Search

Entered into Dan Voiculescu's chronological catalogue among the last finalized titles (July, 2009), Fantasia e Fuga sulle pedale per organo requires a simultaneous analytical reading, both from the perspective of the Baroque and modernity. The first piece of the diptych represents an echo that Dan Voiculescu seems to produce centuries later of the Prelude and Fugue in G Minor, for Organ, BWV 542, by Bach. The writing technique of this first section of the diptych evokes, through its aspect of noted improvisation, pieces of 17th-18th century organ literature, assimilated to the category stylus fantasticus. Fuga sulle pedale leads the analyst to discover a hybrid between the canon of two voices and the pedal fugue, which allows us to pinpoint certain connections with the language of Paul Hindemith's fugues from Ludus Tonalis, or with the airy writing style of the German composer's Three Organ Sonatas. The stylistic bivalence of the entire piece is also reflected in the type of grammars used in modelling this novel opus; while the author applies a traditional grammar for the form shaping, by designing the discourse according to an early Baroque formula, he resorts to a generative grammar, typical for 20th century music, for the elaboration of the content. The two levels of the text - the Baroque and the modern - overlap in a harmonious fusion and prove that the author rarely departs from an adherence to strict contrapuntal principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies testing the knowledge of syntactic properties have resulted in two potentially contrasting proposals in relation to third language acquisition (TLA); the Cumulative Enhancement Model (Flynn et al., 2004), which proposes that previously learned languages will positively affect the acquisition of a third language (L3); and the ‘second language (L2) status factor’ hypothesis (Bardel and Falk, 2007), which proposes that the primacy of the L2 can block the potential positive effects that may be transferable from the first language (L1). This article attempts to extend these hypotheses to the domain of morphosyntax, in relation to the TLA of the properties of grammatical number and gender concord marking on German attributive adjectives; these properties not present in the L1 of Japanese, or the L2 of English. Two further factors are of interest in the current study; first, the performance of the learners according to their L3 and their L2 proficiency levels, a variable not discussed in the above-mentioned studies; and, second, the role that the type of task has on the performance of these learners. Three groups of Japanese native speakers (matched for proficiency within each German group), but with differing English proficiencies, completed a carefully balanced gap-filling task, together with two oral elicitation tasks in the form of games; both of these elicited tokens of adjectival inflection. Initial results offer partial support for weaker versions of the two hypotheses mentioned above. However, neither of the L3 models tested can fully account for the results obtained, which are more consistent with a feature-based account of the organization of grammar in the domain of morphosyntax, such as that of Distributed Morphology (DM) (Halle and Marantz, 1993). DM is a model for language acquisition which — coupled with a view that the Subset Principle proposed by this account is not observed by non-primary language learners — has recently been proposed to explain the optionality observed in L2 learners’ production (Hawkins et al., 2006). The data presented here suggest that it could be extended to L3 learners’ production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we present an experiment in which we examined the time course of typing German compounds. The compounds varied according to three criteria: (1) whole word frequency (high vs. low), (2) head frequency (high vs. low) and (3) semantic transparency (transparent vs. opaque). In this experiment, we recorded the interkey intervals (IKIs) and concentrated on the IKI measurements found at the boundary of the two immediate constituents in compounds. We refer to this boundary type as an SM-boundary because (S)yllable and (M)orpheme boundaries coincide at this word position. As we found effects of lexical frequency for SM-IKIs in a series of previous studies, we argue that possible differences in SM-IKIs found for compounds of different frequency classes and of different degrees of semantic transparency can give an insight into the processes involved in the written production of German compounds: whole word procedures and/or compositional procedures. Our findings show that SM-IKIs are affected by compound frequency, head frequency and semantic transparency. We therefore argue that both whole word procedures and compositional procedures are involved in the written production of German compounds. These findings are in line with those versions of dual-route models which postulate that the two routes run in parallel and interact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]