To answer the question how does cross-linguistic variation in linguistic structure affect children’s acquisition of early number word meanings, we investigated number word learning in two unrelated languages that feature a tripartite singular-dual-plural distinction: Slovenian and Saudi Arabic. We found that learning dual morphology affects children’s acquisition of the number word 'two' in both languages, relative to English. Children who knew the meaning of two were surprisingly frequent in the dual languages, relative to English. Furthermore, Slovenian children were faster to learn 'two' than children learning English, despite being less-competent counters. Finally, in both Slovenian and Saudi Arabic, comprehension of the dual was correlated with knowledge of 'two' and higher number words.
COBISS.SI-ID: 2935803
In this work the authors address an interesting phenomenon concerning change of the pattern of agreement in Bulgarian numeral phrases from the prescriptively correct “count form” of masculine nouns to a simple plural form. The phenomenon is observed in everyday speech and writing and has been noted by traditional Bulgarian grammarians. They propose to treat it on a par with agreement errors previously observed in the language production literature on English (e.g. The editor of the books are…) and Romance languages. We have conducted a corpus study of agreement errors in Bulgarian the results of which support a class of theoretical models of language production which hold, in particular, that structural hierarchy is relevant for computation of agreement in language production.
COBISS.SI-ID: 2910459
The paper discusses the syntactic position of the type of stacking Slavic verbal prefixes whose semantic contribution with respect to the singly-prefixed counterpart corresponds to 'too' in 'to stuff too full', to 're-' in 'to rebottle', to 'slightly' in 'to lift up slightly', casting the discussion against the background of the distinction between lexical and superlexical prefixes. It is argued that these prefixes are neither superlexical, nor are they (unlike the stacked prefixes discussed in, say, Žaucer 2010, 2012) a case of a lexical prefix and a concealed null verb. Instead, the paper applies various tests whose results at first sight point in different directions but can in fact all be seen as converging on the idea that we must posit another class of non-stem-adjacent prefixes which originate in the result part of the verb phrase, i.e. result-modifying prefixes. This status explains their mixed behaviour, whereby they exhibit clear resultative diagnostics on some tests (scope wrt the lowest type of adverbials, such as restitutive 'again', adverbs of completion) but do not, for instance, exhibit some hallmarks of resultativity, such as unselected objects.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3045627
The authors discuss a well-known and frequently cited claim that sluicing repairs island violations. With a detailed study of various combinations of different island violations, the authors show that the predictions made by the standard theory on slucing are not realized. They suggest that sluicing should be analyzed differently, which also means sluicing should not be seen a process that has an effect on island violations.
COBISS.SI-ID: 2781435
Paper talks about slovenian multiple wh-question in the light of the theory of distinctiness, which states that only those syntactic constituents that are sufficently distinct from one another can participate in linearization statements and thus get linearized. Langauges are said to differ as to what counts in the evaluation of distinctness. In English on one side, constituents need different labels, while in Serbocroatian case already makes two syntactic phrases distinct. This paper reports on an experiment showing that Slovenian phrases are made distinct not only by category labels and case features but also by gender, number and animcy features.
COBISS.SI-ID: 2781179