Per què Y? Sobre la centralitat de la sintaxi a l’arquitectura de la gramàtica

Irurtzun, Aritz

doi:10.5565/rev/catjl.145

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 23 publications

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“…Syntactic variation related to discourse-information structure is one particularly relevant example, and it presents one of the biggest challenges for the Y-model of language (e.g., Irurtzun 2009). Although no crosslinguistic model accounting for variability due to information structure currently exists in this framework, numerous attempts have centered on particular phenomena or languages.…”

Section: Gradience Across Generative Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why we need a gradient approach to word order

Levshina¹,

Namboodiripad²,

Allassonnière-Tang³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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This paper argues for a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order preferences, both within and across languages, as a continuous variable. Word order variability should be regarded as a basic assumption, rather than as something exceptional. Although this approach follows naturally from the emergentist usage-based view of language, we argue that it can be beneficial for all frameworks and linguistic domains, including language acquisition, processing, typology, language contact, language evolution and change, variationist linguistics and formal approaches. Gradient approaches have been very fruitful in some domains, such as language processing, but their potential is not fully realized yet. This may be due to practical reasons. We discuss the most pressing methodological challenges in corpus-based and experimental research of word order and propose some solutions and best practices.

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Section: Gradience Across Generative Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why we need a gradient approach to word order

Levshina¹,

Namboodiripad²,

Allassonnière-Tang³

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Determining the cognitive biases behind a viral linguistic universal: the order of multiple adjectives

Leivada

2022

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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When people are asked to create a phrase with the elements {blue, earrings, beautiful}, they produce ‘beautiful blue earrings’. Several theories have been proposed about the origins of this universal tendency to order multiple adjectives in a specific way: an innate universal hierarchy with designated positions for each category of adjectives, sensitivity to the definiteness of the adjectival denotation, availability and psychological closeness of the adjective attributes to the speaker, the encoding of subjective vs. objective properties, and the adjective’s phonological weight. Although these theories have strong descriptive power, they often focus on what happens at the phenotypic level without explaining what cognitive needs trigger this behavior. Through a timed task that measures acceptability in ‘Adjective-Adjective-Noun’ sequences that either comply with the universal order or violate it, we adduce evidence for the high acceptability of the violating orders, whose processing did not take longer than that of the compliant orders, as should have happened if the former were non-canonical. The results suggest that ordering preferences exist but are not invariable, as one would expect if a strong linguistic universal was involved. We track the origin of adjective ordering preferences to the synergistic interplay of three cognitive biases: Zipf’s Law, Intolerance of Ambiguity, and Novel Information Bias. Last, we show that the linguistic manifestation of these preferences is sensitive to the statistical distribution of the input data, resulting to variation even among speakers of the same language.

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Introduction

Gupton¹,

Gielau

2021

Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics

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Per què Y? Sobre la centralitat de la sintaxi a l’arquitectura de la gramàtica

Cited by 8 publications

References 23 publications

Why we need a gradient approach to word order

Why we need a gradient approach to word order

Determining the cognitive biases behind a viral linguistic universal: the order of multiple adjectives

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