Eliciting target response from children, without much syntactic complexity

I have become very interested in the complementation patterns of adjectives as my students make a number of errors in this area. I am particularly interested in adjective patterns containing infinitives and gerunds, but I would also like to know of studies which compare the latter to the pattern adjective+"that clause". Unfortunately, there are far fewer studies of adjective valency patterns in English than there are of verb or noun patterns.

Ilka Mindt's book on adjective complementation focusses on "that clauses."Tor Arne Haugen's articles on Research Gate provide an interesting discussion of what constitutes a valency pattern and of the possibility of predicting patterns from the semantics of the target adjectives. However, he focuses on adjectival patterns in Norwegian and points out that Norwegian has different valency patterns from English. Makoto Sumiyoshi's article “ Valency Patterns in Dictionaries” contains something on adjective patterns but far more on verbs. I have ordered Francis et al's book “Cobuild Grammar Patterns 2: nouns and adjectives” and expect to find it very useful but maybe slightly outdated.

Can anyone point me to other books, articles or conference papers on this area?

I am thinking about adapting language therapy for children to adults with aphasia and I know there is a debate among linguists and patholinguists, but I cannot find any literature. Could anyone help me?

Hi everyone! I'm preparing an ERP study of written sentence processing in school aged children. My target population are children between 8 and 11 years old, and I'm aiming to examine N400 and P600 effects after semantic and syntax violations. Sentences will be displayed on the center of a computer screen, word by word (rapid serial visual presentation). I wanted to ask your opinion about what would be the optimal SOA (stimulus onset asynchrony) to maximize the probability of actually seeing the language-related ERP effects, as it has been shown that presentation rate may affect the magnitude of these potentials, at least in certain populations (like L2 and older adults).

Thanks for your kind attention!

We are developing a test for ad-hoc (ad-hoc) and scalar implicatures (SI) and are showing 3 images (of similar nature) to the participants: image, image with 1 item, image with 2 items.

E.g. Plate with pasta, a plate with pasta and sauce, a plate with pasta, sauce and meatballs.

A question for an ad-hoc is: My pasta has meatballs, which is my pasta?

Q. for an SI is: My pasta has sauce or meatballs, which is my pasta? (pasta with sauce is the target item since we are testing pragmatic implicatures, where 'or' means 'not both'.)

The item that causes many difficulties in making up questions is the image without any items, ie. plate with pasta. How do we phrase the question so that it elicits this image as a target response, without using too complex syntax?

Negation; "My plate has no sauce or meatballs", "My plate has only pasta, no sauce and no meatballs", seems like a complex structure to introduce as a counterbalance to the other type of items.

Has anyone tested something similar, without negation? We would be grateful for any kind of tips and hints.

On the one hand, Miyagawa (2012) reports that Japanese -mas- polite agreement marker may appear in embedded clauses headed by to (non-factive complementizer) and selected by say-type verbs (i.e. Hooper & Thompson's (1973) Type A verbs):

(i) Taroo-wa [Hanako-ga ki-mas-i-ta to] it-ta.

Taro-TOP Hanako-NOM come-POLITE-PAST C say-PAST

'Taro said that Hanako came.'

On the other hand, Japanese allows long-distance scrambling out of a clause headed by to:

(ii) [Sono hon-o]_i Hanako-ga [Taroo-ga t_i katta to] omotteiru.

that book-ACC Hanako-NOM Taro-NOM bought C think

'Hanako thinks Taro bought that book.'

My question is the following: In Japanese embedded -mas- clauses it's possible to legitimate an wh-phrase by a matrix interrogative ka particle like in (iii)?

(iii) Context: The speaker ask about Taro's words.

Taroo-wa [dare-ga ki-mas-i-ta to] it-ta ka?

Taro-TOP who-NOM come-POLITE-PAST C say-PAST Q

~ 'Who_i did Taro say t_i came?'

REFERENCES

Hooper, Joan B. & Thompson, Sandra A. (1973): On the applicability of root transformations. Linguistic Inquiry 4:465-497.

Miyagawa, Shigeru (2012) : Agreements that occur mainly in the main clause. In: Lobke Aelbrecht, Liliane Haegeman and Rachel Nye, Main Clause Phenomena: New Horizons, p. 79-111. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Saito, M. (1992): Long distance scrambling in Japanese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 1(1):69-118.

Hi guys!

I have a question on a framing effect-like issue. Well, everyone of us has the immediate feeling that there's a huge difference between saying - for instance - "you should respect the environment" and "we should respect the environment", or also "the environment should be respected".

The difference might lie in how such sentences are interpreted by our minds and of course it affects the compliance to the described behavior (i.e., "respect the environment").

I'm convinced that I'm no genius and there must be a huge literature behind such an effect; but I'm not skilled in these themes, so I'm calling for help. Any clues?

P.S.: I know that nudge units and behavioral interventions teams in general promote the "make it personal" magic recipe to increase compliance, but I wonder where such strategies come from. I'm particularly interested in understanding the differences between "you should /we should", that is how grammatical phrasing (i.e., switching the person in the phrase) affects the interpretation and the relative compliance.

thanks in advance for any help

all the best,

Alessandro

I am interested on references about syntax and pragmatics of mimetic indirect speech as a variety of indirect speech.

Thank you.

1. a. Who_j knows who_k heard what stories about himself_k?

b. John does (=John knows who_k heard what stories about himself_k).

2. a. Who_j knows what stories about himself_j who_k heard?

b. John does (=John knows what stories about himself_j who_k heard

/John knows who_k heard what stories about his_j own)

The examples (1a) and (2a) ask questions about the matrix subject 'who', with 'John' italicized in (1b) and (2b) corresponding to the wh-constituents that are being answered. I am curious about the binding relations in these examples, particularly in (2). Can example (2a) be construed as a question target matrix subject 'who' with 'himself' bound by the matrix subject?