Professor; Department Chair
he/his
Office Information:
Linguistics Department, University of Michigan
3435 North Quad, 105 S. State St - Ann Arbor MI 48109-1245 (faculty office)
phone: 734.764.0353 department main office
Syntax; Psycholinguistics; Bilingualism; Acquisition; Language Contact; Morphosyntax; Language Variation; Linguistics; Staff; Tenure-track
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park
Current Courses
LING 316-001
Aspects of Meaning
Books, Articles, and Book Chapters
The Minimalist Syntax of Defective Domains: Gerunds and Infinitives.
Acrisio Pires
2006. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 190p.
ABSTRACT:
This book unifies the analysis of certain non-finite domains, focusing on subject licensing, agreement, and Case and control. It proposes a minimalist analysis of English gerunds which allows only a null subject PRO (TP-defective gerunds), a lexical subject (gerunds as complements of perception verbs), or both types of subjects (clausal gerunds). It then analyzes Portuguese infinitives, showing that the morphosyntactic properties of non-inflected and inflected infinitives correlate with distinct treatments of obligatory...
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Minimalist Inquiries into Child and Adult Language Acquisition: Case Studies across Portuguese
Acrisio Pires and Jason Rothman, eds.
Publisher: Mouton de Gruyter
Month of Publication: June
Year of Publication: 2009
ABSTRACT:
The volume is a collection of original articles that present new research on first and second language acquisition from the perspective of current generative linguistics, using a detailed case study of Portuguese as a first, second and third language. The book focuses on studies exploring both empirical/experimental and theoretical aspects of the acquisition of syntax and its interfaces with morphology, with semantics/pragmatics, and language change. The...
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Delay in the acquisition of differential object marking by Spanish monolingual and bilingual teenagers.
Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes, Acrisio Pires and Will Nediger.
International Journal of Bilingualism. 19p. Published online 09/2015.
ABSTRACT:
Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: This study investigated the acquisition of Spanish Differential Object Marking (DOM) by bilingual and monolingual Spanish teenagers, evaluating to which extent their knowledge of DOM can be explained by different theories of acquisition.
Design/Methodology/Approach: Two experiments with bilingual and monolingual Spanish teenagers (ages 10 to 15) were conducted. The experiments included an Elicited Production Completion Task,...
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L2 acquisition of wh-features and syntactic constraints: Evidence for full-access approaches.
Sujeewa Hettiarachchi and Acrisio Pires.
2015. Proceedings of the 6th GALANAlGenerative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America. University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.
ABSTRACT:
This paper presents an experimental study to re-evaluate the Feature Interpretability Hypothesis (see Hawkins & Hattori, 2006; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007; Tsimpli & Mastropavlou, 2007), a theory of learnability in adult Second Language Acquisition (SLA) that has received a substantial amount of attention in SLA research. This paper re-evaluates the predictive and explanatory power of the Interpretability...
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Subject‐to‐subject raising and the syntax of tense in L2 spanish: A full access approach.
Gonzalo Campos‐Dintrans, Acrisio Pires, Jason Rothman
Name of Periodical: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition Volume Number: 17 Issue Number: 1 Year of Publication: 2014 Page Numbers: 38-55
This paper investigates the acquisition of syntax in L2 grammars. We tested adult L2 speakers of Spanish (English L1) on the feature specification of T(ense), which is different in English and Spanish in so-called subject-to-subject raising structures. We present experimental results with the verb parecer “to seem/to appear” in different tenses, with and without experiencers, and with Tense Phrase (TP), verb phrase (vP) and...
See MoreSyntactic change.
Acrisio Pires and David Lightfoot.
2013. Oxford Bibliography in Linguistics. Ed. M. Aronoff. New York: Oxford University Press.
ABSTRACT:
Linguistics began in the 19th century as a historical science, asking how languages came to be the way they are. Almost all of the work dealt with the changing pronunciation of words and “sound change” more broadly. Much attention was paid to explaining why sounds changed the way they did, and that involved developing ideas about directionality. Work on syntax was limited to compiling how different languages expressed clause types differently, notably Vergleichende...
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The syntax‐semantics of bare and definite plural subjects in the L2 Spanish of English natives
Alejandro Cuza, Pedro Guijarro‐Fuentes, Acrisio Pires, Jason Rothman
Name of Periodical: International Journal of Bilingualism Volume Number: 17 Issue Number: 5 Year of Publication: 2013 Page Numbers: 634-52
ABSTRACT:
This study investigates the extent to which advanced native-English L2 learners of Spanish come to acquire restrictions on bare plural preverbal subjects in L2 Spanish (e.g. gatos “cats” vs. definite plurals such as los gatos “the cats”). It tests L2 knowledge of available semantic readings of bare plurals and definite plurals in Spanish, where [+specific] and [+generic] interpretations are syntactically...
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Disentangling sources of incomplete acquisition: An explanation for competence divergence across heritage grammars
Acrisio Pires, Jason Rothman
2009. International Journal of Bilingualism 13.2: 211-39. Special issue Understanding the Nature of Early Bilingualism.
Article included in the “top 20 most cited articles ever published in the International Journal of Bilingualism”, as part of the 20th Anniversary Virtual Special Issue of the journal.
ABSTRACT:
This article brings to light an important variable involved in explaining a type of competence divergence in an instance of bilingual acquisition: heritage speaker (HS) bilingualism. We present...
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How much syntactic reconstruction is possible?
Acrisio Pires and Sarah G. Thomason.
2008. In Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction, ed. G. Ferraresi and M. Goldbach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. p. 27-72.
ABSTRACT:
This paper explores ways to synthesize methods from generative linguistics and historical linguistics to develop explanatory criteria that need to be satisfied by different attempts to carry out syntactic reconstruction. It addresses various questions such as (i) the need to define exactly what it means to reconstruct a language; (ii) characterizing the formal entities that count as the basic elements in the analysis of the empirical...
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EPP in T: More controversial subjects
Acrisio Pires, Samuel D. Epstein, T. Daniel Seely
Syntax: A Journal of Theoretical, Experimental and Interdisciplinary Research 8.1: 65-80.
ABSTRACT:
This paper has two goals. First, it provides a solution to an important and particularly recalcitrant problem regarding non-control infinitival complements of derived nouns, which have been argued to provide independent motivation for the retention of the EPP in T. Second, it presents an unnoted problem regarding the elimination of the EPP in infinitival complements of underived nouns, proposing an analysis for them that need not appeal to the EPP in T. To reach...
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