Title Participants Abstract "The use of verb morphology of advanced L2 learners and native speakers of French" "Nancy Kemps" "Research on L2 acquisition has proposed a more or less fixed 'natural order' or route of acquisition of various language elements (cf. Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982; Ellis 1995; Perdue 1993). These acquisitional routes (or 'developmental paths') have been organised in successive stages. Each stage can be seen as constituting a grammatical 'profile' of a learner at a given moment in his development (Clahsen 1984; Pienemann 1998). A shortcoming of many of these proposals is that (a) they are mainly based on the analysis of a small number of target languages (esp. English and German) and (b) they focus on the early phases of L2 acquisition so that only the initial stages are spelled out in sufficient linguistic detail. In an attempt to redress these imbalances, Bartning and Schlyter (2004) have presented a comprehensive overview of the development of French as a second or foreign language (FFL), a hitherto underspecified target language, on the basis of the linguistic analysis of the spoken French interlanguage of Swedish adult learners. Based on a number of characteristic syntactic and grammatical features, Bartning and Schlyter propose an acquisitional route consisting of six developmental stages or levels ranging from the very onset of acquisition to near-native like production. A subsequent goal of their study is to contribute to a more precise evaluation of the level of linguistic development of a given learner at a given moment in the acquisitional process. Particularly interesting to Bartning and Schlyter's approach is that it treats in detail the advanced learner, often ignored in previous studies (e.g. Klein et Perdue 1997). Bartning and Schlyter distinguish three advanced substages: a 'lower', 'middle' and 'upper' advanced variety stage. Progress at the level of these stages is characterised (a) by 'un éventail plus large de structures d'énoncés' and (b) by 'la grammaticalisation de la morphologie flexionnelle qui devient fonctionnelle mais avec des zones 'fragiles' de développement' (Bartning & Schlyter 2004 : 296). Bartning and Schlyter's work raises a number of important questions: (a) to which extent is the acquisitional route for French-L2 observed for Swedish adults valid for learners with a different L1? (b) to which extent is the subdivision of the advanced stage into three substages legitimate? and (c) can the three substages be further refined? The aim of the study reported in this article is to address these three questions." "An experimental approach to iconicity in Dutch strong and weak verb morphology" "Isabeau De Smet, Laura Rosseel" "In Dutch, some verbs can vary in their preterite and past participle form. These verbs can either take the strong inflection (using ablaut, e.g. schuilen-school-gescholen ‘hide-hid-hidden’) or the weak inflection (adding a dental suffix, e.g. schuilen-schuilde-geschuild ‘hide-hid-hidden’). In a diachronic corpus study, De Smet & Van de Velde (2020) show that this variation can be exapted to express aspect in an iconic manner. Their results indicate that weak preterites are used more often in durative contexts, while the shorter strong variants are used more often in punctual contexts. For the past participles, this pattern is reversed: the longer strong variants are used more often in durative contexts, while the shorter weak variants are used more often in punctual contexts. In this paper, we seek experimental validation of these results. Furthermore, we also distinguish between preterite singulars and preterite plurals, as we expect the iconicity effect to be less obvious for the latter, given that the difference in length between the strong and weak preterite plural is negligible (e.g. schuilden vs. scholen). Participants were presented with a forced choice task where they had to choose between weak or strong preterites and past participles of nonce verbs in sentences suggesting either a durative or a punctual context. Though no general effect of aspect on verb inflection was found, results indicate a trend for a particular group of verbs that supports the corpus results from De Smet & Van de Velde (2020). Furthermore, the durative-punctual distinction was also found to be portrayed in yet another iconic manner: verb forms with vowels that are sound symbolically associated with slow long movements were used more often in durative contexts, while verb forms with vowels that are associated with quick, short movements were used more often in punctual contexts." "Grammatical Error Diagnosis in Fluid Construction Grammar: A Case Study in L2 Spanish Verb Morphology" "Katrien Beuls" "Construction grammar (CG) has been proposed as an adequate grammatical formalism for building intelligent language tutoring systems because it is highly compatible with the learning strategies observed in Second Language Learning. Unfortunately, the lack of computational CG implementations has made it impossible in the past to corroborate these proposals with actual language tutoring prototypes. However, recent advances in Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) now offer exciting new ways of operationalizing robust and open-ended language processing within a construction grammar approach. This paper demonstrates its adequacy for CALL applications through a case study on error diagnosis in the domain of Spanish tense, aspect and modal morphology. The performance of the FCG tutor is tested on the Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpus (SPLOCC 2). This first FCG Spanish error diagnostic prototype achieves an accuracy of 70% on a total of 500 conjugation errors in four oral tasks carried out by 20 low intermediate and 20 advanced English learners of Spanish. Follow- up experiments will test this prototype on larger learner corpora of differing proficiency levels." "Inflectional patterns as constructions: Spanish verb morphology in Fluid Construction Grammar" "Although often a painful and prolonged process, conjugating verbs correctly is essential when you try to master a foreign language. Verbs that exhibit an irregular conjugation paradigm, however, are often the verbs that occur most frequently in a language. The nature of inflectional morphemes and the mechanism for conjugating verbs have been the topic of debate for 25 years now. This has lead to many different accounts of the problem, both in the field of descriptive linguistics as well as in a range of modeling approaches. The field of Construction Grammar has recently witnessed the theoretical work on Construction Morphology by Geert Booij (2010), but there has been no computational implementation suggested that could test the theory on a large scale. Using the framework of Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG), I investigate the grammar and morphological constructions that are needed to automatically conjugate the full paradigms of the 600 most frequently used verbs in Spanish. This paper reports a fully operational rule-based implementation of such a grammar and goes into the details of the constructions that support it. The results also show that morphological constructions are exemplary constructions since they combine two (or more) units (a stem and a suffix(es)) into a single meaningful unit (a conjugated verb form) that can be picked up by other discourse elements. Extensions towards embedding the conjugation constructions into a bigger grammar or automatically learning new morphological constructions remain the focus of future work." "The Predictive Processing of Number Information in Subregular Verb Morphology in a First and Second Language." "Eva Marie Koch, Bram Bulté, Alex Housen, Aline Godfroid" "We investigated the predictive processing of grammatical number information through stem-vowel alternations in German strong verbs by adult first language (L1) speakers and Dutch-speaking advanced second language (L2) learners of German, and the influence of working memory and awareness (i.e., whether participants consciously registered the predictive cue) thereon. While changed stem vowels indicate a singular referent (e.g., /ε/ in fällt3SG, “falls”), unchanged vowels indicate plural (e.g., /a/ in fallt2PL, “fall”). This target structure presents a challenge for L2 learners of German due to its subregularity and low salience. With their eye movements being tracked, participants matched German auditory sentences (VSO order) with one of two pictures, displaying identical action scenes but varying in agent number. The number cue provided by the strong verbs allowed participants to predict whether the upcoming subject would be singular or plural. The analyses revealed significant prediction, measured as predictive eye movements toward the target picture and faster button-press responses. Prediction in the L2 group was weaker than in the L1 group and present in the eye movement data only. Higher working memory scores were linked to faster predictive presses. Approximately half of the participants had become aware of the predictive cue, and being aware facilitated prediction to a limited extent." "The impact of lexical and syntactic complexity on the acquisition of verb morphology: subject-verb agreement in French as a second language" "Marie-Eve Michot" "Several studies state that subject-verb agreement represents an important area of variation in second language (SL) learners’ interlanguage and that its gradual development is very slow, particularly in French as a second language (FSL) (i.a. Nadasi 2001 ; Bartning & Schlyter 2004 ; Howard 2006). Even advanced FSL learners use short basic forms, i.e. verb forms devoid of 3rd person plural marking, but used with a plural subject (for example ils *prend). The present study examines the impact of syntactic and lexical complexity on the development of subject-verb agreement in FSL. Inspired by hypotheses put forward by Bartning (1998) and Howard (2013), we will determine in the first part of the study whether syntactic complexity indeed hinders subject-verb agreement and thus if subordinate clauses contain more frequently short basic forms than independent clauses do. The second part of the study will assess the possible impact of lexical complexity on subject-verb agreement in FSL. The lexical richness of the learners’ verbal system will be measured to that end and will be linked with their acquisition of subject-verb agreement." "Zero morphology and change-of-state verbs" "Pavel Caha, Karen De Clercq, Guido Vanden Wyngaerd" "This paper discusses a theory of conversion (zero derivation) in terms of phrasal spellout. In this approach, there are no zero morphemes. Instead, the 'silent' meaning components are pronounced cumulatively within overt morphemes. As an empirical case, we discuss adjective/verb ambiguity as in narrow. As verbs, these roots have both an inchoative and a causative sense. Following Ramchand (2008), we assume that such deadjectival causatives contain three parts: the adjective denoting a state, a change-of-state component proc, and a causative component init. Adopting a Nanosyntax approach, we propose that verbs like narrow spell out a complex node with all these abstract heads. The ambiguity between the inchoative, causative and adjective falls out as a consequence of the Superset Principle (Starke 2009), which states that a lexical entry can spell out any subtree it contains. Since both the inchoative sense and the adjective sense correspond to proper parts of the causative one, we derive these readings without the need to postulate zeroes. We show how these assumptions allow us to capture a broad range of patterns, focussing mainly on English and Czech." "Aspectual Morphology of Russian Verbs in Fluid Construction Grammar." "Kateryna Gerasymova, Remi Van Trijp" "Aspect is undoubtedly the most capricious grammatical cate- gory of the Russian language. It has often been asserted as a mystery accessible only to native speakers, leaving all the others lost in its apparently infinite clutter. Recent work in cognitive linguistics has tried to bring order to the seeming chaos of the Russian aspectual system. But these approaches have not been operationalized so far. This paper demonstrates how the aspectual derivation of Russian verbs can be handled successfully with Fluid Constructional Grammar, a computa- tional formalism recently developed for the representation and processing of constructions." "Zero morphology and change-of-state verbs" "Guido Vanden Wyngaerd" "Understanding slope morphology and processes on permafrost-affected mountain slopes based on very high resolution topographic surveys" "Hanne Hendrickx, Reynald Delaloye, Jan Nyssen, Amaury Frankl"