| ROA: | 467 |
|---|---|
| Title: | The effect of feature hierarchies on frequencies of passivization in English. |
| Authors: | Shipra Dingare |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 81 |
| Abstract: | Prominence hierarchies along various dimensions have been posited to play a role in various syntactic phenomena in diverse languages. In this thesis I examine two particular hierarchies - the hierarchies of person and definiteness - and explore their effects not on the grammaticality but on the frequency of passivization in English. It will be demonstrated that these hierarchies have significant effects on the choice between active and passive in English, supporting the speculation that their influence is felt not only in certain phenomena in a few languages, but in all languages. These effects will be formalized and modeled using the harmonic alignment technique described in Aissen (1999,2000) and the stochastic OT framework of Boersma and Hayes (2001). That a hierarchy of definiteness has effects on syntax has been evidenced by phenomena in a number of languages, including differential object marking, split ergativity, and subject and object selection. While the hierarchy has taken different forms from account to account, it has generally been motivated either in terms of the greater ease of processing of elements higher on the hierarchy or the greater likelihood of these elements to be topical or to represent old information. In the theory of Aissen (2000), the interaction of the definiteness hierarchy with syntax is formalized in the OT framework by using the technique of harmonic alignment to produce constraint subhierarchies in which elements higher on the definiteness hierarchy are less marked than lower elements as subjects but more marked as non-subjects. When interpreted in the stochastic OT framework, these constraints yield systematic predictions for differences in frequency of passivization given inputs containing agent and patient arguments of varying definiteness. It is shown here that these frequency gradation predictions are confirmed by the results of a study of the frequency of passivization in the Wall Street Journal subcorpus of the Penn Treebank (Marcus et al 1993). In the third chapter I turn to the hierarchy of person. As with the definiteness hierarchy, the hierarchy of person has been shown to have categorical effects on phenomena in a number of languages, and these effects have been attributed, among other things, to the greater ease of processing or to the higher topicality of elements higher on the person hierarchy. In particular, the hierarchy of person has been shown to have categorical effects on passivization in languages such as Lummi, where passive is obligatory when the agent is first person and the patient third person. In work also presented in Bresnan et al (2001), it is demonstrated here that these effects of the person hierarchy on the choice between active and passive are paralleled in English by increases and decreases in the relative frequency of passivization for these inputs in the Switchboard subcorpus of the Penn Treebank. The effects of feature hierarchies on frequencies of passivization in English as demonstrated here simultaneously support the relevance of constraints referencing feature hierarchies to all languages as well as the idea that frequencies, like grammars, are principled, and are a valid domain for seeking cross-linguistic generalizations. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | Syntax |
| Article: | Version 1 |