Kathleen O'Connor | Université de Lille (original) (raw)
Papers by Kathleen O'Connor
Based mainly on a number of interpretive considerations, Henry (1995) and Den Dikken (2005) elabo... more Based mainly on a number of interpretive considerations, Henry (1995) and Den Dikken (2005) elaborate an analysis of English SCR which mirrors their discourse function. However, while the proposed topic-comment representation may well reflect the information structural properties of SCR, its predictions for the internal and external syntax of SCR are incorrect. it is argued that a topic-comment representation for English SCR, though attractive on interpretive grounds, cannot be maintained.
Http Www Theses Fr, 2008
This thesis proposes an account of apposition in English within the theory of generative grammar.... more This thesis proposes an account of apposition in English within the theory of generative grammar. Apposition is defined as the non-restrictive post-modification on an NP (the antecedent) by an AP, DP or PP (the appositive). This study is divided into two categories : internal syntax and external syntax. With respect to the internal syntax, a study of the different classes of adverbs that occur in appositives demonstrates that they contain an extensive hierarchy of functional projections associated with the area located above IP. The presence of conjunctions and modal adverbs provides evidence that appositives also have a CP layer that includes the projection SubP, the site that hosts conjunctions, and the projection ForceP, associated with illocutionary force. Attention is then given to nominal projections within the appositive, particularly the potential for a subject and for quantifiers. It is proposed that appositives contain a predication relation with a nul argument. Certain quantifiers appear to float from this subject, whereas others are assumed to be located in subject position. It is then suggested that the link between the appositive and its host clause is one of specifying coordination. This relationship is governed by a functional projection, &:P, that hosts the antecedent in its specifier and a null DP in complement. The null DP takes the CP of the antecedent as its complement. The null subject of the appositive has a [+wh] feature that requires movement to CP for feature checking. Under this assumption, an appositive is essentially a non-finite, non-restrictive relative clause
Elements of Comparative Syntax, 2017
Varieties of Spoken French, 2016
Journal of English Linguistics, 2013
This article investigates the discourse functions of nonverbal appositives: noun phrases, preposi... more This article investigates the discourse functions of nonverbal appositives: noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and adjective phrases in apposition to a preceding nominal unit. Given the many similarities between nonverbal appositives and appositive relative clauses, the discourse functions of the latter serve as a starting point for an evaluation of the discourse functions of the former. More precisely, we compare our 600-token corpus of nonverbal appositives with Loock’s taxonomy of discourse functions for appositive relative clauses. The taxonomy is then modified to accommodate the nonverbal appositives that do not fit the taxonomy. Correlations with a series of linguistic parameters are established.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2000
... Among the most powerful contributions in the volume are those written by Mark Fettes and Jame... more ... Among the most powerful contributions in the volume are those written by Mark Fettes and James Craw-ford, which deal with indigenous languages in ... Romaine analyzes Anglo-phone pidgins and creoles from a literary perspective, whereas Görlach considers their dictionaries ...
Phonology, 2015
This paper investigates the syntax–prosody interface with respect to apposition in Shingazidja. W... more This paper investigates the syntax–prosody interface with respect to apposition in Shingazidja. We examine the syntactic properties of two types of apposition (restrictive and non-restrictive). While restrictive apposition appears to form a single constituent, the syntactic data for non-restrictives are ambiguous between a single constituent analysis and an analysis in which the appositive and its anchor are syntactically separate. Prosodic data confirm the single constituent analysis for restrictive apposition, and provide evidence that non-restrictive appositives are syntactically linked to their antecedent and prosodically embedded in their host clause. The phenomenon of final raising emerges as the principal indicator of intonational phrases in Shingazidja; tone shift signals phonological phrasing. Our analysis is formalised in Optimality Theory through a comparison of Align/Wrap theory and Match theory. A Match-theory account predicts the existence of recursive phonological phr...
Fostering learner autonomy – learners, teachers and researchers in action C. Ludwig, A. Pinter, T. Smits, A. M. Tassinari et K. Van de Poel (eds). Hong Kong : Candlin & Mynard., 2018
Die kommentative Funktion, to appear
This chapter presents a novel approach to examining syntactic structure. We show how facts about ... more This chapter presents a novel approach to examining syntactic structure. We show how facts about prosody can be used to as evidence for competing syntactic analyses of a particular structure. Our object of study is apposition in German. We first describe apposition more generally and the competing syntactic analyses of one type of apposition. We then move on to the description of a study that we designed to employ facts about prosody to examine the syntax of apposition in German. Finally, in the results and discussion section, we present the results and their implications for our syntactic analyses.
Elements of comparative syntax : Theory and description. E. Aboh, E. Haeberli, G. Puskas & M. Schoenenberger (eds), Berlin : De Gruyter Mouton. , 2017
De la passion du sens en linguistique. N. Flaux, P. Haas, V. Mostrov, K. Paykin & F. Tayalati (eds). Valenciennes: Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2017
Learner autonomy and web 2.0. M. Cappellini, T. Lewis & A. Rivens (eds). Sheffield, UK: Equinox., 2017
Learner autonomy has become a leading pedagogical paradigm in foreign language education. Within ... more Learner autonomy has become a leading pedagogical paradigm in foreign language education. Within this context, learners are helped to (learn to) take responsibility for their learning. Given that more recent studies have highlighted the importance of the social dimensions of learner autonomy, we examine, on a qualitative basis, student logs within a collective blog completed during a teletandem experience between French and Australian universities in order to identify different types of metacognitive operations and to develop a descriptive typology.
This chapter explores the linguistic features of French spoken in Northern France, based on the a... more This chapter explores the linguistic features of French spoken in Northern France, based on the analysis of a speaker from La Madeleine, a small city in the Lille metropolitan area. The first part of the chapter analyses the sociolinguistic profiles of both the speaker and the region, focusing on the links between French and Picard and on the importance of the textile and coal industries. The chapter then provides a detailed discussion of specific features of Northern French, illustrated with representative examples from our corpus. It examines (i) lexical regionalisms, with a focus on the lexical fields of work, war, and school; (ii) syntactic and discursive features, e.g. the absence of the feminine third-person plural subject pronoun, ne-deletion, and the use of quoi as a discourse marker; (iii) phonetic and phonological features, in particular palatalization and depalatalization phenomena; and (iv) dialectal features.
This paper investigates the syntax–prosody interface with respect to apposition in Shingazidja. W... more This paper investigates the syntax–prosody interface with respect to apposition in Shingazidja. We examine the syntactic properties of two types of apposition (restrictive and non-restrictive). While restrictive apposition appears to form a single constituent, the syntactic data for non-restrictives are ambiguous between a single constituent analysis and an analysis in which the appositive and its anchor are syntactically separate. Prosodic data confirm the single constituent analysis for restrictive apposition, and provide evidence that non-restrictive appositives are syntactically linked to their antecedent and prosodically embedded in their host clause. The phenomenon of final raising emerges as the principal indicator of intonational phrases in Shingazidja; tone shift signals phonological phrasing. Our analysis is formalised in Optimality Theory through a comparison of Align/Wrap theory and Match theory. A Match-theory account predicts the existence of recursive phonological phrasing, and we present evidence supporting this prediction.
This presentation examines goal-setting in the context of a university tandem learning course. Th... more This presentation examines goal-setting in the context of a university tandem learning course. The participants include approximately 60 native French and English speakers, each of which was studying the non-native language as a second language. The learners were enrolled in an autonomous language-learning scheme in which they were put into French-English pairs. Each pair was required to hold 10 90-minute sessions in order to interact in their target language, with the time divided evenly between the two languages. Additionally, each learner was expected to set three linguistic and/or cultural goals for the course. The objective of this presentation is to examine the types of goals the learners set for themselves, as well as their attitude toward these goals and the usefulness of goal-setting for tandem learning. Data are drawn from the learning journals and a questionnaire distributed at the end of the course.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2001
Language Acquisition, 2000
Evidence from young children's early phonological development is brought to bear on the evaluatio... more Evidence from young children's early phonological development is brought to bear on the evaluation of a newly proposed type of correspondence relation within optimality theory , ) namely sympathy. Sympathy has been advanced to account for certain opacity effects in fully developed languages. Given the claims of the theory, comparable opacity effects are expected to occur in the course of acquisition. Toward this end, different interactions of two common phenomena-that is, final consonant omission and vowel lengthening before voiced consonants-are examined with a focus on a case study of 2 young children with phonological delays in their acquisition of English. We argue that at least some developmental opacity effects support sympathy and that such effects naturally emerge in the course of development from the harmonic ranking of sympathy over input-output faithfulness and the incremental demotion of markedness constraints.
Based mainly on a number of interpretive considerations, Henry (1995) and Den Dikken (2005) elabo... more Based mainly on a number of interpretive considerations, Henry (1995) and Den Dikken (2005) elaborate an analysis of English SCR which mirrors their discourse function. However, while the proposed topic-comment representation may well reflect the information structural properties of SCR, its predictions for the internal and external syntax of SCR are incorrect. it is argued that a topic-comment representation for English SCR, though attractive on interpretive grounds, cannot be maintained.
Http Www Theses Fr, 2008
This thesis proposes an account of apposition in English within the theory of generative grammar.... more This thesis proposes an account of apposition in English within the theory of generative grammar. Apposition is defined as the non-restrictive post-modification on an NP (the antecedent) by an AP, DP or PP (the appositive). This study is divided into two categories : internal syntax and external syntax. With respect to the internal syntax, a study of the different classes of adverbs that occur in appositives demonstrates that they contain an extensive hierarchy of functional projections associated with the area located above IP. The presence of conjunctions and modal adverbs provides evidence that appositives also have a CP layer that includes the projection SubP, the site that hosts conjunctions, and the projection ForceP, associated with illocutionary force. Attention is then given to nominal projections within the appositive, particularly the potential for a subject and for quantifiers. It is proposed that appositives contain a predication relation with a nul argument. Certain quantifiers appear to float from this subject, whereas others are assumed to be located in subject position. It is then suggested that the link between the appositive and its host clause is one of specifying coordination. This relationship is governed by a functional projection, &:P, that hosts the antecedent in its specifier and a null DP in complement. The null DP takes the CP of the antecedent as its complement. The null subject of the appositive has a [+wh] feature that requires movement to CP for feature checking. Under this assumption, an appositive is essentially a non-finite, non-restrictive relative clause
Elements of Comparative Syntax, 2017
Varieties of Spoken French, 2016
Journal of English Linguistics, 2013
This article investigates the discourse functions of nonverbal appositives: noun phrases, preposi... more This article investigates the discourse functions of nonverbal appositives: noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and adjective phrases in apposition to a preceding nominal unit. Given the many similarities between nonverbal appositives and appositive relative clauses, the discourse functions of the latter serve as a starting point for an evaluation of the discourse functions of the former. More precisely, we compare our 600-token corpus of nonverbal appositives with Loock’s taxonomy of discourse functions for appositive relative clauses. The taxonomy is then modified to accommodate the nonverbal appositives that do not fit the taxonomy. Correlations with a series of linguistic parameters are established.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2000
... Among the most powerful contributions in the volume are those written by Mark Fettes and Jame... more ... Among the most powerful contributions in the volume are those written by Mark Fettes and James Craw-ford, which deal with indigenous languages in ... Romaine analyzes Anglo-phone pidgins and creoles from a literary perspective, whereas Görlach considers their dictionaries ...
Phonology, 2015
This paper investigates the syntax–prosody interface with respect to apposition in Shingazidja. W... more This paper investigates the syntax–prosody interface with respect to apposition in Shingazidja. We examine the syntactic properties of two types of apposition (restrictive and non-restrictive). While restrictive apposition appears to form a single constituent, the syntactic data for non-restrictives are ambiguous between a single constituent analysis and an analysis in which the appositive and its anchor are syntactically separate. Prosodic data confirm the single constituent analysis for restrictive apposition, and provide evidence that non-restrictive appositives are syntactically linked to their antecedent and prosodically embedded in their host clause. The phenomenon of final raising emerges as the principal indicator of intonational phrases in Shingazidja; tone shift signals phonological phrasing. Our analysis is formalised in Optimality Theory through a comparison of Align/Wrap theory and Match theory. A Match-theory account predicts the existence of recursive phonological phr...
Fostering learner autonomy – learners, teachers and researchers in action C. Ludwig, A. Pinter, T. Smits, A. M. Tassinari et K. Van de Poel (eds). Hong Kong : Candlin & Mynard., 2018
Die kommentative Funktion, to appear
This chapter presents a novel approach to examining syntactic structure. We show how facts about ... more This chapter presents a novel approach to examining syntactic structure. We show how facts about prosody can be used to as evidence for competing syntactic analyses of a particular structure. Our object of study is apposition in German. We first describe apposition more generally and the competing syntactic analyses of one type of apposition. We then move on to the description of a study that we designed to employ facts about prosody to examine the syntax of apposition in German. Finally, in the results and discussion section, we present the results and their implications for our syntactic analyses.
Elements of comparative syntax : Theory and description. E. Aboh, E. Haeberli, G. Puskas & M. Schoenenberger (eds), Berlin : De Gruyter Mouton. , 2017
De la passion du sens en linguistique. N. Flaux, P. Haas, V. Mostrov, K. Paykin & F. Tayalati (eds). Valenciennes: Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2017
Learner autonomy and web 2.0. M. Cappellini, T. Lewis & A. Rivens (eds). Sheffield, UK: Equinox., 2017
Learner autonomy has become a leading pedagogical paradigm in foreign language education. Within ... more Learner autonomy has become a leading pedagogical paradigm in foreign language education. Within this context, learners are helped to (learn to) take responsibility for their learning. Given that more recent studies have highlighted the importance of the social dimensions of learner autonomy, we examine, on a qualitative basis, student logs within a collective blog completed during a teletandem experience between French and Australian universities in order to identify different types of metacognitive operations and to develop a descriptive typology.
This chapter explores the linguistic features of French spoken in Northern France, based on the a... more This chapter explores the linguistic features of French spoken in Northern France, based on the analysis of a speaker from La Madeleine, a small city in the Lille metropolitan area. The first part of the chapter analyses the sociolinguistic profiles of both the speaker and the region, focusing on the links between French and Picard and on the importance of the textile and coal industries. The chapter then provides a detailed discussion of specific features of Northern French, illustrated with representative examples from our corpus. It examines (i) lexical regionalisms, with a focus on the lexical fields of work, war, and school; (ii) syntactic and discursive features, e.g. the absence of the feminine third-person plural subject pronoun, ne-deletion, and the use of quoi as a discourse marker; (iii) phonetic and phonological features, in particular palatalization and depalatalization phenomena; and (iv) dialectal features.
This paper investigates the syntax–prosody interface with respect to apposition in Shingazidja. W... more This paper investigates the syntax–prosody interface with respect to apposition in Shingazidja. We examine the syntactic properties of two types of apposition (restrictive and non-restrictive). While restrictive apposition appears to form a single constituent, the syntactic data for non-restrictives are ambiguous between a single constituent analysis and an analysis in which the appositive and its anchor are syntactically separate. Prosodic data confirm the single constituent analysis for restrictive apposition, and provide evidence that non-restrictive appositives are syntactically linked to their antecedent and prosodically embedded in their host clause. The phenomenon of final raising emerges as the principal indicator of intonational phrases in Shingazidja; tone shift signals phonological phrasing. Our analysis is formalised in Optimality Theory through a comparison of Align/Wrap theory and Match theory. A Match-theory account predicts the existence of recursive phonological phrasing, and we present evidence supporting this prediction.
This presentation examines goal-setting in the context of a university tandem learning course. Th... more This presentation examines goal-setting in the context of a university tandem learning course. The participants include approximately 60 native French and English speakers, each of which was studying the non-native language as a second language. The learners were enrolled in an autonomous language-learning scheme in which they were put into French-English pairs. Each pair was required to hold 10 90-minute sessions in order to interact in their target language, with the time divided evenly between the two languages. Additionally, each learner was expected to set three linguistic and/or cultural goals for the course. The objective of this presentation is to examine the types of goals the learners set for themselves, as well as their attitude toward these goals and the usefulness of goal-setting for tandem learning. Data are drawn from the learning journals and a questionnaire distributed at the end of the course.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2001
Language Acquisition, 2000
Evidence from young children's early phonological development is brought to bear on the evaluatio... more Evidence from young children's early phonological development is brought to bear on the evaluation of a newly proposed type of correspondence relation within optimality theory , ) namely sympathy. Sympathy has been advanced to account for certain opacity effects in fully developed languages. Given the claims of the theory, comparable opacity effects are expected to occur in the course of acquisition. Toward this end, different interactions of two common phenomena-that is, final consonant omission and vowel lengthening before voiced consonants-are examined with a focus on a case study of 2 young children with phonological delays in their acquisition of English. We argue that at least some developmental opacity effects support sympathy and that such effects naturally emerge in the course of development from the harmonic ranking of sympathy over input-output faithfulness and the incremental demotion of markedness constraints.