Anthony S. Kroch

Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change

When one form replaces another over time in a changing language, the new form does not occur equally often in all linguistic contexts. Linguists have generally assumed that those contexts in which the new form is more common are those in which the form first appears and in which it advances most rapidly. However, evidence from several linguistic changes (most importantly the rise of the periphrastic auxiliary do in late Middle English) shows that the general assumption is false. Instead, at least for syntactic cases, change seems to proceed at the same rate in all contexts. Contexts change together because they are merely surface manifestations of a single underlying change in grammar. Differences in frequency of use of a new form across contexts reflect functional and stylistic factors, which are constant across time and independent of grammar.

Alternative conceptions of phrase structure

In the early years of generative grammar it was assumed that the appropriate mechanism for generating syntactic structures was a grammar of context-free rewriting rules. The twelve essays in this volume discuss recent challenges to this classical formulation of phrase structure and the alternative conceptions proposed to replace it. Each article approaches this issue from the perspective of a different linguistic framework, such as categorical grammar, government-binding theory, head-driven phrase structure grammar, and tree-adjoining grammar. By contributing to the understanding of the differing assumptions and research strategies of each theory, this volume serves as an important survey of current thinking on the frontier of theoretical and computation linguistics.

Pseudocleft Connectedness: Implications for the LF Interface Level

Pseudoclefts constitute a difficult challenge for linguistic theory, displaying effects of core syntactic conditions in a noncanonical configuration that cannot be normalized with standard syntactic operations. We argue that these connectedness effects follow from the nature of pseudoclefts as equatives. This treatment yields an integrated account of the syntactic and semanticopragmatic properties of the construction, but leads to the conclusion that certain syntactic constraints apply to a level of representation more abstract than LF under most current conceptions. This representation is built up in the process of discourse interpretation and may constitute the interface with the conceptual-intentional system of mind.

TOWARD A THEORY OF SOCIAL DIALECT VARIATION

Publisher Summary This chapter presents the study of language in its social context that has become a mature field with a substantial body of method and empirical results. Processes that originate in the popular vernacular infiltrate the prestige dialect and processes of the prestige dialect extend to popular speech. Labovs research has generated considerable evidence for the proposition that working-class speech is more susceptible to the processes of phonetic conditioning than is the prestige dialect. The central assumption of linguists about the origin of dialect variation has been that when sound changes arise in the speech of individuals or small groups, the further spread of these changes depends on the prestige of their users. Labov does criticize Bloomfield and others for their assertion that new forms originate among speakers with the highest social status and are then borrowed by those of lesser status.

The rightward movement of complements and adjuncts in the Old English of Beowulf

Although it has generally been recognized that Old English was a verb-final language with verb-seconding, the existence of clauses with main verb complements and adjuncts appearing after the otherwise clause-final verb seems to contradict the hypothesis that the language was strictly verb-final in underlying structure. There are three possible analyses to explain these clauses: variable word order in the base, leftward verb movement, and rightward movement of NPs and PPs. In this article, we demonstrate that only the third analysis adequately explains the data of the Early Old English poem Beowulf . Moreover, by investigating the mapping between syntactic structures and metrical units, we provide evidence for two types of rightward movement with two distinct structures: heavy NP shift, with a characteristic major intonational boundary between the main verb and the postposed NP, and PP extraposition, where the intonational boundary was much less common.

The Isolability of Syntactic Processing

In this chapter we explore a controversial hypothesis about the nature of the syntactic processing system. The hypothesis, roughly stated, is that some of the procedures that create grammatical patterns in sentences are in an important sense indifferent to the content of the symbols they manipulate, in somewhat the same way that the procedures for long multiplication are indifferent to the numbers involved in the computation. The purpose of this exploration is to uncover the linguistic or cognitive bases of a phenomenon noted by many, including Edward Sapir, who described it in this way: All languages evince a curious instinct for the development of one or more particular grammatical processes at the expense of others, tending always to lose sight of any explicit functional value that the process may have had in the first instance, delighting, it would seem, in the sheer play of its means of expression .... This feeling for form as such, freely expanding along predetermined lines and greatly inhibited in certain directions by the lack of controlling types of patterning, should be more clearly understood than it seems to be... these submerged and powerfully controlling impulses to definite form operate as such, regardless of the need for expressing particular concepts or of giving consistent external shape to particular groups of concepts (1921, pp. 60–61).

Toward a theory of social dialect variation

Publisher Summary This chapter presents the study of language in its social context that has become a mature field with a substantial body of method and empirical results. Processes that originate in the popular vernacular infiltrate the prestige dialect and processes of the prestige dialect extend to popular speech. Labovs research has generated considerable evidence for the proposition that working-class speech is more susceptible to the processes of phonetic conditioning than is the prestige dialect. The central assumption of linguists about the origin of dialect variation has been that when sound changes arise in the speech of individuals or small groups, the further spread of these changes depends on the prestige of their users. Labov does criticize Bloomfield and others for their assertion that new forms originate among speakers with the highest social status and are then borrowed by those of lesser status.

Verb movement and coordination in a dynamic theory of licensing

Over the last decade generative grammar has moved away from using phrase structure rules s the basic specifiers of syntactic structure; instead, the theory has come to see phrase structure s the instantiation of a number of licensing relations, chiefly θ-role assignment, case, agreement, and predication. The licensing of phrase structure has, however, been conceived in a static way: although the elements being licensed may move in the course of a derivation in order to reach the positions in which licensing takes place, the positions themselves are fixed for each relation. In this article we explore the consequences of abandoning this static view, and taking instead a dynamic approach in which the licensing positions themselves may change in the course of a derivation. In essence, we will argue that a licensing relation holding between two elements α and β is satisfied whenever α arid β are in the relevant configuration (for example head-complement, head-specifier); there is no motivation for restricting the satisfaction of the relation to the underlying positions of α and/or . Instead, we will show that something close to the converse is true: given economy assumptions along the lines of Chomsky (1991, 1992), a licensing relation will necessarily be satisfied by the highest position in a chain at which the relevant licensing configuration occurs. Consequently, a given trace can appear only if at least one of the licensing relations in which it participates is not also satisfied by some position higher in its chain. In what follows we will show that this new view of how structure is licensed straightforwardly accounts for a wide r nge of otherwise problematic data. We focus initially on a well-known problem concerning coordination in the

ON THE LINGUISTIC CHARACTER OF NON-STANDARD INPUT

If natural language understanding systems are ever to cope with the full range of English language forms, their designers will have to incorporate a number of features of the spoken vernacular language. This communication discusses such features as non-standard grammatical rules, hesitations and false starts due to self-correction, systematic errors due to mismatches between the grammar and sentence generator, and uncorrected true errors.

The Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English: First Parsing Results and Analysis

This paper presents the first results on parsing the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE), a millionword historical treebank with an annotation style similar to that of the Penn Treebank (PTB). We describe key features of the PPCMBE annotation style that differ from the PTB, and present some experiments with tree transformations to better compare the results to the PTB. First steps in parser analysis focus on problematic structures created by the parser.