Phonological Markedness Effects in Sentence Formation Canaan Breiss, Bruce Hayes
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Phonological markedness effects in sentence formation Canaan Breiss, Bruce Hayes Language, Volume 96, Number 2, June 2020, pp. 338-370 (Article) Published by Linguistic Society of America DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2020.0023 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/757631 [ Access provided at 1 Jul 2020 21:07 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] PHONOLOGICAL MARKEDNESS EFFECTS IN SENTENCE FORMATION CANAAN BREISS BRUCE HAYES University of California, Los Angeles University of California, Los Angeles Earlier research has found that phonological markedness constraints (for example, against stress clash or sibilant sequences) statistically influence speakers’ choices between particular syn - tactic constructions and between synonymous words. In this study, we test phonological con - straints not just in particular cases, but across the board. We employ a novel method that statistically models the distribution of word bigrams (consecutive two-word sequences) and how this distribution is influenced by phonological constraints. Our study of multiple corpora indicates that several phonological constraints do indeed play a statistically significant role in English sen - tence formation. We also show that by examining particular subsets of the corpora we can diag - nose the mechanisms whereby phonologically marked sequences come to be underrepresented. We conclude by discussing modes of grammatical organization compatible with our findings.* Keywords : markedness, phrasal phonology, syntax-phonology interface, grammatical architec - tures 1. Goals and setting . The focus of this article is how different domains of linguistic knowledge—here, syntactic, phonological, and lexical—interact in the creation of sen - tences. An influential proposal for how these domains interact is the componential feed- forward model, laid out in Chomsky 1965:16 and shown in Figure 1. This model places the syntactic component at the core of the grammar, with its output transmitted to two in - terpretive components, which derive output representations for meaning and sound. Syntax Semantics Phonology Meaning Phonetics Sound Figure 1. A schematic depiction of the feed-forward model. Zwicky and Pullum (1986:63) offered a way to interpret such diagrams so as to make a clear empirical prediction: ‘the syntactic component determines the order in which words may be placed in sentences … and the phonological component determines what pronunciations are associated with particular structured sequences of words that the syntax says are well-formed’. In other words, syntax is generative, phonology interpre - tive; the phonology freely accepts whatever the syntax chooses to give it and forms a pronunciation. It is this interpretation of Fig. 1 that we address here. * We would like to thank Joan Bresnan, Tim Hunter, Paul Kiparsky, Omer Preminger, and Stephanie Shih; Siavash Jalal of the UCLA statistical consulting unit; the referees for Language ; and talk audiences at UCLA, Seoul National University, Cornell University, the Linguistic Society of America, the University of Arizona, and the University of Southern California for their advice and practical assistance. All responsibility for re - maining errors rests with us. This work was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to Breiss and by the Committee on Research of the UCLA Academic Senate. Supplemental materials for this article can be accessed online at http://muse.jhu.edu/resolve/97. 338 Printed with the permission of Canaan Breiss & Bruce Hayes. © 2020. Phonological markedness effects in sentence formation 339 In the intervening years, Zwicky and Pullum’s interpretation has been met with an ever-growing body of empirical challenges. For instance, the syntax of a language often offers more than one way to express a given meaning, and it can be shown that speakers’ choices between alternative constructions are sometimes phonologically motivated. Shih and Zuraw (2017, 2018) studied two parallel noun-adjective constructions in Tagalog: {Adj. linker Noun} and {Noun linker Adj.}, where linker is one of two contextually de - termined allomorphs, na or - ng . Using corpus data, they showed that speakers tend to choose between these options in ways that avoid violating certain phonological marked - ness constraints: *[+nasal][+nasal], * Hiatus , and *NC ̥, all of which are active elsewhere in the language’s phonology. Similar instances of phonologically biased syntactic choice have been detected for the English dative alternation ( give X to Y vs. give Y X ; Anttila et al. 2010, Shih & Grafmiller 2011, Shih 2017a), the genitive alternation ( X’s Y , Y of X ; Shih et al. 2015, Ryan 2019), and the conjunct-order alternation ( X and Y , Y and X ; Benor & Levy 2006, Shih 2017a, Ryan 2019). The Sanskrit Rigveda takes advantage of free word order to avoid hiatus (Gunkel & Ryan 2011). Other forms of evidence have been put forth. For instance, the linear ordering of cli - tics is argued to depend in part on phonological factors (Zec & Inkelas 1990, Chung 2003, Erteschik-Shir et al. 2019). The notion of weight, governing heavy NP shift, top - icalization, and other aspects of word order, has been argued to be at least partly phono - logically defined (Zec & Inkelas 1990, Shih & Grafmiller 2011, Ryan 2019). Along with Zec and Inkelas, Agbayani and Golston have argued for movement operations (for instance, Japanese long-distance scrambling) that apply to phonological, not syntactic, constituents (Agbayani & Golston 2010, 2016, Agbayani et al. 2015). To accommodate such phenomena, some formal models bifurcate the syntax, estab - lishing a ‘narrow’ core that is phonology-free but performs only a subset of the work of actually arranging words into sentences, leaving other aspects of linearization to sepa - rate mechanisms. Such approaches would include the work of Agbayani and colleagues just cited, as well as Embick and Noyer (2001). Our data do not bear, as far as we can tell, on the validity of such models. However, the approach of isolating a phonology- free core of the syntax does have the potential to obscure what is meant by ‘phonologi - cal effects in syntax’, ruling out their existence more or less by definition (Anttila 2016:130). To keep our purpose clear, we use the phrase ‘sentence formation’, desig - nating whatever grammatical apparatus is employed, in any framework, to derive com - plete, observable sentences. ‘Sentence formation’ would also include word choice, which also appears to be guided by phonological constraints. Schlüter (2005, 2015) has demonstrated that, given a syn - onym pair, speakers tend to select the word that creates fewer phonological constraint vi - olations in its local syntactic context. Her evidence comes from the distribution of historical English lexical doublets like worse and worser , which are gradiently deployed to avoid violations of * Clash (stress on adjacent syllables). Schlüter and Knappe (2018) have obtained similar results for modern synonym pairs such as glad /happy . A characteristic of the cases just cited is that the phonology enforces a gradient preference among competing variants, a property we will see below in our own data. Yet the pattern is not always gradient: analysts have suggested cases in which utter - ances are fully ungrammatical due to violation of a phonological constraint. One such case is provided by Rice and Svenonius (1998) and Rice (2007), who observe that in some varieties of Norwegian, there exist imperative verb forms that end in consonant clusters with reversed sonority, such as sykl ‘bicycle. imp ’ or åpn ‘open. imp ’. The 340 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 96, NUMBER 2 (2020) phonology of these dialects does not permit reversed-sonority syllable codas, and as a result these verbs cannot be uttered prepausally, or in a sentence before a consonant- initial word. But before a vowel-initial word in the same sentence, the sonority problem is repaired by resyllabification across the word boundary (that is, sy.kl# V), and the im - perative becomes useable. A representative contrast (Rice 2007:204) is given in 1. (1) Reversed-sonority imperatives in Norwegian a. *Sykl opp bakken *bike up the.hill ‘Bike up the hill!’ b. *Sykl ned bakken *bike down the.hill ‘Bike down the hill!’ It would seem that 1b is a sentence that is ungrammatical for phonological reasons. Fur - ther cases of this sort are proposed by Zec and Inkelas (1990), Harford and Demuth (1999), Agbayani et al. (2015), and Anttila (2016). The literature that critically addresses the feed-forward model appears to be both vast and fragmented among distinct research communities (Anttila 2016:133). The absence of a consensus theoretical framework for such work has surely contributed to this frag - mentation. For further access to this literature we recommend the surveys (incorporat - ing specific proposals) by Anttila (2016), Shih (2017a), and Ryan (2019). We address the question of theoretical framework at the end of this article. Our main purpose, however, is empirical: we seek to expand the set of relevant phenomena and to offer a novel research method. In previous research, it has been the norm to choose some specific area to investigate: for example, a particular choice between competing syntactic constructions or lexical items. This approach is sensible, since it offers closely controlled comparisons. However, we feel it may be appropriate to complement this work with a broader approach. For our project, we have devised a means of testing the entire content