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
(Hegedűs, 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-Lőrik
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