[koglist] Meghívó - BME Kognitív Szemináriumsorozat / Invitation - BME Cognitive Seminar Series

We cordially invite you to the next lecture of the BME Cognitive Seminar Series: Date & Time: December 5, Monday, 12:00-13:00 Location: BME, XI., Egry József utca 1., T. ép 515. *Beatrix Burghardt*** Indiana University, USA *Evidence for the [PATH [PLACE]] linguistic hierarchy from adult Hungarian language acquisition* Abstract This talk reports on the acquisition of directed motion expressions by adult learners of Hungarian as a second language. Results reveal that L2 learners have access to Universal Grammar during interlanguage development. Recent cross-linguistic analysis has shown that the syntactic ordering of adpositions forms a strict hierarchical pattern where the directional phrase precedes the lower locational phrase (van Riemsdijk, 1990; Stringer, 2005; Svenonious, 2006). The same analysis has also been applied toHungarian (Hegedu"s, 2006; Stringer, 2008). Hungarian provides an interesting testing ground for acquisitionally-orientated investigations because of its wealth of spatial expressions, agglutinative character and its rich morphology. In particular, I bring evidence from second language acquisition in support of the claim that the layered PP structure is universal, and knowledge of UG is accessible during L2 acquisition. Original data has been collected from adult English L1 learners of Hungarian L2 (N=18). I conducted two forced elicitation production tasks to test expressions of PATH, i.e. source, goal, location. These include the language-specific /Pléh-Palotás-Lo"rik Test (PPL) /(2002), and a purposefully designed original picture series capturing a frog jumping to and from different types of objects. Learner-produced non- target-like utterances are systematic and only include the following two types of ordering: (1) in case of Hungarian postpositions Path is ordered before Place, and the latter is before the N; (2) in case of locative suffixes the ordering is reversed, i.e. N is followed by Place, and the latter by Path. These patterns result in spatial suffix stacking on nouns and postpositions. Neither pattern is target-like, nor can they be derived from the learners' L1 English; thus they provide clear evidence that in the spatial domain UG is available during interlanguage development. -- Attila Keresztes Junior Research Fellow Budapest University of Technology and Economics Dept. of Cognitive Science, Egry József u. 1, Budapest 1111, Hungary Tel: +36 1 4633525