{"id":16613,"date":"2024-11-04T06:03:05","date_gmt":"2024-11-04T11:03:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=16613"},"modified":"2024-12-28T16:48:58","modified_gmt":"2024-12-28T21:48:58","slug":"syntax-square-11-05-nuria-bosch-university-of-cambridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2024\/11\/04\/syntax-square-11-05-nuria-bosch-university-of-cambridge\/","title":{"rendered":"Syntax Square 11\/05 \u0097 N\u00faria Bosch (University of Cambridge)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Speaker: <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.languagesciences.cam.ac.uk\/staff\/nuria-bosch\"> N\u00faria Bosch<\/a> (University of Cambridge)<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Title: <\/strong>Not all topics are equal: syntactic complexity and its effect on the acquisition of left-peripheral structures <br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Time: <\/strong>Tuesday, November 5, 1pm - 2pm<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Location: <\/strong>32-D461<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<br class=\"\" \/>\n<\/p>\n<p><strong>Abstract: <\/strong>Approaches to the acquisition of functional categories, particularly maturational approaches, havetypically focused on theorising putatively universal aspects of development, e.g., universally \u0091delayed\u0092 development of CP-structures (i.a., Radford 1990; Rizzi 1993\/4; Friedmann et al. 2021). In this talk, I highlight the empirical reality and theoretical significance of systematic crosslinguistically variableacquisition orders of CP-structures. I present a two-part empirical argument against rigidly pre-wired developmental pathways, drawing in particular on bilingual and monolingual acquisition of topicalization structures.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a71. I summarise two (ongoing) corpus studies on seven Germanic-Romance bilinguals acquiring Italian-Dutch, Italian-German and Spanish-German. Study 1 examines the order of acquisition of CP-structures. Study 2 is a supplementary study on the development of cliticization that investigates its interlinking (or lack thereof) with the emergence of Clitic-Left Dislocation in Romance. The data reveals several consequential patterns: among others, CP-structures systematically emerge early, irrespective of structural height; and secondly, the acquisition of topics reveals language-specific discrepancies (Germanic topics vs Romance CLLD). These results are incompatible with bottom-up maturation, and extant approaches that could accommodate the data (continuity, inward maturation) prove insufficiently predictive on their own. I develop a neo-emergentist generative account of the patterns (Biberauer, 2011, et seq.; Biberauer &amp; Roberts, 2015) and propose that L1-specific mismatches in the acquisition of topics systematically \u0091track\u0092 the formal, parametric complexity of the topicalization strategies in the relevant L1.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a72. Our predictions are, then, tested against data on monolingual acquisition of topics from a range of 10+ typologically-diverse languages. I show that the development of topics (early vs late) systematically varies as a function of the formal complexity of each L1\u0092s topicalization strategies (e.g., A\/A\u0092 properties of topics, operator\/non-operator topics).<br clear='none'\/>\nThese results have several ramifications for requirements on theories of functional category acquisition and for the crosslinguistic \u0091flexibility\u0092 of learning paths more broadly. Critically, I conclude that \u0091late\u0092 topics reported in some maturational work (e.g., Friedmann et al., 2021; Meira &amp; Grolla, 2023; and references therein) are an epiphenomenon of the L1s studied, not of universal maturational constraints on the CP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: N\u00faria Bosch (University of Cambridge) Title: Not all topics are equal: syntactic complexity and its effect on the acquisition of left-peripheral structures Time: Tuesday, November 5, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Approaches to the acquisition of functional categories, particularly maturational approaches, havetypically focused on theorising putatively universal aspects of development, e.g., universally \u0091delayed\u0092 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16613"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16716,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16613\/revisions\/16716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}