Alena Witzlack-Makarevich

Nouns slow down speech across structurally and culturally diverse languages

Significance When we speak, we unconsciously pronounce some words more slowly than others and sometimes pause. Such slowdown effects provide key evidence for human cognitive processes, reflecting increased planning load in speech production. Here, we study naturalistic speech from linguistically and culturally diverse populations from around the world. We show a robust tendency for slower speech before nouns as compared with verbs. Even though verbs may be more complex than nouns, nouns thus appear to require more planning, probably due to the new information they usually represent. This finding points to strong universals in how humans process language and manage referential information when communicating linguistically. By force of nature, every bit of spoken language is produced at a particular speed. However, this speed is not constant—speakers regularly speed up and slow down. Variation in speech rate is influenced by a complex combination of factors, including the frequency and predictability of words, their information status, and their position within an utterance. Here, we use speech rate as an index of word-planning effort and focus on the time window during which speakers prepare the production of words from the two major lexical classes, nouns and verbs. We show that, when naturalistic speech is sampled from languages all over the world, there is a robust cross-linguistic tendency for slower speech before nouns compared with verbs, both in terms of slower articulation and more pauses. We attribute this slowdown effect to the increased amount of planning that nouns require compared with verbs. Unlike verbs, nouns can typically only be used when they represent new or unexpected information; otherwise, they have to be replaced by pronouns or be omitted. These conditions on noun use appear to outweigh potential advantages stemming from differences in internal complexity between nouns and verbs. Our findings suggest that, beneath the staggering diversity of grammatical structures and cultural settings, there are robust universals of language processing that are intimately tied to how speakers manage referential information when they communicate with one another.

Decomposing hierarchical alignment: Co-arguments as conditions on alignment and the limits of referential hierarchies as explanations in verb agreement

Abstract Apart from common cases of differential argument marking, referential hierarchies affect argument marking in two ways: (a) through hierarchical marking, where markers compete for a slot and the competition is resolved by a hierarchy, and (b) through co-argument sensitivity, where the marking of one argument depends on the properties of its co-argument. Here we show that while co-argument sensitivity cannot be analyzed in terms of hierarchical marking, hierarchical marking can be analyzed in terms of co-argument sensitivity. Once hierarchical effects on marking are analyzed in terms of co-argument sensitivity, it becomes possible to examine alignment patterns relative to referential categories in exactly the same way as one can examine alignment patterns relative to referential categories in cases of differential argument marking and indeed any other condition on alignment (such as tense or clause type). As a result, instances of hierarchical marking of any kind turn out not to present a special case in the typology of alignment, and there is no need for positing an additional non-basic alignment type such as “hierarchical alignment”. While hierarchies are not needed for descriptive and comparative purposes, we also cast doubt on their relevance in diachrony: examining two families for which hierarchical agreement has been postulated, Algonquian and Kiranti, we find only weak and very limited statistical evidence for agreement paradigms to have been shaped by a principled ranking of person categories.

Referential and lexical factors in alignment variation of trivalent verbs

Abstract Argument marking with trivalent verbs exhibits a much larger variation than argument marking with bivalent verbs. In many cases, this variation – stemming both from referential and lexical factors – presents a problem when attempting crosslinguistic comparison of alignment patterns of trivalent verbs. Often, this problem results in picking just one of a number of patterns as representative for comparative purposes and thus ignoring the rest of the variation. This paper addresses these general challenges by discussing a case study of trivalent verbs in Yakima Sahaptin, a language with a large amount of alignment variation in indexing and flagging. In doing so, the paper elaborates the recently developed method for alignment typology called exhaustive alignment, adjusting the method to meet the challenges of constructions with trivalent verbs and pointing out its limitations.

2. Typological evidence against universal effects of referential scales on case alignment

If a language develops differential subject or differential object marking by case or adpositions, this is widely hypothesized to result om a universal effect of referential scales. The effect can be understood as a universal correlation between the odds of overt case marking and scale ranks (a negative correlation for subjects, a positive one for objects), or as an implicational universal proposing that, if a language has a split in case marking, this split fits a universal scale. We test both claims with various versions of scale definitions by statistically estimating diachronic biases towards correlations or scale-fitting in an areally stratified sample of over 460 case systems worldwide. For most scales tested, results suggest evidence against universal preferences towards universal scale effects under either a correlational or an implicational model. For binary partof-speech and information-structure distinction and object marking, the evidence for universal effects is inconclusive. What we do find, by contrast, is highly significant area effects: casemarking splits tend to have developed and spread in Eurasia and the New-Guinea/Australia (‘Sahul’) macro-areas. This suggests that any replication of scale effects across language families is a side-effect of areal diffusion rather than of universal principles in grammar or cognition. * This research was supported by Grant No. BI 799/3-1 om the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Bickel designed the study and wrote the paper, Bickel and Zakharko performed the statistical analyses, and Witzlack-Makarevich did most of the data analysis. All computations were done in R (R Development Core Team 2012), with the added packages vcd (Meyer et al. 2006), MASS (Venables & Ripley 2002), and glmperm (Wer & Potter 2010). We thank an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. Revised and accepted version – November 22, 2013 2 Referential scales and case alignment