Jenny Audring

Pronominal Gender in Spoken Dutch

This paper discusses the problem of gender agreement in Dutch, arising from the loss of gender markers and resulting in different gender values for nouns and pronouns. On the basis of corpus data from spontaneous speech, the study shows that Dutch pronominal gender is undergoing a functional reinterpretation according to the degree of individuation of the referent. In addition to the antecedents lexical gender, this conceptual property governs the agreement behavior of personal, possessive, and relative pronouns. Special attention is given to the competition between semantic and syntactic gender agreement and to parallel phenomena in other Germanic languages. Many thanks to Geert Booij, Grev Corbett, Edith Moravcsik, Monika Schmid, Hans Olav Enger, Caroline Sandstrom, Pieter van Reenen, Frans Hinskens, Florian Haas, and two anonymous referees for comments on versions of this article, to Andrew Spencer for discussion, and to my colleagues at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for additional data. The usual disclaimers apply.

Cooperation and coercion

Abstract Coercion is a much-discussed topic in the linguistic literature. This article expands the usual range of cases at the most subtle and the extreme end: it demonstrates how coercion extends into semantic flexibility on the one hand and into idiomaticity on the other. After discussing a broad variety of coercion cases in syntax and morphology and briefly reviewing the equally diverse literature, we identify three mechanisms – selection, enrichment, and override – that have alternatively been proposed to account for coercion effects. We then present an approach that combines all three mechanisms, arguing that they can be unified along a single axis: the degree of top-down influence of complex structures on lexical semantics.

Partial Motivation, Multiple Motivation: The Role of Output Schemas in Morphology

Output-oriented, constructional schemas should be used for stating regularities that are not productive. These schemas have a motivational function only. We show that words may be partially motivated even when they lack a base word. Moreover, they can be motivated by more than one schema. This applies to the huge set of Dutch verbs in -elen. Verbs in -eren appear to exhibit similar properties, as do parallel verbs in German and English, and Dutch words ending in -ig. Diachronic facts, in particular the construction of nouns ending in -er, support the claim that language users make generalizations in the form of output-oriented schemas.

Construction Morphology and the Parallel Architecture of Grammar.

This article presents a systematic exposition of how the basic ideas of Construction Grammar (CxG) (Goldberg, ) and the Parallel Architecture (PA) of grammar (Jackendoff, ) provide the framework for a proper account of morphological phenomena, in particular word formation. This framework is referred to as Construction Morphology (CxM). As to the implications of CxM for the architecture of grammar, the article provides evidence against a split between lexicon and grammar, in line with CxG. In addition, it shows that the PA approach makes it possible to be explicit about what happens on which level of the grammar, and thus to give an insightful account of interface phenomena. These interface phenomena appear to require that various types of information are accessible simultaneously, and it is argued that constructional schemas have the right format for expressing these mutual dependencies between different types of information.

Morphology and Memory: Toward an Integrated Theory

Framed in psychological terms, the basic question of linguistic theory is what is stored in memory, and in what form. Traditionally, what is stored is divided into grammar and lexicon, where grammar contains the rules and the lexicon is an unstructured list of exceptions. We develop an alternative view in which rules of grammar are simply lexical items that contain variables, and in which rules have two functions. In their generative function, they are used to build novel structures, just as in traditional generative linguistics. In their relational function, they capture generalizations over stored items in the lexicon, a role not seriously explored in traditional linguistic theory. The result is a highly structured lexicon with rich patterns among stored items. We further explore the possibility that this sort of structuring is not specific to language, but appears in other cognitive domains as well, such as the structure of physical objects, of music, and of geographical and social knowledge. The differences among cognitive domains do not lie in this overall texture, but in the materials over which stored relations are defined. The challenge is to develop theories of representation in these other domains comparable to that for language.