@conference {4721, title = {How to investigate stigmatized constructions in French?}, year = {2016}, month = {09/2016}, abstract = {

It is widely known that some constructions like left-dislocation (Les gateaux, je les ai mang\és / The biscuits, I ate them.), though widespread in spoken corpora are marked in standard written French. Acceptability judgment experiments in written context show stigmatization compared to other pragmatically marked constructions (e.g. clefts), even in felicitous contexts. We replicated those experiments using spoken sentences, and a written speeded grammaticality judgment paradigm.\ 
In spoken French we did not find any differences to the previous experiments. Even with the right prosody, left-dislocations are judged significantly less acceptable than clefts in their respective felicitous contexts. The task demands seem to encourage metalinguistic judgments based on sociolinguistic parameters.\ 
Speeded grammaticality judgments (SGJ), however, show equally high acceptability rates for left-dislocations and clefts. Ungrammatical clefts with clitics, on the other hand, are judged strongly unacceptable while pragmatically odd left-dislocations without clitics are judged moderately acceptable. This is coherent with gradient acceptability accounts where clefts with clitics are ungrammatical syntax wise (hard constraint) and left-dislocations without clitics are possible grammatically, but need a salient alternative to be felicitous (soft constraint).\ 
This series of experiments shows that challenging tasks like SGJ provide results closer to the actual usage of stigmatized constructions.

}, author = {Etienne Riou and Barbara Hemforth} } @conference {4722, title = {How to turn Brazilians into Europeans: Global and local exposure effects on co-reference in European (EP) and Brazilian (BP) Portuguese}, year = {2016}, month = {09/2016}, abstract = {

Co-reference is affected by the availability of pronominal forms in the language, but the interaction of language-based (global) exposure and (local) exposure, e.g., during experiments, is still unclear. We addressed this issue in questionnaires with Overt and Null pronouns in Portuguese sentences like The photographer greeted the journalist when he/\Ø finished?, where he/\Ø referred to either ?photographer? (Subject) or ?journalist? (Object).\ 
While EP keeps a symmetrical distribution of Null and Overt forms, BP seems to be losing the Null forms. This would explain why EP shows the traditional ?division of labour? (Null retrieving Subject/ Overt retrieving Object) whereas BP shows no preference for Overt forms. If the processor is sensitive to pronouns? availability, skewing local exposure towards Null forms should elicit in BP the EP pattern. We created two Exposure conditions (50\%/50\%, 75\%/25\%) varying the relative amount of Null and Overt Pronouns. A significant interaction Pronoun:Exposure for BP confirmed our prediction: while Subject and Object were equally selected as the antecedent of the Overt pronoun in the 50/50 condition, choices for Subject and Object in the 75/25 condition were 30\% and 70\%, approaching the EP pattern. Our results indicate adaptation to the local statistical environment.

}, author = {Eunice Fernandes and Paula Luegi and Eduardo Correa Soares and Israel de la Fuente and Barbara Hemforth} } @conference {4459, title = {Heaviness in a Verb-final Language: Evidence from Persian}, year = {2013}, month = {09/2013}, address = {Marseille}, doi = {10.13140/RG.2.1.2450.1924}, author = {Pegah Faghiri and Samvelian, Pollet and Barbara Hemforth} }