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Papers by Francesca Filiaci

1. Background Assumptions and the basic hypothesis • Syntactic attrition is a consequence of a lo... more 1. Background Assumptions and the basic hypothesis • Syntactic attrition is a consequence of a long-term contact of the native with the second language; it is expected to be found primarily in near-native speakers of the second language who use L1 and L2 in roughly equal amounts in everyday situations. • Syntactic attrition could be described as a change in the steady-state of L1 as this is found in monolingual speakers. • Within the Principles and Parameters framework, the change in the Ss (L1) is predicted to affect aspects of a parameter for which the L1 and L2 assume a different value (e.g. the Null Subject parameter in Italian vs English). • However, syntactic attrition cannot be argued to change (or ‘unset’) the L1 value of a given parameter as this would imply that the syntax of the native language can be lost in case a second language is acquired. • In Minimalist terms (Chomsky, 1995), morpho-syntactic features differ in terms of their interpretability at LF. Parameters are ...

Over the last twenty years a great deal of linguistic research has investigated how anaphoric exp... more Over the last twenty years a great deal of linguistic research has investigated how anaphoric expressions retrieve their antecedents in the discourse showing that a variety of pragmatic factors together with grammatical and cognitive constraints contribute in determining the distribution of different types of expressions. A particularly interesting case for the study of such phenomena is that of Null Subject Languages, and of the principles that in such languages underlie the alternation of null and overt subjects (NSs and OSs). Many languages have the possibility of leaving the subject of a tensed verb phonetically empty and this generalisation is captured by the Null Subject Parameter (for a formulation of the parameter see Rizzi, 1986a, 1997). As Rizzi points out, in order for a subject to be dropped it has to be possible to recover its content through the context that is overtly realised. The mechanisms that allow for such recovery vary cross-linguistically, nevertheless it has ...

The nature of syntactic representations in simultaneous bilingual children has been the object of... more The nature of syntactic representations in simultaneous bilingual children has been the object of a debate ever since systematic investigation of bilingual first language acquisition started in the late 1970s (Genesee, 1989; Taeschner, 1983; Volterra & Taeschner, 1978). The current prevailing understanding is that bilingual children who are regularly exposed to two languages from birth or thereafter have separate syntactic representations for each of their two languages. The bulk of the evidence for this claim comes from studies focusing on cross-linguistic differences in word order where young bilinguals have been shown to use language-specific word order in each of their languages (Meisel, 1989; Meisel, 1994; Paradis & Genesee, 1996). If language A has the word order X1-X2 and language B has the word order X2-X1 and a bilingual child acquiring languages A and B uses the appropriate grammatical word order in each of her languages, then we can conclude that this child has separate s...

The present study addresses the question of the distribution of null and overt subjects (NS and O... more The present study addresses the question of the distribution of null and overt subjects (NS and OS) in Spanish. Over the last twenty years different theories have associated the possibility to drop a constituent with the relative prominence of its antecedent in the discourse (see for example Optimality Theory (Grimshaw & Samek-Lodovici, 1998), Centering Theory (Grosz, Joshi, & Weinstein, 1995)

In this study I investigate cross-linguistic differences between Italian and Spanish in the use a... more In this study I investigate cross-linguistic differences between Italian and Spanish in the use and interpretation of personal subject pronouns and I try to identify the possible origins of these differences and discuss their implications in terms of current theories of anaphora resolution. Spanish and Italian are two typologically related Null Subject languages with many morphological and syntactic similarities, and

Selected proceedings of the 12th Hispanic Linguistics …, 2010

... More precisely, this study tests the validity in Spanish of © 2010 Francesca Filiaci. Selecte... more ... More precisely, this study tests the validity in Spanish of © 2010 Francesca Filiaci. Selected Proceedings of the 12th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, ed. Claudia Borgonovo et al., 171-182. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Page 2. ...

Second Language Research, 2006

... 7) a. Quando Marioi chiama Giovannak, øi/?luii è contento. When Marioi calls Giovannak,øi / ?... more ... 7) a. Quando Marioi chiama Giovannak, øi/?luii è contento. When Marioi calls Giovannak,øi / ?hei is happy-M b. Quando Marioi chiama Giovannak, ?øk/leik è contenta. ... Page 15. 9) Mentre leik/l/proi si mette il cappotto, la mammai dà un bacio alla figliak. ...

Lingua, 2009

This study investigates the acceptability of Italian and English pronominal subject forms in Àtop... more This study investigates the acceptability of Italian and English pronominal subject forms in Àtopic shift [ÀTS] and +topic shift [+TS] contexts in English-Italian and Spanish-Italian bilingual children aged 6-7 and 8-10, age-matched monolingual children, and monolingual adults. The aim was to disentangle possible effects of cross-linguistic influence from the more general effects of bilingualism and the use of 'default' forms. A further aim of the study was to test the influence of input and exposure to Italian by comparing bilinguals living in Italy and bilinguals living in the UK. The results showed no statistically significant differences in English: regardless of age, language combination, and language of the community, participants overwhelmingly rejected ungrammatical sentences with a missing subject and chose sentences with an overt subject pronoun. In Italian, by contrast, the patterns of results were much more varied. Younger monolingual and bilingual children chose significantly more pragmatically inappropriate overt subject pronouns than older children and adults. A significant interaction between age and language of the community also showed that at the age of 6-7 English-Italian bilinguals in the UK chose significantly more pragmatically overt pronouns than all the other groups of children, while at the age of 8-10 it was the Spanish-Italian bilinguals that performed significantly less accurately than all other groups of children. Bilingual children, regardless of age and language combination, also accepted some infelicitous null subject pronouns. This pattern of results indicates that variables beside cross-linguistic influence must be considered as explanatory factors in this particular domain. It also suggests that it is important to differentiate among different discourse conditions affecting subject pronouns in context. #

Language and Cognitive Processes, 2013

ABSTRACT The present study explores the cross-linguistic differences between Spanish and Italian ... more ABSTRACT The present study explores the cross-linguistic differences between Spanish and Italian in the anaphoric interpretation of null subjects and overt pronominal subjects. The availability of null subjects in a language is determined by the parametric settings of its syntax, but their felicitous use as an alternative to overt pronouns depends on contextual conditions affecting how different expressions retrieve their antecedents in the discourse. According to Accessibility Theory, at least some of these principles must have universal validity; however, up to now no experimental research has been carried out with the aim of comparing directly the interpretation of anaphoric dependencies in two typologically similar null subject languages. In this paper, we report the results of two self-paced reading experiments carried out in Spanish and in Italian. The results show a similar pattern for the resolution of null subjects, as predicted by Accessibility Theory, whereas the resolution of overt pronouns seems to diverge. This suggests that subtle differences restricted to the scope of the overt pronoun yield systematic variation between the two languages.

International Journal of Bilingualism, 2004

In this paper we present some results from an experimental study that we have been conducting int... more In this paper we present some results from an experimental study that we have been conducting into the effects of syntactic attrition on the L1 of Greek and Italian speakers who have achieved near-native proficiency in their L2 (English) but still use their L1 on a regular basis. In particular, we test the hypothesis, developed on the basis of assumptions regarding syntactic modularity, that the changes in L1 syntax will be restricted to the interface with the conceptual / intentional cognitive systems. The area of investigation is the domain of grammatical subjects in Greek and Italian. More specifically, we tested the participants on the production and interpretation of null and overt subjects, and of preverbal and postverbal subjects. We also elicited grammaticality judgments on subject extraction and subject position in various syntactic contexts. In this paper we report on the results of one of the production tasks (of preverbal and postverbal subjects) and two interpretation tasks. Attrition effects are found in the production of preverbal subjects in the Greek group whereas Italian speakers show attrition effects in the interpretation of overt pronominal subjects. We argue that these results are in the right direction, that is, that semantic features are vulnerable in language attrition whereas syntactic options remain intact.