UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Knowledge and Processing of Morphosyntactic Variation in African American Language and Mainstream American English(2023) Maher, Zachary Kevin; Edwards, Jan; Novick, Jared; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As people from different social groups come into contact, they must accommodate differences in morphosyntax (e.g., He seem nice vs. He seems nice) in order to successfully represent and comprehend their interlocutor’s speech. Listeners usually have high comprehension across such differences, but little is known about the mechanisms behind morphosyntactic accommodation. In this dissertation, I asked what listeners know about variation in morphosyntax and how they deploy this knowledge in real-time language processing. As a test case, I focused on regularized subject-verb agreement (e.g., He seem nice, They was happy)—which is common in African American Language (AAL), but not in Mainstream American English (MAE)—and compared how listeners adjust their linguistic expectations depending on what language varieties both they and their interlocutors speak. In Experiment 1, I showed that participants who primarily speak MAE 1) recognize that some speakers use regularized subject-verb agreement, 2) evaluate that regularized subject-verb agreement is associated with AAL, and 3) predict that the subject-verb agreement rules of AAL allow for some patterns (They was happy) but not others (*He were happy). This was accomplished using a novel sentence rating task, where participants heard audio examples of a given language variety, then rated written sentences for how likely a speaker of that variety would be to say them. In Experiment 2, I showed that a similar pool of participants did not merely recognize regularized subject-verb agreement; their knowledge of variation lead them to predict that AAL speakers use regularized forms in an acoustically ambiguous context. Participants heard sentences like He sit(s) still, where it is unclear whether the verb includes a verbal -s due to a segmentation ambiguity. They were more likely to transcribe a regularized form (He sit still) when it was spoken by an AAL-speaking voice than when it was spoken by an MAE-speaking voice. Together, these results indicate that listeners have rich mental models of their interlocutors that extend beyond a general awareness of linguistic difference. In Experiment 3, I compared bidialectal speakers of AAL and MAE and monodialectal speakers of MAE. On the rating task from Experiment 1, bidialectal participants showed a greater degree of differentiation between sentences that are grammatical in AAL and sentences that are ungrammatical in AAL, compared to monodialectal participants. However, both groups of participants indicated that ungrammatical sentences are broadly more likely in AAL than MAE, contrary to usage patterns in the world. On the transcription task from Experiment 2, bidialectal participants were overall more likely to transcribe regularized subject-verb agreement, but they differentiated between AAL- and MAE-speaking voices to the same degree as monodialectal participants. Both groups were more likely to use MAE subject-verb agreement (He sits still) than regularized subject-verb agreement (He sit still). These results suggest that bidialectal listeners broadly expect regularized subject-verb agreement to a greater degree than do monodialectal listeners, rather than making stronger predictions about a given speaker. Moreover, while bidialectal listeners have a more granular sense of AAL’s grammatical rules, all listeners still favor MAE, likely reflecting MAE’s dominant status. In Experiment 4, I asked how listeners use their knowledge of variation in subject-verb agreement to guide real-time interpretation of sentences, again comparing bidialectal and monodialectal participants. Participants heard sentences like The duck(s) swim in the pond, where they must rely on the agreement morphology of the verb to determine whether the subject of the sentence is singular or plural, since a segmentation ambiguity makes it unclear whether the noun ends in -s. In MAE, only a plural interpretation is available, while in AAL, a singular interpretation is also available. Participants’ eye-movements were tracked as they looked at and selected images on a screen. Participants were more likely to look at and select a singular image if the sentence was presented in an AAL-speaking voice, compared to an MAE-speaking voice, and bidialectal participants were more likely to look at and select a singular image, compared to monodialectal participants. As with the transcription task in Experiment 3, this suggests that bidialectal participants are broadly more likely to consider the possibility that a speaker uses regularized SVA, compared to monodialectal participants, but their linguistic expectations are not more strongly differentiated based on the grammar of their interlocutor. These results make it clear that listeners have mental models of morphosyntactic variation, which can be characterized along a variety of dimensions, including the syntax, semantics, and indexicality (social meaning) of a given variable. This can serve as a foundation for future inquiry into the details of these models and the real-time switching and control dynamics as listeners adjust to different varieties in their environment.Item Coordination without grammar-internal feature resolution(2021) Lyskawa, Paulina; Polinsky, Maria; Preminger, Omer; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Morphological agreement with coordinate phrases involves a computation that takes as its input a set of features from each conjunct and outputs exactly one resolved set of features (number, person, grammatical gender/noun class, commonly labelled phi-features). Such resolution is typically taken to be grammar-internal because it relies on other grammar-internal ingredients (phi-features, agreement, coordination), and at least in some instances seems to follow systematic rules that may be captured by familiar grammatical operations. Exceptions to these apparent rules, if not ignored altogether, have received disparate analyses depending on the language, framework, and the particular features involved. In this thesis, I argue that it is such exceptions that are illuminating, and that the appearance of rigid rules is misleading. Treating variation in agreement with coordinate phrases as exceptional with respect to the otherwise deterministic output rules either delays the task of explaining the surface data, or risks weakening the language competence theory by adding the baroque stipulations that a purely grammar-internal treatment would require. Phi-agreement with coordinate phrases is subject to inter- and intra-speaker variability and ineffability; such variation is widespread in the world’s languages, even the ones with limited phi-agreement morphology like English. I therefore reject the grammar-internal approach to agreement with coordinate phrases and argue instead that the agreement morphology we observe on the surface is due to grammar-external mechanisms being recruited to determine the resulting agreement morphology. Under this approach, systematicity in agreement with coordinations is only apparent and can be manipulated. The reason a grammar-internal mechanism is unavailable is because it would have to take place on the agreeing head (e.g., Infl0 or v0), and what we know about agreement between a syntactic head and multiple arguments (e.g., from omnivorous agreement and the Person Case Constraint) renders it ill-suited for the task of coordination resolution.Item A Structural Theory of Derivations(2018) Stone, Zachary; Lasnik, Howard; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Operations which take in tuples of syntactic objects and assign them output syntactic objects are used to formalize the generative component of most formal grammars in the minimalist tradition. However, these models do not usually include information which relates the structure of the input and output objects explicitly. We develop a very general formal model of grammars which includes this structural change data, and also allows for richer dependency structures such as feature geometry and feature-sharing. Importantly, syntactic operations involving phrasal attachment selection, agreement, licensing, head-adjunction, etc. can all be captured as special kinds of structural changes, and hence we can analyze them using a uniform technique. Using this data, we give a rich theory of isomorphisms, equivalences, and substructures of syntactic objects, structural changes, derivations, rules, grammars, and languages. We show that many of these notions, while useful, are technically difficult or impossible to state in prior models. It is immediately possible to define grammatical notions like projection, agreement, selection, etc. structurally in a manner preserved under equivalences of various sorts. We use the richer structure of syntactic objects to give a novel characterization of c-command naturally arising from this structure. We use the richer structure of rules to give a general theory of structural analyses and generating structural changes. Our theory of structural analyses makes it possible to extract from productions what structure is targeted by a rule and what conditions a rule can apply in, regardless of the underlying structure of syntactic objects or the kinds of phrasal and featural manipulations performed, where other formal models have difficulty incorporating such structure-sensitive rules. This knowledge of structural changes also makes it possible to extend rules to new objects straightforwardly. Our theory of structural changes allows us to deconstruct them into component parts and show relationships between operations which are missed by models lacking this data. Finally, we extend the model to a copying theory of movement. We implement a traditional model of copying ‘online’, where copies and chains are formed throughout the course of the derivation (while still admitting a feature calculus in the objects themselves). Part of what allows for this is having a robust theory of substructures of derived objects and how they are related throughout a derivation. We show consequences for checking features in chains and feature-sharing.Item MEMORY AND PREDICTION IN CROSS-LINGUISTIC SENTENCE COMPREHENSION(2014) Lago, Maria S.; Phillips, Colin; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the role of morphological and syntactic variation in sentence comprehension across languages. While most previous research has focused on how cross-linguistic differences affect the control structure of the language architecture (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) here we adopt an explicit model of memory, content-addressable memory (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; McElree, 2006) and examine how cross-linguistic variation affects the nature of the representations and processes that speakers deploy during comprehension. With this goal, we focus on two kinds of grammatical dependencies that involve an interaction between language and memory: subject-verb agreement and referential pronouns. In the first part of this dissertation, we use the self-paced reading method to examine how the processing of subject-verb agreement in Spanish, a language with a rich morphological system, differs from English. We show that differences in morphological richness across languages impact prediction processes while leaving retrieval processes fairly preserved. In the second part, we examine the processing of coreference in German, a language that, in contrast with English, encodes gender syntactically. We use eye-tracking to compare comprehension profiles during coreference and we find that only speakers of German show evidence of semantic reactivation of a pronoun's antecedent. This suggests that retrieval of semantic information is dependent on syntactic gender, and demonstrates that German and English speakers retrieve qualitatively different antecedent representations from memory. Taken together, these results suggest that cross-linguistic variation in comprehension is more affected by the content than the functional importance of gender and number features across languages.