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Syntactic alternations : Empirical investigations and theoretical implications| old_uid | 1132 |
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| title | Syntactic alternations : Empirical investigations and theoretical implications |
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| start_date | 2006/04/28 |
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| schedule | 14h30-16h30 |
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| online | no |
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| details | suite le 5 mai, 14h-16h |
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| summary | Natural languages often make available multiple ways of expressing the same proposition. What leads speakers to select one way of saying something over another way of expressing the same thought? These lectures summarize a number of studies that address this question.
They also address methodological issues surrounding the investigation of such choices, and the implications of these studies for psycholinguistics and grammatical theory.
The phenomena considered are five alternations in English :
- Heavy NP Shift: "They take too many dubious assumptions for
granted" vs. "They take for granted too many dubious assumptions"
- Dative Alternation: "We gave a bone to a dog" vs. "We gave a dog a
bone"
- Verb Particle Placement: "You figured out the problem" vs. "You figured the problem out"
- Relativizer Optionality: "This is the book that I was reading" vs. "This is the book I was reading"
- Complementizer Optionality: "I think that it is raining" vs. "I think it is raining"
Corpus studies and psycholinguistic experiments on all of these alternations have shown correlations between construction choice and various syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse factors (see, inter alia, Arnold, et al 2000, Arnold, et al 2004, Ferreira & Dell 2000, Hawkins 1994, 2004, Jaeger 2005, Lohse, et al 2004, Race & MacDonald 2003, Wasow 1997, 2002, Wasow & Jaeger 2005). Many of these correlations receive natural explanations in terms of the contingencies of utterance production. These are summarized in a set of proposed production strategies.
This entire line of investigation is called into question by Bolinger's (1968) dictum, "A difference in form always spells a difference in meaning", for, on this view, the choice of one construction over another would be dictated by the speaker's intended meaning. A completely different kind of objection was raised by
Chomsky in his early work and continues to be widely accepted :
probabilistic models, he claimed, bear "no useful relation to the intuitive scale of grammaticalness on which all linguistic description is based" (Chomsky 1965). These lectures will respond to the fundamental methodological objections raised by Bolinger and Chomsky.
What are the implications of corpus and psycholinguistic studies of syntactic alternations for theories of grammar? Accepting Bresnan and Kaplan's (1982) Strong Competence Hypothesis (that the grammar should be a component of a performance model), such studies argue for a theory like HPSG -- involving direct generation of surface structures and simultaneous satisfaction of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic constraints -- over any kind of transformational approach. |
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| oncancel | Changement d’horaire |
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| responsibles | Abeillé |
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