Sigr\u00ed\u00f0ur Bj\u00f6rnsd\u00f3ttir<\/a> Kate Fedorova<\/a> Isabel N. Jensen<\/a> Bror Magnus Strand<\/strong><\/a> Tammer Castro (2016)<\/a><\/strong> Natalia Mitrofanova (2016)<\/strong><\/a> Olga Urek (2016)<\/strong><\/a> Marta Velnic (2017)<\/strong> Anna Wolleb (2015)<\/strong><\/a>
\n<\/strong>Working title:\u00a0<\/strong>Grammatical gender in Icelandic and Norwegian: a view from learnability and diachrony
\n<\/em>Supervisors:\u00a0<\/strong>Marit Westergaard<\/a>,\u00a0Terje Lohndal\u00a0<\/a>
\nBrief description:\u00a0<\/strong>The goal of this project is to investigate how regularization processes rooted in language acquisition may account for how gender systems may change over time, using Icelandic and Norwegian as case studies. These are two languages that originated from a common source, Old Norse, yet have over time developed differently with respect to grammatical gender. Icelandic has retained a 3-gender system from Old Norse that distinguishes between Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Many dialects of Norwegian, however, have developed a 2-gender system that distinguishes between Common gender and Neuter. This project seeks to answer how the seemingly systematic changes to grammatical gender in Norwegian dialects have taken \u00a0place by accounting for the learning mechanisms that are responsible for grammatical gender acquisition.\u200b\u200b<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Working title:<\/strong>\u00a0Sonority distance in complex onsets: sonority plateau and sonority<\/em>\u00a0reversal.
\nSupervisors:\u00a0<\/strong>Martin Kr\u00e4mer<\/a>, Draga Zec
\nBrief description:<\/strong>\u00a0The sequencing of segments within a syllable is driven by a number of sonority principles: the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), the Minimum Sonority Distance (MSD), and the Sonority Dispersion Principle (SDP). However, some languages tolerate violations of the mentioned principles. The current project representing a typological analysis of complex onsets that violate the sonority principles aims to find out the driving force of the sonority plateau and sonority reversal.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Working title:<\/strong> Transfer in adult third-language acquisition<\/em>
\n<\/span>Supervisors:<\/strong> Marit Westergaard<\/a>, Roumyana Slabakova<\/a>
\n<\/span>Brief description:<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span>This project investigates how previously acquired linguistic systems affect the development of new linguistic representations in third language (L3) acquisition. Transfer of morphosyntactic properties from the first and second languages is well-documented in the relatively new field of generative L3 acquisition research. However, the sources of transfer are highly debated and there is currently no consensus\u00a0<\/span>about how transfer happens in L3 acquisition.<\/span>\u00a0The possible models are the following: the systems of the L1 or the L2 can be copied in their entirety (wholesale transfer), or both languages can be active in the minds of the speakers (property-by-property transfer). The purpose of the current study is to contribute to this discussion by investigating morphosyntactic transfer in adult third-language acquisition.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nWorking title: <\/strong>Structure and development of the Norwegian Roleplaying Register in Norwegian Preschoolers<\/em>
\nSupervisors: <\/strong>Merete Anderssen<\/a>, \u00d8ystein Vangsnes <\/a>
\nBrief description:\u00a0<\/strong>Norwegian children outside the capital dialect area are known to use something resembling the capital dialect when engaging in roleplay. The aim of this project is to assess Norwegian children\u2019s acquisition and attainment of this register.<\/p>\nCompleted Phd Projects<\/h3>\n
\nDissertation title:<\/strong> Heritage and adult L2 acquisition of empty categories in a bidialectal-bilingual context <\/em>
\nDissertation committee:<\/strong> Ester Rinke (Frankfurt), Ruth Lopes (Campinas), Antonio F\u00e1bregas (Troms\u00f8)
\nSupervisors:<\/strong> Marit Westergaard<\/a>, Tarald Taraldsen
\n<\/a>Abstract: <\/strong> Despite their high degree of mutual intelligibility, Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP) and European Portuguese (henceforth EP) have been argued to differ in many micro-parametric domains, which suggests that speakers with enough exposure to both varieties could potentially acquire them as separate mental systems. The present study makes use of this language pairing to investigate issues raised in current literature on heritage language (HL) and second language (L2) acquisition (e.g., Montrul & Polinsky, 2011, Sorace, 2011), L2 processing (Hopp, 2016; Hartsuiker & Pickering, 2008) and first language (L1) attrition (Altenberg, 1991; Schmid, 2011). We apply a comprehension task in order to test anaphora resolution in two groups of speakers exposed to BP and EP, taking into account the different null subject distribution in these languages. We investigate whether late BP-EP bilinguals and heritage BP speakers growing up in Portugal, tested in both dialects, will pattern like native controls or display some effects of EP on their native BP or vice-versa. Through an open-ended production task, we also attempt to measure these speakers\u2019 distribution of both null subjects and objects and compare that to the pattern shown by monolingual controls. In a second comprehension task, we test the extent to which BP immigrants arriving in adulthood display cross-linguistic effects such that either or both EP and BP differ(s) from monolinguals. Our findings indicate that, for this language pairing, the directionality of cross-linguistic influence is more dependent on which properties are being acquired, and the high degree of typological proximity between the L1 and the L2 appears to facilitate L1 attrition and delimit the acquisition of L2 properties. We relate the findings of the present study to key theoretical questions and debates within the context of the larger field of bilingual studies.
\nPhD dissertation may be downloaded here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n
\nDissertation title: <\/strong>Paths and Places: Aspects of Grammar and Acquisition\u200b<\/em>
\nDissertation committee:<\/strong> Natalia Gagarina (Berlin), Sonja Eisenbeiss (Essex\/Cologne), Tarald Taraldsen (Troms\u00f8)
\nSupervisors:<\/strong> Marit Westergaard<\/a>, Peter Svenonius<\/a>
\nAbstract: <\/strong> This dissertation explores the underlying structural properties of spatial expressions, and the
\nacquisition of these structures by children. In the first part of the dissertation I focus on directional axial expressions in Russian, and argue that their distributional and semantic properties are tightly related to their underlying syntactic structure. I present an original analysis of these items, and further suggest that the application of this analysis to a wider class of unbounded directional expressions in English and Russian makes it possible to compositionally derive their semantic properties from the underlying syntactic structure. In the second part of the dissertation we turn to the acquisition of spatial expressions by children. I report on a series of production and comprehension studies with monolingual
\nRussian and Norwegian children, and propose a model for the acquisition of locative PPs, which states that child grammars at early stages involve an underspecified Place category associated with a generalized locative semantics. Finer-grained locative contrasts are taken to develop gradually, based on the acquisition of individual locative items from the input.\u200b
\nPhD dissertation may be downloaded here<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n
\nDissertation title:<\/strong> Palatalization in Latvian<\/em>
\nDissertation committee:<\/strong> Nicoleta Bateman (CSUSM), Francesc Torres-Tamarit (Paris), Tore Nesset (Troms\u00f8)
\nSupervisors:<\/strong> Martin Kr\u00e4mer<\/a>, Marit Westergaard<\/a>
\nAbstract:<\/strong> Palatalization is very commonly attested across languages and has sparked considerable interest in fields like linguistic typology, phonetics, and phonology. However, palatalization notoriously exhibits a large degree of diversity, both cross-linguistically and within individual languages, which, on the one hand, precludes a straightforward phonetic explanation, and, on the other hand, poses considerable challenges for formal phonological accounts striving to provide a unified analysis of all processes subsumed under this cover term. In this dissertation, I undertake a systematic investigation of a group of palatalization processes in Modern Standard Latvian, namely assimilatory palatalization, diminutive palatalization, and palatal assimilation in consonant clusters. The intricate Latvian patterns have hitherto received very little attention in the generative phonological literature. The relatively narrow empirical focus of this work made it possible to examine the phenomena in considerable depth and to uncover some regularities and dependencies that have been previously overlooked. I develop a representational and constraint-based analysis of Latvian palatalization. The substance-free approach to a process that has traditionally been regarded as a classic example of a phonetically motivated rule developed in this thesis provides a descriptively adequate, explanatory and formally simple analysis of assimilation patterns that posed considerable challenges for traditional phonetically-driven approaches, while at the same time revealing a complex inter-relation of different phonological and morphological phenomena within a given grammar.
\nPhD dissertation may be downloaded here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n
\n<\/a>Dissertation title<\/strong>:\u00a0The Acquisition of Double Object Constructions in Croatian Child Language<\/em>
\nCommittee:\u00a0<\/strong>Bernhard Brehmer (Greifswald), Tihana Kra\u0161\u00a0(Rijeka), Tanja Kupisch (Troms\u00f8)\u00a0<\/strong>
\n<\/span>Supervisors:\u00a0<\/strong>Merete Anderssen<\/a>,\u00a0<\/strong>Marit Westergaard<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Abstract:\u00a0<\/strong> This dissertation explores the effects that a semantic factor, animacy, and a pragmatic factor,
\ngivenness, have on the relative ordering of the two objects (IO-DO vs. DO-IO) in Croatian
\nditransitive structures. While the effects of animacy are explored only at a global level (object
\nordering), the effects of givenness are explored also in the choice of referring expressions. The
\neffect that these factors have is explored both in adult and child language in a way that offers
\nvaluable insights for both groups. This research provides a new analysis in the acquisition of
\nditransitive structures as it reveals a major role of animacy in shaping children\u2019s object order.
\nThe results show that when the two factors are neutralised, there is an indication of DO-IO
\nbeing the basic object order. Conversely, I find that the IO-DO is more frequently used both
\nin naturalistic and in experimental data, but this frequency can be attributed to the fact that in
\ndouble object structures the IO is prototypically animate and the DO is prototypically
\ninanimate. I argue that both adults and children are sensitive to animacy, but children are more
\nsensitive to it than adults. With regard to givenness, I find that it influences both object order
\nand choice of referring expression in the adults, but only the choice of referring expression in
\nthe children\u2019s data.
\nPhD dissertation may be downloaded here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nDissertation title:<\/strong> Syntactic representations in the bilingual mind: the role of executive function and pragmatics in cross-language priming <\/em>
\nDissertation committee:<\/strong> Ludovica Serratrice (Manchester), Holly Branigan (Edinburgh), \u00d8ystein Vangsnes (Troms\u00f8)
\nSupervisors:<\/strong> Marit Westergaard<\/a>, Antonella Sorace<\/a>
\nAbstract:\u00a0<\/strong>In this thesis I investigate how syntactic forms are represented and accessed in the mind of bilingual children. In particular, I explore the role of executive control and pragmatics in the selection and use of these representations. To do so, I tested a group of Norwegian-English bilingual children and a group of Norwegian age-matched monolinguals in a priming paradigm and in a cognitive task (the Dimensional Change Card Sort, hereafter DCCS). I investigated word order in possessive constructions and dative alternation. These forms were chosen because they allow for different word orders, which vary depending on semantic and discourse factors. That is, the different structures were elicited by means of a priming task (both within- and between-language) where children were first exposed to the alternating word orders (prime) and then had to describe a picture by selecting one the two possible options (target). My goals are two-fold: first, to show that priming within-language is stronger than priming between-language, arguably due to the involvement of an inhibitory mechanism; second, to demonstrate that the access to the abstract syntactic representation is mediated by semantic and pragmatic factors.
\nPhD dissertation may be downloaded here<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"