John A. Hawkins

PROCESSING COMPLEXITY AND FILLER-GAP DEPENDENCIES ACROSS GRAMMARS

This article examines crosslinguistic variation in FILLER-GAP DEPENDENCIES (wH-questions and relative clauses) from a processing perspective, and integrates research findings from psycholinguistics, language typology and generative grammar. Numerous implicational universals and hierarchies are proposed that receive a natural explanation in terms of processing and complexity. Filler-gap domains are complex in proportion to their size and in proportion to the amount of simultaneous syntactic and semantic processing that is required in addition to gap identification. They are simplified by making the gap easier to identify and process, or by avoiding a gap structure altogether. When grammatical variation is viewed from this perspective many descriptive insights and implicational patterns can be motivated that have either been stipulated or that have gone unnoticed hitherto. This approach provides an alternative to the assumption of innate parameterized subjacency constraints in this area.*

On (In)Definite Articles: Implicatures and (Un)Grammaticality Prediction.

Since Paul Grice published ‘Logic and conversation’ in 1975, there have been a number of attempts to develop his programmatic remarks on conversational and conventional implicatures further (see Gazdar, 1979; Atlas & Levinson, 1981; Horn, 1985; Sperber & Wilson, 1986; and especially Levinson, 1983, and the references cited therein). The result has been a growing understanding of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, and more generally of human reasoning in everyday language use. Many aspects of natural language understanding that were previously thought to be part of the conventional meaning of a given expression can now be shown to be the result of conversational inference. And with cancellability as the diagnostic test, a number of traditional problems in the study of meaning are yielding to more satisfactory analyses. Even more ambitiously, implicatures are penetrating into core areas of the syntax, as pragmatic theories of increasing subtlety are proposed for ‘grammatical’ phenomena such as Chomskys (1981, 1982) binding principles (see Reinhart, 1983, and Levinson, 1987a, b, 1991).

The suffixing preference: A processing explanation

Cross-linguistic studies of morphology have demonstrated that there is an asymmetry in the type of affixation preferred: languages which would he predicted on independent structural grounds to prefer suffixes to prefixes do so, but languages which would be predicted to prefer prefixes to suffixes also show a tendency toward suffixation. In other words, independently of other structural considerations there is an overall preference for suffix morphology. It is argued here that this preference results from the way language is processed by its users. Two lines of psycholinguistic evidence are drawn upon: (1) word onsets are more psychologically salient than other parts of the word; (2) stems and affixes are processed separately. In the light of these considerations it is argued that language users prefer to process stems before affixes, and for this reason languages prefer to order stems before affixes. Thus the linguistic and psycholinguistic evidence combine to suggest an explanation which has implications both for language typology and for the structure of psychological models of language processing.

A Comparative Typology of English and German : Unifying the Contrasts

Acknowledgements Preface Part One: An Overview of Some English/German Contrasts 1. Introduction: the Theoretical Interest of English/German Contrasts 2. Grammatical Morphology 3. Word Order Freedom 4. Basic Grammatical relations and their Semantic Diversity 5. Raising Structures 6. Extractions 7. Deletions 8. The Unity of English/German Contrasts: a Realignment in the Mapping between Form and Meaning Part Two: The Position of the Verb in English and German 9. Verb-final Order in German 10. Leaking Behing the Verb in German 11. Verb-first Structures in English and German Overview and Further Prospects Notes References Index

Why are categories adjacent

This paper presents patterns of adjacency in performance data and in cross-linguistic grammatical conventions. It is argued that a common principle of processing efficiency explains both: the more syntactic and semantic relations whose processing domains are minimized, and the greater the minimization preference in the processing of each relation, the more adjacency we find. The preferences of performance are quite systematic and it is suggested that they are ultimately motivated by reductions in simultaneous processing demands in working memory. The correlations with patterns of grammatical variation exist because grammars have conventionalized the adjacency preferences of performance.

The relative order of prepositional phrases in English: Going beyond Manner–Place–Time

This article argues against Manner–Place–Time and other proposed grammatical principles of ordering for prepositional phrases (PPs) in postverbal position in English. Instead, greater empirical adequacy can be achieved by a theory of processing efficiency that defines a preference for minimal domains in the recognition of syntactic phrase structure and in the processing of lexical–semantic dependencies between verbs and prepositions. Some new entailment tests are proposed on the basis of which these dependencies can be defined. The data come from 500 pages of written English. For 300 pages, an additional analysis is given in terms of structural ambiguity avoidance and pragmatic information status. Syntactic complexity is the biggest single predictor of PP sequences, whereas lexical–semantic factors predominate when syntactic preferences are weak. Manner–Place–Time is not the correct semantic generalization, however. Ambiguity avoidance had no clear impact on these orderings. Pragmatic effects were not visible when syntactic weight made no predictions and were correlated with weight when it did but were less strongly supported.

Criterial Features in Learner Corpora: Theory and Illustrations

One of the major goals of the Cambridge English Profile Programme is to identify ‘criterial features’ for each of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) proficiency levels as they apply to English, and to assess the impact of different first languages on these features (through ‘transfer’ effects). The present paper defines what is meant by criterial features and proposes an initial taxonomy of four types. Numerous illustrations are given from our collaborative research to date on the Cambridge Learner Corpus. The benefits and challenges posed by these features for corpus linguistics and for theories of second language acquisition are briefly outlined, as are the benefits and challenges for language assessment practices and for publishing ventures that make use of them as supplements to the current CEFR descriptors.

Cross-linguistic variation and efficiency

1. Language Variation and the Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis 2. Three General Efficiency Principles 3. Some Current Issues in Language Processing and the Performance-Grammar Relationship 4. The Conventionalization of Processing Efficiency 5. Word Order Patterns: Head Ordering and (Dis)harmony 6. The Typology of Noun Phrase Structure 7. Ten Differences between VO and OV Languages 8. Asymmetries between Arguments of the Verb 9. Multiple Factors in Performance and Grammars and their Interaction 10. Conclusions

Implicational universals as predictors of language acquisition

Implicational universals can make predictions for firstand second-language acquisition. They predict the relative timing with which structures and properties are acquired in different languages, and also the types of errors that are made (and those that are not made). The first scholar to address the logic of this relationship between (typological) universals and language acquisition was Roman Jakobson. This paper builds on his insights but argues that his discussion of the relationship was not sufficiently explicit, nor was it quite correct. Implicational predictions for acquisition are accordingly defined and tested against some relevant acquisition data.

Symmetries and asymmetries: their grammar, typology and parsing

Cross-linguistic variation reveals both symmetries (A + B and B + A are productive) and asymmetries (only one ordering is productive, in all languages or in certain subsets). The challenge is to better understand and predict which will be which. This paper introduces a parsing approach based on two efficiency principles, Maximize On-line Processing (MaOP) and Minimize Domains (MiD). MaOP defines a preference for parse strings that avoid misassignments (or garden paths) and unassignments of properties on-line (compared with structures that assign the relevant properties earlier). MiD defines a preference for minimal surface structure domains in the processing of all relations of combination and dependency. The predictions made by these principles for performance and grammars are defined. Symmetries are predicted across grammars when each ordering is motivated, by MaOP or MiD or both. Asymmetries arise when one order is motivated by MaOP, and there is no or significantly less motivation for the other by either principle. Only one order is strongly preferred in performance in these cases and is conventionalized in grammars.