About Marta

Velnic Portrait

 

I am a researcher affiliated with NTNU-Norwegian University of Science and Technology. I am currently collaborating on the ADIM project in which I am responsible for a work package that investigates the acquisition of genericity in second and third language. The target languages are English as the L2 and Norwegian as the L3, we mainly focus on native speakers of Polish.

Genericity is a basic meaning that all languages have to express. Languages of the world use various means of expressing this and other, closely related, meanings. Generic interpretations are determined by one or more covert elements, which are never realised by an unambiguous over morpho-syntactic form. Very likely these mismatches translated into processing issues as well. experimental studies to date have been done mainly on English and Romance languages, thus adding Norwegian and Polish would be beneficial for theory.

ADIM is a project founded by the National Science Centre in Poland, it is a collaborative project between Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, UiT- the Arctic University of Norway, and NTNU. It currently employs 6 researchers working on 4 different aspects of multilingualism.

Before joining ADIM I was already at NTNU for my  Postdoctoral project. Here, I am part of the AcqVA group. My postdoctoral project consists of researching Cross-Linguistic Influence in possessive structures in Norwegian-Italian bilingual populations. With my Postdoctoral project on CLI, I conducted research on Bilingualism by investigating CLI as  the main aim of the project. The project investigated CLI in possessive structures on Norwegian-Italian bilingual children. This project is currently on hold due to my duties with ADIM.

I am also keeping an active collaboration with UiT- The  Arctic University of Norway where I completed my doctoral degree by working on a project investigating dative alternation and object shift in Norwegian in collaboration with  Merete Anderssen

I have a BA in Anthropology and an MA in Linguistic Science, both from Alma Mater Studiorum the University of Bologna (Italy), and I have completed my doctorate at UiT- The Arctic University of Norway. You can download my full CV here.

In my PhD project “ Ditransitive structures in Croatian adult and child language: the role of animacy and givenness” I investigated how Croatian children acquire the possible word orders of dative alternation (Direct Object-Indirect Object/Indirect Object-Direct Object). Since Croatian has relatively free word order, another goal of this project was to understand what role givenness plays in structuring the information, how children use the various forms since all of them are possible but not equally appropriate in every context, and how this influences the choice of the form of the two objects (NP, Pronoun, or Clitic). The dissertation was article-based and it spurted four papers, all of which are available in the Publications section.

 

Other than a Linguist, I am a mum of a lovely eight-year-old boy and a very decisive and indipendent four-year old girl; I enjoy baking, playing board games, and perhaps even creating languages.