Linguistics Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2787
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item A world without words: A non-lexicalist framework for psycho- and neuro-linguistics(2024) Krauska, Alexandra; Lau, Ellen; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In standard models of language production or comprehension, the elements which are retrieved from memory and combined into a syntactic structure are “lemmas” or “lexical items”. Such models implicitly take a “lexicalist” approach, which assumes that lexical items store meaning, syntax, and form together, that syntactic and lexical processes are distinct, and that syntactic structure does not extend below the word level. Across the last several decades, linguistic research examining a typologically diverse set of languages has provided strong evidence against this approach. These findings suggest that syntactic processes apply both above and below the “word” level, and that both meaning and form are partially determined by the syntactic context. This has significant implications for psychological and neurological models of language processing as well as for the way that we understand different types of aphasia and other language disorders. As a consequence of the lexicalist assumptions of these models, many kinds of sentences that speakers produce and comprehend - in a variety of languages, including English - are challenging for them to account for. In order to move away from lexicalism in psycho- and neuro-linguistics, it is not enough to simply update the syntactic representations of words or phrases; the processing algorithms involved in language production are constrained by the lexicalist representations that they operate on, and thus also need to be reimagined. This dissertation discusses the issues with lexicalism in linguistic theory as well as its implications in psycho- and neuro-linguistics. In addition, I propose a non-lexicalist model of language production, the “WithOut Words” (WOW) model, which does not rely on lemma representations, but instead represents that knowledge as independent mappings between meaning and syntax, and syntax and form, with a single integrated stage for the retrieval and assembly of syntactic structure. Based on this, the model suggests that neural responses during language production should be modulated not just by the pieces of meaning, syntax, and form, but also by the complexity of the mapping processes which link those separate representations. This prediction is supported by the results of a novel experimental paradigm using electroencephalography (EEG) during language production, which observes greater neural responses for meaning-syntax and syntax-form mapping complexity in two separate time windows. Finally, I re-evaluate the dissociation between regular and irregular verbs in aphasia, which has been used as supporting evidence for a distinction between the grammar and the lexicon. By training recurrent neural networks and measuring their performance after lesioning, I show that the observed clinical data can be accounted for within a single mechanism. By moving away from lexicalist assumptions, the non-lexicalist framework described in this dissertation provides better cross-linguistic coverage and aligns better with contemporary syntactic theory.Item Adjunct Control: Syntax and processing(2018) Green, Jeffrey Jack; Williams, Alexander; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes the syntax and processing of adjunct control. Adjunct control is the referential relation between the implicit (PRO) subject of a non-finite adjunct clause and its understood antecedent, as in the temporal adjunct in ‘Holly1 went to bed [after PRO1 drinking milk]’, or the rationale clause in ‘August1 sat on the couch [in order PRO1 to read library books]’. Adjunct control is often assumed to involve a syntactic ‘Obligatory Control’ (OC) dependency, but I show that some adjuncts also permit what is referred to as ‘Non-Obligatory Control’ (NOC), as in the sentences ‘The food tasted better [after PRO drinking milk]’ and ‘The book was checked out from the library [in order PRO to read it]’, where PRO refers to some unnamed entity. I argue that for some adjuncts, OC and NOC are not in complementary distribution, contrary to assumptions of much prior literature, but in agreement with Landau (2017). Contrary to implicit assumptions of Landau, however, I also show that this OC/NOC duality does not extend to all adjuncts. I outline assumptions that Landau’s theory would have to make in order to accommodate the wider distribution of OC and NOC in adjuncts, but argue that this is better accomplished within the Movement Theory of Control (Hornstein, 1999) by relaxing the assumption that all adjuncts are phases. Even in adjuncts where both OC and NOC are possible, OC is often strongly preferred. I argue that this is in large part due to interpretive biases in processing. As a foundational step in examining what these processing biases are, the second part of this dissertation uses visual-world eyetracking to compare the timecourse of interpretation of subject-controlled PRO and overt pronouns in temporal adjuncts. The results suggest that PRO can be interpreted just as quickly as overt pronouns once the relevant bottom-up input is received. These experiments also provide evidence that structural predictions can facilitate reference resolution independent of next-mention predictions.Item Comparative psychosyntax(2015) Chacón, Dustin Alfonso; Phillips, Colin; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Every difference between languages is a “choice point” for the syntactician, psycholinguist, and language learner. The syntactician must describe the differences in representations that the grammars of different languages can assign. The psycholinguist must describe how the comprehension mechanisms search the space of the representations permitted by a grammar to quickly and effortlessly understand sentences in real time. The language learner must determine which representations are permitted in her grammar on the basis of her primary linguistic evidence. These investigations are largely pursued independently, and on the basis of qualitatively different data. In this dissertation, I show that these investigations can be pursued in a way that is mutually informative. Specifically, I show how learnability con- cerns and sentence processing data can constrain the space of possible analyses of language differences. In Chapter 2, I argue that “indirect learning”, or abstract, cross-contruction syntactic inference, is necessary in order to explain how the learner determines which complementizers can co-occur with subjects gaps in her target grammar. I show that adult speakers largely converge in the robustness of the that-trace effect, a constraint on complementation complementizers and subject gaps observed in lan- guages like English, but unobserved in languages like Spanish or Italian. I show that realistic child-directed speech has very few long-distance subject extractions in En- glish, Spanish, and Italian, implying that learners must be able to distinguish these different hypotheses on the basis of other data. This is more consistent with more conservative approaches to these phenomena (Rizzi, 1982), which do not rely on ab- stract complementizer agreement like later analyses (Rizzi, 2006; Rizzi & Shlonsky, 2007). In Chapter 3, I show that resumptive pronoun dependencies inside islands in English are constructed in a non-active fashion, which contrasts with recent findings in Hebrew (Keshev & Meltzer-Asscher, ms). I propose that an expedient explanation of these facts is to suppose that resumptive pronouns in English are ungrammat- ical repair devices (Sells, 1984), whereas resumptive pronouns in island contexts are grammatical in Hebrew. This implies that learners must infer which analysis is appropriate for their grammars on the basis of some evidence in linguistic envi- ronment. However, a corpus study reveals that resumptive pronouns in islands are exceedingly rare in both languages, implying that this difference must be indirectly learned. I argue that theories of resumptive dependencies which analyze resump- tive pronouns as incidences of the same abstract construction (e.g., Hayon 1973; Chomsky 1977) license this indirect learning, as long as resumptive dependencies in English are treated as ungrammatical repair mechanisms. In Chapter 4, I compare active dependency formation processes in Japanese and Bangla. These findings suggest that filler-gap dependencies are preferentially resolved with the first position available. In Japanese, this is the most deeply em- bedded clause, since embedded clauses always precede the embedding verb(Aoshima et al., 2004; Yoshida, 2006; Omaki et al., 2014). Bangla allows a within-language comparison of the relationship between active dependency formation processes and word order, since embedded clauses may precede or follow the embedding verb (Bayer, 1996). However, the results from three experiments in Bangla are mixed, suggesting a weaker preference for a lineary local resolution of filler-gap dependen- cies, unlike in Japanese. I propose a number of possible explanations for these facts, and discuss how differences in processing profiles may be accounted for in a variety of ways. In Chapter 5, I conclude the dissertation.