ORCID Profile
0000-0003-3181-1917
Current Organisations
Autonomous University of Barcelona
,
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
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Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 13-10-2017
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 20-02-2017
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 12-2020
Abstract: Variation involving a switch between pre- and post-verbal placement of pronominal object clitics in a single syntactic environment within a language is unexpected. The rationale why this would not be expected is clear: Languages pattern as either proclitic or enclitic with respect to object clitic placement, possibly allowing one or the other option across different syntactic environments. We provide an overview of our research from data collected in Cyprus, related to the development and use of pronominal object clitics for child populations and adult speakers that are bilectal in Cypriot and Standard Modern Greek. While it has been shown that the tested bilectal populations receive exposure to more than one distinct grammar, including mixed grammars with optional choices for clitic placement, an important question remains unaddressed: Is variation really “free” across all speakers or are there universally reliable predictors (such as gender, age, or level of education) that mediate a consistent use of either the standard or the dialect? Combining insights from targeted elicitation tasks administered to different groups, a corpus of spontaneous speech, and an extensive literature review, we show the weakness of such purported predictors and support a claim of free variation.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 2016
Abstract: The cognitive benefits of bilingualism have an impact on the processing mechanisms that are active during the acquisition process in a way that results in language variation. Within bilingual populations, the notion of “language proximity” is also of key importance for deriving variation. Certain sociolinguistic factors can invest the process of language development and its outcome with an additional layer of complexity that results from the emergence of mesolectal varieties which blur the boundaries of grammatical variants. We report data on the acquisition and development of object clitic placement in the two varieties of Greek spoken in Cyprus, and on performance in executive control tasks by monolingual, bilectal, and bi-/multilingual children. Comparing findings across experiments, the present study identifies the different factors that define “bilectalism” within the greater context of multilingualism, merging sociolinguistic and neurocognitive insights about language variation and how they inform development in diglossic contexts that involve closely related varieties—a study in comparative linguality.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-11-2017
No related grants have been discovered for Evelina Leivada.