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It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English.

ABSTRACT: While much prior literature on the meaning of clefts-such as the English form "it is X who Z-ed"-concentrates on the nature and status of the exhaustivity inference ("nobody/nothing other than X Z"), we report on experiments examining the role of the doxastic status of alternatives on the naturalness of c'est-clefts in French and it-clefts in English. Specifically, we study the hypothesis that clefts indicate a conflict with a doxastic commitment held by some discourse participant. Results from naturalness tasks suggest that clefts are improved by a property we term "contrariness" (along the lines of Zimmermann, 2008). This property has a gradient effect on felicity judgments: the more strongly interlocutors appear committed to an apparently false notion, the better it is to repudiate them with a cleft.

SUBMITTER: Destruel E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6591431 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English.

Destruel Emilie E Beaver David I DI Coppock Elizabeth E

Frontiers in psychology 20190618

While much prior literature on the meaning of clefts-such as the English form "it is X who Z-ed"-concentrates on the nature and status of the exhaustivity inference ("nobody/nothing other than X Z"), we report on experiments examining the role of the doxastic status of alternatives on the naturalness of <i>c'est</i>-clefts in French and <i>it</i>-clefts in English. Specifically, we study the hypothesis that clefts indicate a conflict with a doxastic commitment held by some discourse participant. ...[more]

PMID: 31275211

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Project description:The framework of assimilation and accommodation has been proposed to explain the brain mechanisms supporting second language reading acquisition (Perfetti et al. [2007]: Bilingual Lang Cogn 10:131). Assimilation refers to using the procedures of the native language network in the acquisition of a new writing system, whereas accommodation refers to using second language procedures for reading the newly acquired writing system. We investigated assimilation and accommodation patterns in the brains of bilingual individuals by recruiting a group of Chinese-English bilinguals and a group of English-Chinese bilinguals to perform lexical decision tasks in both English and Chinese. The key question was whether the assimilation/accommodation procedures supporting second language reading in the brains of Chinese-English and English-Chinese bilinguals were dynamic, i.e., modulated by proficiency in the second language and perceptual features of the second language's script. Perceptual features of the scripts were manipulated through orthographic degradation by inserting spaces between the radicals of a Chinese character or between the syllables of an English word. This manipulation disrupts the visual configuration of the orthography but does not change its more fundamental design principles. We found that for English-Chinese bilinguals, higher proficiency was associated with greater accommodation, suggesting that the accommodation procedure in a bilingual individual's brain is modulated by second language proficiency. Most interestingly, we found that the assimilation/accommodation effects vanished or diminished when orthographically degraded scripts were processed by both Chinese-English and English-Chinese bilinguals, suggesting that the assimilation/accommodation procedures in a bilingual individual's brain are modulated by perceptual features of orthography. This work therefore offers a new, dynamic perspective for our understanding of the assimilation/accommodation framework for second language acquisition.

Dataset Information

It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English.

Publications

It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English.

Similar Datasets

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