Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

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Developments in English sentential complements:
a processing-based explanation
Fanego, Teresa
University of Santiago de Compostela
iafanego@usc.es
Since Chomsky (1965), it has been generally assumed in linguistics that grammars have not
been shaped by performance to any significant extent. Hawkins (2004; see also Hawkins
1994), however, puts forward the hypothesis that grammars have been profoundly shaped by
processing considerations, that is, by language in use. More specifically, he proposes three
very general constraints or principles of efficiency –namely Minimize Domains, Minimize
Forms, and Maximize On-line Processing– which are suggested by the preferences observed
cross-linguistically in actual performance data.
The basic insight of Minimize Domains is that the processor prefers shorter processing
domains than longer ones, given combinatorial and/or dependency relations between two
elements within a particular domain; this principle explains, inter alia, why SVO languages
tend to be prepositional and SOV languages postpositional. Minimize Forms predicts, in turn,
that “it is preferable to reduce the number of distinct form-property pairs in a language as
much as possible, as long as the intended contextually appropriate meaning can be recovered
from reduced linguistic forms with more general meanings” (Hawkins 2004: 28). Finally,
Maximize On-line Processing captures the intuition that the human processor prefers to select
and arrange linguistic forms so as to provide the earliest possible access to properties in the
ultimate proposition to be communicated.
In my presentation at the 39th Annual Meeting of the SLE I will check whether the above
predictions can help to account for a number of changes in the history of English, including:
a. The specialization of to-infinitives to encode object clauses with controlled implicit
subjects (e.g. “I want to see Mary”) and of gerundives to encode object clauses with
non-controlled implicit subjects (e.g. “I cannot understand mobilizing demonstrations
against your own country”). In earlier stages of English the infinitive (or occasionally
a that-clause) was used in both cases.
b. The specialization of the opposition to:-ing to distinguish the different senses of
retrospective verbs. Compare “I will remember to do it” (future reference) with “I
perfectly remember carrying back the manuscript you mention” (past-time reference).
c. The long-term replacement of preverbal subject infinitives (“To invite the twins was a
bad mistake”) by gerundives (“Inviting the twins was a bad mistake”). In Present-day
British and American English the average frequencies per 100,000 words of preverbal
infinitives and gerundives are, respectively, 7 and 34; in the seventeenth century the
respective frequencies were 26 and 0.9.
References:
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Hawkins, John A. 1994. A performance theory of order and constituency.Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hawkins, John A. 2004. Efficiency and complexity in grammars.Oxford: Oxford University
Press.