Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "The emergence of syntactic complexity. The first language acquisition of cleft sentences as a window onto the syntax – prosody – information structure interface." "Karen Lahousse" "Functional and Cognitive Linguistics: Grammar and Typology (FunC), Leuven" "This project will investigate how complex language is acquired. We will focus on how children, in their first language acquisition, produce and understand meaning making use of complex form (syntax), pronunciation (prosody) and discourse context. To this extent, we will analyze the emergence and development of two types of “cleft sentences” (1-2) in French, with children between ages 2 and 8. (1) Child (age 2;9): C'est toi qui m(e) fait les tortues. ‘It’s you who does the turtles for me.’ (1’) ~ Tu me fais les tortues. ‘You do the turtles for me.’ (2) Child (age 3;11): Il y a quelqu'un qui vole un parapluie. ‘There is somebody who is stealing an umbrella.’ (2’) ~ Quelqu’un vole un parapluie. ‘Somebody is stealing an umbrella.’ Clefts pose an intriguing puzzle for linguistic research on first language acquisition and the interaction between syntax, prosody and interpretation, because they communicate the same basic information as the corresponding simple sentence (1’ and 2’), but have a more complex form, and a specific interpretation and prosody. They consist of two clauses (a main clause and an embedded clause) and emphasize that one part of the sentence (toi ‘you’ in (1)) or the whole sentence (in (2)) constitutes new information for the hearer. Moreover, c’est clefts (1), but not il y a clefts (2) often have a special (contrastive and exhaustive) interpretation, and imply that ‘it’s you and nobody else who will do the turtles’." "The emergence of syntactic complexity. The first language acquisition of cleft sentences in French as a window onto the syntax - prosody - Information Structure interface." "Karen Lahousse" "Functional and Cognitive Linguistics: Grammar and Typology (FunC), Leuven, Université de Paris, University College London, University of Leeds" "This project will investigate how complex language is acquired. We will focus on how children, in their first language acquisition, produce and understand meaning making use of complex form (syntax), pronunciation (prosody) and discourse context. To this extent, we will analyze the emergence and development of two types of “cleft sentences” (1-2) in French, with children between ages 2 and 8. (1) Child (age 2;9): C'est toi qui m(e) fait les tortues. ‘It’s you who does the turtles for me.’ (1’) ~ Tu me fais les tortues. ‘You do the turtles for me.’ (2) Child (age 3;11): Il y a quelqu'un qui vole un parapluie. ‘There is somebody who is stealing an umbrella.’ (2’) ~ Quelqu’un vole un parapluie. ‘Somebody is stealing an umbrella.’ Clefts pose an intriguing puzzle for linguistic research on first language acquisition and the interaction between syntax, prosody and interpretation, because they communicate the same basic information as the corresponding simple sentence (1’ and 2’), but have a more complex form, and a specific interpretation and prosody. They consist of two clauses (a main clause and an embedded clause) and emphasize that one part of the sentence (toi ‘you’ in (1)) or the whole sentence (in (2)) constitutes new information for the hearer. Moreover, c’est clefts (1), but not il y a clefts (2) often have a special (contrastive and exhaustive) interpretation, and imply that ‘it’s you and nobody else who will do the turtles’." "The development of Dutch syntax in learners of Dutch as a foreign language: effects of immersion, language background and training by means of syntactic priming." "Sarah Bernolet" "Centre for Computational Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics (CLiPS)" "Background: In these days of mass migration, many people learn a brand new language at a later age. This is not easy: Languages have both similarities and differences in the sentence structures with which they express particular meanings. For instance, the Dutch and French active sentences are similar in both languages (Le chat chasse la souris - De kat jaagt op de muis [The cat cases the mouse]), but Dutch has three different forms for the full passive sentence, whereas French has only one (La souris est chassée par le chat). How do learners deal with this? Aims: Previous research suggests that bilinguals share information about sentence structure across their languages, whenever these structures are similar enough. Hartsuiker and Bernolet (2017) proposed a developmental model for second language syntax in which learners go through several consecutive learning stages before they share syntax between languages. The challenging aspect is our goal to test that theory in ecologically valid settings. More specifically, we investigate the influence of immersion in the L2 and of knowledge of related languages on the development and the representation of Dutch syntax in students who learn Dutch as a foreign language. Additionally, we investigate whether and how syntactic priming experiments can aid the develoment of native-like production preferences in Dutch as an L2. Methodology: All studies in the project use syntactic priming as a tool (Branigan & Pickering, 2017): all sentences that need to be produced or comprehended are preceded by a prime sentence with the same or a competing syntactic structure. If a prime structure is represented in memory, it will influence the production and the comprehension of the upcoming sentence, within and across languages. We will investigate the syntactic representations in different speakers of Dutch: 1) Flemish students with Dutch as their only native language; 2) Walloon students who learned Dutch at the age of 10; 3) first generation immigrants learning Dutch as their first or second Indo-European language. The first production study compares groups 1 and 2. We investigate the representation of Dutch syntactic structures that lack a similar counterpart in the learners' native language (French) and we compare the production preferences for Walloon learners of Dutch living inan immersion context with the preferences of learners living in a monolingual French context. The second study investigates how we can boost the production of Dutch syntactic structures that are dispreferred due to influence of a native language. Studies 3 is a longitudinal study that explores the differences between the learning trajectories for Dutch syntax in native Arabic speakers who learn Dutch as their first or second Indo-European language (after English). Impact: By documenting the different stages in L2 syntactic development with actual learner data, this project will have a strong impact on both the psychology of language and on second language acquisition research. Additionally, this project will provide valuable information on the learning trajectory for Dutch syntax, more specifically on the influence of native language syntax, and on the effects of immersion, knowledge of related languages and specific training on the development and the final representation of Dutch syntax. Hence, the project outcome will be relevant to teachers and trainers of Dutch as a foreign language." "Comparatives under the microscope: the syntax of standard markers" "Jeroen Van Craenenbroeck" "Formal and Computational Linguistics (ComForT), Brussels Campus, Formal and Computational Linguistics (ComForT), Leuven" "The COMIC‐project investigates the morphology, syntax, and semantics of adjectival comparative constructions of the type illustrated in (1). (1) Jill is taller than Fred. Compared to the positive degree (Jill is tall), the comparative construction adds two pieces of material. First, the comparative morpheme –er is added to the adjective tall, and second, the comparative adjective taller introduces the phrase than Fred, which contains the comparative standard Fred, to which Jill is compared. The comparative standard is introduced by the standard marker than. Comparative constructions thus combine morphological marking (the –er‐morpheme), syntactic structure (the than‐phrase), and a semantic interpretation, in which two entities are compared with respect to a certain property (in this example Jill and Fred with respect to their height). Existing approaches typically study the morphology or the syntax or the semantics of comparative adjectives. This has led to a situation where the outcomes of the different perspectives do not properly link up with one another: semantic analyses do not take into account—and are sometimes incompatible with—typological observations and generalisations, and syntactic and morphological approaches are insufficiently informed by the insights of compositional semantics. The COMIC‐project aims to fill this gap by developing a fully integrated analysis of these three aspects of comparative constructions. To this end, it investigates the cross‐linguistic macro‐ and microvariation in the expression of adjectival comparison and the comparative standard, with the aim of investigating the hypothesis that there is more morphological and syntactic complexity to comparative adjectives than is conventionally assumed. It will develop a strongly compositional semantics of comparative adjectives and the comparative standard, which is informed and constrained by the findings of the morphological and syntactic investigations. The research will be carried out by two PhD-students and one Post-Doc researcher under the supervision of three pls. The syntactic research will be carried out by PhD-student Lena Heynen under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jeroen Van Craenenbroeck." "Theory meets Quantity: Corpus-based Comparative Syntax" "Frank Van Eynde" "Formal and Computational Linguistics (ComForT), Leuven" "The availability of digital corpora and sophisticated tools to extract information from them provides exciting opportunities to carry out groundbreaking research in linguistics. This project explores the potential of corpus-based research for comparative syntax. On a more general level, this project aims to investigate how the data-driven approach of corpus linguistics can optimally be combined with the knowledge-based approach of theoretical linguistics, as many corpus studies lack theoretical support. For corpus-based syntactic research, syntactically annotated corpora, also known as ‘treebanks’, are of special interest. Such corpora consist of sentences together with their syntactic analysis. There is a fast expanding community of linguists who use treebanks for their research. What is still in its infancy though, is using treebanks for the comparative study of different languages. The corpus study carried out in this project will not be limited to the use of monolingual corpora and treebanks. A major innovation includes the exploitation of the recently constructed Europarl parallel treebank for comparative syntax. In a number of case studies it will be shown how the new tools and methods can lead to new insights and more accurate descriptions of cross-linguistic variation. The central topic is one of the most notorious phenomena in West Germanic syntax, i.e. the formation of verb clusters in German, Dutch and Afrikaans." "Syntax in Language and Music : Overlap in Local and Global Structure Processing" "Robert Hartsuiker" "Department of Experimental psychology" "This research project focuses on the relationship between syntactic processing in language and music, both at the level of global structural configuration and at the level of specific syntactic rules. We shall use paradigms of (musical) syntactic priming and syntactic interference research. This project will contribute to linguistic syntax processing research, and further introduce music as a domain of research." "The internal Syntax of Quantifiers" "Liliane Haegeman" "Department of Linguistics" "The aim of this project is to look inside quantifiers (Qs) and identify which building blocks they consist of. Qs like some, many, often, few, seldom and rarely all look opaque at first sight. However, Qs like few, seldom and rarely have something in common with the marker for sentential negation in English: both can trigger positive question tags, as well as inversion. For that reason, Klima (1964: 269-272) assumed that a covert sentential negation can incorporate into these negative scalar Qs (Horn 1989: 247, NSQs). This project wants to investigate whether there is evidence from visible morphology supporting Klima’s assumption. The 16-language sample of Qs studied in Keenan & Paperno (2012) suggests that NSQs indeed may consist of a negative marker and another element. In Malagasy for instance vitsy ‘few’ contains the sentential negative marker ‘tsy’ (Hanitramalala & Paul 2012: 619). According to the same sample, Qs like some, often and many, also called positive scalar Qs (Horn 1989: 248, PSQs), tend to have a lexicalized opaque form, a typical property of an unmarked form in natural language (Greenberg 1966: 68). This project wants to look at a typologically balanced 40-language sample (Haspelmath 1997) to see to what extent the internal structure of Qs indeed supports the idea that the distinction between NSQs and PSQs resides in their internal structure. In doing so, it will contribute to a better understanding of the internal syntax of Qs in general. " "The interaction between information structure, syntax and semantics: a comparative linguistic and interdisciplinary analysis." "Karen Lahousse" "Functional and Cognitive Linguistics: Grammar and Typology (FunC), Leuven" "One of the major functions of language is to convey information between speakers and hearers. Speakers have several linguistic means at their disposal to structure the information they want to communicate, e.g. active (Nous avons pris la décision) vs passive sentences (La décision a été prise) refer to the same referential content but the way in which the information is structured differs. Information Structure (IS) is a basic ingredient of human language in everyday life because the efficiency of linguistic communication largely depends on how information is structured in sentences and in text in general. The relevance of IS for linguistic analysis is widely recognized, but its precise nature, its interaction with syntax and semantics and its position in human language and cognition are still poorly understood. In order to contribute to a better understanding of IS, the goal of this project is to undertake a comparative analysis of two semantic phenomena (quantifier scope and anaphoric relations) in four IS-driven syntactic configurations in French, Spanish and English: verb-subject word order, impersonal (existential) structures, cleft sentences and dislocation. The main hypothesis underlying the research is that a full account of IS is only possible when both its syntactic and semantic effects are considered." "The development and representation of Dutch syntax in learners of Dutch as a foreign language and learners of Dutch as a second native language." "Sarah Bernolet" "Ghent University, Centre for Computational Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics (CLiPS)" "In current days of mass migration, many people learn a brand new language at a later age. This is not easy: Languages have both similarities and differences in the sentence structures with which they express particular meanings. For instance, the Dutch and French active sentences are similar in both languages (Le chat chasse la souris - De kat jaagt op de muis [The cat cases the mouse]), but Dutch has three different forms for the full passive sentence, whereas French has only one (La souris est chassée par le chat). How do learners deal with this? Previous research suggests that bilinguals share information about sentence structure across their languages, whenever these structures are similar enough. We proposed a developmental model for second language syntax in which learners go through 5 consecutive learning stages before they share syntax between languages. The goal of this project is to test and refine that theory. We will investigate the syntactic representations in different speakers of Dutch: 1) Flemish students with Dutch as their only native language; 2) Arabic-Dutch simultaneous bilinguals; 3) Walloon students who learned Dutch at the age of 10; 4) first generation immigrants learning Dutch as second Indo-European language. This will provide valuable information on the learning trajectory for Dutch syntax (with its possible problems) and on the influence of native language syntax on the development and the final representation of Dutch syntax. -" "Comparative syntax. Layers of structure and the cartography project." "Liliane Haegeman" "Department of Linguistics, Department of English" "The project examens cross linguistic variation, both microvariation and macrovariation. It adopts the cartographic approach to syntax, whose aim it is to decompose the sentence in its primitive syntactic components. The project has three main lines of enquiry. A first line deals with the syntax of the left periphery of the clause, i.e. the constituents to the left of the subject position. The second line examines the demarcation of the left periphery ('cp') and the core sentential domain ('tp') and raises the question of the status of the subject position in relation to CP and TP. The third strand examines to what extent the internal structure of the nominal projection can be assimilated to that of the clause."