Volume 64, Issue 1

The acquisition and use of a second language may impact a speaker’s first language, a phenomenon known as attrition . An area of particular interest for research on attrition has been the interpretation of subject pronouns in languages like Italian, which exhibit distinct biases for null and overt pronouns. That body of work has largely focused on overt pronouns, arguing that speakers’ biases for those forms weaken under attrition. However, we argue that previous results are more mixed than usually acknowledged; they also provide evidence that speakers undergoing attrition may exhibit a strengthening of their L1 (interpretive) biases more generally. To assess whether we should take this second trend seriously, the present paper investigates an apparent strengthening effect relating to null pronouns in Italian. For this, we conducted a sentence interpretation task with globally ambiguous sentences which included either a null or an overt pronoun. This task was presented to two groups of native Italian speakers, one in Italy and one in an English-speaking country. As predicted, results revealed a stronger interpretive bias for null pronouns under attrition. Therefore, we argue that theories of attrition should account for why speakers may exhibit not only a weakening of specific biases, but also a strengthening of their L1 biases more generally.

Interpretive differences between overt subject pronouns relative to null subject pronouns are commonly considered a defining property of Consistent Null Subject Languages (CNSLs), in contradistinction to Partial Null Subject Languages (PNSLs). In this article, we present the results of two experimental studies which challenge this view with respect to two environments: variable binding and pronominal coreference (binding) under double embedding. Having shown that given the two phenomena, all four logically possible patterns of binding of overt pronouns are attested in languages with null arguments, we propose that a theoretically meaningful typological pro- drop classification should move away from facts surrounding the binding or interpretation of overt pronouns, and should instead focus on what kind of derivational mechanism a language has to yield a null subject structure. Specifically, CNSLs are characterised by a ‘rich’ inflection-based mechanism, in contrast to PNSLs, for which alternative proposals have been made.

This article investigates experimentally elicited personal name blends (PN blends, such as Benjalene from Benjamin and Helene ) as an understudied type of name-based word formation in German. It focuses on the influence of formal similarity between PN blends and their name constituents on the creativity of PN blends. We adopt a usage-based approach to blending and a definition of creativity as a combination of the degree of the blend’s originality and the recoverability grade of its source names to study the following research questions: (1) How does formal similarity (measured with normalized indel similarity) between a blend and its name constituents influence the interpretation of PN blends as more or less creative? (2) Which factors significantly predict the creativity of PN blends bearing different similarity grades? and (3) How do usage-based factors (linguistic experience with blends and domain-based knowledge) influence the indel similarity values of personal name blends? The statistical analysis based on the results of two experiments shows that PN blends with high grades of normalized indel similarity (e.g., Renastian ) are more recoverable but not less original than those with low normalized indel similarity (e.g., Reba ). The factors significantly predicting the creativity of PN blends of different similarity grades are the participants’ knowledge about the domains in which PN blends usually occur and the number of correctly predicted name constituents for the recoverability ratings, and the number of correctly predicted name constituents for the originality ratings. Both the linguistic experience with blends and domain-based knowledge significantly influence the similarity values of personal name blends. The results regarding their contribution to the (usage-based) theory of word-formation creativity are discussed.

Left dislocation (LD) is described as a feature of informal, spoken discourse. However, most research on LD relies on a collection of examples or on datasets with a restricted mode/formality. To understand LD use across discourse types, we investigate the frequency of LDs in a corpus of 287 participants with four narrative types: informal spoken, formal spoken, informal written, formal written. We consider the speaker characteristics of age (adolescent and adult), gender (female and male), and speaker group (English monolinguals and German, Greek, Russian, and Turkish heritage speakers). We also analyze LD characteristics (e.g., noun phrase, function) based on formality. We found that the spoken mode contained more LDs than the written one and that informal narratives had more LDs than formal ones. However, the effect of formality was modulated by speaker group: only Turkish heritage speakers produced more LDs in the informal than formal narratives, while the other groups showed no evidence of a formality effect. No evidence of age or gender effects was discovered. Lastly, participants used LDs of the same characteristics in both formalities. Thus, the study confirms previous findings on LD use across discourse types and raises the importance of including bilingualism as a speaker characteristic.

Productivity has long been one of the central topics in the study of word-formation. Research in this area has primarily focused on affixation and treated it independently of the creative performance of language users. This paper offers new insights into the nature of word-formation by discussing productivity within the context of two other related phenomena: creative naming acts of language users, and the structural complexity of a word-formation system. These phenomena have typically been studied in isolation, with an emphasis on their outcomes. A cognitively grounded onomasiological approach to word-formation enables a deeper understanding of the relationship between these factors. Instead of concentrating on the products of word-formation, it focuses on the process of coining new complex words, i.e., the creative act of naming by a language user. Rather than a phenomenon detached from language users, this perspective presents word-formation as one deeply tied to their creative potential, manifested through their individual creative performances. The paper highlights how this psychologically grounded factor, combined with the available means of word-formation, influences the productivity of word-formation processes and rules. By emphasizing the processual aspect of word-formation, the paper defines the productivity rate of a word-formation process or rule as the cumulative result of all individual creative naming acts. These acts take place within a competitive environment of all available word-formation means – not limited to affixation. The competition is shaped by the structural richness of the word-formation system, and directly affects the productivity of word-formation processes and rules, thereby influencing the evolution of the system itself. Ultimately, the paper underscores the necessity of viewing each act of naming as the outcome of an interplay between various objective and subjective factors.

While research into the interaction of language and sexuality is becoming increasingly widespread, there is still little sociophonetic sexuality work that considers female speakers and much of the previous research focuses on a binary distinction of gay women compared to straight women. This study instead considers a distinct identity that distinguishes female speakers based on their participation in local football. This analysis shows that participants who are part of their local football team have significantly different /s/ productions than those who were not part of the team. This article suggests that this difference may connect to aspects of gender identity and sexuality and discusses the societal factors that may influence this relation between identity and football.

In this article we explore various properties of direct objects in Russian that may condition the preference for a preverbal versus postverbal position of the object, against the general trend towards VO constituent order in Russian. First, we show that a preference for OV over VO order is associated with (in order of increasing effect size) animacy and definiteness of the object, personal pronouns in object function and pronominal object clitics. We argue that the main determining factor is accessibility of the referent. Russian follows the general trend of languages to place constituents conveying more accessible information sentence-initially, regardless of their distance to the verb. This is hypothesized to be efficient from the perspective of incremental speech processing. Likewise, we show that the bias towards a postverbal position of the object phrase is a function of the length of that phrase. This tendency is conditioned by Hawkins’ Minimize Domain Principle, which is assumed to optimize sentence processing. Finally, we report an effect of negation on the preference for OV order, and we provide evidence against the claim that in Russian, word order is employed for the discrimination of subjects from objects if case fails to disambiguate. More generally, we suggest that Russian has no grammatical conventions for word order and is therefore a truly free-word-order language in which the ordering of elements is constrained by cognitive and discourse related factors, not conventionalized in the form of grammatical rules.