Usage-based approaches assume that children’s early utterances are item-based. This has been demonstrated in a number of studies using the tracebackmethod. In this approach, a small amount of “target utterances” from a child language corpus is “traced back” to earlier utterances. Drawing on a case study of German, this paper provides a critical evaluation of the method from a usage-based perspective. In particular, we check how factors inherent to corpus data as well as methodological choices influence the results of traceback studies. To this end, we present four case studies in which we change thresholds and the composition of the main corpus, use a cross-corpus approach tracing one child’s utterances back to another child’s corpus, and reverse and randomize the target utterances. Overall, the results show that the method can provide interesting insights—particularly regarding different pathways of language acquisition—but they also show the limitations of the method.

Faroese is known to lie grammatically between Icelandic and the Mainland Scandinavian languages and dialects. One example of this is that, on the one hand, Faroese is like Icelandic in having a basically intact morphological four case system. On the other hand case-marking in Faroese is linked to clause function to a greater degree than in Icelandic – but to a lesser degree than in the Mainland Scandinavian standard languages. In Scandinavian Linguistics, it has long been an axiom that in the longer term the aforementioned four case system will be reduced in all varieties of the Scandinavian languages. The present thesis investigates if, and if so how, this expected development manifests itself in Senior High School graduation essays in Faroese from the period 1940–1999. A quantitative study forms the core of the thesis. The choice between the dative and other cases is related to eight syntactic variables whose effect on the choice of case is compared using methods from the variationist framework, among others. The results are partly surprising: the dative did not reduce in frequency from the 1940s to 1990s. There certainly is a tendency, however not a statistically significant one, that the dative is more often replaced by another case in contexts where the norm is to use the dative. On the other hand it also seems to become more common for the dative to be used hypercorrectly. Furthermore, the development is not linear, in that around the middle of the investigation period, the dative is used far more according to norms than otherwise. As expected, clause function is an important variable, but by the end of the period under investigation the placement of the nominal phrase within the clause becomes a surprisingly strong factor. It also becomes more important if the phrase takes the form of a first/second-person pronominal or not. The results are theoretically interpreted in the light of, firstly, Generative Grammar, and secondly Construction Grammar. The modification of certain terms is discussed, such as lexical case in Generative Grammar or usage-based model in Construction Grammar. The conclusion is that the linguistic descriptive models of these theories can only partly cover the tendencies to change that are observed. Other parts of the results are best explained using aspects of sociolinguistics. The conclusion is that case studies on a micro-level are valuable in order to evaluate and develop theories of linguistic variation and change at a macro-level.

The present diploma thesis focuses on the unconscious code-switching between second and third language. The main objective of this thesis is to deal with principles of unconscious code-switching, describe and categorize actual appearances of unconscious code-switching between second and third language. After introducing issues, the second chapter sums up the way of second and third language acquisition in terms of bilingualism and multilingualism. The third chapter presents a definition and theoretic bases of code-switching. The fourth chapter concerns the analysis of the reason for code- switching in terms of usage-based and psycholinguistic approaches. The fifth chapter presents a categorization of code-switching from syntactic and pragmatic perspectives. The sixth chapter concerns the analysis of cases of code-switching from recorded interviews and the explanation of possible factors causing unconscious code-switching. Key words: Unconscious code-switching, bilingualism, multilingualism, usage-based approach, psycholinguistic approach, function words, acquisition, second language, third language, WIPP

This study tested the unique checking constraint hypothesis and the usage-based account concerning why young children produced tense and agreement morphemes variably via three experiments. Experiment 1 investigated whether subject types influenced the production accuracy of auxiliary 'is' in three-year-olds through an elicited production task. The rate of use of auxiliary 'is' increased as children's tense productivity increased, but the pattern was different for each subject type. The rate of use increased more rapidly with tense productivity for lexical NP subjects than it did for pronominal subjects. Experiment 2 further examined the role of subject types, predicate types, and predicate word frequency on the use of copula 'is' in three-year-olds via an elicited production task. Overall, the production accuracy of copula 'is' was higher with nominal predicates than with permanent- or temporary-adjectival predicates, followed by locative predicates. Children also produced copula 'is' more accurately with low-frequency predicate words than with high-frequency predicate words. Moreover, the effect of subject types on the use of copula 'is' varied with children's tense productivity. For sentences with nominal, permanent-adjectival, or temporary-adjectival predicates, children with lower tense productivity used copula 'is' more accurately with lexical subjects than with pronominal subjects in. In contrast, children with higher tense productivity produced copula 'is' more accurately with pronominal subjects than with lexical subjects. Experiment 3 extended Experiment 1 by exploring the degree of abstractness of representations of auxiliary BE via a structural priming task. The production accuracy of auxiliary 'is' in three-year-olds increased above the baseline when the prime-target pair shared the same structure and subject + auxiliary 'is' combinations, but not when the prime-target pair only shared the same structure. However, the production accuracy of auxiliary 'are' did not change with prime types. These experiments suggest that young children have only lexically-specific representations of auxiliary BE. Frequency, rather than structural properties, of sentence elements influenced the production accuracy of auxiliary and copula 'is' in young children. These findings support the usage-based approach that young children use tense and agreement morphemes variably because they have not yet learned adult-like abstract representations and use highly frequent/ lexically-specific constructions for the production of these morphemes.

The work in this thesis presents and evaluates a number of strategies by which English-learning children might discover the major open-class parts-of-speech in English (nouns, verbs and adjectives) on the basis of purely distributional information. Previous work has shown that parts-of-speech can be readily induced from the distributional patterns in which words occur. The research reported in this thesis extends and improves on this previous work in two major ways, related to the constructional status of the utterance contexts used for distributional analysis, and to the way in which previous studies have dealt with categorial ambiguity. Previous studies that have induced parts-of-speech from word distributions have done so on the basis of fixed “windows” of words that occur before and after the word in focus. These contexts are often not constructions of the language in question, and hence have dubious status as elements of linguistic knowledge. A great deal of recent evidence (e.g. Lieven, Pine & Baldwin, 1997; Tomasello, 1992) has suggested that children’s early language may be organized around a number of lexically-specific constructional frames with slots, such as “a X”, “you X it”, “draw X on X”. The work presented here investigates the possibility that constructions such as these may be a more appropriate domain for the distributional induction of parts-of-speech. This would open up the possibility of a treatment of part-of-speech induction that is more closely integrated with the acquisition of syntax. Three strategies to discover lexically-specific frames in the speech input to children are presented. Two of these strategies are based on the interplay between more and less frequent words in English utterances: the more frequent words, which are typically function words or light verbs, are taken to provide the schematic “backbone” of an utterance. The third strategy is based around pairs of words in which the occurrence of one word is highly predictable from that of the other, but not vice versa; from these basic slot-filler relationships, larger frames are assembled. These techniques were implemented computationally and applied to a corpus of child-directed speech. Each technique yielded a large set of lexically-specific frames, many of which could plausibly be regarded as constructions. In a comparison with a manual analysis of the same corpus by Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven and Tomasello (2003), it is shown that most of the constructional frames identified in the manual analysis were also produced by the automatic techniques. After the identification of potential constructional frames, parts-of-speech were formed from the patterns of co-occurrence of words in particular constructions, by means of hierarchical clustering. The resulting clusters produced are shown to be quite similar to the major English parts-of-speech of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Each individual word token was assigned a part-of-speech on the basis of its constructional context. This categorization was evaluated empirically against the part-of-speech assigned to the word in question in the original corpus. The resulting categorization is shown to be, to a great extent, in agreement with the manual categorization. These strategies deal with the categorial ambiguity of words, by allowing the frame context to determine part-of-speech. However, many of the frames produced were themselves ambiguous cues to part-of-speech. For this reason, strategies are presented to deal with both word and context ambiguity. Three such strategies are proposed. One considers membership of a part-of-speech to be a matter of degree for both word and contextual frame. A second strategy attempts to discretely assign multiple parts-of-speech to words and constructions in a way that imposes internal consistency in the corpus. The third strategy attempts to assign only the minimally-required multiple categories to words and constructions so as to provide a parsimonious description of the data. Each of these techniques was implemented and applied to each of the three frame discovery techniques, thereby providing category information about both the frame and the word. The subsequent assignment of parts-of-speech was done by combining word and frame information, and is shown to be far more accurate than the categorization based on frames alone. This approach can be regarded as addressing certain objections against the distributional method that have been raised by Pinker (1979, 1984, 1987). Lastly, a framework for extending this research is outlined that allows semantic information to be incorporated into the process of category induction.

Submitted by Maike Costa (maiksebas@gmail.com) on 2016-07-19T13:59:09Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 3655935 bytes, checksum: c32c80be0b5d66b04eb2ca7b1e59f308 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-19T13:59:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 3655935 bytes, checksum: c32c80be0b5d66b04eb2ca7b1e59f308 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-12-04 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This dissertation points out how the appearances of the neologisms in a language, by lexicalization, can contribute to enrichment and updating of the lexicon of the same language. Therefore, it looked for: (i) expose the main concepts about lexicon, neologism and lexicalization, based on the Usage-Based Linguistics (UBL), (ii) it presents 13 lexical items selected from the digital corpus and (iii) present the real relevance of the lexicalization for the formation of new words, for to understand how this affects/changes the multi-system. The corpus used was the one of the Project AC/DC: corpo Corpus Brasileiro, which has about one billion words employed in the most varied use contexts. For the fundamentation of the dissertation, some scholars were consulted, among them we highlight: Martelotta (2011), Gonçalves (2011), Contiero and Ferraz (2014), Correia and Almeida (2012), Carvalho (2009a), Biderman (1981), Câmara Jr. (2011), Pontes-Ribeiro (2007), Castilho (2003a; 2003b; 2008), Cunha (2011), Mendes and Seabra (2006), Ferraz (2006; 2007) and Fortunato (2008). The methodology consists in three stages: a) select of lexical elements samples in the corpus, b) extraction of this samples and compilations of them in tables and c) analyses of collected data. The results revealed that some of the 13 lexicalized words/neologisms, possibly, appeared to fulfill an existing space of linguistic signs in the multi-system, others acquired new meanings when used in new contexts of use and many others are in process of disappearance. The frequency of use was determining in the change of meaning. / Esta dissertação aponta como o surgimento dos neologismos em uma língua, pela lexicalização, pode contribuir para o enriquecimento e atualização do léxico desta mesma língua. Deste modo, buscou-se: (i) expor os principais conceitos sobre léxico, neologismo e lexicalização, com base na Linguística Centrada no Uso (LCU), (ii) apresentar 13 itens lexicais selecionados a partir do corpus digital e (iii) discutir a relevância da lexicalização para a formação de novas palavras, para entender como isso afeta/altera o multissistema. O corpus utilizado foi o Projeto AC/DC: corpo Corpus Brasileiro, que contém cerca de um bilhão de palavras empregadas nos mais variados contextos de uso. Para a fundamentação da dissertação, alguns estudiosos foram consultados, entre os quais se destacam: Martelotta (2011), Gonçalves (2011), Contiero e Ferraz (2014), Correia e Almeida (2012), Carvalho (2009a), Biderman (1978; 1981), Câmara Jr. (2011), Pontes-Ribeiro (2007), Castilho (2003a; 2003b; 2008), Cunha (2011), Mendes e Seabra (2006), Ferraz (2006; 2007) e Fortunato (2008). A metodologia consistiu em três etapas: a) coleta de amostras de itens lexicais no corpus, b) extração dessas amostras e compilação em tabelas e c) análise dos dados coletados. Os resultados revelaram que alguns dos 13 neologismos/palavras lexicalizadas, possivelmente, surgiram para preencher um vazio de signos linguísticos no multissistema, outros adquiriram novos sentidos ao serem empregados em novos contextos de uso e outros tantos estão em processo de desaparecimento. A frequência de uso foi determinante para a mudança no sentido.

This article investigates the role of direct input in the code-mixing of three bilingual children aged 2–4 years acquiring English as one language, and either German, Polish, or Finnish as the other. From a usage-based perspective, it is assumed that early children’s utterances are item-based and that they contain many lexically fixed patterns. To account for such patterns, the traceback method has been developed to test the hypothesis that children’s utterances are constructed on the basis of a limited inventory of chunks and frame-and-slot patterns. We apply this method to the code-mixed utterances, suggesting that much of the code-mixing occurs within frame-and-slot patterns, such as Was ist X? as in Was ist breakfast muesli? “What is breakfast muesli?” We further analyzed each code-mixed utterance in terms of priming. Our findings suggest that much of the early code-mixing is based on concrete lexically fixed patterns which are subject to input occurring in immediately prior speech, either the child’s own or that of her caregivers.

This paper offers an inductive, exploratory study on the role of input and individual differences in the early code-mixing of bilingual children. Drawing on data from two German-English bilingual children, aged 2–4, we use the traceback method to check whether their code-mixed utterances can be accounted for with the help of constructional patterns that can be found in their monolingual data and/or in their caregivers’ input. In addition, we apply the tracebackmethod to checkwhether the patterns used by one child can also be found in the input of the other child. Results show that patterns found in the code-mixed utterances could be traced back to the input the children receive, suggesting that children extract lexical knowledge from their environment. Additionally, tracing back patterns within each child was more successful than tracing back to the other child’s corpus, indicating that each child has their own set of patterns which depends verymuch on their individual input. As such, these findings can shed new light on the interplay of the two developing grammars in bilingual children and their individual differences.

This paper explores the added value of studying intra- and interspeaker variation in grammaticalisation based on idiolect corpora. It analyses the usage patterns of the English let alone construction in a self-compiled William Faulkner corpus against the backdrop of aggregated community data. Vast individual differences (early Faulkner vs. late Faulkner vs. peers) in frequencies of use are observed, and these frequency differences correlate with different degrees of grammaticalisation as measured in terms of host-class and syntactic context expansion. The corpus findings inform general issues in current cognitive-functional research, such as the from-corpus-to-cognition issue and the cause/consequence issue of frequency. They lend support to the usagebased view of grammaticalisation as a lifelong, frequency-sensitive process of cognitive automation. To substantiate this view, this paper proposes a selffeeding cycle of constructional generalisation that is driven by the interplay of frequency, entrenchment, partial sanction and habituation.

Following a usage-based approach to language acquisition, lexically specific patterns are considered to be important building blocks for language productivity and feature heavily both in child-directed speech and in the early speech of children (Arnon, Inbal & Morten H. Christiansen. 2017. The role of multiword building blocks in explaining L1-L2 differences. Topics in Cognitive Science 9(3). 621–636; Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a language: A usagebased theory of language acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). In order to account for patterns, the traceback method has been widely applied in research on first language acquisition to test the hypothesis that children’s utterances can be accounted for on the basis of a limited inventory of chunks and partially schematic units (Lieven, Elena, Dorothé Salomo & Michael Tomasello. 2009. Two-year-old children’s production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 20(3). 481–508). In the current study, we applied the method to code-mixed utterances (n = 1,506) of three German-English bilingual children between 2 and 4 years of age to investigate individual differences in each child’s own inventory of patterns in relation to their input settings. It was shown that units such as I see X as in I see a Kelle ‘I see a trowel’ could be traced back to the child’s own previous productions. More importantly, we see that each child’s inventory of constructions draws heavily on multiword chunks that are strongly dependent on the children’s language input situations.