Nigel Duffield

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Konan University

In this paper, we investigate Chinese L2 learners' knowledge of two grammatical constraints in Vietnamese: the first, a constraint on the aspectual interpretation of accomplishment predicates, the second pertaining to alternations in the position of embedded subjects in mono-clausal làm causatives. Whereas the former constraint is shared by Vietnam...

In this paper, we scrutinise the interpretation and distribution of a number of morphemes that serve as means of expressing temporal/aspectual relations in Vietnamese, investigating whether they should treated as genuine tense and aspect markers. The main goals of the study are two-fold: (i) empirically, to offer a comprehensive description of Viet...

This volume was originally inspired by a 2017 conference to honour the scholar and linguist Cao Xuân Hạo, whose landmark work – in many diverse areas of language study – established a bridge between traditional Vietnamese scholarship and contemporary theories of grammatical organisation. The book offers the reader a closely edited collection of pap...

This paper offers an extended critique of an article by Bruening & Tran (2006) concerning wh-questions in Vietnamese. Drawing on both language-internal and cross-linguistic evidence, attention is brought to bear on several empirical shortcomings in Bruening & Tran’s analysis, as a result of which the constituency of wh-question constructions in thi...

This volume was originally inspired by a 2017 conference to honour the scholar and linguist Cao Xuân Hạo, whose landmark work – in many diverse areas of language study – established a bridge between traditional Vietnamese scholarship and contemporary theories of grammatical organisation. The book offers the reader a closely edited collection of pap...

The experiments reported here investigate possible correlations between participants' ability to identify non-native speech sounds (phonological discrimination), and their discrimination of 'non-native' faces. These two skills exhibit timing parallels in typical infant development: in both instances, an effect of perceptual narrowing is observed be...

Cambridge Core - Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics - Reflections on Psycholinguistic Theories - by Nigel Duffield

By comparison with other areally- and typologically-related languages, the Vietnamese language disposes of a large and diverse set of (non-affixal) grammatical particles: these display interesting parallels with functional heads in familiar Western European languages. Most of these grammatical morphemes are ‘multifunctional’ in the sense that their...

Are the perceptual abilities underlying linguistic aptitude in SLA the result of processes specific to language, or do they derive from a more domain-general set of attentional mechanisms? The results reported here emerge from a project investigating possible correlations between participants’ ability to identify non-native speech sounds (phonologi...

The paper presents data from several languages—chiefly, Vietnamese and English—in support of two empirical claims concerning the syntax of polarity elements, assertion and mood (illocutionary force). The proposal draws on and develops Klein's (1998) arguments for a decomposition of Finiteness: whereas Klein originally proposed that finiteness shoul...

This is the text of a talk, presented a general audience, concerning different construals of Universal Grammar, and language typology. Appears in Konan Faculty Journal, 163 (2013).

In this paper, we report on an eye-tracking study investigating the processing of English VP-ellipsis (John took the rubbish out. Fred did [] too) (VPE) and VP-anaphora (John took the rubbish out. Fred did it too) (VPA) constructions, with syntactically parallel versus nonparallel antecedent clauses (e.g., The rubbish was taken out by John. Fred di...

This study examines whether the sentence structure of particular languages predisposes speakers to particular attentional patterns. We hypothesized that the holistic attentional bias of Japanese participants observed in a previous study (Masuda and Nisbett 2001), attributed in that paper to pan-Asian cultural factors, is better interpreted as a con...

This book explores the interaction of grammatical components in a wide variety of languages, and presents and exemplifies new experimental and analytic techniques for studying linguistic interfaces. Speaking a language requires access to the different aspects of its grammar - semantic, syntactic, phonological, pragmatic, morphological, and phonetic...

Previous studies, including Duffield and Matsuo (2001; 2002; 2009), have demonstrated second language learners’ overall sensitivity to a parallelism constraint governing English VP-ellipsis constructions: like native speakers (NS), advanced Dutch, Spanish and Japanese learners of English reliably prefer ellipsis clauses with structurally parallel a...

In this commentary three aspects of the feature-based model that Lardiere assumes are discussed: the value of formalization in the investigation of second language acquisition, the extent to which native speakers converge on the same grammatical representations, and the length of time it takes to establish a mature native grammar. These factors nee...

This article examines sensitivity to structural parallelism in verb phrase ellipsis constructions in English native speakers as well as in three groups of advanced second language (L2) learners. The results of a set of experiments, based on those of Tanenhaus and Carlson (1990), reveal subtle but reliable differences among the various learner group...

This article is concerned with the proper characterization of subject omission at a particular stage in German child language. It focuses on post-verbal null subjects in finite clauses, here termed Rogues. It is argued that the statistically significant presence of Rogues, in conjunction with their distinct developmental profile, speaks against a S...

This article presents a new set of experiments using the sentence-matching paradigm (Forster, 1979; Freedman and Forster, 1985; see also Bley-Vroman and Masterson, 1989), investigating native speakers' and second language (L2) learners' knowledge of constraints on clitic placement in French. Our purpose is three-fold: • to shed more light on the co...

This article presents some data from Vietnamese that provide significant empirical support for the theoretical claims articulated in Klein (1998, 2006): first, that finiteness should be understood as a composite of tense and assertion, and that assertion may be realized independently of tense marking; second, that the assertion operator so realized...

Ever since the derivational theory of complexity (DTC) apparently bit the dust in the late 1960s, experimental psycholinguistics have been afflicted by a dualism at least as troublesome as the mind/brain dichotomy, namely, the grammar/parser distinction. The idea that mentally represented grammar is something fully dissociated from the human langua...

Second language acquisition has to integrate the totality of the SLA process, which includes both the learning of the core syntax of a language and the learning of the lexical items that have to be incorporated into that syntax. But these two domains involve different kinds of learning. Syntax is learnt through a process of implementing a particula...

In this paper, we argue in favour of the NO IMPAIRMENT HYPOTHESIS, whereby L2 functional categories, features and feature values are attainable, and against the NO PARAMETER RESETTING HYPOTHESIS, according to which L2 learners are restricted to L1 categories and features, as well as against the LOCAL IMPAIRMENT HYPOTHESIS, which claims that the int...

In this article, we report on experiments investigating children's knowledge of the constraints on ellipsis constructions in English, focusing on subtle contrasts between verb phrase–ellipsis (VPE) and VP-anaphora (VPA). These contrasts are of theoreti-cal interest insofar as they present an apparent learnability paradox: On one hand, the negative...

In this paper, we report on an experiment investigating adult second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish object clitic placement by native speakers of English (which lacks clitics) and French (where clitics contrast in certain respects with Spanish). Two different experimental methodologies are compared: an on-line sentence matching (SM) task and...

Cet article etudie la syntaxe et la semantique des constructions du vietnamien ou l’element auxiliaire apparait a droite du syntagme verbal. A premiere vue, cette distribution represente une objection aux propositions universalistes de Kayne 1995 et Cinque 1998, objection qui a deja fait l’objet de deux analyses (Duffield 1998 et Simpson 1997, 1998...

This article offers a unified syntactic treatment of initial mutation in Modern Irish, one of the best-known characteristics of that language. Both types of consonant mutation, as well as the less-studied mutations affecting vowels, are discussed. It is proposed that the appearance of initial mutation is a function of particular structural configur...

This 1996 volume brings together ten chapters on the Celtic languages using the insights of principles-and-parameters theory. The leading researchers in the field examine Welsh, Irish, Breton and Scots Gaelic in comparative perspective, making reference to recent work on English, French, Arabic, German and other languages. The editors have provided...

It has been proposed that grammatical number features are associated in some way with their own syntactic projection, usually called NumP; cf. Löbel (1990), Ritter (1991, 1993). This paper presents an analysis of some Modern Irish data which further supports the idea that number is syntactically active, and which provides evidence for two distinct...

This chapter has two related goals.2 The first is to develop a syntactic account of initial consonant mutation (ICM) in Modern Irish, a phenomenon traditionally considered to be solely lexically or morphologically conditioned. It is argued here that there is a rather well-defined structural context for this effect, and that in spite of the many exc...

It has long been recognized that human languages are qaulitatively distinct from other systems of communication.1 For Hermann Paul, one of the foremost linguists of the modern period, what set two apart was knowledge of syntax: It is doubtless of great importance that the number of traditional words and thereby the number of distinguished concepts...

The aim of this chapter is to provide an adequate theoretical description of the syntax of Modern Irish noun-phrases.l We shall be chiefly concerned with the contrast between ‘simple’ noun-phrases, illustrated in (1a), and complex nominals involving possessor subjects, which we shall term CONSTRUCT STATE NOMINALS (CSNs), shown in (1 b): 1. a. an fe...

The focus of investigation in this chapter is yet another grammatical particle, the final preverbal particle to be considered in this book. As was the case with the direct relative particle in the previous chapter, the element to be investigated triggers lenition: again, it will be claimed to do so in virtue of lexicalizing a functional head, in th...

In this chapter, we continue our investigation of Irish clause-structure through an examination of some apparent counter-examples to the Mutation Hypothesis proposed at the end of Chapter 2.1 These are grammatical particles which either fail to trigger the ICM effect predicted by the Mutation Hypothesis, or trigger the ‘wrong’ mutation effect, i.e....

1: Theoretical Issues.- 1.1 Explaining Syntactic Universals and Syntactic Variation.- 1.1.1 Lexical and Functional Projections: A Retrospective.- 1.1.2 Projections, Particles and Initial Consonant Mutation.- 1.2 Constraints on Phrase-Structure.- 1.2.1 X'-theory.- 1.2.2 Deriving X'-theory: Kayne (1993).- 1.3 Conditions on Movement: Deriving Locality...

as well as to two anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this paper. 2 Flying Squirrels and Dancing Girls: Events, Inadvertent Causes and the Temporal Anchoring of English Present Participles 1 0. ABSTRACT This paper draws attention to interpretive effects involving English pre-nominal present participles, distinguishing participles derived fro...

0.Abstract This paper draws attention to interpretive effects involving English pre-nominal present participles, distinguishing participles derived from certain unaccusative predicates from those derived from unergatives. The contrast is also shown to partition the set of Experiencer Predicates, where, unexpectedly from a theoretical viewpoint, a s...

Developing ideas about the lexicon-syntax interface originally due to Hale and Keyser (1993), Travis (2000) Travis (in preparation) articulates a specific structural proposal for the l-syntax/s-syntax divide, schematized in (1), according to which verbal properties traditionally viewed as syntactically inert are associated with autonomous structura...