Selected Papers by Fred Weerman
Dutch modal verb hoeven ‘need’ is a Negative Polarity Item (NPI) because of its restricted distri... more Dutch modal verb hoeven ‘need’ is a Negative Polarity Item (NPI) because of its restricted distribution to certain negative contexts only. By investigating the distribution of this NPI in child Dutch, the paper explores a solution to a learnability problem raised by the existence of NPIs: how can a child acquire the limited distribution of an NPI in the absence of both direct and indirect negative evidence? Corpus data collected through CHILDES confirm children’s employment of a conservative widening learning strategy to solve the learnability problem. This strategy entails that children start out with the strictest assumption of hoeven, exhibiting a lexical dependency with the negative marker niet ‘not’, and weaken the assumption down to a less rigid reanalysis of this NPI, associated with an abstract negation in its underlying syntactic representation. The initial learning process turns out to be distribution-based only, i.e., without presuming any innate knowledge of NPIs and their restricted occurrences. However, distributional properties alone are not sufficient for children to reanalyze the NPI. Children’s linguistic knowledge of negative indefinites as exhibiting a decomposable negation plays a crucial role in the subsequent reanalyzing process. The reanalysis emerging shortly after age four signifies exactly how adult speakers analyze the NPI, also explaining hoeven’s strength as a polarity item.
Papers by Fred Weerman
Linguistics in the Netherlands 1987, 1987
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2020
This study compares ordinal acquisition in Dutch and English, and shows that both groups of learn... more This study compares ordinal acquisition in Dutch and English, and shows that both groups of learners acquire ordinals via a rule, rather than lexically. Our evidence comes from a Give-X type comprehension task (cf. Wynn 1992, Meyer et al. 2018, under review) which we administered to 70 Dutch L1 learners (2;08–4;11) and 35 learners of American English (3;3–5;3). The data not only offer a replication of the core findings in Meyer et al. (2018), showing that Dutch-speaking children acquire irregular forms (such as derde ‘third’) after they acquire regular synthetic forms (such as vierde ‘fourth’), but also show that (i) children acquire irregular forms after analytic forms (e.g., boot zes ‘boat six’), and (ii) the rule-based pattern that holds for Dutch also holds for English. We argue that children use the ordinal form to acquire its meaning, which implies that ordinals are acquired in a different way than cardinal numerals (which follow a slow, sequential pattern), and also what is t...
In this paper changes in views on language change are discussed by focussing on two specific prob... more In this paper changes in views on language change are discussed by focussing on two specific problems. The first concerns the starting point of change, the second the stage where at first sight there is just as much evidence for the new rule as against it. It is argued how in both cases an interplay between early and late language acquisition might help to understand what is going on. Not only does the debate on access of UG in L2 acquisition turn out to be relevant, but also oppositions between storage and computation, symbolism and connectionism, and principles & parameters versus construction grammar. It is suggested that these different theories are responsible for different aspects of language and might play different roles in early and late acquisition, and thereby in change. 1 Taalverandering is onmogelijk Mij is gebleken dat de titel van dit artikel sommige lezers niet terugbrengt naar de zeventiende eeuw, zoals ik had bedoeld, maar hen verleidt tot een Engelse interpretatie...
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 2021
This paper explores the learnability of English indefinite any, Dutch modal verb hoeven, and Mand... more This paper explores the learnability of English indefinite any, Dutch modal verb hoeven, and Mandarin Chinese (WH-)indefinite/pronoun shenme. These three expressions, belonging to different syntactic categories in different languages, have been referred to as Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in the literature, as they are all restricted to contexts that in some sense count as negative although there are differences in the types of semantic environment that may license them. By investigating the distribution of these three expressions in both child and child-directed speech recorded in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2009), this paper argues that children in their acquisition of these NPIs employ the same conservative widening learning strategy (Berwick and Weinberg 1986; Manzini and Wexler 1987), which prevents them from overgeneration. A two-stage acquisition process is detected for each of the three NPIs. However, distinct learning pathways are found, which we take as evidence indi...
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, 2019
Certain phenomena of interest to linguists mainly occur in low-resource languages, such as contac... more Certain phenomena of interest to linguists mainly occur in low-resource languages, such as contact-induced language change. We show that it is possible to study contact-induced language change computationally in a historical variety of a low-resource language, Early-Modern Frisian, by creating a model using features that were established to be relevant in a closely related language, modern Dutch. This allows us to test two hypotheses on two types of language contact that may have taken place between Frisian and Dutch during this time. Our model shows that Frisian verb cluster word orders are associated with different context features than Dutch verb orders, supporting the 'learned borrowing' hypothesis.
Nederlandse Taalkunde, 2018
In this article we investigate what the Taalportaal has to offer concerning Dutch word formation.... more In this article we investigate what the Taalportaal has to offer concerning Dutch word formation. We note that the Taalportaal is not yet able to provide a large group of users with relevant information in an accessible manner. This is partly due to the fact that the Taalportaal has not yet been made suitable for the Internet, for another part the grammatical information makes ample use of scientific jargon so that it is not readable for the layperson. Finally, on the basis of a few case studies, we check to what extent the Taalportaal can function as a 'scientific grammar' .
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Selected Papers by Fred Weerman
Papers by Fred Weerman
In this work, we model the historical development of verbal cluster order in Germanic languages. While there is an ongoing debate on the syntactic structure of these clusters, we created a simple model of surface patterns in which we view each order as a separate outcome, with a probability distribution over the outcomes. This type of modeling lets us explore the diverging development of verbal clusters in these languages, taking a reconstruction of the state of verbal clusters in Proto-Germanic as a starting point. The models converge from their manually defined, Proto-Germanic initial probability distribution to a state in which probabilities are distributed based on the features of the model. We then compare the resulting model output with actual Germanic language texts to see how well we have modeled the real state of these languages. We show that the interaction of basic probabilistic choices of constructions with shifting input and shifting preference of constructions may be a key to understanding different word orders as observed in the Germanic languages.