Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Björn Lundquist (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)

Title: The production, processing, planning and acquisition of syntactic variation – in search of the forces behind word order regularization

Abstract: In this talk I will present various work from the last couple of years that has taken place within the project Experimental Approaches to Syntactic Optionality. In this project, we try to uncover the driving forces behind syntactic regularization by comparing the processing and acquisition of word order optionality in the three closely related Mainland North Germanic languages (Norwegian, Swedish and Danish), which show a varying degree of word order freedom. We focus on four syntactic phenomena, namely Subject Shift, Object Shift, Particle Shift and Long Object Shift (or in short, the placement of subjects and objects with respect to adverbials, particles and other arguments). For all of these phenomena, at least one of the three languages has developed a categorical word order pattern, i.e., a strict mapping from an underlying hierarchical structure to a linear order, while at least one of the languages exhibits word order freedom. By studying the production, processing, and acquisition of these structures in the three languages, we hope to be able to answer if regularization mainly takes place during language acquisition or during adult language use. Specifically, three hypotheses are central to the project:

1. Categoricity arises from an innate or early bias against synonymy/optionality (e.g., Clark 1987).
2. Categoricity evolves gradually over generations due to children’s tendency to over-regularize variation (possibly due to memory limitations, Newport 1985, Yang 2012).
3. Templatic patterns arise due to processing demands in adult language production (MacDonald 2013, Levinson 2017).

In this talk, I will mainly focus on the adult L1 production and processing of optionality, but I will also present some recent L2 studies, and some studies on the influence of prosody on word order choices. In addition, I will spend some time defining word order optionality, especially in the context of the North Germanic languages.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

• Elizabeth Pankratz

• Centre for Language Evolution