Nozomi Tanaka

This study investigated whether L1-English Chinese learners show a subject preference in their oral production of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) and whether they show animacy effects. We conducted a picture-based elicited production experiment that compared subject and object RCs, varying the object animacy between animate and inanimate. The results from thirty learners showed more targetlike performance in subject RCs than in object RCs, both at group and individual levels, regardless of object animacy. Error analyses revealed that more object RCs were converted into subject RCs than vice versa. These results point toward a clear subject preference despite conflicted findings in previous research on RCs in Chinese as a foreign language. Animacy influenced subject and object RCs alike: both types were easier to produce when featuring an inanimate object. We suggested similarity-based interference or distribution-based effects to account for this finding.

This study investigates two possible factors in the well-known subject preference in the acquisition and processing of relative clauses (RCs): (i) an effect of similarity between declarative and relative clauses and (ii) an effect of frequency of certain RC types. Two production experiments were conducted with adult and child speakers of Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a Philippine-type voice system. One experiment elicited declarative clauses and the other elicited relative clauses; both had two animacy conditions: animate-animate (animate agent and patient) and animate-inanimate (animate agent, inanimate patient). Experiment 1’s results show a preference for patient voice in the animate-animate condition only. Experiment 2’s results show a preference for the relativization of the agent in the animate-inanimate condition only. We suggest that the interplay of a patient voice preference in Tagalog with a general preference for the relativization of agents – the source of which remains undetermined – may explain these results.

Word order, case marking, and animacy are cues used to convey and comprehend argument roles in transitive events. Japanese, however, is characterized by flexible word order, null arguments, and case-marker omission. This study analyzes corpus data of interviews between native Japanese speakers and L1-English and L1-Korean learners to examine these characteristics in both input to learners and learners' own production. The relative importance of the three cues is estimated based on their distributional properties using the competition model framework. The findings indicate that animacy was the strongest cue for the native speakers and, when at least one NP was elided, for the learners. However, when both subject and object were present, learners adhered to SOV word order. Case marking was reliable when present but was so frequently omitted that it was not a useful cue, contra previous reports. L1 and proficiency effects are also discussed.

There is little consensus in the Japanese syntax literature on the question of whether complex NPs with a noun complement headed by toyuu ‘that.say’ are islands for NP-scrambling dependencies. To explore this question, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments using the factorial definition of islands to test the status of noun complements, relative clauses (which are also complex NPs, and uniformly considered islands in the literature), and coordinated NP structures (which are also uniformly considered islands in the literature). Our first experiment yielded strong evidence that relative clauses and coordinated NPs are islands (as expected), and strong evidence that noun complements are not. Our second experiment also found strong evidence that relative clauses and coordinated NPs are islands, but yielded a small, non-significant, trend toward an effect with noun complements. Based on the sizes of our samples (89 and 90 participants, respectively), the sizes of the effects, and the details of the acceptability patterns, we conclude that noun complements in Japanese are not islands with respect to NP-scrambling. We also investigated between- and within-participant variability in our results. We observe no evidence of increased between-participant variability for noun complements relative to other islands, and no increase of within-participant variability for noun complements relative to scrambling out of (non-island) declarative CPs. Our results have consequences for a number of issues that have been encoded in current syntactic theories of island effects, including the correlation between syntactic constituent complexity and island status (e.g., number of bounding nodes or phase heads), and the correlation between complementizer deletion and island status (e.g., the complement/adjunct distinction).

The question of whether there exists a universal subject preference in relativization has stimulated research in a wide range of languages and across different domains, yielding an extensive body of literature in relative clause acquisition and processing. In this article, we aim at consolidating the efforts of existing research in order to inform further exploration of the universality of the subject preference with a comprehensive analysis of relevant work (including journal articles on empirical studies, dissertations, and conference proceedings). We present an overview of the proposals regarding the source(s) of the subject-object asymmetry from a cross-linguistic perspective and discuss commonly used methodologies in this research area, and we survey the research on relative clause processing and acquisition of different linguistic communities, including native speakers, second language learners, clinical populations, and heritage speakers.

This article reports on the acquisition of relative clauses in Tagalog, the most widely spoken language in the Philippines. A distinctive feature of Tagalog is a unique system of voice that creates competing patterns, each with different possibilities for relativization. This study of children’s performance on agent and patient relative clauses in a comprehension task revealed an agent relative clause advantage. These findings cannot be explained by the voice preference in declarative clauses, but are compatible with an explanation based upon input frequency factors.

Background: Virtually nothing is known about the ability of Tagalog speakers with agrammatic aphasia to cope with basic grammatical features of their language. Tagalog is unusual in exhibiting competing transitive patterns thanks to a system of voice that can make either of the verb’s arguments syntactically prominent – a prerequisite for undergoing syntactic operations such as relativisation.Aims: Our objective is to investigate the nature of the syntactic impairment associated with agrammatic aphasia in Tagalog, with special attention to voice patterns and relative clauses (RCs).Methods and Procedures: Five native Tagalog-speaking patients diagnosed with agrammatism took part in (1) elicited-production and (2) comprehension tasks to assess their ability with respect to voice patterns and (3) elicited-production, (4) imitation, and (5) comprehension tasks to assess their performance on RCs.Outcomes and Results …