An L2 perspective on possessives: Contrasts and their possible consequences

Fabricius‐Hansen, Cathrine; Helland, Hans Petter; Pitz, Anneliese

doi:10.5617/osla.4762

Cited by 8 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 21 publications

(37 reference statements)

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“…This is especially true when looking at closely related languages like German and Norwegian that differ considerably in the area of reflexive/possessive pronouns. This paper is meant as the first step in creating a baseline for further research, in which the results from native speakers of a number of languages will form the grounds for experimental studies focused on second language acquisition (see Fabricius-Hansen et al 2017). In addition to Czech, other languages are of great interest, belonging to three different typological groups -Germanic, Slavic and Romance.…”

Section: On the Interpretation Of Possessives In Czech: An Experimental Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The present study is part of a larger cross-linguistic project on possessives presented by Fabricius-Hansen et al (2017), and it leans on a comprehension experiment conducted by Pitz et al (2017). In the present paper, the Czech language is added to this cross-linguistic project in order to broaden its linguistic diversity.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Since the focus of this paper is on the empirical validation of the use of possessives in Czech, a thorough theoretical discussion outside Czech literature will be kept to the minimum. An overview of the theoretical studies on reflexivity mainly within an Anglo-American context can be found in Fabricius-Hansen et al (2017). [3] The term speaker/speakers is used in the present article as a general term for language user (speaker, listener, reader, interpreter, etc.).…”

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confidence: 99%

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On the interpretation of possessives in Czech: An experimental approach

Mertins¹

2021

OSLa

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This paper presents first findings from an offline study of Czech native speakers’ use and interpretation of reflexive and non-reflexive possessive pronouns. The study is part of a larger possessive project outlined by Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017), leaning on the comprehension experiment presented in Pitz et al. (2017). The study encompasses questionnaire data collected from 259 informants who were tested under four different conditions on two competing pronouns: the reflexive possessive (svůj) and the 3rd person non-reflexive possessive (jeho). The results revealed that Czech native speakers show a strong uncertainty when interpreting constructions with a cataphoric non-reflexive possessive. This shows that even for native speakers, the establishment of the anaphoric and cataphoric relations under certain syntactic conditions is a challenging and highly complex task. With these results, several hypotheses are formulated in various target-source-language pairs concerning the processing of reflexive and non-reflexive possessives in L2.

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Section: On the Interpretation Of Possessives In Czech: An Experimental Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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On the interpretation of possessives in Czech: An experimental approach

Mertins¹

2021

OSLa

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“…Helland 2017 for a study on French learners of Norwegian). One hypothesis proposed to explain this is that the 'double' system (like the Scandinavian languages and Polish) is extremely complex: not only are there two forms, but correct choice involves a number of morphological, syntactic and semantic factors (for an overview, see Fabricius-Hansen et al 2017).…”

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confidence: 99%

Processing possessives in simultaneous interpreting from English to Polish

Stachowiak-Szymczak¹,

Behrens²

2021

OSLa

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The present paper reports on an experiment in which the use of possessives is investigated in an interpreting task from English to Polish. The English possessive determiner system is neutral with respect to the syntactic position of the antecedent possessor, while Polish distinguishes lexically between locally bound – i.e. reflexive – and non-reflexive possessive modifiers. The interpreter therefore has to ‘compute’ mentally the syntactic position of the antecedent possessor in order to make the correct choice in Polish as the target language. The study shows that this is cognitively a very demanding task in simultaneous interpreting, as many errors as well as self-corrections occur. The study furthermore shows that interpreters adapt their language to their audience, and adequate omissions, as well as correct form of the possessive occur more often when they have a group of engineers in mind than when they interpret for language specialists. We understand this to mean that the cognitive complexity of solving the cross-linguistic asymmetry in the possessive system causes more errors when the interpreter stays closer to the source text in speaking to language specialists.

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“…Leaving differences of the inflectional systems aside, it is with respect to the nature of the possessive items and the conditions determining their use that the Norwegian and the German system of possessives differ most conspicuously (Fabricius-Hansen et al 2017). Thus, Norwegian has a specific reflexive possessive si* which, roughly speaking, must be used when the possessive is locally bound, i.e.…”

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Lexical interference in non-native resolution of possessives?

Fabricius‐Hansen¹,

Pitz²,

Torgersen³

2021

OSLa

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Research on non-native pronoun resolution has predominantly been concerned with (i) ‘ordinary’ 3rd person pronouns/anaphors like En. "he", "she", "they" or "himself", "herself", "themselves", (ii) language pairs involving English as the native (L1) or the foreign (L2) language, and (iii) the role that binding constraints and syntactic structure in general play in L2 versus L1 processing. The present paper – a follow-up study to Pitz et al. (2017) – deviates from this trend in all three respects: We investigate how L1-Norwegian learners of L2-German interpret the two German possessive pronouns/determiners "sein" (≈ his) and "ihr" (≈ her or their), arguing that lexical divergence between the possessive systems, and in particular the formal similarity between binding-neutral L2-German "sein" and the L1-Norwegian reflexive possessive "sin", may enhance or interfere with L2 comprehension, depending on the structural conditions. In Section 2 we briefly present the two possessive systems. Section 3 summarizes relevant research on pronoun resolution, with a special view to possessives. Sections 4–6 present a pilot study on L1-Norwegian learners’ grammaticality judgments of "sein" and "ihr" in simple sentences (Sect. 5) and a forced-choice resolution experiment involving a group of L1-Norwegian learners with a background two or three years’ teaching of L2-German at high-school level and a control group of native speakers of German (Sect. 6). The final Section 7 provides a summary and concluding discussion of our findings.

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An L2 perspective on possessives: Contrasts and their possible consequences

Cited by 8 publications

References 21 publications

On the interpretation of possessives in Czech: An experimental approach

On the interpretation of possessives in Czech: An experimental approach

Processing possessives in simultaneous interpreting from English to Polish

Lexical interference in non-native resolution of possessives?

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