Affiliation:
1. University of Arizona, USA
2. University of Texas at Austin, USA
Abstract
Abstract
The container-content relation represents a set of nominal configurations unexplored in the acquisition literature.
Whereas in English the switch from a noun-noun compound (water bottle) to a noun-prepositional phrase (bottle
of water) is associated with a semantic shift from container to content, Spanish and Arabic adopt single
canonical configurations for both conditions, noun-prepositional phrase and noun phrase, respectively.
Importantly, Spanish, Arabic, and English display structural overlap in the content condition maintained by
head-first isomorphic strings. In the container condition, they show structural dissimilarity; whereas English
uses a head-final construction, Arabic and Spanish consistently use head-first constructions. Results from an
elicited sentence-reordering task demonstrate that advanced late learners pattern native speakers when tested
in Spanish but not when tested in English. Additionally, when tested in English, Arabic-speaking and
Spanish-speaking learners overextend their L1 canonical configurations to both conditions. Furthermore,
bilingual native speakers do not perform at ceiling, suggesting bidirectional cross-linguistic influence.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
Cited by
1 articles.
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