Non-canonical Word Order Research Articles

Information structure and discourse stance in a monologic “public speaking” register of Japanese

Previous research on register variation has focused on differences between written and spoken registers, but there has been less systematic attention to how situational contexts create variation within these categories. This article draws on several data sources to delineate the linguistic features which characterize monologic public speaking as a distinct register of spoken Japanese. The data include congratulatory speeches given at wedding receptions, officers’ reports at organizational meetings, and a comparison of conversation and officers’ reports for three individual speakers. The linguistic variables that are analyzed include information structuring at the clause and sentence level (complex NPs with clausal modifiers and the use of conjunctive forms to link clauses) and markers of discourse stance (honorifics, non-canonical word order, sentence-final particles, and hedges). In comparison with conversation, monologic public discourse involves relatively high frequencies of both complex NPs and the linking of clauses with conjunctions. Discourse markers which index deference and the presentation of a public social persona are common in public speaking, whereas those which involve more personal expressions of affective stance are rare. This distribution of linguistic features distinguishes public speaking from both conversational Japanese and written, expository prose.

Typology of periphrastic ‘do’-Constructions (review)

Reviewed by: Typology of periphrastic ‘do’-Constructions Pieter Muysken Typology of periphrastic ‘do’-constructions. By Andreas Jäger. (Diversitas linguarum 12.) Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer. Pp. xii, 343. ISBN 3819606750. $65.83. In this book, the revised version of a 2005 University of Queensland doctoral dissertation, Andreas Jäger examines a sample of two hundred languages with respect to the periphrastic ‘do’-construction, which is well known in English (e.g. The boat does travel south, 29), but is also present in a wide variety of languages. The book offers a welcome snapshot of a yet unexplored construction. In contrast with many recent typological surveys, it does not take a concept or grammatical notion as its point of departure, but rather a construction, for which the range of associated concepts and grammatical notions is charted. [End Page 939] In Ch. 1 (2–28), J outlines and defends the typological method and presents his language sample. The sample is ‘structurally based, that is to say languages are selected according to whether they employ relevant “do” periphrasis or not’ (24). It is clear from the database provided (306–13) that a wide range of families is included, covering Barbacoan (Ecuador, Colombia), Caucasian, Celtic, Dravidian, Mayan, Niger-Congo, Tibeto-Burman, and so on. Thus we get an idea where the construction occurs, but not really where it does not. I return to this below. Ch. 2 is dedicated to the definition of the constructions and the different subtypes. The construction is defined in terms of the following criteria (drawn from pp. 28–29): (i) it must consist of at least two separate lexical items or morphemes, (ii) one being a full lexical verb, (iii) the other being an auxiliary with an abstract (or highly schematic) ‘action’ meaning as exemplified by the English word do, (iv) the argument structure is determined by the lexical verb, and (v) the subject of the auxiliary is the same as that of the lexical verb. The construction is monoclausal, and thus must be distinguished from multiverb or multiclause constructions. It must also be distinguished from serial verb constructions (where both verbs may contribute to the argument structure) and light verb constructions (where the lexical element has nominal features). In an elaborate review of the literature J makes the relevant distinctions, but acknowledges that the cluster of different phenomena that periphrastic ‘do’-constructions are part of is best viewed as a continuum. The functions of the grammatically motivated periphrastic ‘do’-construction are the topic of Ch. 3 (85–188), the core of the book. Four key functions are distinguished: (a) obligatory periphrasis triggered by the need to mark specific morphosyntactic distinctions in the complex predicate (e.g. negative polarity in English), (b) obligatory periphrasis triggered by noncanonical word order (e.g. ‘why’ questions in English), (c) lexically triggered periphrasis (e.g. with nonnative verb stems), and (d) obligatory periphrasis to mark a construction type (e.g. subordination). All four functions are fairly well represented in J’s sample, the fourth type being the rarest. In Chs. 4, 5, and 6, additional functions of the ‘do’-construction are discussed. Ch. 4 deals with ‘do’ in connection with coordinated lexical verbs, something that occurs in around thirty-six languages in J’s sample, as shown in 1 below. 1. it-tari ki-tari suru (Japanese, 190) come-often go-often do ‘be coming and going all the time’ The status of the constructions in Ch. 5 is somewhat different: here optional periphrasis is discussed, with a variety of functions, pragmatic (e.g. focalization), semantic (e.g. transitivizing or causativizing), and morphological (avoiding inflection of the main verb for some reason). Many of these uses link up to functions discussed in Ch. 3 and illustrate them with a series of additional examples. In Ch. 6, ‘do’-periphrasis as a direct marker of various grammatical categories is discussed. Most frequent is the marking of past tense (fifteen cases), emphatic or intensive modality (nine cases), and progressive/continuative/durative aspect (twelve cases). Finally, Ch. 7 provides some conclusions and a schematic overview of the data. It would be interesting to link this overview with mapping software, in a future publication, to establish...

Vernacular style writing

This paper shows that some Japanese non-fiction writers are using various structural characteristics of spoken discourse in their writing. Their written discourse includes non-canonical word order and long sentences that are produced by combining a series of clauses. Their sentences may lack case or topic marking particles, but they may contain clause-final particles. Their discourse looks like it may have gone through a dynamic, on-going formation process because it includes reformulation and changes in the structure in midstream. It is proposed that writers who adopt such an approach are deliberately blurring the boundary between speech and writing for multiple reasons. They may be exhibiting their creativity and innovation as well as their anti-establishment ideology. Vernacular style writing may also be an attempt to engage, involve, and connect with their readers. Further, they may be reflecting as well as expressing contemporary society in which orality is viewed favorably and as a result, writing in general has become increasingly more casual than before. The phenomenon discussed in this paper may be viewed as a reflection of erosions and shifting of traditional genres.

Dislocation focus construction in Chinese

The use of the Dislocation Focus Construction (DFC) (also known as “Right Dislocation”) in colloquial Chinese (including Cantonese and Mandarin) gives rise to various non-canonical word orders. In DFCs, the sentence particle (SP) occurs in a sentence-medial position. The pre- and post-SP materials are demonstrated to be syntactically connected, based on four diagnostic tests, namely (i) the zinghai ‘only’ test, (ii) the doudai (“wh-the-hell”) test, (iii) polarity item licensing, and (iv) Principle C violations. The findings offer new insights into the syntax of the Chinese left periphery and constraints on focus movement. First, the observations entail that Chinese CPs are head-initial, and an XP is obligatorily moved around the SP to a position higher than the CP. Second, the XP-raising in the DFC is argued to be driven by focus because of the focus interpretation induced. It is discovered that the focus movement is subject to the Spine Constraint, which turns out to be remarkably similar to the properties of the Nuclear Stress Rule (e.g., selection of focus set and metrical invisibility). It is argued that the DFC is the syntactic realization of the rule.

Information Structure and Syntactic Structure

AbstractThis article explores the interface between syntactic structure and information structure – in particular, the broad generalizations that can be made between certain noncanonical word orders and information‐structural constraints on their use. Various ways of implementing the distinction between ‘given’ and ‘new’ information are described, and several classes of word orders (such as preposings, postposings, argument reversals, and clefts) are discussed in terms of the information‐status constraints to which they are sensitive. It is argued that classes of related word orders share related constraints but that – both cross‐linguistically and within a single language – there are also construction‐specific constraints on the correlation between word order and information status.

Incremental Processing of Coreference and Binding in Japanese

Abstract. This article presents two on‐line self‐paced reading studies and three off‐line acceptability judgment studies on the processing of backward anaphoric dependencies in Japanese in which a pronoun precedes potential antecedent noun phrases. The studies investigate the real‐time formation of coreference relations and operator‐variable binding relations to determine whether speakers of head‐final languages are able to construct grammatically accurate syntactic structures before they encounter a verb. The results of the acceptability rating studies confirm previous claims that backwards anaphoric dependencies in Japanese are more acceptable in configurations where a pronoun has been fronted via scrambling from a position where it would be c‐commanded by its antecedent. The results of the on‐line studies demonstrate that these acceptability contrasts have an immediate impact on parsing. Reading‐time results showed immediate sensitivity to the semantic congruency between an NP and a preceding pronoun in noncanonical (“scrambled”) word orders, and no immediate effect of semantic congruency otherwise. This contrast was found both for coreference relations involving the personal pronounskare/kanojo(experiment 1) and for operator‐variable relations involving the demonstrative pronounsoko(experiment 3). These findings go beyond previous evidence for incremental parsing in head‐final languages by showing that Japanese speakers build compositional structures (such as anaphoric relations) in a grammatically constrained fashion in advance of encountering a verb in the input.

Canonicity effects as grammatical phenomena

The existence of a split in agrammatic Broca's aphasics’ comprehension of semantically reversible sentences with canonical vs. non-canonical word order have been explored in deep in the last decades. In this paper we present and discuss a new approach to canonicity effects that derives the asymmetry in a principled way from the Relativized Minimality approach to locality in syntax. The approach takes both processing and representational considerations into account thus avoiding problems, such as variation and complexity, encountered in non-integrated accounts. New data from a series of tests on both comprehension and production with an agrammatic Broca's aphasic patient are presented and discussed in light of the new proposal. Reduction of these asymmetries to a special case of the more general theory of locality allows generalizations to be made, which might be extended over different populations.

Production and comprehension of wh-questions in German Broca's aphasia

Current proposals suggest that agrammatic speakers have severe deficits in producing and understanding wh-questions. Whereas the CP layer is assumed to be pruned such that wh-questions can no longer be produced, for comprehension it has been suggested that the agrammatic deficit leads to a deletion of movement traces in syntactically derived sentences. We present data from three experiments testing the production and comprehension of wh-questions in nine German agrammatic Broca's aphasics. In an elicitation and a repetition task we find that complete and grammatical wh-questions can be produced by German agrammatic aphasics, thus indicating that the CP layer can still be projected. The results of a picture-pointing task show, however, that deficits in the comprehension of wh-questions ( who and which N questions) are common. A closer analysis reveals a variety of error patterns in our subjects. The additive effects that non-canonical word order and the discourse-linking of a referential NP ( which N) exert on the comprehension performance of our subjects cannot be captured by current syntactic deficit accounts on agrammatism.

An fMRI study of canonical and noncanonical word order in German

Understanding a complex sentence requires the processing of information at different (e.g., phonological, semantic, and syntactic) levels, the intermediate storage of this information and the unification of this information to compute the meaning of the sentence information. The present investigation homed in on two aspects of sentence processing: working memory and reanalysis. Event-related functional MRI was used in 12 healthy native speakers of German, while they read sentences. Half of the sentences had unambiguous initial noun-phrases (masculine nominative, masculine accusative) and thus signaled subject-first (canonical) or object-first (noncanonical) sentences. Noncanonical unambiguous sentences were supposed to entail greater demand on working memory, because of their more complex syntactic structure. The other half of the sentences had case-ambiguous initial noun-phrases (feminine gender). Only the second unambiguous noun-phrase (eighth position in the sentences) revealed, whether a canonical or noncanonical word order was present. Based on previous data it was hypothesized that ambiguous noncanonical sentences required a recomputation of the sentence, as subjects would initially commit to a subject first reading. In the respective contrasts two main areas of brain activation were observed. Unambiguous noncanonical sentences elicited more activation in left inferior frontal cortex relative unambiguous canonical sentences. This was interpreted in conjunction with the greater demands on working memory in the former condition. For noncanonical ambiguous relative to canonical ambiguous sentences, an activation of the left supramarginal gyrus was revealed, which was interpreted as a reflection of the reanalysis-requirements induced by this condition.

A Topographical Study on the Event-related Potential Correlates of Scrambled Word Order in Japanese Complex Sentences

One of the most fundamental and universal properties of human language is a phenomenon called displacement. In the present study, we used multichannel event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify the nature of this phenomenon with Japanese, a subject-object-verb (SOV) language of relatively free word order. The ERPs of sentences of canonical word order (CC) were compared with those of non-canonical word order in two types of Japanese complex sentences; namely, in those which can be described as being in a middle-scrambled condition (MSC) and in those in a long-scrambled condition (LSC). The sustained anterior negativity (SAN) and the P600 in the pregap position were observed in the LSC, compared to the CC, and they are consistent with previous findings. The SAN, exhibiting a tripartite nature in morphology and scalp distribution, mainly reflected a storage cost of scrambled elements in sentence comprehension. The subsequent P600 had a left fronto-temporal maximum, distinguished from a posterior P600, taken as a reflector of the thematic role assignment in previous related studies. It is argued that the P600 in the present study reflects a cost of structural integration intensively depending on the case marker information. A compositional interpretation of sentence meanings was also observed, reflected in an anterior negativity at the postgap verbal position, which cannot be differentiated at the pregap verbal position in the languages of subject-verb-object (SVO) word order.

Word order variation in spatial descriptions with adverbs

Previous research has shown that in a three-term spatial reasoning task, the second premise of a German premise pair is especially easy to comprehend if (1) the prepositional object rather than the grammatical subject denotes the given entity, and if (2) the term denoting the given entity precedes the term denoting the new entity. Accordingly, the second premise is easiest to comprehend with noncanonical word order--that is, with the prepositional object in preverbal position denoting the given entity (e.g., To the right of the given object is the new subject). This finding is explained in terms of contextual licensing of noncanonical word order. Here, we discuss and tested two alternative accounts of contextual licensing, given-new and partially ordered set relations (Poset). The given-new account claims that noncanonical word order is licensed by the term denoting the given entity preceding the term denoting the new entity. On the Poset account, noncanonical word order is licensed if the preverbal constituent introduces a new entity that stands in a transitive, irreflexive, and asymmetric relation to a given entity. Comprehension times for second premises with spatial adverbs in four different word orders support both accounts of contextual licensing; Poset licensing was stronger than given-new licensing.

Case and word order in Lithuanian

This paper examines the unusual case and word order behavior of objects of infinitives in Lithuanian. In addition to lexically determined case idiosyncrasy, Lithuanian exhibits syntactically determined case idiosyncrasy: with infinitives in three distinct constructions, case possibilities other than accusative obtain. These cases (dative, genitive, and nominative) depend on the general clause structure rather than on the particular infinitive. Moreover, unlike ordinary direct objects, these objects appear in a position preceding rather than following the verb. It is argued that they move to this position in order potentially to be accessible for Case assignment by some higher Case-assigning head. In this way we unify the two superficially unrelated properties of non-canonical word order and Case. This movement, however, is not feature-driven in the sense of standard minimalist Case-licensing mechanisms. We characterize it as ‘agnostic’ in that it applies to an object with unvalued Case features, if that object reaches a point in the derivation where it has no recourse but to move because failure to do so would be fatal.

Grammar and the “timing” of social action: Word order and preference organization in Japanese

This article explores the interconnection between grammar and the performance of preferred and dispreferred responses in Japanese. As is well known, dispreferred format turns are structurally more complex than preferred format turns, regularly delayed, accompanied by prefaces and accounts, mitigated, or made indirect. Owing to the flexibility of Japanese grammar, participants have expanded intra-turn capacity to maximize or minimize compliance with such formats. On one extreme, a dispreferred action can be massively delayed until near the turn-ending through opting for so-called canonical predicate-final word order and minimization of ellipsis. On the other extreme, a preferred action can be expedited to the very opening of a turn through non-canonical predicate-initial word order by taking advantage of word order variability and ellipsis. Such syntactic practices are interactionally managed for calibrating the timing of social action. It emerges that the canonical word order – assumed to be the generically unmarked alternative – is actually optimally tailored for the implementation of marked (dispreferred) responses, as opposed to a non-canonical word order for unmarked (preferred) responses, in the given sequential environment.

Revisiting the role of Broca's area in sentence processing: syntactic integration versus syntactic working memory.

Most previous neuroimaging studies of sentence processing have associated Broca's area with syntactic processing; however, the exact nature of the processes subserved by this brain region is yet not well understood. Although some authors suggest that Brodmann area (BA) 44 of the left inferior frontal gyrus (i.e., Broca's area) is relevant for syntactic integration processes, others claim that it is associated with working memory mechanisms relevant for language processing. To dissociate these two possible functions, the present study investigated hemodynamic responses elicited while participants processed German indirect wh-questions. Activation increases were observed in left BA 44 together with superior temporal areas and right hemispheric homologues for sentences with noncanonical word order, in which a verb argument was dislocated from its canonical position over a relatively long distance. In these sentences, syntactic working memory load was assumed to be greatest. In contrast, no activation increase was elicited by object-initial as opposed to subject-initial sentences that did not differ with respect to working memory costs but with respect to syntactic integration costs. These data strongly suggest that Broca's area plays a critical role in syntactic working memory during online sentence comprehension.

Discourse functions at the periphery: noncanonical word order in English

Speakers have a wide range of noncanonical syntactic options that allow them to mark the information status of the various elements within a proposition. The correlation between a construction and constraints on information status, however, is not arbitrary; there are broad, consistent, and predictive generalizations that can be made about the information-packaging functions served by preposing, postposing, and argument-reversing constructions. Specifically, preposed constituents are constrained to represent discourse-old information, postposed constituents are constrained to represent information that is either discourse-new or hearer-new, and argument-reversing constructions require that the information represented by the preposed constituent be at least as familiar as that represented by the postposed constituent (Birner & Ward 1998). The status of inferable information (Clark 1977; Prince 1981), however, is problematic; a study of corpus data shows that such information can be preposed in an inversion or a preposing (hence must be discourse-old), yet can also be postposed in constructions requiring hearer-new information (hence must be hearer-new). This information status – discourse-old yet hearer-new – is assumed by Prince (1992) to be non-occurring on the grounds that what has been evoked in the discourse should be known to the hearer. I resolve this difficulty by arguing for a reinterpretation of the term 'discourse-old' as applying not only to information that has been explicitly evoked in the prior discourse, but rather to any information that provides a salient inferential link to the prior discourse. Extending Prince’s notion in this manner allows us to account for the distribution of noncanonically positioned peripheral constituents in a principled and unified way.

What Does a Novice Look Like? Describing the Grammar and Discourse of Young Learners of Japanese

The purpose of the present study is to describe diverse aspects of the speaking proficiency of novice-low to novice-mid level FLES students and to identify the syntactic knowledge presumably underlying such behavior. Data were collected from students who had been studying Japanese continually for six and seven years on a variety of oral production tasks. The analyses revealed a number of interesting findings with respect to syntactic development such as their control of certain particles and use of non-canonical word order. Additionally, although the FLES students comprehended input and spoke in ways similar to child native speakers in terms of certain word-level features, the quantity of their output differed with FLES students producing less output less often. The pedagogical implications of these findings for early language learning educators are discussed.

The costs of freedom: an ERP – study of non-canonical sentences

Objectives: The present investigation explored the electrophysiological correlates of working memory during sentence comprehension. Methods: Event-related brain potentials (ERP) were recorded from 29 channels in 22 subjects, while they read German sentences having subject-first (canonical) or object-first (non-canonical) word orders. Results: Three different ERP effects were observed: a negativity (maximum at Fc5) differentiating unambiguous object-first and subject-first sentences, interpreted as reflecting the demands of the object-first sentences on working memory; a second negativity (maximum at F7) to the subject noun-phrase in object-first sentences, interpreted as indicating retrieval of verbal material. Finally, a parietal positivity was found for ambiguous sentences that turned out to have a non-canonical word order, which was interpreted as indicating revision and reevaluation processes. Conclusions: The present data underscore the different roles of working memory in comprehension.

On manifestations of aphasia in Catalan: a case study of Broca's aphasia

This paper discusses a case of Broca's aphasia in light of the impact of the structure of the patient's mother tongue, Catalan, on the types of errors he makes. What seems to be most affected in the present case, in terms of Kolk's (1995) theory of “structural simplification” —proposed originally for sentence production and comprehension—are those linguistic levels that are most complex in Catalan: closed class word morphology and verb morphology as well as production and comprehension of sentences with non-canonical word order. The types of errors presented always occur in structurally obligatory contexts where the semantic or propositional content of the omitted or misused elements is rather small. Another important fact to bear in mind when studying Catalan aphasics is that, due to the bilingualism of all speakers, some of the signs and symptoms of aphasic speech have to be interpreted in light of the rival language, Spanish.

What preschool children do and do not do with ungrammatical word orders

Akhtar [J. Child Lang. 26 (1999) 339.] found that when 4-year-old English-speaking children hear novel verbs in transitive utterances with ungrammatical word orders (e.g., Elmo the tree meeked), they correct them to canonical SVO order almost all of the time. However, when 3-year-olds and older 2-year-olds hear these same utterances, they waver between correcting and using the ungrammatical ordering. In the current study, we adapted this task for children at 2;4, using an intransitive construction. The major finding was that children corrected the noncanonical word order less than half as often as Akhtar's 2-year-old subjects who were approximately 4 months older. At the same time, however, children showed in several ways that they had some implicit understanding of canonical SV order; for example, they used the novel verb which they heard used in grammatical word order more often than the novel verb which they heard in ungrammatical word order, and they consistently used pronouns and the progressive – s auxiliary in appropriate ways. The current findings thus contribute to a growing body of theory and research suggesting that the ontogenetic emergence of linguistic categories and schemas is a gradual process, as is the emergence of categories in other domains of cognitive development.

Review of Birner & Ward (1998): Information status and noncanonical word order in English

Review of Birner & Ward (1998): Information status and noncanonical word order in English