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Research paper thumbnail of An Accessibility hierarchy pattern for Resumptive pronouns in spoken French

Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale

On the basis of the results of a corpus study on Colloquial French, which show that the distribut... more On the basis of the results of a corpus study on Colloquial French, which show that the distribution of resumptive pronouns globally matches the Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan, Comrie 1977), we argue that resumptive pronouns in French relative clauses are not intrusive and that resumptive and gapped relatives involve different syntactic derivations belonging to different registers. We explain the lack of the highest subject restriction in Colloquial French, in contrast with (other) languages displaying regular resumptive relatives, by the special nature of French subject clitics as agreement markers (Culbertson 2010). This conclusion and the distribution of subject clitics we found in the corpus reinforces the analysis of the relative complementizer qui as a grammaticalized form of que+obligatory resumption il (Rooryck 2000; Rizzi, Shlonsky 2007).

Research paper thumbnail of Relative clauses are not adjuncts: an experimental investigation of a corollary of the raising analyses 

Linguistische Berichte (LB)

Relative clauses and more generally clauses modifying nouns have been at the center of a long deb... more Relative clauses and more generally clauses modifying nouns have been at the center of a long debate in the last forty years, opposing largely diverging syntactic analyses, comparing relevant data and discussing perspectives. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this debate by adding novel experimental data on how these structures are processed in an online reading task. Two eye-tracking experiments were designed to investigate the temporal structural ambiguity that can arise between object relative clauses (object RCs; 'the claim that linguists made is a mistake)' and so-called complement clauses of a noun (CCs; 'the claim that linguists made a mistake ...') in Italian and English. Although the pattern is complex, the results of both experiments suggest that a reanalysis effect is associated with CCs, showing an initial preference for the object RC structural interpretation. The implications of our results are discussed in relation to competing syntactic analyses for CCs ad RCs.

Research paper thumbnail of Língua gestual portuguesa e outras línguas de sinais : estudos linguísticos

Research paper thumbnail of Diagnosing phase boundaries in participial relative clauses

Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL) 9: Phase Theory, Dec 1, 2016

International audienceno abstrac

Research paper thumbnail of Part 6: Semantics

Research paper thumbnail of A contrastive analysis of interrogative constructions in Romance: Microvariation and theory

Research paper thumbnail of Part 1: Socio-historical background

Research paper thumbnail of As small as they seem?

Research paper thumbnail of Assessing Lexical and Syntactic Comprehension in Deaf Signing Adults

Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education

Among the existing sign language assessment tools, only a small number can be used in clinical se... more Among the existing sign language assessment tools, only a small number can be used in clinical settings. This contribution aims at presenting three comprehension assessment tests (two lexical and one syntactic) that offer a solid basis to build tools to assess language impairments in deaf signing adults. We provide the material and guidelines, based on psychometric analyses of the items, to make these tests suitable for clinical assessment. They are available for French Sign Language and Italian Sign Language. So far, the three tests were administered to three groups of deaf participants based on age of exposure (AoE) to sign language: native (AoE from birth), early (AoE = from 1 to 5 years), and late (AoE = from 6 to 15 years) signers. The results showed that the three tests are easy for the typical deaf signing population, and therefore, they can be adapted into tests that assess a deaf signing population with language impairments. Moreover, the results of the syntactic test revea...

Research paper thumbnail of Gli enunciati mistilingui bimodali: un esperimento naturale

International audienceno abstrac

Research paper thumbnail of Experiment on complementizer-less subject relatives in English

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Feb 15, 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Are all adverbial clauses adjuncts? The Internal and External Syntax of Adverbial Clauses

Research paper thumbnail of Relative Clauses in the Romance Languages

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, May 24, 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Unprobed movement and labeling: tree trimming as a key to understand successive cyclicity

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2022

Research paper thumbnail of 17. Unprobed movement and labeling : tree trimming as a key to understand successive cyclicity

Presses universitaires de Vincennes eBooks, Mar 11, 2022

Research paper thumbnail of Frequency of grammatical constructions and syntactic priming

Research paper thumbnail of Simulteneous Grammars: two word orders but only one morphology

Research paper thumbnail of Assessing lexicalism through bimodal eyes

Glossa, Nov 30, 2016

The relation holding between words and syntax is at the core of a lively debate. Two competing pr... more The relation holding between words and syntax is at the core of a lively debate. Two competing proposals have been advanced: the lexicalist view, claiming that the lexicon and the syntax are distinct modules of the grammar, and what we shall refer to as the constructionist view typically represented by models like Distributed Morphology, advocating for the redundancy of a notion such as the lexicon and arguing for no divide between syntax and word formation. By facing the debate from the privileged point of view of the mixed production of bimodal bilinguals (Italian-Italian Sign Language), namely users of a sign and a vocal language simultaneously produced, we discuss the interaction of the two grammars at play with respect to their word order, morphology and phonology and draw some consequences relevant to the debate.

Research paper thumbnail of The acquisition of French ambiguous embedded structures introduce by ce que

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Nov 3, 2017

Research paper thumbnail of PART 4: Section 1.2. (“Interrogatives”), Section 2.1 (“The syntactic realization of argument structure”), Section 2.2 (“Grammatical functions”), Section 2.3 (“Word order”), Section 2.5 (“Clausal ellipsis”), Section 3.5 (“Adverbial clauses”). PART 6: Chapter 14 (“The meaning of embedded clauses”)....

Research paper thumbnail of An Accessibility hierarchy pattern for Resumptive pronouns in spoken French

Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale

On the basis of the results of a corpus study on Colloquial French, which show that the distribut... more On the basis of the results of a corpus study on Colloquial French, which show that the distribution of resumptive pronouns globally matches the Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan, Comrie 1977), we argue that resumptive pronouns in French relative clauses are not intrusive and that resumptive and gapped relatives involve different syntactic derivations belonging to different registers. We explain the lack of the highest subject restriction in Colloquial French, in contrast with (other) languages displaying regular resumptive relatives, by the special nature of French subject clitics as agreement markers (Culbertson 2010). This conclusion and the distribution of subject clitics we found in the corpus reinforces the analysis of the relative complementizer qui as a grammaticalized form of que+obligatory resumption il (Rooryck 2000; Rizzi, Shlonsky 2007).

Research paper thumbnail of Relative clauses are not adjuncts: an experimental investigation of a corollary of the raising analyses 

Linguistische Berichte (LB)

Relative clauses and more generally clauses modifying nouns have been at the center of a long deb... more Relative clauses and more generally clauses modifying nouns have been at the center of a long debate in the last forty years, opposing largely diverging syntactic analyses, comparing relevant data and discussing perspectives. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this debate by adding novel experimental data on how these structures are processed in an online reading task. Two eye-tracking experiments were designed to investigate the temporal structural ambiguity that can arise between object relative clauses (object RCs; 'the claim that linguists made is a mistake)' and so-called complement clauses of a noun (CCs; 'the claim that linguists made a mistake ...') in Italian and English. Although the pattern is complex, the results of both experiments suggest that a reanalysis effect is associated with CCs, showing an initial preference for the object RC structural interpretation. The implications of our results are discussed in relation to competing syntactic analyses for CCs ad RCs.

Research paper thumbnail of Língua gestual portuguesa e outras línguas de sinais : estudos linguísticos

Research paper thumbnail of Diagnosing phase boundaries in participial relative clauses

Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL) 9: Phase Theory, Dec 1, 2016

International audienceno abstrac

Research paper thumbnail of Part 6: Semantics

Research paper thumbnail of A contrastive analysis of interrogative constructions in Romance: Microvariation and theory

Research paper thumbnail of Part 1: Socio-historical background

Research paper thumbnail of As small as they seem?

Research paper thumbnail of Assessing Lexical and Syntactic Comprehension in Deaf Signing Adults

Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education

Among the existing sign language assessment tools, only a small number can be used in clinical se... more Among the existing sign language assessment tools, only a small number can be used in clinical settings. This contribution aims at presenting three comprehension assessment tests (two lexical and one syntactic) that offer a solid basis to build tools to assess language impairments in deaf signing adults. We provide the material and guidelines, based on psychometric analyses of the items, to make these tests suitable for clinical assessment. They are available for French Sign Language and Italian Sign Language. So far, the three tests were administered to three groups of deaf participants based on age of exposure (AoE) to sign language: native (AoE from birth), early (AoE = from 1 to 5 years), and late (AoE = from 6 to 15 years) signers. The results showed that the three tests are easy for the typical deaf signing population, and therefore, they can be adapted into tests that assess a deaf signing population with language impairments. Moreover, the results of the syntactic test revea...

Research paper thumbnail of Gli enunciati mistilingui bimodali: un esperimento naturale

International audienceno abstrac

Research paper thumbnail of Experiment on complementizer-less subject relatives in English

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Feb 15, 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Are all adverbial clauses adjuncts? The Internal and External Syntax of Adverbial Clauses

Research paper thumbnail of Relative Clauses in the Romance Languages

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, May 24, 2023

Research paper thumbnail of Unprobed movement and labeling: tree trimming as a key to understand successive cyclicity

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2022

Research paper thumbnail of 17. Unprobed movement and labeling : tree trimming as a key to understand successive cyclicity

Presses universitaires de Vincennes eBooks, Mar 11, 2022

Research paper thumbnail of Frequency of grammatical constructions and syntactic priming

Research paper thumbnail of Simulteneous Grammars: two word orders but only one morphology

Research paper thumbnail of Assessing lexicalism through bimodal eyes

Glossa, Nov 30, 2016

The relation holding between words and syntax is at the core of a lively debate. Two competing pr... more The relation holding between words and syntax is at the core of a lively debate. Two competing proposals have been advanced: the lexicalist view, claiming that the lexicon and the syntax are distinct modules of the grammar, and what we shall refer to as the constructionist view typically represented by models like Distributed Morphology, advocating for the redundancy of a notion such as the lexicon and arguing for no divide between syntax and word formation. By facing the debate from the privileged point of view of the mixed production of bimodal bilinguals (Italian-Italian Sign Language), namely users of a sign and a vocal language simultaneously produced, we discuss the interaction of the two grammars at play with respect to their word order, morphology and phonology and draw some consequences relevant to the debate.

Research paper thumbnail of The acquisition of French ambiguous embedded structures introduce by ce que

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Nov 3, 2017

Research paper thumbnail of PART 4: Section 1.2. (“Interrogatives”), Section 2.1 (“The syntactic realization of argument structure”), Section 2.2 (“Grammatical functions”), Section 2.3 (“Word order”), Section 2.5 (“Clausal ellipsis”), Section 3.5 (“Adverbial clauses”). PART 6: Chapter 14 (“The meaning of embedded clauses”)....