•Speakers vary adjective order to facilitate early referent identification.•Adjectives that rule out more referential alternatives are placed earlier.•Adjective ordering is also affected by a ...production-centered availability effect.•Discriminability and availability affect ordering differently from semantic effects.•Competition in the speaker’s message determines adjective selection and ordering.
We contrasted two hypotheses concerning how speakers determine adjective order during referential communication. The discriminatory efficiency hypotheses claims that speakers place the most discriminating adjective early to facilitate referent identification. By contrast, the availability-based ordering hypothesis assumes that speakers produce most available adjectives early to ease production. Experiment 1 showed that speakers use more pattern-before-color modifier orders (than the reversed) when pattern, not color, distinguished the referent from alternatives, providing support for the discriminatory efficiency hypothesis. Participants also overspecified color more often than pattern, and they generally favored color-before-pattern orders, in support of the availability-based ordering hypothesis. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated both effects in a dialogue setting, where speakers’ adjective ordering was also primed by their partner’s ordering, using conjoined and non-conjoined constructions. We propose a novel model (PASS) that explains how discriminability and availability simultaneously influence adjective selection and ordering via competition in the speaker’s message representation.
By drawing on service encounter data in Japanese, this paper analyzes a previously undocumented request action initiated by a service provider to a client as a necessary step to provide the service. ...The service provider and their client, both exercising respective deontic rights, collaboratively construct a request turn in particular ways. In this case, due to the Japanese SOV word order, the service provider takes advantage of segmenting their request turn to allow the recipient clients to begin compliance, who thereby acquiesce to the service provider’s deontic authority at the earliest point. By bringing the request turn to completion after the client’s compliance while reflexively showing their deontic and beneficiary stances in the turn final component, the service provider displays commitment to balancing out their relative deontic status to the client.
This paper develops Ramchand’s first phase syntax theory by investigating the Mandarin directional serial verb construction. Specifically, the position of the theme argument in these constructions is ...investigated, and two major word order variants are identified: the VOV type and the VVO type. The former are argued to be accomplishments, whereas the latter are achievements. The analysis embraces Ramchand’s spirit that three sub-eventive projections (InitP, ProcP, and ResP) exist universally as the basic building blocks in the first-phase syntax, and it proposes that the surface word order alternation and situation type shift is the consequence of the occurrence/absence of the ResP and the different insertion position of the directional morphemes.
We report a novel transposed-word effect in speeded grammaticality judgments made about five-word sequences. The critical ungrammatical test sequences were formed by transposing two adjacent words ...from either a grammatical base sequence (e.g., “The white cat was big” became “The white was cat big”) or an ungrammatical base sequence (e.g., “The white cat was slowly” became “The white was cat slowly”). These were intermixed with an equal number of correct sentences for the purpose of the grammaticality judgment task. In a laboratory experiment (N = 57) and an online experiment (N = 94), we found that ungrammatical decisions were harder to make when the ungrammatical sequence originated from a grammatically correct base sequence. This provides the first demonstration that the encoding of word order retains a certain amount of uncertainty. We further argue that the novel transposed-word effect reflects parallel processing of words during written sentence comprehension combined with top-down constraints from sentence-level structures.
To better understand Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of non-canonical word orders, we tested comprehension and production of Mandarin non-canonical active
-construction and passive
...-construction, in comparison with canonical active SVO sentences among 180 children between three and 6 years of age. Our results showed that children had more difficulties with
-construction compared to SVO sentences in both comprehension and production, but early problems of
-construction only lied in production. We discussed these patterns in connection with two accounts of language acquisition which attribute language development to the maturation of grammar or to the exposure to the input, respectively.
Word order is one of the major properties on which languages are compared and its study is fundamental to linguistics. This comprehensive survey provides an up-to-date, critical overview of this ...widely debated topic, exploring and evaluating word order research carried out in four major theoretical frameworks – linguistic typology, generative grammar, optimality theory and processing-based theories. It is the first book to bring these theoretical approaches together in one place and is therefore a one-stop resource covering the current developments in word order research. It explains word order patterns in different languages and at different structural levels and critically evaluates (and where possible, compares) the theoretical assumptions and word order principles used in the different approaches. Also highlighted are issues and problems that require further investigation or remain unresolved. This book will be invaluable to those investigating word order, and researchers and students in syntax, linguistic theory and typology.
We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and ...approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. (1) We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. (2) We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. (3) In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike.
Abstract
In syntactic change, it remains an open issue whether word orders are more conservative or innovative in subordinate clauses compared with main clauses. Using 47 dependency-annotated corpora ...and Bayesian phylogenetic inference, we explore the evolution of S/V, V/O, and S/O orders across main and subordinate clauses in Indo-European. Our results reveal similar rates of change across clause types, with no evidence for any inherent conservatism of subordinate or main clauses. Our models also support evolutionary biases towards SV, VO, and SO orders, consistent with theories of dependency length minimization that favor verb-medial orders and with theories of a subject preference that favor SO orders. Finally, our results show that while the word order in the proto-language cannot be estimated with any reasonable degree of certainty, the early history of the family was dominated by a moderate preference for SVO orders, with substantial uncertainty between VO and OV orders in both main and subordinate clauses.
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