Default Inheritance Research Articles

Default Inheritance in Modified Statements: Bias or Inference?

It is a fact that human subjects rate sentences about typical properties such as “Ravens are black” as very likely to be true. In comparison, modified sentences such as “Feathered ravens are black” receive lower ratings, especially if the modifier is atypical for the noun, as in “Jungle ravens are black”. This is called the modifier effect. However, the likelihood of the unmodified statement influences the perceived likelihood of the modified statement: the higher the rated likelihood of the unmodified sentence, the higher the rated likelihood of the modified one. That means the modifier effect does not fully block default inheritance of typical properties from nouns to modified nouns. This paper discusses this inheritance effect. In particular, I ask whether it is the direct result of composing concepts from nouns, that is, a bias toward “black” when processing “raven”. I report a series of experiments in which I find no evidence for a direct inheritance from composition. This supports the view that default inheritance is rather an inference than a bias.

The Role of Reasoning and Pragmatics in the Modifier Effect

The modifier effect refers to the fact that the perceived likelihood of a property in a noun category is diminished if the noun is modified. For example, "Pigs live on farms" is rated as more likely than "Dirty pigs live on farms." The modifier effect has been demonstrated in many studies, but the underlying cognitive mechanisms are still unclear. This paper reports two series of experiments that jointly point to the conclusion that the modifier effect is the result of a superposition of three cognitive mechanisms: (a) probabilistically softened default inheritance, (b) pragmatic implicatures due to Gricean relevance assumptions, and (c) inference based on world knowledge. We present evidence that the pragmatic effects operate largely on an unconscious level and that their influence can be reduced by changing the presentation format of the cognitive task.

Exploring the pedagogical potential of vertical and horizontal relations in the constructicon:The case of the family of subjective-transitive constructions withdecirin Spanish

AbstractThis paper explores the pedagogical implications and implementations of a Cognitive Construction Grammar (Goldberg, Adele E. 2006.Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. New York: Oxford University Press) approach for the teaching of construal in the L2 class of Spanish at an advanced level. To this end, this paper focuses on instances of secondary predication (involving a direct object and an object-related XPCOMP) withdecir“say” and other verbs of saying and calling in present-day Spanish, under the rubric of the denominative subjective-transitive construction. This construction comprises a number of lower-level configurations involving a reflexive direct object (the reflexive subjective-transitive construction), and an imperative verb (the imperative subjective-transitive construction). The verbdeciris also frequently attested in the reflex passive construction (the impersonal subjective-transitive construction), under which two different, though closely connected, lexically-filledlo que se diceXPCOMP configurations can be posited, which may function as a focusing/emphasizer subjunct or as a summative conjunct in present-day Spanish. A default inheritance system of the type invoked in Cognitive Construction Grammar is shown to capture broad and specific generalizations at a horizontal level (among the verbs attested in the (sub-)construction(s)) and a vertical level (among constructions of varying degrees of specificity) and can thus be informally used to optimize the pedagogical efficiency of the input for the explicit instruction of grammar in the advanced Spanish L2 class.

Development of conditional imperatives in Japanese: A diachronic constructional approach

AbstractThis paper proposes a diachronic construction grammar analysis of the conditional imperative in Japanese to demonstrate that a constructional approach provides an effective model for language change. The Japanese conditional imperative comprises two types with distinct properties, but no study to date has successfully analyzed how the two types appeared and are related to each other. In diachronic construction grammar, language change is situated in the context of a construction as well as in relation to other constructions linked in a network. This perspective makes it a particularly beneficial model for accommodating the case in question. The construction developed in two steps, exemplifying different types of language change, both of which, however, are motivated by analogy between different constructions. Adopting the multiple inheritance analysis, I contend that the construction first emerged as a result of the reanalysis of a sequence of an imperative sentence and a subsequent sentence as a type of the conditional construction. A later development reflected another case of construction-based analogy: the daughter construction inherited the host-class expansion that occurred in the parent, and the new type emerged as a result of coercion to accommodate the expansion. Thus the development of the Japanese conditional imperative not only finds a consistent analysis in this framework, but provides valuable insight into the workings of the construction network. This paper also addresses the issues of the inheritance model, and suggests the present case argues for a model with default inheritance at the construction level, which runs counter to previous studies which have restricted the overrides of default inheritance to the level of construct.

Comments on ‘Linguistic structure: A plausible theory’

This comment on Sydney Lamb’s article “Language structure: A plausible theory” explores the similarities and differences between Lamb’s theory and my own theory called Word Grammar, which was inspired by Lamb’s work in the 1960s. The two theories share Lamb’s view that language is a symbolic network, just like the rest of our knowledge. The note explains this claim, then picks out a number of differences between the theories, all of which centre on the distinction between types and tokens. In Word Grammar, tokens are represented as temporary nodes added to the permanent network, and allow the theory to use dependency structure rather than phrase structure, to include mental referents, to recognise the messiness of spreading activation and to include a monotonic theory of default inheritance.

Items and Generalizations: Evidence from <i>Decir</i> within the Family of Subjective-Transitive Constructions in Spanish

This paper explores the existence of a continuum between regular, productive, conventional configurations and fixed, idiosyncratic and novel configurations within the full gamut of instances of secondary predication with decir ('say') and verba dicendi in present-day Spanish. Drawing on Cognitive Construction Grammar, it is argued that instances of the secondary predication with these verbs can be aptly regarded as forming part of the family of subjective-transitive constructions. Specifically, schematic configurations involving decir and other verba dicendi are shown to be instances of the denominative subjective-transitive construction. Configurations of this kind interact with partially filled in instances of secondary predication involving coercion via a reflexive pronoun in the postverbal NP slot as well as coercion in combination with an imperative form. This continuum is even more clearly observable in the case of configurations involving the reflex passive clitic se, giving rise to a three-point cline between (i) non-gramaticalized (compositional) configurations with an active counterpart, (ii) non-grammaticalized constructions without an active counterpart and (iii) grammaticalized (non-compositional) configurations without an active counterpart. At a higher level of delicacy, it is shown that lo que se dice XPCOMP construction, understood as the result of incipient grammaticalization, may function as a focusing/emphasizer subjunct or as a summative conjunct in present-day Spanish. One of the broad-scale generalizations emerging from this study is that the XPCOMP must lend itself to a subjective, evaluative construal on the part of the subject/speaker. All the instances of the subjective-transitive construction surveyed here impose this restriction on the XPCOMP. However, the lo que se dice XPCOMP construction functioning as a emphasizer/focusing subjunct also allows a more disparate range of non-evaluative XPCOMPs. A default inheritance system of the type invoked in Cognitive Construction Grammar is shown to capture the commonalities as well as the idiosyncratic particulars of this family of constructions and can thus be informally used to optimize the input for the instruction of grammar in the advanced Spanish L2 class.

Paradigmatic Chaos in Nuer

The case-number suffixes of the Western Nilotic language Nuer (Frank 1999) display a remarkable combination of formal simplicity and distributional complexity, which is manifested in: (i) a seemingly erratic form-function mapping that precludes attributing a consistent meaning to the suffixes, and (ii) a wealth of inflection classes only barely differentiated from each other. The suffixes looks as if they were rule-generated, but behave as if they were memorized. I advance a model of inflection combining principal parts, implicational rules, and default inheritance, in which the bulk of the complexity is attributed to the lexical stem, revealing the underlying systematicity behind suffix assignment.

The modifier effect in within-category induction: Default inheritance in complex noun phrases

Within-category induction is the projection of a generic property from a class (Apples are sweet) to a subtype of that class (Chinese apples are sweet). The modifier effect refers to the discovery reported by Connolly et al., that the subtype statement tends to be judged less likely to be true than the original unmodified sentence. The effect was replicated and shown to be moderated by the typicality of the modifier (Experiment 1). Likelihood judgements were also found to correlate between modified and unmodified versions of sentences. Experiment 2 elicited justifications, which suggested three types of reason for the effect—pragmatics, knowledge-based reasoning, and uncertainty about attribute inheritance. It is argued that the results provide clear evidence for the default inheritance of prototypical attributes in modified concepts, although a full account of the effect remains to be given.

This is to count as a construction

This article investigates the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of utterances such as 'This is to count as a construction.' It is argued that a construction is required to capture certain semi-idiosyncratic aspects of the pattern. We call this construction the is-to construction. At the same time, its properties are 'motivated' by relating the construction to other well-known constructions via a default inheritance hierarchy. The article also discusses a non-productive “object-related” construction and suggests a diachronic relationship between the two. The proposal is contrasted with word-based, semantic, and purely syntactic accounts.

Lexical relatedness and the lexical entry: A formal unification

Based on the notion of a lexicon with default inheritance, I address the problem of how to provide a template for lexical representations that allows us to capture the relatedness between inflected word forms and canonically derived lexemes within a broadly realizational-inferential model of morphology. To achieve this we need to be able to represent a whole host of intermediate types of lexical relatedness that are much less frequently discussed in the literature. These include transpositions such as deverbal participles, in which a word's morphosyntactic class changes (e.g. verb ⇒ adjective) but no semantic predicate is added to the semantic representation and the derived word remains, in an important sense, a "form" of the base lexeme (e.g. the 'present participle form of the verb'). I propose a model in which morphological properties are inherited by default from syntactic properties and syntactic properties are inherited from semantic properties, such as ontological category (the Default Cascade). Relatedness is defined in terms of a Generalized Paradigm Function (perhaps in reality a relation), a generalization of the Paradigm Function of Paradigm Function Morphology (Stump 2001). The GPF has four components which deliver respectively specifications of a morphological form, syntactic properties, semantic representation and a lexemic index (LI) unique to each individuated lexeme in the lexicon. In principle, therefore, the same function delivers derived lexemes as inflected forms. In order to ensure that a newly derived lexeme of a distinct word class can be inflected I assume two additional principles. First, I assume an Inflectional Specifiability Principle, which states that the form component of the GPF (which defines inflected word forms of a lexeme) is dependent on the specification of the lexeme's morpholexical signature, a declaration of the properties that the lexeme is obliged to inflect for (defined by default on the basis of morpholexical class). I then propose a Category Erasure Principle, which states that 'lower' attributes are erased when the GPF introduces a non-trivial change to a 'higher' attribute (e.g. a change to the semantic representation entails erasure of syntactic and morphological information). The required information is then provided by the Default Cascade, unless overridden by specific declarations in the GPF. I show how this model can account for a variety of intermediate types of relatedness which cannot easily be treated as either inflection or derivation, and conclude with a detailed illustration of how the system applies to a particularly interesting type of transposition in the Samoyedic language Sel'kup, in which a noun is transposed to a similitudinal adjective whose form is in paradigmatic opposition to case-marked noun forms, and which is therefore a kind of inflection.

The family of object-related depictives in English and Spanish: towards a usage-based constructionist analysis

Drawing on naturally-occurring data extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) in conjunction with data elicited from native speakers by means of questionnaires, this paper provides a bottom-up, usage-based analysis of instances of depictive secondary predicates involving mainly verba cogitandi (e.g. “considerar”/“consider”, “encontrar”/“find”, etc.) in English and Spanish. Building on Gonzálvez-García [Gonzálvez-García, F., 2006a. Passives without Actives: Evidence from Verbless Complement Constructions in Spanish. Constructions SV1-5/2006; Gonzálvez-García, F., 2003. Reconstructing object complements in English and Spanish. In: Martínez Vázquez, M. (Eds.), Gramática de Construcciones (Contrastes entre el Inglés y el Español). Grupo de Gramática Contrastiva, Huelva, pp. 17–58], these configurations are argued to be constructions in their own right, viz. the subjective–transitive construction. The main focus of this paper is on the investigation of the most salient semantico-pragmatic hallmarks of four lower-level configurations of the subjective–transitive construction in the light of coercion [Michaelis, L.A., 2003a. Word meaning, sentence meaning, and syntactic meaning. In: Cuyckens, H., Dirven, R., Taylor, J., (Eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, pp. 163–209; Michaelis, L.A., 2003b. Headless constructions and coercion by construction. In: Francis, E., Michaelis, L.A., (Eds.), Mismatch: Form-Function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar. CSLI, Stanford, pp. 259–310; Michaelis, L.A., 2004a. Type shifting in construction grammar: an integrated approach to aspectual coercion. Cognitive Linguistics 15 (1), 1–67; Michaelis, L.A., 2004b. Why we believe that syntax is construction-based. Unpublished plenary delivered at the Third International Conference on Construction Grammar(s), Université de Provence, Marseille, July 9, 2004.] via (i) obligatory reflexive pronouns in the object slot, (ii) a progressive verb form with an inherently stative situation/state of affairs, (iii) an imperative verb with a prima facie non-controllable situation/state of affairs, and (iv) an imperfect tense with a counterfactual interpretation. It is shown that while the first three types of coercion are observable in both English and Spanish, type (iv) points to an interesting asymmetry between these two languages, thus lending further credence to the assumption that argument structure is construction-specific as well as language-specific. Moreover, it is demonstrated that these configurations can be aptly regarded as a family of constructions and that a non-monotonic, default inheritance system of the type invoked in the cognitively-influenced strand of Construction Grammar [Goldberg, A.E., 1995. Constructions. A Construction Approach to Argument Structure. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London; Goldberg, A.E., 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford University Press, New York] can capture the commonalities and the idiosyncratic particulars of these conventional extensions in the construct-i-con.

A Default Inheritance Hierarchy for Computing Hebrew Verb Morphology

We apply default inheritance hierarchies to generating the morphology of Hebrew verbs. This approach represents inflectional exponents as markings associated with the application of rules by which complex word forms are deduced from simpler roots or stems. The high degree of similarity among verbs of different conjugation classes allows us to formulate general rules; these general rules are, however, sometimes overridden by conjugation-specific rules. Similarly, a verb's form within a particular conjugation is determined both by default rules and by overriding rules specific to lexical stem peculiarities. Our result is a concise set of rules defining the morphology of Hebrew verbs in all conjugations. We express these rules in KATR, both a formalism for default inheritance hierarchies and associated software for generating the forms specified by those rules. As we describe the rules, we point out general strategies for expressing morphology in KATR. We conclude by discussing KATR's advantages over ordinary DATR for the representation of morphological systems and our plans for KATR's successor, LATR.

Descent rules and strategic transfers. Evidence from matrilineal groups in Ghana

Traditional descent systems can roughly be divided into patrilineal and matrilineal. In the latter, a man's heir is not his own child but rather his sister's son. The paper examines the implications of this social norm for the pattern of inter-vivos transfers using household level data from rural Ghana, where the largest ethnic group is traditionally matrilineal. In particular, it tests the predictions of a model of strategic behavior according to which children should respond to the threat of disinheritance by increasing transfers to their parents during lifetime to induce a donation of land before the default (matrilineal) inheritance is enforced. I find that the credibility of customary norms enforcement, as proxied by the presence of a nephew in the father's household, significantly increases the probability of receiving transfers from children for Akans but not for the other groups. The effect is specific to nephews and not to other co-resident boys. This pattern of behavior can affect asset accumulation decisions across generations.

Fixed segmentism and dual description

This article considers the theoretical challenge posed by fixed segmentism, the introduction of a particular segment or segments into a reduplicated string. The languages of the Indian subcontinent contain many examples of this type and a wide range of different patterns is presented. Previous accounts of fixed segmentism are surveyed and applied to these data, with particular attention to the optimality theory approach of Alderete et al. (1999). This is contrasted with a new proposal, termed “dual description”, which is set within the framework of declarative phonology. This uses the mechanism of default inheritance to implement the repetition of phonological material from the base. The introduction of fixed segments is handled by default unification, a procedure that conjoins the inherited material with information specific to the reduplicant, giving priority to the latter. This approach is applied to the Indian data and shown to handle the full range of patterns of fixed segmentism successfully. Its potential as a general theory of reduplication is also demonstrated by applying dual description to various other kinds of reduplicative phenomena.

Yearbook of Morphology 1999 (review)

Reviewed by: Yearbook of morphology 1999 ed. by Geert Booij, Jaap van Marle Edward J. Vajda Yearbook of morphology 1999. Ed. by Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. Pp. 319. ISBN 079236631X. $157.50 (Hb). This Yearbook volume contains eleven articles, five on diachronic aspects of morphology, the rest dealing with miscellaneous topics. The data derives mainly from Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages. Martin Haspelmath is guest editor for the section on diachronic morphology. The articles here focus mainly on the motivation behind morphological change, or on the notion of which formal elements in a word (stem vs. affix, phonological stem trait vs. inflection) actually convey semantic content. Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy’s ‘Umlaut as signans and signatum: Synchronic and diachronic aspects’ (1–23) explores an instance where a phonological trait has come to express informational content. In ‘What sort of thing is a derivational affix? Diachronic evidence from Romanian and Spanish’ (25–52), Martin Maiden makes a similar argument for the function of derivational affixes, which, contrary to some claims (cf. Robert Beard, Lexeme morpheme base morphology, New York: SUNY Press, 1995), are shown not to be semantically vacuous. In ‘The development of “junk”: Irregularization strategies of have and say in the Germanic languages’ (53–74), Damaris NÜbling analyzes how these originally weak verbs became irregular across the various Germanic languages. Elisabetta Magni’s ‘Paradigm organization and lexical connections in the development of the Italian passato remoto’ (75–96) explores cognitive motivations for the development of irregular preterite forms. Elke Ronneberger-Sibold’s ‘On useful darkness: Loss and destruction of transparency by linguistic change, borrowing, and word creation’ (97–120) likewise deals with speaker awareness of phonological processes—a factor that manifests itself in speaker preference for specific types of word formation. The volume’s remaining six articles cover a range of topics, most dealing with cognitive processing. Marco Baroni’s ‘The representation of prefixed forms in the Italian lexicon’ (121–52) uses the distribution of intervocalic [s] and [z] allophones in Northern Italian dialects as evidence for whether speakers have come to regard certain historically prefixed stems as monomorphemic. In ‘On inherent inflection feeding derivation in Polish’ (153–83), Bożena Cetnarowska argues that in certain Polish word forms derivation must be able to follow as well as precede inflection. This raises interesting questions about the notion of lexical stem. In ‘The processing of interfixed German compounds’ (184–220), Wolfgang U. Dressler, Gary Libben, Jacqueline Stark, Christiane Pons, and Gonia Jarema explore the cognitive processing of compound words such as leben-s-lang ‘life-long’. Andrew Hippisley’s ‘Word formation rules in a default inheritance framework: A network morphology account of Russian personal nouns’ (221–61) provides an excellent encapsulation of network morphology, as well as a convincing account of how affix rivalry and exceptionality can be simultaneously accommodated in a theory of word form creation. Steven G. LaPointe’s ‘Stem selection and OT’ (263–97) gives an optimality theory account of stem and affix allomorphy, based on data from a variety of languages, including Korean and Cherokee. The book’s final article, Irit Meir’s ‘Verb classifiers as noun incorporation in Israeli sign language’ (299–319), argues that certain hand gestures bear striking similarities to the properties of certain types of noun incorporation. This excellent study is a welcome inclusion here for the new dimension it adds to understanding the essence of morphological structure shorn of the epiphenomenon of sound. All of these articles reflect the ‘cutting edge’ of morphological research, making this volume, like its predecessors in the same series, an important acquisition for any linguist or librarian serious about keeping pace with morphological theory. Edward J. Vajda Western Washington University Copyright © 2005 Linguistic Society of America

Historical Linguistics 1999 (review)

Reviewed by: Historical linguistics 1999 ed. by Laurel J. Brinton Marc Picard Historical linguistics 1999. Ed. by Laurel J. Brinton. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001. Pp. xii, 389. Cloth $105.00. This book contains 23 of the papers that were presented at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL 14), Vancouver, BC, August 1999. These papers, which range in length from 11 to 26 pages, are arranged in alphabetical order by the authors’ names and are followed by an index of languages and language families, an index of names, and an index of subjects. Most of the articles can be roughly divided into those that deal mainly with (morpho)phonology and those that are concerned primarily with (morpho)syntax. In the first category, we find ‘Recent advances in the reconstruction of the Proto-Munda verb’ by Gregory D. S. Anderson and Norman H. Zide, ‘On ablaut and aspect in the history of Aramaic’ by Vit Bubenik, ‘Language change and the phonological lexicon of Korean’ by Young-mee Y. Cho, ‘Distinctive vowel length in Old French: Evidence and implications’ by Randall Gess, and ‘Remains of a submerged continent: Preaspiration in the languages of Northwest Europe’ by Gunnar Ólafur Hansson. Papers in which the languages dealt with are not obvious from the title include Janice M. Aski’s ‘Multivariable reanalysis and phonological split’, which examines the variable outcome of Latin /tj/ and /dj/ in a variety of Tuscan dialects, and Johanna Nichols’s ‘Why “me” and “thee”?’, which looks at the worldwide distribution of these pronouns as well as ‘mama’–‘papa’ lexemes in terms of phonosymbolism. Among the papers that have (morpho)syntax as their major theme, there is ‘How far has far from become grammaticalized?’ by Minoji Akimoto, ‘Are Old English conjunct clauses really verb-final?’ by Kristin Bech, ‘Alternation according to person in Italo-Romance’ by Delia Bentley and Thórhallur Eythórsson, ‘On the origin of the Portuguese inflected infinitive: A new perspective on an enduring debate’ by Ana Maria Martins, ‘Innovation of the indirect reflexive in Old French’ by D.Gary Miller, ‘The English s-genitive: Animacy, topicality, and possessive relationship in a diachronic perspective’ by Anette Rosenbach, ‘Coreference in the Popolocan languages’ by Annette Veerman-Leichsenring, and ‘Atlantis Semitica: Structural contact features in Celtic and English’ by Theo Vennemann. Other languages that are the focus of research in this area are English in David Denison’s ‘Gradience and linguistic change’, Romanian in Maria M. Manoliu’s ‘The conversational factor in language change: From prenominal to postnominal demonstratives’, Mohawk in Marianne Mithun’s ‘Lexical forces shaping the evolution of grammar’, and Vedic in Gregory Stump’s ‘Default inheritance hierarchies and the evolution of inflectional classes’. The four articles that do not fit into these two general categories are ‘Animals and vegetables, Uto-Aztecan noun derivation, semantic classification, and cultural history’ by Karen Dakin, which seeks to establish the direction in which certain borrowed terms were diffused in a number of unrelated Mesoamerican languages; ‘Rapid change among expletive polarity items’ by Jacob Hoeksema, which explores the semantic development of certain collocation relations in Dutch; ‘On the eve of a new paradigm: The current challenges to comparative linguistics in a Kuhnian perspective’ by Marie-Lucie Tarpent, wherein the author speculates on the possible emergence of a new paradigm in historical linguistics to remedy what she sees as its present-day crisis; and ‘Modeling koineization’ by Donald N. Tuten, which argues that this process should not be seen as a ‘mere reduction to a “least common denominator” ’ since it ‘can also lead to the introduction of novel features not found in any of the established contributing dialects’ (325). According to the editor, the selection of these particular articles for publication (less than 15% of the total number of presentations) was ‘intended to display the state of current research in the field of historical linguistics’ (xi). Indeed, a remarkable...

Gerunds without Phrase Structure

English gerunds such as (We weretalking about) John having a sabbaticalcombine the internal characteristics ofa clause with the external characteristicsof a noun phrase. Previous analyses havetried to recognise the mixed characterof gerunds by assigning them two separatenodes, one verbal and the other nominal.However, dependency analyses such as WordGrammar allow only one node perword, so they do not allow analyses of thiskind. Two-node analyses are strongevidence against dependency analysis, so itis important to be sure that they areneeded. The present paper presents ananalysis similar to the one recently proposedby Malouf in which the verbal and nominalclassifications are combined on asingle node which inherits both verbaland nominal characteristics; butunlike Malouf's analysis, it does notassume phrase structure. Like his, it exploitsthe logic of multiple default inheritance whichallows a single node to inherit fromtwo supercategories, in this case from both`verb' and `noun'. As Malouf points out,multiple inheritance works because English grammaris organised in such a way thatthe characteristics of these categoriesare orthogonal. In short, a gerund is both a verband a noun, as in traditional analyses. Simplestipulations are needed to allow for`possessive' subjects (e.g., about John'shaving a sabbatical) and a number ofvery specific constructions peculiar to gerunds:no in prohibitions or existentials(e.g., No playing loud music! There's no mistaking that voice), and a very fewconstructions which demand a gerund ratherthan a noun phrase (e.g., It's nouse . . ., They prevented us from ...).

How Are Inflectional Affixes Organized in the Mental Lexicon?: Evidence from the Investigation of Agreement Errors in Agrammatic Aphasics

Recent psycholinguistic studies have provided evidence that regularly inflected words are decomposed into stems and affixes, both of which have their own representations in the mental lexicon. Specific models of the lexical organization of inflectional affixes have, however, only rarely been investigated in psycho- or neurolinguistic work. We test two recently proposed theoretical models: a representation of affixes (i) in default inheritance trees (Corbett & Fraser, 1993) and (ii) in underspecified paradigms (Wunderlich, 1996). Based on an analysis of agreement errors in elicited speech-production data of German agrammatic aphasics, we argue that affixes are organized with respect to the morphosyntactic features they encode. Specifically, our data indicate that inflectional affixes are best captured within an underspecified paradigm.

* I amn't

In most standard dialects of English, there is a gap in the paradigm of the verb BE where we expect to find amn't . But how do we know that this gap exists, since learners have no positive evidence that amn't is ungrammatical? It is even more puzzling since there is no gap when the subject is inverted ( aren't I . . . ?). Familiar explanations for this gap fail; in particular, it cannot be the result of conservative acquisition strategies. The explanation offered here is based crucially on a combination of multiple-default inheritance and function-based morphology, as embodied in word grammar. The gap is due to a Nixon-diamond conflict between two competing values for the same morphological function required by the categories negative and first-person. The inverted form is supplied by stipulation because of the functional pressure to supply a 'casual' form. Various dialect alternatives to the Standard English pattern are also considered. The success of this explanation shows that language must use default inheritance, multiple nonorthogonal inheritance, and morphological functions.

Grammatical acquisition: Inductive bias and coevolution of language and the language acquisition device

An account of grammatical acquisition is developed within the parameter setting framework applied to a generalized categorial grammar (GCG). The GCG is embedded in a default inheritance network yielding a natural partial ordering (reflecting generality) of parameters that determines a partial order for parameter setting. Computational simulation shows that several resulting acquisition procedures are effective on a parameter set expressing major typological distinctions based on constituent order, and defining 70 distinct full languages and over 200 subset languages. The effects on acquisition of inductive bias, that is, of differing initial parameter settings, are explored via computational simulation. Computational simulation of POPULATIONS of language learners and users instantiating the acquisition model shows that: (1) variant acquisition procedures, with differing inductive biases, exert differing selective pressures on the evolution of language(s); and (2) acquisition procedures will evolve towards more efficient variants in the environment of adaptation. The reciprocal evolution of language acquisition procedures and of languages creates a genuinely coevolutionary dynamic, despite the relative speed of linguistic selection for language variants compared to natural selection for variant language acquisition procedures.