) a syntactic element based in previously occurring cues. Thus, these results fail to support the predictions of the SSH. In terms of individual differences, overall, neither statistical learning nor inhibitory control appear to modulate the on-line processing of this particular long-distance dependency in Spanish.

In recent years, attempts to simplify the grammatical mechanisms used in syntax have led to proposals to reduce the relationships between elements in a sentence to relations between heads and complements, doing away with free adjunction. For the analysis of modifying relations one consequence has been the rise of analyses that use the properties of selecting heads to stipulate unexpected syntactic behaviour, such as the use of light verbs to derive transparency in complex verb constructions. This thesis shows that such accounts are empirically inadequate and argues that the relationship between heads and adjuncts provides a more empirically-satisfactory model of modifying relations, such as complex verb constructions, than one restricted to the selection relation between heads and complements in the syntax. In support of the adjunct relation, I show how a modular approach to adjuncts in which the position of adjunction is licensed in the semantics and long-distance dependencies are licensed in the syntax can provide a more unified account of subextraction from two separate types of island configurations, viz. asymmetric subextraction from coordination and subextraction from participial adjuncts, either than analyses involving complementation in the syntax (Borgonovo and Neeleman, 2000; Fabregas and Jiménez-Fernández, 2016; Wiklund, 2007), or hybrid analyses mixing processing filters with syntactic licensing of long-distance dependencies (Truswell, 2009, 2011). The first part of the thesis shows that Chomsky’s (2000; 2001) phase theory gives rise to blackholes in the specifier positions of phases from which movement cannot take place. I provide a theoretical account in terms of feature-licensing, where blackholes are formed by the impossibility of licensing at least one unlicensed feature on a phase head, and show how this account derives the distinction between canonical adjuncts from which subextraction is not permitted and subextraction from single event constructions in which subextraction is permitted. The section speculatively concludes with a demonstration of how blackholes might provide a unified analysis of islandhood in general. The second part of the thesis concentrates on the empirical phenomenon of subextraction from coordination and participial adjuncts. I report the results of a series of judgement experiments run in parallel across two sets of constructions, coordination and participial adjuncts, in three languages, English, German and Norwegian. The aim was to test whether acceptability of subextraction from within coordination and participial adjuncts varied depending on the aspectual or grammatical type of matrix predicate. The results show that acceptability of subextraction does depend on the type of matrix predicate. The crucial factor is intransitivity, partially confirming the bias towards unaccusatives in subextraction from participial adjuncts observed informally in Borgonovo and Neeleman (2000); Fabregas and Jiménez-Fernández (2016); Truswell (2011) whilst providing evidence against theoretical accounts that rely primarily on unaccusativity (Borgonovo and Neeleman, 2000; Fabregas and Jiménez-Fernández, 2016), primarily on aspectual distinctions (Truswell, 2007b) or primarily on agentivity (Truswell, 2009, 2011). Interestingly, the hierarchy in acceptability between the four types of matrix predicates stays constant across all three languages, despite both pseudocoordination and subextraction from within participials being ungrammatical in German.

No description available.