The Tale of Two Lexicons: Decomposing Complexity across a Distributed Lexicon

The notion of complexity is evasive and often left to intuition, yet it is often invoked when studying heritage language grammars. In this article, we propose a first pass at decomposing the notion of complexity into smaller components in a formal grammatical model. In particular, we argue that a distributed model of the lexicon (i.e., one that assumes that principles that generate both words and phrases are one and the same) allows us to identify three components: syntactic features, the hierarchical organization of features, and the mapping between syntactic features and their exponents. Based on grammatical gender in different language pairs, in particular the heritage language American Norwegian (AmNo), we illustrate how this distributed model can account for developments in heritage language grammars whereby the grammatical gender system is considered to have become less complex. More generally, the article demonstrates that a distributed architecture is better suited empirically and theoretically as a heuristic to understand complexity effects in heritage grammars and beyond

The importance of features and exponents: Dissolving Feature Reassembly

Formal approaches tobi-and multilingual grammars rely on two important claims: (i)the grammatical architecture should be able to deal withmonoandbi-/multilingual data without any specific constraints for the latter, (ii)features play a pivotal role in accounting for patterns across and within grammars. In the present paper, it is argued that an exoskeletal approach to grammar, which clearly distinguishes between the underlying syntactic features and their morphophonological realizations (exponents), offers an ideal tool to analyze data frombi-and multilingual speakers. Specifically, it is shown that this framework can subsume the specific mechanism of Feature Reassemblydeveloped by Donna Lardiere since the late 1990’s. Three case studies involving different languages and language combinations are offered in support of this claim, demonstrating how an exoskeletal approach can be employed without any additional constraints or mechanisms

Modeling multilingual grammars: Constraints and predictions

We are grateful for the many thoughtful responses to our epistemological paper, ‘The importance of features and exponents: Dissolving Feature Reassembly’ (henceforth, L&P). It is impossible to do justice to all of the points that have been raised in this response; rather, we will focus on three main points which hopefully will address the most important comments and concerns that have been raised

The Tale of Two Lexicons: Decomposing Complexity across a Distributed Lexicon

The notion of complexity is evasive and often left to intuition, yet it is often invoked when studying heritage language grammars. In this article, we propose a first pass at decomposing the notion of complexity into smaller components in a formal grammatical model. In particular, we argue that a distributed model of the lexicon (i.e., one that assumes that principles that generate both words and phrases are one and the same) allows us to identify three components: syntactic features, the hierarchical organization of features, and the mapping between syntactic features and their exponents. Based on grammatical gender in different language pairs, in particular the heritage language American Norwegian (AmNo), we illustrate how this distributed model can account for developments in heritage language grammars whereby the grammatical gender system is considered to have become less complex. More generally, the article demonstrates that a distributed architecture is better suited empirically and theoretically as a heuristic to understand complexity effects in heritage grammars and beyond

Comparing Island Effects for Different Dependency Types in Norwegian

Recent research suggests that island effects may vary as a function of dependency type, potentially challenging accounts that treat island effects as reflecting uniform constraints on all filler-gap dependency formation. Some authors argue that cross-dependency variation is more readily accounted for by discourse-functional constraints that take into account the discourse status of both the filler and the constituent containing the gap. We ran a judgment study that tested the acceptability of wh-extraction and relativization from nominal subjects, embedded questions (EQs), conditional adjuncts, and existential relative clauses (RCs) in Norwegian. The study had two goals: (i) to systematically investigate cross-dependency variation from various constituent types and (ii) to evaluate the results against the predictions of the FOCUS BACKGROUND CONFLICT constraint (FBCC). Overall we find some evidence for cross-dependency differences across extraction environments. Most notably wh-extraction from EQs and conditional adjuncts yields small but statistically significant island effects, but relativization does not. The differential island effects are potentially consistent with the predictions of the FBCC, but we discuss challenges the FBCC faces in explaining finer-grained judgment patterns