Antisymmetry and the Conservation of C-Command: Scrambling and Phrase Structure in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective

Holmberg’s Generalization (Holmberg 1986) was originally stated to describe the “object shift” phenomena found in the modern Scandinavian languages. This dissertation argues that object shift is merely a subcase of scrambling, a type of adjunction, and that Holmberg’s Generalization is a subcase of a universal constraint, the “Generalized Holmberg Constraint” (GHC), which prohibits leftward scrambling across c-commanding functional heads. The existence of such a constraint turns out to have ramifications far beyond the analysis of scrambling itself, and the predictions it makes ultimately form an extended argument in favor of a universal antisymmetric approach to phrase structure (Kayne 1994). The most important evidence for the GHC comes from diachronic data. The study presents quantitative data from the history of Yiddish and English to show that, in cases where a language undergoes major changes in its clause structure, the GHC remains an active and stable constraint in the language, indicating its status as a universal. Once a phrase structure change begins, the resulting variation within a single speech community, and even within individuals, immediately shows the effect of the GHC on scrambling. The latter portion of the study argues that the GHC is not merely a constraint on scrambling, but rather a much more general constraint on the way syntactic computations progress, the “Conservation of C-Command.” The Conservation of C-Command finds a natural cross-linguistic formulation only if we adopt an antisymmetric approach to languages with head-final phrase structures. This approach turns out to have consequences for a variety of other problems of syntactic analysis, including the West Germanic Verb (Projection) Raising construction and Heavy NP Shift. This dissertation accounts for the typology of scrambling found in the world’s languages and during periods of language change, and shows that the way in which scrambling is constrained provides insight into basic properties of phrase structure. In addition, it constitutes an extended argument for the autonomy of syntax: while prosodic and pragmatic considerations favor leftward scrambling in a number of contexts, a language’s inventory of functional heads puts a strict upper bound on whether scrambling can respond to these considerations

Attention To People Like You: A Proposal Regarding Neuroendocrine Effects on Linguistic Variation

Although the literature on language change has often replicated and discussed a pattern in which female speakers lead in changes that occur below the level of awareness, there is no consensus on why this pattern should arise. Interestingly, recent findings in endocrinology show that differences in prenatal testosterone exposure can impact learning patterns. In the light of these findings, we first present preliminary results consistent with the hypothesis that a biological factor, prenatal exposure to androgens, can have a small, continuous biasing effect on linguistic variation, namely the variable duration of pre-aspiration conditioned by voiceless obstruents in Tyneside English. Second, we propose an explanatory model in which the biological factor—prenatal testosterone exposure—creates subtle bias in how speakers learn linguistic variants and suggest that some reported sex effects are derivative. This model is compatible with the high tendency for females to lead in language change from below (Labov 1990: 206)

Relatório de estágio em farmácia comunitária

Relatório de estágio realizado no âmbito do Mestrado Integrado em Ciências Farmacêuticas, apresentado à Faculdade de Farmácia da Universidade de Coimbr

Formal Metrics Meets the Boojum: Metrical Variation in Lewis Carroll's Verse

n/

Smooth Signals and Syntactic Change

A large body of recent work argues that considerations of information density predict various phenomena in linguistic planning and production. However, the usefulness of an information theoretic account for explaining diachronic phenomena has remained under-explored. Here, we test the idea that speakers prefer informationally uniform utterances on diachronic data from historical English and Icelandic. Our results show that: (i) the information density approach allows us to predict that Subject and Object type will affect the frequencies of OV and VO in specific ways, creating a complex Constant Rate Effect, (ii) the bias towards information uniformity explains this CRE and may help to explain others, and (iii) communities of speakers are constant in their average target level of information uniformity over long periods of historical time. This finding is consistent with an understanding of this bias which places it deep in the human language faculty and the human faculty for communication

Deriving the Constant Rate Effect

The Constant Rate Hypothesis (Kroch 1989) states that when grammar competition leads to language change, the rate of replacement is the same in all contexts affected by the change (the Constant Rate Effect, or CRE). Despite nearly three decades of empirical work into this hypothesis, the theoretical foundations of the CRE remain problematic: it can be shown that the standard way of operationalizing the CRE via sets of independent logistic curves is neither sufficient nor necessary for assuming that a single change has occurred. To address this problem, we introduce a mathematical model of the CRE by augmenting Yang’s (2000) variational learner with production biases over an arbitrary number of linguistic contexts. We show that this model naturally gives rise to the CRE and prove that under our model the time separation possible between any two reflexes of a single underlying change necessarily has a finite upper bound, inversely proportional to the rate of the underlying change. Testing the predictions of this time separation theorem against three case studies, we find that our model gives fits which are no worse than regressions conducted using the standard operationalization of CREs. However, unlike the standard operationalization, our more constrained model can correctly differentiate between actual CREs and pseudo-CREs—patterns in usage data which are superficially connected by similar rates of change yet clearly not unified by a single underlying cause. More generally, we probe the effects of introducing context-specific production biases by conducting a full bifurcation analysis of the proposed model. In particular, this analysis implies that a difference in the weak generative capacity of two competing grammars is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition of language change when contextual effects are present.publishe

Universal Dependencies 2.7

Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008)

Universal Dependencies 2.8.1

Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008). Version 2.8.1 fixes a bug in 2.8 where a portion of the Dutch Alpino treebank was accidentally omitted