The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Monday, March 17 at 3pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/16ZiB1ATRMGSUxbkGOJGvw.
The meeting will feature two presenters, who are both talking about relative clauses. Clara Tran (McGill) will be discussing “Relative Clause Attachment by L1 Vietnamese-L2 English Bilinguals: Effects of Prosody.” Austin Kraft (McGill), will be discussing “Light-headed relative clauses in Simpakng.” Here are their abstracts:
Clara’s abstract:
In English, a relative clause (RC) such as who has a dog in the sentence Jimmy met the brother of the engineer who has a dog can modify either the brother (NP1) or the engineer (NP2), though native speakers tend to prefer the interpretation where the RC refers to NP2 (i.e., low attachment; Fodor, 2002). Prosodic cues (e.g., breaks and intonational contours) influence this preference, and L2 learners are often sensitive to them, though L1 transfer can also occur. However, previous research primarily investigated L1-L2 combinations where both languages display ambiguous RC attachment. The effect of prosody remains unclear when ambiguity stemming from RC attachment is infrequent in the L1.
English native speakers and Vietnamese-speaking learners of English (intermediate and advanced) participated in a sentence interpretation task with auditory stimuli. The target items were sentences with ambiguous RC attachment, which were recorded in three ways, namely, with break after NP1, break after NP2, and no break. Since breaks introduce prosodic phrase boundaries, break after NP1 should favour low attachment (e.g., [the brother][of the engineer who has a dog]), while break after NP2 should favour high attachment (e.g., [the brother of the engineer][who has a dog]).
Both native speakers’ and advanced learners’ preferences adjusted their interpretations based on break placement. In contrast, intermediate learners showed a slight preference for low attachment across all conditions. Mixed-effects logistic regression confirmed that advanced learners, like native speakers, were influenced by prosodic cues, whereas intermediate learners were not. These findings suggest that while intermediate learners recognize RC ambiguity despite L1 differences, they struggle to interpret prosodic cues effectively, unlike more proficient learners.
Austin’s abstract:
I present in-progress research on a puzzle about relative clauses in Simpakng (also called Onya Darat in Tadmor 2009, 2015), a Southern Land Dayak language of western Borneo. In general, Simpakng relative clauses require the overt relativizer yang. However, this relativizer becomes optional when the word pongan ‘thing’ linearly precedes the rest of the relative clause. My working proposal is that pongan-constructions can be analyzed as light-headed relative clauses (LHRCs): relative clauses with a pronominal or determiner “light head” (Citko 2004, on Polish LHRCs). Notable from the cross-linguistic description of LHRCs, their relativizer requirements can differ from the requirements imposed on other relative clauses in the language (Mantenuto & Caponigro 2021). Constructions parallel to Simpakng LHRCs occur elsewhere in the Southern Land Dayak subgroup (Sommerlot 2020), suggesting that the pattern may be a more typologically widespread strategy for relativization.