Researcher/Posdoctoral Fellow - "Across-Domain Investigations in Multilingualism"

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One 2-year position as Researcher/Postdoctoral Fellow in Multilingualism is available in the Department of Language and Literature at NTNU The Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The position is affiliated with the project ADIM (Across-Domain Investigations in Multilingualism), a Polish-Norwegian project financed by EEA Norway grants. ADIM is a collaborative project between three institutions, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (AMU), UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, and NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. In addition to the researcher/postdoctoral fellow at NTNU, there will be a corresponding position at UiT and two in Poznan. The project must be completed by April 30, 2024.

The position will also be part of the AcqVA research group , which is a joint research group between NTNU and UiT The Arctic University of Norway (Tromsø). The NTNU part of AcqVA includes 8 permanent members of staff, 3 adjunct professors, 3 postdocs, and 7 PhD candidates. The group investigates variation, acquisition, and attrition from a formal grammar perspective, and includes faculty from multiple sections: English, French, German, and Nordic.

This package addresses genericity, which interacts in interesting ways with definiteness and specificity and their morphosyntactic expressions across languages. Genericity is a basic meaning that all languages have to express. When using a generic noun phrase, e.g. Tigers eat meat, the speaker wants to express a general property characteristic of all animals falling into the genus tiger, namely, that they are carnivores. Languages of the world use various means of expressing this and other, closely related, meanings. Sometimes, one language would express genericity with a certain form while in another language the equivalent form would not convey a generic meaning.  An example is provided by Spanish and English: the Spanish definite plural los tigres is used to refer generically, while in English the tigers describes some specific animals, but not all tigers in the world. Such form–meaning mismatches create enormous difficulties for language learners. Generic interpretations are determined by one or more covert elements (a semantic morpheme GEN has been proposed), which are never realized by an unambiguous overt morpho-syntactic form. Paradigms contain 3–4 forms expressing different shades of genericity, unlike any other semantic property. Learners acquiring a second or a third language are faced with many-to-many acquisition tasks prompting difficult paradigm reshuffles. Very likely these mismatches translate into processing issues as well, but they have not been investigated so far. In addition, the bulk of experimental studies to date have been done on English and a handful of Romance languages, so adding Norwegian and Polish would be beneficial for theory development. In sum, within the broad linguistic area of genericity, variation within a language and cross-linguistic variation need to be addressed consistently.

In our research to date, we have created a genericity-testing questionnaire and translated it into ten languages. Polish can easily be added. Here are our cross-linguistic findings so far: In expressing generic meanings (e.g., Tigers eat meat), languages fall largely into three groups: those without articles (Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Polish); Romance type (Spanish, French, Italian, Bulgarian) and Germanic type (Norwegian, Swedish, German). English is exceptional in that it has a larger paradigm, and there are interesting form-meaning mismatches between Norwegian and English. We will explore these differences in our research designs and relate them to knowledge of definiteness and specificity.

For example, one interesting area of mismatched expression is for sentences such as Life is beautiful. While Norwegian does have definite and indefinite articles in general, English patterns with the article-less Polish, while Norwegian is different. On the other hand, in the marking of definiteness (e.g., Susan thought that her dog was lazy. The dog slept a lot.), Norwegian and English pattern together, to the exclusion of Polish. Such a configuration of properties will allow us to test cross-linguistic influence (CLI) consistently, avoiding language dominance issues. Processing research designs should follow and expand on acceptability tasks, in order to triangulate knowledge of meaning, knowledge of expression, and processing.

We will use acceptability judgment tasks, which have been the leading methodology in examining these semantic properties. We will also create Truth Value Judgment Tasks, incorporating all the meanings that are expressed in the same way, and those that are expressed differently, in the three languages under consideration. Finally, we will use the eye tracking while reading method, creating stories with acceptable or unacceptable sentences. Eye tracking has not been used before in the L3A of semantics.