Joan Bresnan

The lexical integrity principle: Evidence from Bantu

The lexical integrity principle has been called into question by recent work which hypothesizes a syntactic phrasal source for inflected words. Bantu morphology provides a particularly rich empirical domain for this issue because it straddles the boundary between morphology and syntax, inviting syntactic analyses in both the earliest missionary grammars and recent theoretical works in generative grammar (Myers 1987; Baker 1988a,b; Kinyalolo 1991, Carstens 1991). In this study we show that the morphology and syntax of Bantu noun class markers strikingly support the lexical integrity principle, once the morphemic structure of words is factored apart from their prosodic and functional structures.

Sentence Stress and Syntactic Transformations

If the Nuclear Stress Rule of English is ordered within the transformational cycle after all of the syntactic transformations, many apparent exceptions to Chomsky and Halle (1968) are predictable, for the stress patterns of certain syntactically complex constructions reflect those of the simple sentences embedded within them in deep structure. This preservation of basic stress pattern through the syntactic derivation provides a new method for determining underlying grammatical representations and deciding questions of syntax, which is illustrated. The consequences for linguistic theory, in particular the lexical vs. transformational hypotheses (Chomsky, 1970b), are discussed.

Cross-Serial Dependencies in Dutch

Chomsky’s argument that natural languages are not finite state languages puts a lower bound on the weak generative capacity of grammars for natural languages (Chomsky (1956)). Arguments based on weak generative capacity are useful in excluding classes of formal devices as characterizations of natural language, but they are not the only formal considerations by which this can be done. Generative grammars may also be excluded because they cannot assign the correct structural descriptions to the terminal strings of a language; in this case, the grammars are excluded on grounds of strong generative capacity. Thus, the deterministic subclasses of context-free grammars (Knuth (1965)) can be rejected because they cannot assign alternative phrase structures to represent natural language ambiguities.

Non-configurationality in Australian aboriginal languages

The syntax of the Australian Aboriginal language Warlpiri has led to two opposing models of non-configurationality: a dual structure hypothesis, which abandons the projection principle for a grammatical architecture that separates constituency and functional representations (Simpson 1983, 1991, Hale 1983, Kroeger 1993), and a pronominal argument hypothesis, which hypothesizes that bound or zero pronominals satisfy the projection principle in such languages, with free nominals analysed as adjuncts (Jelinek 1984, Baker 1991, Hale 1993). Although the pronominal argument hypothesis is widely accepted in the syntactic literature, we show that available evidence from Warlpiri, new evidence from the related language Jiwarli, and a survey of six other Australian languages actually support the dual structure hypothesis. The non-configurationality characteristics of free word order, null anaphora, and split NPs are in fact independent of each other and of the distribution of bound pronouns. Additionally, the clitic pronouns that Jelinek (1984) and others take to be the source of non-configurationality in Warlpiri are simply an areal feature of Australian languages that is independent of the syntactic properties that are supposed to derive from it.

Animacy encoding in English: why and how

We report on two recent medium-scale initiatives annotating present day English corpora for animacy distinctions. We discuss the relevance of animacy for computational linguistics, specifically generation, the annotation categories used in the two studies and the interannotator reliability for one of the studies.

Optimality and Functionality: Objections and Refutations

The classical generative theory of knowledge of language is that a speaker’s mental grammar is a pure combinatorial engine, blind to typology and resistant to grammar-external forces. It arises from domain-specific innate principles of UG, whose parametric variation becomes fixed upon exposure to a given linguistic experience. In this classical epistemology, markedness hierarchies such as the animacy hierarchy cannot play a role in the individual synchronic grammar of a present-day English speaker. These hierarchies are not universal; they are exceptionridden, both across languages and even within the individual languages where their effects sometimes appear. They also have no obvious structural basis in generative representations. Hence, they are regarded as at best vague tendencies reflecting scalar properties of human perception and cognition or socio-cultural categorizations, external to the specific domain of linguistic structure. Their appearance in languages typologically distant from English (e.g. Lummi, Dyirbal, Navajo) shows merely that grammar-external forces may leave their marks upon languages historically. On this view, some of the grammatical structure found in existing languages may be the conventionalized residue of external pressures on historical change, which are no longer active synchronically. But present-day speakers have no knowledge of typology, nor of the external pressures that have affected typological distributions—and their mentally represented grammars reflect this.

Spoken syntax: The phonetics of giving a hand in New Zealand English 1

Abstract This article considers the exemplar theories which are independently developing in phonetics and in syntax, and argues that they jointly make some predictions that neither does alone. One of these predictions is explored in the context of two sound changes which occurred in the history of New Zealand English. We show that both of these phonetic changes were affected by phrase-level factors. The raising of /æ/ was more advanced in the word hand when it referred to a limb, than when used in phrases such as give a hand or lend a hand. And the centralization of the /i/ vowel was more advanced in utterances of give involving abstract themes (give a chance), than when it had a meaning of transfer of possession (give a pen). We argue that existence of such effects lends support both to the idea (from syntactic exemplar theory) that phrases are stored, and the idea (from phonetic exemplar theory) that lexical representations are phonetically detailed.

Retained inflectional morphology in pidgins: A typological study

Abstract It is commonly accepted that the process of pidginization leads to a loss of inflectional morphology, but this loss is often not total. Lexifier inflections instead follow a cline of reduction: full retention – partial retention – partial lexicalization – full lexicalization – full loss. This article examines the retention of inflection in 29 languages that reflect a history of pidginization in their development, comparing the morphological richness of pidgins with their respective lexifiers. The results indicate an asymmetry between the retention of inherent and contextual inflections, such that pidgins express fewer grammatical categories via contextual inflection than do their lexifiers. The authors suggest that this may reflect a role of markedness (semantic relevance) in the preservation of inflection.

Typology in variation: A probabilistic approach to 'be' and 'n't' in the Survey of English Dialects

Variation within grammars is a reflection of variation between grammars. Subject agreement and synthetic negation for the verb be show extraordinary local variation in the Survey of English Dialects (Orton et al., 1962–71). Extracting partial grammars of individuals, we confirm leveling patterns across person, number, and negation (Ihalainen, 1991; Cheshire, Edwards & Whittle, 1993; Cheshire, 1996). We find that individual variation bears striking structural resemblances to invariant dialect paradigms, and also reflects typologically observed markedness properties (Aissen, 1999). In the framework of Stochastic Optimality Theory (Boersma & Hayes, 2001), variable outputs of individual speakers are expected to be constrained by the same typological and markedness generalizations found crosslinguistically. The stochastic evaluation of candidate outputs in individual grammars reranks individual constraints by perturbing their ranking values, with the potential for stable variation between two near-identical rankings. The stochastic learning mechanism is sensitive to variable frequencies encountered in the linguistic environment, whether in geographical or social space. In addition to relating individual and group dialectal variation to typological variation (Kortmann, 1999; Anderwald, 2003), the findings suggest that an individual grammar is sensitively tuned to frequencies in the linguistic environment, leading to isolated loci of variability in the grammar rather than complete alternations of paradigms. A characteristic of linguistic variation that has emerged in distinct fields of enquiry is that variation within a single grammar bears a close resemblance to variation across grammars. Sociolinguistic studies, for instance, have long observed that ‘variation within the speech of a single speaker derives from the variation which exists between speakers’ (Bell, 1984: 151). In the present study, individual patterns of variation in subject–verb agreement with affirmative and negative be extracted from the Survey of English Dialects ( SED , Orton et al., 1962–71) show striking structural resemblances to patterns of interdialectal, or categorical, variation.

A statistical model of the grammatical choices in child production of dative sentences

Focusing on childrens production of the dative alternation in English, we examine whether childrens choices are influenced by the same factors that influence adults’ choices, and whether, like adults, they are sensitive to multiple factors simultaneously. We do so by using mixed-effect regression models to analyse child and child-directed datives extracted from the Child Language Data Exchange System corpus. Such models allow us to investigate the collective and independent effects of multiple factors simultaneously. The results show that childrens choices are influenced by multiple factors (length of theme and recipient, nominal expression type of both, syntactic persistence) and pattern similarly to child-directed speech. Our findings demonstrate parallels between child and adult speech, consistent with recent acquisition research suggesting that there is a usage-based continuity between child and adult grammars. Furthermore, they highlight the utility of analysing childrens speech from a multi-variable perspective, and portray a learner who is sensitive to the multiple cues present in her input.