This article reports on a study with which we sought to test the methodological soundness of an experiment designed to verify the hypothesis that the foundations of the universal hierarchy of functional projections stem from general cognition. We focus on the noun phrase, the merging domain of adjectives denoting size, color and shape, which can be associated with the concepts that such adjectives refer to (e.g. the adjective ’red‘ refers to the concept of ’red color‘). Inside the (Slovenian) noun phrase, any adjectives belonging to these categories typically occur in the following order: size ) shape ) color. If the syntactic hierarchy indeed results from general cognition we can conclude, on the assumption that syntactic structure is acquired bottom-up, that children will first acquire the concept of color, then shape, and then size. In this article, we assess the soundness of the ’find-the-pair‘ task used in the study, but we also report results of the pilot study.
COBISS.SI-ID: 5276411
We present three experiments that were set up to test whether the hierarchy of functional projections has some reality also in non-linguistic cognitive processes. The cartographic approach to language claims that there exist hierarchies of functional elements that come on top of lexical heads such as the noun inside a noun phrase. One of the core questions of such an approach (other than the very compositions of and orders within these hierarchical sequences) is what the ultimate source of these hierarchies is, cf. Cinque and Rizzi (2008). The focus of the three experiments was the functional sequence hosting adjectives inside the noun phrase. More precisely we focus on the sequence of adjectives expressing color, size and shape, which are typically found in the following order inside the noun phrase: size ) shape ) color.
COBISS.SI-ID: 5276667
We report on a study of gender agreement patterns, i.e. agreement patterns reflecting one of the categories for which there is a debate on whether they represent an independent functional projection, and are as such part of the hierarchical functional structure of the noun phrase and part of the domain whose origin might be linked to general cognition. Against the background of the wide-spread assumption that hierarchical structure is a grammatical universal, we used experimental methods to show that linear order can also be a relevant syntactic relation. In fact, our results of gender agreement patterns with conjoined subjects show that in certain configurations, grammatical production can actually favor linear order over hierarchical structure. The results demonstrate that gender agreement morphology may be computed in a series of steps, one of which is partly independent from syntactic hierarchy. Since linearity is in its essence a nonlinguistic relation, the results uncover another dimension in which general cognition can impact language behavior.
COBISS.SI-ID: 4986619
This paper studies gender agreement patterns, i.e. agreement patterns reflecting one of the categories for which there is a debate on whether they represent an independent functional projection, and are as such part of the hierarchical functional structure of the noun phrase and part of the domain whose origin might be linked to general cognition. A recurring hypothesis about gender agreement phenomena generalized as closest conjunct agreement takes this pattern to result from reduced clausal conjunction, and to simply display the agreement of the verb with a non-conjoined subject in the clause whose content survives ellipsis (Aoun et al. 1994, 1999; see also Wilder 1997). Closest conjunct agreement is the dominant agreement pattern in Slovenian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (B/C/S). A natural question is whether closest-conjunct agreement in these varieties may indeed be analyzed as entirely derived from conjunction reduction. The results of two experiments we report on reject this possibility.
COBISS.SI-ID: 99999997