Nozomi Tanaka

Indiana University Bloomington | IUB · Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

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 result...

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...

There is little consensus in the Japanese syntax literature on the question of whether complex NPs with a complement clause headed by to yuu ‘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 island status of noun...

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...

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...

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 undergoin...

In this paper, we present data on the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Tagalog, an understudied language with a symmetrical voice system. In Tagalog, agent voice and theme voice are both transitive, and neither voice pattern is derived from the other. The argument brought to prominence by the choice of voice is the only argument that can un...

This study makes use of an elicited production task to investigate child and adult preferences for particular focus patterns in Tagalog declarative sentences and relative clauses. Our findings point to a general preference for theme focus over agent focus in declarative sentences on the part of both children and adults, but a preference among child...

The acquisition of verbs involves the discovery of agent-patient relations. The major determiners of agent-patient relations are word order (Dryer 2005), inflectional morphology including case marking (Comrie 2005), and various forms of verb agreement (Siewierska 2005). Animacy is also considered to be helpful information, and many researchers clai...