Hannah Lee

Left dislocation (LD) is described as a feature of informal, spoken discourse. However, most research on LD relies on a collection of examples or on datasets with a restricted mode/formality. To understand LD use across discourse types, we investigate the frequency of LDs in a corpus of 287 participants with four narrative types: informal spoken, formal spoken, informal written, formal written. We consider the speaker characteristics of age (adolescent and adult), gender (female and male), and speaker group (English monolinguals and German, Greek, Russian, and Turkish heritage speakers). We also analyze LD characteristics (e.g., noun phrase, function) based on formality. We found that the spoken mode contained more LDs than the written one and that informal narratives had more LDs than formal ones. However, the effect of formality was modulated by speaker group: only Turkish heritage speakers produced more LDs in the informal than formal narratives, while the other groups showed no evidence of a formality effect. No evidence of age or gender effects was discovered. Lastly, participants used LDs of the same characteristics in both formalities. Thus, the study confirms previous findings on LD use across discourse types and raises the importance of including bilingualism as a speaker characteristic.

Demonstratives and locative adverbs cross-linguistically are typically acquired relatively late, with children initially overusing proximal forms. However, these findings are largely based on research in languages with only two or three demonstratives. It is unclear whether the findings extend to languages with more complex systems. The present study examines data from Inuktitut, a language of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan family, which has 20 demonstrative roots and 10 locative adverb roots representing six spatial distinctions. It uses data from 18 Inuktitut speakers (8–60 years) to investigate the target-like use of demonstratives/locatives and data from eight Inuktitut-speaking children (1–4 years) and their mothers to determine the acquisition trajectories of these structures. Children initially used only the proximal demonstratives/locatives, which aligns with prior research. The proportion of proximal forms out of all others decreased significantly with mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLUm), and by MLUm 2.50, children were using the full demonstrative/locative paradigm in a target-like manner. This differs from prior research and highlights the importance of language diversity in acquisition research.