CiteULike: briordan's syntactic-variation

Grammaticality judgments in children: The role of age, working memory and phonological ability

Janet Mcdonald — 2008-05-04T17:34:27-00:00

Journal of Child Language, Vol. 35, No. 02. (2008), pp. 247-268.

This paper examines the role of age, working memory span and phonological ability in the mastery of ten different grammatical constructions. Six- through eleven-year-old children (n=68) and adults (n=19) performed a grammaticality judgment task as well as tests of working memory capacity and receptive phonological ability. Children showed early mastery of some grammatical structures (e.g. word order, article omissions) while even the oldest children differed from adults on others (e.g. past tense, third person singular agreement). Working memory capacity and phonological ability accounted for variance in grammaticality judgments above and beyond age effects. In particular, working memory capacity correlated with structures involving verb morphology and word order; phonological ability was important for structures with low phonetic substance. Children's relative difficulty with the different constructions showed parallels to adult performance under memory load stress, indicating working memory capacity may be a limiting factor in their performance. Implications for performance by memory and phonologically impaired populations are discussed.

Priming ditransitive structures in comprehension

Manabu Arai — 2008-01-17T02:01:42-00:00

Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 54, No. 3. (May 2007), pp. 218-250.

Many studies have shown evidence for syntactic priming during language production (e.g., Bock, 1986). It is often assumed that comprehension and production share similar mechanisms and that priming also occurs during comprehension (e.g., Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Research investigating priming during comprehension (e.g., Branigan et al., 2005 and Scheepers and Crocker, 2004) has mainly focused on syntactic ambiguities that are very different from the meaning-equivalent structures used in production research. In two experiments, we investigated whether priming during comprehension occurs in ditransitive sentences similar to those used in production research. When the verb was repeated between prime and target, we observed a priming effect similar to that in production. However, we observed no evidence for priming when the verbs were different. Thus, priming during comprehension occurs for very similar structures as priming during production, but in contrast to production, the priming effect is completely lexically dependent.

Recent changes in the function and frequency of Standard English genitive constructions: a multivariate analysis of tagged corpora

LARS Hinrichs — 2007-12-29T01:51:41-00:00

English Language and Linguistics, Vol. 11, No. 03. (2007), pp. 437-474.

Variation and Morphosyntactic Theory: Competition Fractionated

David Embick — 2007-12-29T01:20:27-00:00

Language and Linguistics Compass, Vol. 0, No. 0. (0), pp. ???-???.

Abstract The study of the ‘dynamic’ aspects of language - variation and change - and the development of grammatical theory are often pursued independently of one another. Concentrating on morphosyntax, this article explores connections between these domains that are centered on the notion of ‘competition’. When the relationship between competition for grammaticality and competition for use is articulated, it is clear that grammar competition models of variation and change are connected directly to specific theoretical approaches to synchronic grammar.

Gradient grammar: An effect of animacy on the syntax of give in New Zealand and American English

Joan Bresnan — 2007-12-23T19:30:18-00:00

Lingua, Vol. 118, No. 2. (February 2008), pp. 245-259.

Bresnan et al. (2007) show that a statistical model can predict United States (US) English speakers' syntactic choices with `give'-type verbs extremely accurately. They argue that these results are consistent with probabilistic models of grammar, which assume that grammar is quantitive, and learned from exposure to other speakers. Such a model would also predict syntactic differences across time and space which are reflected not only in the use of clear dialectal features or clear-cut changes in progress, but also in subtle factors such as the relative importance of conditioning factors, and changes over time in speakers' preferences between equally well-formed variants. This paper investigates these predictions by comparing the grammar of phrases involving `give' in New Zealand (NZ) and US English. We find that the grammar developed by Bresnan et al. for US English generalizes remarkably well to NZ English. NZ English is, however, subtly different, in that NZ English speakers appear to be more sensitive to the role of animacy. Further, we investigate changes over time in NZ English and find that the overall behavior of `give' phrases has subtly shifted. We argue that these subtle differences in space and time provide support for the gradient nature of grammar, and are consistent with usage-based, probabilistic syntactic models.

A feature principle for partial agreement

William Badecker — 2007-12-20T18:54:20-00:00

Lingua, Vol. 117, No. 9. (September 2007), pp. 1541-1565.

An Optimality Theoretic account of partial agreement (agreement with just one of multiple conjuncts) presented here explains typologically interrelated properties of partial agreement. For example, in languages such as Moroccan and Lebanese Arabic, partial agreement is optional, incompatible with anaphor binding, and limited to non-collective predication; in languages such as Welsh and Standard Arabic, it is obligatory, compatible with anaphor binding and free of semantic constraint on predication. These correlated properties are explained through the interaction of constraints requiring agreement with an NP's concord features and a distinct set of constraints requiring agreement with index features. Partial agreement is possible only when the optimal type of agreement (index agreement in some languages, concord agreement in others) cannot be satisfied by the conjoined phrase as a whole. Conjoined NPs lack concord features, so a constraint requiring agreement with concord features will oblige agreement with a conjunct that bears concord features. Conjoined NPs may lack index features (if they encode an exclusively non-collective referent set), but this lack of index will also entail partial agreement. Which of the conjuncts a verb agrees with is determined by alignment constraints favoring the conjunct that is linearly closest to the agreement target.

"When stones falls": a conceptual-functional account of subject-verb agreement in Persian

Farzad Sharifian — 2007-12-17T01:41:30-00:00

Language Sciences, Vol. 29, No. 6. (November 2007), pp. 787-803.

Most linguistic studies of subject-verb agreement have thus far attempted to account for this phenomenon in terms of either syntax or semantics. Kim (2004) [Kim, J., 2004. Hybrid agreement in English. Linguistics 42 (6), 1105-1128] proposes a `hybrid analysis', which allows for a morphosyntactic agreement and a semantic agreement within the same sentence. In this paper we propose that conceptual-functional views of language may provide a powerful and complementary approach to the `hybrid analysis' approach. Drawing on data from subject-verb agreement in Persian, we show how the choice between plural and singular verb endings may reflect a speaker's construal of an event. In particular it appears that the construal resolution/level of schematicity has a bearing on subject-verb agreement patterns. It is argued that linguistic devices that are often described as `optional' in descriptive grammars may in fact be motivated and sensitive to conceptualisation of experience.

Predicting the dative alternation

Joan Bresnan — 2007-12-14T16:17:56-00:00

pp. 69-94.

“They” as a gender-unspecified singular pronoun: Eye tracking reveals a processing cost

Anthony Sanford — 2007-12-04T02:02:10-00:00

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 60, No. 2. (2007), pp. 171-178.

The plural pronouns they and them are used to refer to individuals with unknown gender and when a random allocation of gender is undesirable. Despite this apparently felicitous usage, “singular they/them” should raise processing problems under the theory that pronouns seek gender- and number-matched antecedents. Using eye-tracking, we investigated whether there was any processing cost associated with using singular they/them. There was a clear cost of number incompatibility for they/them. Thus, although singular they/them is in current usage, it does not appear that they/them is immediately tolerant of a plural antecedent, though such may be rapidly accommodated. The data are consistent with the search account of pronoun resolution and preserve the semantics of they/them as denoting plurality.

Agreement attraction in comprehension: representations and processes

Matthew Wagers — 2007-10-02T15:18:11-00:00

Journal of Memory and Language (submitted)

Much work has demonstrated so-called attraction errors in the production of subject-verb agreement (e.g., 'The key to the cabinets are on the table', [Bock, J. K., & Miller, C. A. (1991). Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 45-93]), in which a verb erroneously takes on the agreement of an intervening noun. Six self-paced reading experiments examined the online mechanisms underlying the analogous attraction effects that have been shown in comprehension; namely reduced disruption for subject-verb agreement violations when these 'attractor' nouns intervene. One class of theories suggests that these effects are rooted in faulty representation of the number of the subject, while another class of theories suggests that such effects arise rather in the process of re-accessing subject number at the verb. Two main findings provide evidence against the first class of theories. First, attraction also occurs in relative clause configurations in which the attractor noun does not intervene between subject and verb and is not in a direct structural relationship with the subject head (e.g., ‘The drivers who the runner wave to each morning’). Second, attraction effects were limited to ungrammatical sentences, which is unexpected under the assumption that the attractor number overwrites the subject number some proportion of the time. These results suggest that agreement attraction in comprehension is due not to errors in normal agreement representation, but rather reflects properties of the processes engaged by ungrammatical sentences when the correctly predicted agreement features fail to be instantiated on the verb.

Rhythmic alternation and the optional complementiser in English: New evidence of phonological influence on grammatical encoding

Ming-Wei Lee — 2007-09-22T01:31:47-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 105, No. 2. (November 2007), pp. 446-456.

In a recall-based spoken production experiment, native English-speaking participants' variable use of the complementiser that to introduce the sentential complement in sentences like Henry knew (that) Lucy/Louise washed the dishes was found to be related to whether that inclusion/omission resulted in an alternating sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables between the verb of the main clause and the subject of the complement clause. This finding is discussed in relation to the question of whether and how phonological encoding can influence grammatical encoding in spoken language production.