Holger Diessel

Competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial clauses

Abstract This article examines the ordering distribution of main and adverbial clauses. Using corpus data from spoken and written English, it is shown that the positioning of finite adverbial clauses vis-à-vis the main clause varies with their meaning or function: conditional clauses tend to precede the main clause, temporal clauses are common in both initial and final position, and causal clauses usually follow the main clause. The article argues that the positional patterns of adverbial clauses are motivated by competing functional and cognitive forces. Specifically, it is shown that final occurrence of adverbial clauses is motivated by processing, while initial occurrence results from semantic and discourse pragmatic forces that may override the processing motivation.

Iconicity of sequence: A corpus-based analysis of the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses in English

Abstract Recent work in functional and cognitive linguistics has argued and presented evidence that the positioning of adverbial clauses is motivated by competing pressures from syntactic parsing, discourse pragmatics, and semantics. Continuing this line of research, the current paper investigates the effect of the iconicity principle on the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses. The iconicity principle predicts that the linear ordering of main and subordinate clauses mirrors the sequential ordering of the events they describe. Drawing on corpus data from spoken and written English, the paper shows that, although temporal clauses exhibit a general tendency to follow the main clause, there is a clear correlation between clause order and iconicity: temporal clauses denoting a prior event precede the main clause more often than temporal clauses of posteriority. In addition to the iconicity principle, there are other factors such as length, complexity, and pragmatic import that may affect the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses. Using logistic regression analysis, the paper investigates the effects of the various factors on the linear structuring of complex sentences.

The acquisition of German relative clauses: A case study*

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other participants, assert new information and often occur with main-clause word order. In the course of the development, more complex relative constructions emerge, in which the relative clause is embedded in a fully-fledged main clause. We argue that German relative clauses develop in an incremental fashion from simple non-embedded sentences that gradually evolve into complex sentence constructions.

Particle placement in early child language: A multifactorial analysis

Abstract Recent studies of the English verb particle construction have shown that particle placement varies with a variety of linguistic features, which seem to influence the speaker’s choice of a particular position. The current study investigates whether children’s use of the particle varies with the same features as in adult language. Using corpus data from two English-speaking children, we conducted a multifactorial analysis of six linguistic variables that are correlated with particle placement in adult language. Our analysis reveals significant associations between the position of the particle and two of the six variables, the NP type of the direct object and the meaning of the particle, suggesting that children as young as two years of age process at least some of the features that motivate particle placement in adult speakers.

Demonstratives, Frames of Reference, and Semantic Universals of Space

There is a large body of research indicating that speakers of (familiar) European languages tend to encode and conceptualize space from an egocentric perspective, but linguistic fieldworkers have shown that speakers of certain other languages (e.g. Tzeltal) often describe the same spatial scenes based on fixed coordinates of the environment. This has led some researcher to challenge long-standing assumptions about semantic universals of space and the uniformity of spatial cognition. Specifically, Levinson and colleagues have questioned the hypothesis that there is a universal preference for egocentric, body-oriented representations of space in language and cognition. It is the purpose of the present paper to reconsider this hypothesis in light of an important class of spatial terms that has been disregarded in this research: demonstratives such as English this and that and here and there. The paper shows that the semantic interpretation of demonstratives presupposes a coordinate system with the same conceptual constituents as body-based expressions such as left and right or up and down. Combining evidence from linguistic typology with psychological research on joint attention, it is argued that demonstratives constitute a universal class of spatial terms that invoke an egocentric, body-anchored frame of reference grounded in basic principles of spatial and social cognition.

Frequency shapes syntactic structure.

Journal of Child Language / Volume 42 / Issue 02 / March 2015, pp 278 281 DOI: 10.1017/S0305000914000622, Published online: 03 February 2015 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0305000914000622 How to cite this article: HOLGER DIESSEL (2015). Frequency shapes syntactic structure. Journal of Child Language, 42, pp 278-281 doi:10.1017/S0305000914000622 Request Permissions : Click here

Social and cognitive processes influencing grammar evolution. Comment on 'Modelling the cultural evolution of language' by Luc Steels.

In the structuralist and generativist traditions of linguistics, grammar is seen as a self-contained system consisting of discrete categories and combinatorial rules that are studied without any reference to social and pragmatic aspects of language use. Challenging this view of grammar, evolutionary linguists have argued that linguistic structure and meaning are fundamentally grounded in usage and cognition. In this ‘usage-based approach’ (cf. Bybee [1]), language is seen as a dynamic (or emergent) system consisting of fluid categories and transient constraints that are in principle always changing under the influence of general cognitive and social pressures involved in language comprehension and production (cf. Hopper [5]). Building on this research, Steels and his team developed a fascinating new line of research in experimental robotics that seeks to test some of the hypotheses of evolutionary (or usage-based) linguistics in agent-based computer simulations. The target article [7] provides an overview of this research and identifies some of the challenges of this new approach. One of the issues that have to be addressed in future research is the question ‘What are the social and cognitive processes that underlie the evolution of language and the dynamics of grammar?’ Evolutionary linguists agree that linguistic categories, including all categories of grammar, are emergent from domain-general processes of usage and cognition; but the linguistic literature offers a great deal of different functional and cognitive explanations. Some linguists have emphasized the role of communication and pragmatic inference for the emergence of new grammatical categories and constructions (cf. Givón [3]); other researchers have argued that phrase structure constituency and word order are crucially influenced by general processing mechanisms that are ultimately determined by principles of economy and efficiency (cf. Hawkins [4]); and yet others have claimed that grammaticalization processes are driven by frequency of occurrence leading to the phonetic reduction and semantic bleaching of linguistic expressions through habituation and the creation of morphologically complex words and multi-word phrases through automatization and chunking (cf. Bybee [1]; see also Diessel [2] for a recent review). There are so many different motivating factors in the linguistic literature on language evolution and diachronic language change that functional and cognitive explanations for the emergence of grammar have been criticized for being arbitrary and ad hoc (cf. Newmeyer [6]). Obviously, what is needed is a more systematic approach that differentiates between different aspects (or levels) of usage and cognition and thereby constrains the explanatory power of the evolutionary approach (see Bybee [1] for a recent proposal).

Cross-linguistic patterns in the structure, function, and position of (object) complement clauses

Abstract The present contribution examines object complement clauses from the perspective of constituent-order typology. In particular, it provides the first principled empirical investigation of the position of object clauses relative to the matrix verb. Based on a stratified sample of 100 languages, we establish that there is an overall cross-linguistic preference for postverbal complements, due largely to the heterogeneous ordering patterns in OV-languages. Importantly, however, we also show that the position of complement clauses correlates with aspects of their structural organization: Preverbal complement clauses are significantly more likely to be coded by morphosyntactically “downgraded” structures than postverbal complements. Given that previous research has found a parallel correlation between structural downgrading and the semantics of the complement-taking predicate (Givón 1980. The binding hierarchy and the typology of complements. Studies in Language 4. 333–377, Cristofaro 2003. Subordination. Oxford: Oxford University Press), one needs to analyze how positional, structural and semantic factors interact with one another. Our data suggest that the correlation between clause order and morphosyntactic structure holds independently of semantic considerations: All predicate classes distinguished in the present study increase their likelihood of taking downgraded complements if they are preceded by the complement clause. We thus propose that, in addition to the well-known “binding hierarchy”, a second correlation needs to be recognized in the typology of complementation: the co-variation of linear order and morphosyntactic structure.

Clause linkage in cross-linguistic perspective : data-driven approaches to cross-clausal syntax

The volume is a collection of thirteen papers given at the Third Syntax of the World s Languages conference, complemented with four additional papers as well as an introduction by the editors. All contributions deal with clause combining, focusing on one or both of the following two dimensions of analysis: properties of the clauses involved, types of dependency. The studies are data-driven and have a cross-linguistic or typological orientation. In addition to survey papers the volume contains in-depth studies of particular languages, mostly based on original data collected in recent field work.