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Choosing among syntactic alternatives| old_uid | 1233 |
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| title | Choosing among syntactic alternatives |
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| start_date | 2006/05/16 |
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| schedule | 14h |
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| online | no |
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| details | conférence exceptionnelle |
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| summary | What leads speakers to select one way of saying something over another way of expressing the same thought ? This lecture proposes four general strategies of utterance production that influence the choice among alternative formulations :
- Contiguity - Minimize interruptions internal to syntactic and semantic units
- Procrastination - Postpone producing complex units
- Brevity - Keep what is predictable short; and
- Audience Design - Let your audience know when you are having difficulty. It also argues against the widely held assumption that ambiguity avoidance is a major factor in the choice among syntactic alternatives.
Evidence for these strategies will be drawn from corpus studies and
psycholinguistic experiments, with special attention to the following
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"
While each strategy is quite simple and intuitive in itself, the interactions among
them lead to some subtle and surprising results. |
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| responsibles | Faraco, Bertrand |
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