Search results for " comparative linguistics"
showing 2 items of 2 documents
Exploring the nature of the ‘subject’-preference: Evidence from the online comprehension of simple sentences in Mandarin Chinese
2009
In two visual ERP studies, we investigated whether Mandarin Chinese shows a subject-preference in spite of the controversial status of grammatical relations in this language. We compared ERP responses at the position of the verb and the second NP in object-verb-subject (OVS) and subject-verb-object (SVO) structures. While SVO is the basic word order in Chinese and OV with subject-drop is possible, OVS is strongly dispreferred. At the position of the verb, which disambiguated towards an object or a subject reading of NP1, Experiment 1 revealed an N400 for both subject-initial control conditions in comparison with the critical object-initial condition. Experiment 2 showed that this result was…
La linguistica ottocentesca fra speculazione, storia e tipologia
2020
In the 19th century of the past millennium not only did linguistics become a historical science, it also began to lay the foundations of the theoretical and synchronic investigation that in the later century would gain a pre-eminent position amongst researchers. The directions of research that linguists took in that century are therefore so many and varied that it is definitely difficult to give a detailed account of them in a single paper. Neither is it easy to find and follow a connecting thread that allows coherent, exhaustive treatment of the matter. Things standing as they are, the author starts arbitrarily from the first of the nine lessons that F.M. Müller gave on the science of lang…