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Priming as a driving force in grammaticalization: on the track of unidirectionality

Priming as a driving force in grammaticalization: on the track of unidirectionality. Gerhard Jäger University of Bielefeld, gerhard.jaeger@uni-bielefeld.de Anette Rosenbach University of Düsseldorf, ar@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de. Unidirectionality of grammaticalization processes.

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Priming as a driving force in grammaticalization: on the track of unidirectionality

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  1. Priming as a driving force in grammaticalization: on the track of unidirectionality Gerhard Jäger University of Bielefeld, gerhard.jaeger@uni-bielefeld.de Anette Rosenbach University of Düsseldorf, ar@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de

  2. Unidirectionality of grammaticalization processes • controversial issue (see e.g. special issue of Language Sciences 23; Newmeyer 1998; Lass 2000; Haspelmath 2004) • consensus: most grammaticalization processes cannot be reversed • Why should that be so?

  3. Possible reasons for unidirectionality pro unidirectionality: • Haspelmath (1999) • maxim of extravagance (Keller 1994) as a driving force in grammaticalization; lack of degrammaticalization is due to lack of a counteracting principle of ‚anti-extravagance‘ contra unidirectionality: • Janda (2001) • unidirectionality (as a diachronic constraint) cannot exist in the light of the individual speaker, because current speakers have no awareness of a language‘s history – pathways are therefore always, in principle, reversable for speakers

  4. Usage-based account of unidirectionality – our proposal • psycholinguistic mechanism of ‚priming‘

  5. Organization of talk • Introduction • Priming • Two case studies • Space > time (Boroditsky 2000) • Phonological reduction (Shields & Balota 1991) • A usage-based account of directional change(based on priming) • Conclusion

  6. 2. Priming • tendency of speakers to re-use previously mentioned/heard linguistic items • phenomenon may be operating on: • discourse-functional level ‚parallelism, ‚repetition‘(cf. e.g. Tannen 1987) • cognitive/ psycholinguistic level ‚priming‘ (cf. e.g. Bock 1986; Bock & Loebell 1990; Pickering & Branigan 1999; Zwitserlood 1996)

  7. Priming as a psycholinguistic mechanism • priming = pre-activation • processing of a stimulus linguistic unit (‚prime‘) influences (usually facilitates) the processing of the same or a similar linguistic unit (‚target‘) • prime identical with target: repetition (‚direct‘) priming • prime similar to target: associative (‚indirect‘) priming • operates • on all linguistic levels: phonological, semantic, lexical, morphological, syntactic priming • in language production (e.g. Bock 1986) • in language comprehension (e.g. Luka & Barsalou 2005) • in dialogue (Pickering & Garrod)

  8. Priming: examples repetition priming (a) At what time does your shop close? at six(b) What time does your shop close? six (Levelt & Kelter 1982)

  9. Priming: examples associative priming: e.g. picture naming task(Flores d‘Arcais & Schreuder 1987) • violin easier to name after semantically related prime guitar than after unrelated prime chair primes doesn‘t prime

  10. Priming: examples ‚contextual priming‘* prime: tip of the ... target: tongue (*our term; specific case of syntactic priming: words with high contextual probability are easier to process (Howes 1951, Boland 1997, McDonald et al 2001, inter alia)

  11. 3. Case studies 3.1 From space to time 3.2 Phonological reduction

  12. 3. 1 Case study I: from space to time space-time correspondences in language: from Deutscher (2005:134)

  13. Space > time • presumably universal grammaticalization pathway from space to time • unidirectional: • space > time • but not: time > space see e.g. Heine et al. (1991) Haspelmath (1997) Heine & Kuteva (2002), Hopper & Traugott (2003:85)

  14. Boroditsky (2000) space > time: evidence from experimental priming studies: In how far can spatial expressions prime temporal expressions, and vice versa?

  15. Temporal metaphor • 2 dominant spatial metaphors to sequence events in time (cf. e.g. Clark 1973) ego-moving metaphor We are coming up on Christmas. time-moving metaphor Christmas is coming up. (from Boroditsky 2000:5)

  16. Spatial metaphor ego-moving metaphor object-moving metaphor (from Boroditsky 2000: 6)

  17. Boroditsky (2000): experiment 1Can space prime time? • primes (spatial scenarios consisting of picture and a sentence description): • ego-moving spatial: e.g. The dark can is in front of me. • object-moving spatial: e.g. The light widget is in front of the dark widget. • targets: ambiguous temporal sentences, e.g.Next Wednesday‘s meeting has been moved forward two days. • results: after ego-moving spatial prime: 73.3% ego-moving temporal interpretation (i.e. meeting is on Friday)after object-moving spatial prime: 69.2% time-moving temporal interpretation (i.e. meeting is on Monday) • space can prime time !

  18. Boroditsky (2000): experiment 2Can time also prime space? • 4 primes • spatial: • ego-moving: e.g. The flower is in front of me. • object-moving: e.g. The hat-box is in front of the Kleenex. • temporal: • ego-moving: e.g. On Thursday, Saturday is before us. • time-moving: e.g. Thursday comes before Saturday. • 2 targets: • ambiguous time questions: e.g.Next Wednesday‘s meeting has been moved forward two days.) • ambiguous space questions: e.g.Which one of these widgets is ahead ?

  19. Boroditsky (2000): results from experiment 2 (from Boroditsky 2000: 14)

  20. Boroditsky (2000:22) „Apparently, space and time can share structural relational information on-line, but this sharing is asymmetric; spatial schemas can be used to think about time, but temporal schemas cannot be used to think about space.“

  21. 3.2 Case study II: phonological reduction Phonological reduction in grammaticalization • phoneme reduction ahg brenjan > nhg brennen • phoneme deletionlet us > lets

  22. Phonological reduction „In the process of phonological attrition and selection […], we can identify two tendencies: • A quantitative („syntagmatic“) reduction: forms become shorter as the phonemes that comprise them erode. • A qualitative („paradigmatic“) reduction: the remaining phonological segments in the form are drawn from a progressively shrinking set.“ Hopper & Traugott (2003: 154)

  23. Priming and phonological reduction • Shields and Balota (1991): • experimental study of repetition on • word length • amplitude • results: • both repetition and associative priming lead to shortening • repetition priming also leads to reduced amplitude

  24. Shields and Balota (1991) Typical stimuli: • identical • Her cat chases our cat under the table. • related • Her dog chases our cat under the table. • unrelated • Her son chases our cat under the table.

  25. Shields and Balota (1991) method: • subjects • read sentences in present tense • had to repeat them by heart in past tense • cat in „our cat“ was acoustically analyzed

  26. Shields and Balota (1991): Results Duration: • (cat) … cat: 329 msec • (dog) … cat: 340 msec • (son) … cat: 350 msec

  27. Shields and Balota (1991): Results Amplitude: (in comparison to reference vowel) • (cat) … cat: -1.62 dB • (dog) … cat: -0.11 dB • (son) … cat: 0.23 dB

  28. Shields and Balota (1991): Results Amplitude: • difference between repetition (cat – cat) and other two conditions is significant • difference between related (dog – cat) and unrelated (son – cat) condition is not significant

  29. Further evidence • various studies that show that increased probability of a word in a context leads to reduced pronounciation: • Jurafsky, Bell, Gregory, Raymond (2000) • Gahl and Garnsey (2004) • can be interpreted as phonological reduction under contextual priming

  30. 4. A usage-based account of directional change (based on priming)

  31. Priming and similarity • Priming is related to similarity: • If A and B are similar, then A can prime B • more general: if • A is probable in a context C, and • Ais similar to B, • Then • B is primed by context C

  32. Priming and similarity • similarity is reflexive (A is similar to A) • repetition priming • contextual probability effects • similarity is not identity • associative priming • guitar can prime violin and vice versa

  33. Priming and similarity • similarity can be asymmetric • Want to is more similar to wanna than vice versa • spatial configurations are more similar to homomorphic temporal configurations than vice versa • …

  34. Bold hypothesis • Transitivity • suppose • A has high probability in context C, and • A is similar to B • then, after sufficiently many repetitions • B‘s probability in context C increases

  35. Consequences • suppose • A is similar to B (in a context C), and • B is not similar to A (in C) • then • the BH (bold hypothesis) predicts that B will eventually replace A in C

  36. Implication for unidirectionality • unidirectional pathways of language change should be decomposable into atomic steps ofasymmetric similarity • replication in language use via priming

  37. Predictions (falsifiable) • „asymmetric similarity“ is defined in terms of primingcan be tested by means of psycholinguistic experiments • frequency effects: „transitivity“ depends on frequency of triggering context frequent items should undergo language change faster

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