A seminar by Theo Marinis, Professor of Multilingualism at the University of Konstanz and at the University of Reading
The seminar
Rhetorical questions (RQs) are syntactically interrogatives with the pragmatic function of an assertion that is used to signal the speaker’s attitude, as illustrated in (1) below.
(1) Who wants to pay taxes?
In example (1) world knowledge provides the cue that this is not an information seeking question (ISQ). World knowledge is not the only cue that disambiguates RQs from ISQs. In German, RQs and ISQs can be distinguished through lexical-syntactic cues, such as discourse particles (DiPs; Bayer & Struckmeier, 2017; Biezma & Rawlins, 2017) and through phonetic (e.g., duration, voice quality) and phonological (e.g., pitch accents, boundary tones) cues (Braun et al., 2019). Example (2) illustrates a question that can be interpreted as ISQ or RQ. Example (3) illustrates that the use of the DiPs ‘denn schon’ leads to a RQ interpretation.
(2) Wer mag Bananen? - RQ or ISQ interpretation
Who likes bananas?
(3) Wer mag denn schon Bananen? - RQ interpretation
Who likes DiP DiP bananas?
To date there is very limited research on how children acquire RQs and the cues that contribute to an ISQ or a RQ interpretation. In this talk I will present results from our project ‘Non-Canonical Questions in Early and Late Bilingual Language Acquisition’ that investigates how monolingual and bilingual children and adults acquire RQs in German and Italian. The presentation will focus on German-Italian early bilingual children growing up in Germany and will address what cues they use when they interpret German and Italian questions. Are they able to use lexical-syntactic, phonetic and phonological cues equally well? Are there additive factors when we combine these cues? Are there differences between their dominant language, German, and their non-dominant language, Italian, and are there effects of language input?
Biographical note
Theo Marinis is Professor of Multilingualism at the University of Konstanz and at the University of Reading. His research focuses on language acquisition and processing across populations of typically and atypically developing learners and aims to uncover the nature of language processing in typical and atypical language development. His research has been funded by research councils, like the ESRC (Real-time processing of syntactic information in children with English as a Second Language & children with Specific Language Impairment), ESRC-DFID (Multilingualism & Multiliteracy) and the NWO (Cross-linguistic study of the production and processing of grammatical morphemes in L2 children compared to children with Specific Language Impairment), but also from the British Academy, the Nuffield Foundation and the Onassis Foundation. He was part of the COST Action IS0804 and led the development of the LITMUS Sentence Repetition tasks for multilingual children across a large range of languages. He is currently leading the ESRC-GCRF project ‘ProLanguage' that addresses the protective role of language in global migration and mobilityand the EU project 'MultiMind' that provides multi-disciplinary training on multilingualism to early stage researchers in Europe. He is co-directing the Center for Multilingualism [link] at the University of Konstanz. He was Associate Editor of Applied Psycholinguistics and Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism and has edited special issues in both journals. He is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Child Language, Applied Psycholinguistics, Second Language Research, Language Acquisition, and Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism.
Негізгі бет The Acquisition of Rhetorical Questions in German-Italian bilingual children - Theo Marinis
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