This article focuses on Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel This Mournable Body (2018), which completes her trilogy on Tambudzai Sigauke’s life story in relation to the neoliberal political order in contemporary Zimbabwe. The country has been recently referred to as cultivating ultra-neoliberal policies, and, in such a framework, state repression becomes replaced by state negligence towards citizens’ ...

This study reports on grammatical gender assignment in elicited production data from heritage speakers of Turkish, Papiamento, and Spanish in the Netherlands. We selectively target the nominal domain, consisting of a determiner, a noun, and an adjective. Previous studies have demonstrated gender to be vulnerable in bilingual acquisition (e.g., Gathercole & Thomas 2005; Mitrofanova et al. 2018). The ...

This study investigates the choice of genitive forms (the woman’s book vs. the book of the woman) in the English of Japanese-English bilingual returnees (i.e., children who returned from a second language dominant environment to their first language environment). The specific aim was to examine whether change in language dominance/exposure influences choice of genitive form in the bilingual children; ...

This study investigates the role of lexical vs structural similarity in L3 acquisition. We designed a mini-artificial language learning task where the novel L3 was lexically based on Norwegian but included a property that was present in Russian and Greek yet absent in Norwegian (grammatical case). The participants were Norwegian-Russian and Norwegian-Greek bilinguals as well as a group of Norwegian ...

This article discusses the acquisition of gender in Russian, focusing on some exceptional subclasses of nouns that display a mismatch between semantics and morphology. Experimental results from twenty-five Russian-speaking monolinguals (age 2;6–4;0) are presented and, within a cue-based approach to language acquisition, we argue that children rely on certain morphosyntactic micro-cues in the course ...

A number of European languages have undergone a change from object-verb to verb-object order. We focus on the change in English and Icelandic, showing that while the structural change was the same, it took place at different times and different ways in the two languages, triggered by different E-language changes. As seen from the English viewpoint, low-level facts of inflection morphology may express ...

Intelligent Language Tutoring Systems typically attempt to automatically diagnose learner errors in order to provide individualized feedback. One common approach is the use of mal-rules to extend normative grammars by licensing specific types of learner errors. In finite-state morphologies, mal-rules can be implemented as two-level rules or replace rules. However, unlike the phonological rules of ...

This article offers a diachronic analysis of the concept of “cyclic” time in Russian, more specifically of temporal adverbials such as <i>utrom</i> ‘in the morning’ and <i>vesnoj</i> ‘in the spring’ that refer to the diurnal and annual temporal cycles in nature. It is argued that evidence from diachrony bears on important theoretical questions: Is the sensitivity to “cyclic” time in language due to ...