Linguistische Berichte Heft 246

Relative clauses and more generally clauses modifying nouns have been at the center of a long debate in the last forty years, opposing largely diverging syntactic analyses, comparing relevant data and discussing perspectives. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this debate by adding novel experimental data on how these structures are processed in an online reading task. Two eye-tracking experiments were designed to investigate the temporal structural ambiguity that can arise between object relative clauses (object RCs; 'the claim that linguists made is a mistake)' and so-called complement clauses of a noun (CCs; 'the claim that linguists made a mistake ...') in Italian and English. Although the pattern is complex, the results of both experiments suggest that a reanalysis effect is associated with CCs, showing an initial preference for the object RC structural interpretation. The implications of our results are discussed in relation to competing syntactic analyses for CCs ad RCs.

This paper explores speakers' notions of the situational appropriacy of linguistic variants. We conducted a web-based survey in which we collected ratings of the appropriacy of variants of linguistic variables in spoken German. A range of quantitative methods (cluster analysis, factor analysis and various forms of visualization techniques) is applied in order to analyze metalinguistic awareness and the differences in the evaluation of written vs. spoken stimuli. First, our data show that speakers' ratings of the appropriacy of linguistic variants vary reliably with two rough clusters representing formal and informal speech situations and genres. The findings confirm that speakers adhere to a notion of spoken standard German which takes genre and register-related variation into account. Secondly, our analysis reveals a written language bias: metalinguistic awareness is strongly influenced by the physical mode of the presentation of linguistic items (spoken vs. written).

In recent research on cross-linguistic influence in German-Romance language combinations, it has been argued that there is temporary influence from the less complex language on the more complex one within a bilingual individual. This influence can be of a positive or a negative sort. First evidence for negative influence in the domain of case acquisition comes from longitudinal studies in Schmitz (2006). The present study adds a cross-sectional investigation of monolingual German (n=18) and bilingual German-Italian (n=14) children (4 and 7 years of age) with respect to accusative and dative case marking in German. Results confirm former findings by detecting a statistically significant delay in the acquisition of dative case marking in bilingual children at age 4. Contrary to that, bilingual children at age 7 do not show differences to monolingual acquisition of dative case. The delayed acquisition found in 4-year old bilinguals therefore can be claimed as cross-linguistic influence of a temporary nature only.