Project 5

Representation and acquisition of agreement relations in a usage-based framework

(Third Party Funds Group – Sub project)

Abstract:

In most grammatical frameworks, agreement relations such as subject-verb and adjective-noun agreement are handled by using abstract features and a formal operation which copies or unifies them. Such an approach, however, is incompatible with Langacker’s (1987) content requirement, (which prohibits meaningless grammatical features), raises numerous learnability problems, as well as being problematic for empirical reasons (Kibrik 2019). Building on prior work in construction grammar and cognitive linguistics (Acuña-Fariña 2018, Kibrik 2019, Miorelli & Dąbrowska under review), this project will provide a comprehensive inventory of agreement constructions in a particular language (to be agreed with the supervisors) and an explicit account of how these constructions can be learned from the input available to children which makes testable predictions about acquisition or processing, and test these predictions experimentally.

The first phase of the project will involve analysing spontaneous speech data from the CHILDES corpus in order to examine the suggestion made by Miorelli & Dąbrowska (under review) that children could, in principle, attain a high degree of accuracy on agreement in production without any knowledge of agreement features, by simply superimposing lexically specific chunks with partially overlapping semantic and phonological specifications. Consider, for example, the utterance dove è andato il pomodoro? 'where did the tomato go?' produced by a two-year-old Italian child. The utterance contains three agreement relations: between the subject noun and its determiner (il~POMODORO), between the subject and the auxiliary (POMODORO~è), and between the subject and the past participle (POMODORO~andato). In line with earlier studies of production using the so-called traceback method (Lieven et al. 2003, Dąbrowska and Lieven 2005, Dąbrowska 2014), such an utterance can be derived by superimposing the lexically specific unit il pomodoro 'the tomato' and the schema dove è andato il NOUN-o? 'where did the NOUN go?' (which could be derived by generalizing over similar utterances in the input, e.g. dove è andato il ragazzo? 'where did the boy go?', dove è andato il libro? 'where did the book go?', etc.).

If this account is correct, knowledge about agreement is (at least initially) 'hidden' inside other constructions, which raises interesting theoretical questions about the nature of speakers' knowledge of agreement. This part of the project will address the GRQs CON1 (How do we identify constructions – in this case, how do we know when/if a speaker has mastered a particular agreement construction, and how general is it?) and USE3 (How are constructions combined in the process of formulating an utterance and what role do co-occurrence, overlap and blending play in this process? – cf. Dąbrowska and Lieven 2005, Herbst and Hoffman 2018).

In the second phase, specific hypotheses about the acquisition and processing of agreement relations will be tested using elicited imitation and grammaticality judgment tasks with sentences containing agreement violations. In particular, we will examine the suggestion made above that young children's knowledge of agreement is largely 'buried' inside chunks (i.e., it is not an not independent construction), and a hypothesis derived from Acuña-Fariña's work, namely that young children's knowledge of agreement is to a large extent based on purely phonological patterns (il …o …o, as in il ragazzo alto 'the tall boy' and la …a …a, as in la camicia bianca 'the white shirt'). It is anticipated that, across development, speakers will be better at detecting or correcting errors when these occur inside fixed chunks (i.e., we anticipate better performance on la camicia *bianco 'the white shirt' than on la camicia *grigio 'the grey shirt') and when they involve phonologically regular patterns like those mentioned above (better performance on la barca *bianco 'the white boat' than on la nave *bianco 'the white ship'). This part of the project will address GRQ ENT1 (How do frequency and salience influence entrenchment?). If time allows, we will also conduct ERP studies to examine the brain response to these types of agreement violations and thus address ENT3 (To what extent do measures of neural activity during language processing coincide with the results of behavioural and corpus data and how does this expand our understanding of how constructions are stored and processed in speakers' brains?).