- 1:00 Welcome by Mike Hammond
- Introductory remarks by Andy Wedel
Friday, April 25, 2008: Harvill rm. 115
- 1:15 - 2:15 Harry Tily
- Diachronic processing preferences and their implications for models of syntactic change
- 2:15 – 3:15 Neal Snider
- An exemplar model of syntactic production
Tea Break
- 3:30 – 4:30 Joan Bresnan
- Predicting Syntax: Processing Dative Constructions in Two Varieties of English
- 4:30 – 5:30 Discussion
Dinner at Poca Cosa
- 8:30 Coffee
Saturday, April 26, 2008: Harvill rm. 102
- 8:45 – 9:45 Rob Malouf, Farrell Ackerman and Jim Blevins
- Inflectional morphology as a complex adaptive system
- 9:45 – 10:45 Melissa Redford
- Meaning and Mechanics in Speech and Language Acquisition
Tea Break
- 11:00 – 12:00 Eduardo Altmann
- Recurrences in processes with long-term memory
Lunch
- 1:30—2:30 Robert Daland
- Language variation: convergence, divergence and death
- 2:30 – 3:30 Colin Dawson
- 'Second-Order Learning' as a Source of Structure Stabilization in Both Individual Learning and Cultural Evolution
Tea Break
- 3:45 – 4:45 Andy Wedel
- Modeling sublexical contrast maintenance as an emergent effect of lexical category competition
- 4:45 – 5:45 Clay Beckner and Andy Wedel
- Modeling contributions of usage versus acquisition to language change
Department Potluck party at 7 at Adam Ussishkin and Andy Wedel’s house
Diachronic processing preferences and their implications for models of syntactic change
Harry Tilly
In syntactic variation, it is often the case that one of the possible variants is produced or comprehended more readily by native speakers. For example, speakers tend to select the dative alternation variant (V NP1 NP2 vs V NP2 to NP1) which minimises the distance between heads and their dependents, even though either outcome is grammatical (Arnold et al, 2000). These biases likely reflect greater processing costs associated with the disprefered variant (e.g. Gibson, 2001). Using data from the YCOE treebank of Old English (Taylor et al 2003) and PPCME2 treebank of Middle English (Kroch & Taylor, 2000), I model the effect of processing preferences on a form in variation -- the alternation between OV and VO word order -- as it becomes fossilised in the grammar of Present Day English. Throughout the timecourse when both word orders are available, the dependency lengths between words, and thus the processing cost, entailed by each outcome influence the frequency with which it is chosen. The greater the processing advantage of VO order, the more advanced the gradual shift to VO order tends to be. Such processing asymmetries may prove an efficient cause for syntactic change over a historical timescale, as predicted by Hawkins' (1994,2004) Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis, and implemented at an abstract level in multi-agent simulations by (e.g.) Kirby (1999). I discuss the benefits and pitfalls involved in integrating specific findings from diachronic syntax and online processing into computational models of syntactic change.