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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

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Academic Paper


Title: Animacy affects the processing of subject–object ambiguities in the second language: Evidence from self-paced reading with German second language learners of Dutch
Author: Carrie N. Jackson
Institution: Pennsylvania State University
Author: Leah Roberts
Email: click here to access email
Homepage: http://www.mpi.nl/world/persons/profession/leahro.html
Institution: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Linguistic Field: Language Acquisition; Syntax
Subject Language: Dutch
German
Abstract: The results of a self-paced reading study with German second language (L2) learners of Dutch showed that noun animacy affected the learners' on-line commitments when comprehending relative clauses in their L2. Earlier research has found that German L2 learners of Dutch do not show an on-line preference for subject–object word order in temporarily ambiguous relative clauses when no disambiguating material is available prior to the auxiliary verb. We investigated whether manipulating the animacy of the ambiguous noun phrases would push the learners to make an on-line commitment to either a subject- or object-first analysis. Results showed they performed like Dutch native speakers in that their reading times reflected an interaction between topichood and animacy in the on-line assignment of grammatical roles.

CUP at LINGUIST

This article appears in Applied Psycholinguistics Vol. 31, Issue 4, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST .



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