Project 5

Representation and acquisition of agreement relations in a usage-based framework

This project investigates native speakers’ individual knowledge of (adjectival) NP agreement relations in German and attempts to pinpoint various possible representations throughout different stages of development, ranging from the child to teenage as well as (more and less proficient) adult speakers. Starting from a ‘case of doubt’ in the German language system, the parallel and alternating inflection on double adjective NPs in dative case (cf. Moulin, 2002; Nübling, 2011), the analysis is extended to a general discussion of adjectival agreement within NP-constructions. To approach this issue, we resort to cross-sectional studies and corpus data to test speakers with regard to the interaction of some internal and external factors that may influence proficiency (e.g., age, education, print exposure).

Our baseline is the idea that individual speakers differ regarding their grammatical knowledge. There is good reason to believe that individual speakers of a language have individual mental representations of their respective language rather than sharing one innate system with other speakers of the same language. After all, speakers have individual predispositions for – and experiences with language. Dąbrowska (2008) for example shows that there is individual variation in participants’ mental representations when it comes to the distribution of the Polish dative inflection marker and argues for differently fine-grained representations that people use when applying the genitive to nonce words. Further, Dąbrowska et al. (2023) in a study on semi- and late-literates conclude that written representations facilitate the acquisition of certain aspects of grammar in Spanish speaking participants.

We aim to provide a better understanding of German adjectival agreement relations within the theory of construction grammar. Here, we want to reconsider the traditional, hierarchical and distributional analysis of agreement (controller-target systems) and attempt to offer an analysis that understands the acquisition of agreement relations from a multi-layered perspective. On the experimental and psycholinguistic level, our aim is to identify individual mental representations of agreement from a usage-based perspective and to identify potential grey areas in these mental representations. These goals go hand in hand with the growing research on individual differences and argue for a gradual acquisition of agreement phenomena.

Summing up, this project works on the following Research Questions:

  1. How does grammatical knowledge of agreement relations develop across different developmental stages and what role do intra- and extra-linguistic variables play in shaping this knowledge?
  2. To what extent do the mental representations of individuals differ among native speakers of German and how can these individual representations be abstracted to contribute to a comprehensive description of the German language system?
  3. How can the acquisition of agreement relations be reexamined within the framework of construction grammar and is there empirical evidence that supports the notion of agreement acquisition as a gradual, usage-based process?

 

References:

Dąbrowska, E. (2008). The effects of frequency and neighbourhood density on adult speakers’ productivity with Polish case inflections: An empirical test of usage-based approaches to morphology. Journal of Memory and Language, 58(4), 931–951. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2007.11.005

Dąbrowska, E., Pascual, E., Macías-Gómez-Estern, B., & Llompart, M. (2023). Literacy-related differences in morphological knowledge: A nonce-word study. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1136337. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1136337

Moulin, C. (2002). Varianz innerhalb der Nominalgruppenflexion. Ausnahmen zur sogenannten Parallelflexion der Adjektive im Neuhochdeutschen. Germanistische Mitteilungen, 52, 73–97.

Nübling, D. (2011). Unter großem persönlichem oder persönlichen Einsatz? Der sprachliche Zweifelsfall adjektivischer Parallel- vs. Wechselflexion als Beispiel für aktuellen grammatischen Wandel. In K.-M. Köpcke & A. Ziegler (Eds.), Grammatik—Lehren, Lernen, Verstehen: Zugänge zur Grammatik des Gegenwartsdeutschen. De Gruyter.

 

This project is done by Hendrik Kligge and is supervised by Prof. Dr. Ewa Dabrowska and Prof. Dr. Thorsten Piske.