Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T11:40:49.888Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Have Grammars Been Shaped by Working Memory and If So, How?

from Part III - Linguistic Theories and Frameworks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2022

By
John A. Hawkins
Edited by
John W. Schwieter  and
Zhisheng (Edward) Wen
John W. Schwieter
Affiliation:
Wilfrid Laurier University
Zhisheng (Edward) Wen
Affiliation:
Hong Kong Shue Yan University
Get access

Summary

This chapter examines variation patterns across the world's grammars in relation to working memory (WM) models in psycholinguistics. It distinguishes: (1) constrained capacity proposals in which certain limits in WM are used to explain why some grammatical phenomena are (or are supposed to be) nonoccurring; (2) more versus less WM proposals where greater or lesser demands on WM are reflected in dispreferred versus preferred structures and in declining typological distributions across languages; and (3) integrated WM proposals where WM considerations interact with other factors that facilitate processing. These include prediction, and communicative efficiency, with the result that structures that add to WM load can sometimes be preferred across languages. It is proposed that grammars have conventionalized the preferences of language performance and so have been shaped by the same processing considerations, including WM load, that determine usage data within individual languages and that lead to the preferences in performance. As a result grammars and cross-linguistic comparison can provide relevant evidence for certain issues in language processing that are being debated currently, such as the precise nature and role of WM and its interaction with other processing considerations. These grammatical data come from a vast range of languages that psycholinguists have yet to consider

Keywords

communicative efficiencygrammatical conventionslanguage typologyperformance-grammar correspondencesword order
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Working Memory and Language , pp. 275 - 303
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allwood, J. (1982). The complex NP constraint in Swedish. In Engdahl, E. & Ejerhed, E. (Eds.) Readings on unbounded dependencies in Scandinavian languages (pp. 15–32). Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Anderson, J. R. (1983). The architecture of cognition. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Ariel, M. (1999). Cognitive universals and linguistic conventions: The case of resumptive pronouns. Studies in Language, 23, 217–269.Google Scholar
Baddely, A. (this volume). Working memory and the challenge of language.Google Scholar
Berwick, R. C., & Weinberg, A. S. (1984). The grammatical basis of linguistic performance: Language use and acquisition. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Branigan, H. P., Pickering, M. J., & Tanaka, M. (2008). Contributions of animacy to grammatical function assignment and word order during production. Lingua, 118, 172–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bresnan, J., Dingare, S., & Manning, C. D. (2001). Soft constraints mirror hard constraints: Voice and person in English and Lummi. In Butt, M. & King, T. H. (Eds.), Proceedings of the LFG 01 Conference (pp. 13–32). CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. L. (2010). Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. L., & Hopper, P. (Eds.). 2001. Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding. Foris.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (2005). Three factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry, 36, 1–22.Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (1973). Clause structure and movement constraints in Russian. In Corum, C., Smith-Stark, T. C., & Weiser, A., (Eds.), You take the high node and I’ll take the low node (pp. 291–304). Chicago Linguistic Society,Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (1978). Ergativity. In Lehmann, W. (Ed.), Syntactic typology: Studies in the phenomenology of language. University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (1998). Rethinking the typology of relative clauses. Language Design, 1, 59–86.Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (2013). Alignment of case marking of full noun phrases. In Dryer, M., & Haspelmath, M. (Eds.), The world atlas of language structures (pp.366–369) online. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info/chapter/98Google Scholar
Cowan, N. (2005). Working memory capacity. Psychology Press.Google Scholar
De Smedt, K. J. M. J. (1994). Paralellism in incremental sentence generation. In Adriaens, G. & Hahn, U. (Eds.), Parallelism in natural language processing. Ablex.Google Scholar
Diessel, H., & Tomasello, M. (2006). A new look at the acquisition of relative clauses. Language, 81, 882–906.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, R. M. W. (1972). The Dyirbal language of North Queensland. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dryer, M. S. (1989). Large linguistic areas and language sampling. Studies in Language 13, 257–292.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dryer, M. S. (1992). The Greenbergian word order correlations. Language, 68, 81–138.Google Scholar
Dryer, M. S. (2005a). Order of relative clause and noun. In Haspelmath, M., Dryer, M., Gil, D., & Comrie, B. (Eds.), The world atlas of structures (pp. 366–369). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dryer, M. S . (2005b). Relationship between the order of object and verb and the order of relative clause and noun. In Haspelmath, M., Dryer, M., Gil, D., & Comrie, B. (Eds.), The world atlas of structures (pp. 390–393). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dryer, M. S. (2013). Order of subject, object and verb. In M. Dryer, & M. Haspelmath (Eds.), The world atlas of language structures online. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info/chapter/81.Google Scholar
Dyer, W. E. (2017). Minimizing integration cost: A general theory of constituent order (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Davis).Google Scholar
Engdahl, E., & Ejerhed, E. (Eds.). (1982). Readings on unbounded dependencies in Scandinavian languages. Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Engelhardt, P., Filipovic, L., & Hawkins, J. A. (In prep.) Verbs and arguments as predictors in SVO and SOV languages: Processing and typological considerations (MS, University of East Anglia & University of California Davis).Google Scholar
Featherston, S. (2008). The Decathlon model of empirical syntax. In Kepser, S. & Reis, M. (Eds.), Linguistic evidence: Empirical, theoretical and computational perspectives (pp. 187–208). de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Francis, E. (2022). Gradient acceptability and linguistic theory. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Francis, E., Lam, C., Zheng, C. C., Hitz, J., & Matthews, S. (2015). Resumptive pronouns, structural complexity, and the elusive distinction between grammar and performance: Evidence from Cantonese. Lingua, 162, 56–81.Google Scholar
Frazier, L. (1979). Parsing and constraints on word order. University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 5, 177–198.Google Scholar
Frazier, L. (1985). Syntactic complexity. In Dowty, D., Karttunen, L., & Zwicky, A. (Eds.), Natural language parsing: Psychological, computational, and theoretical perspectives. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Frazier, L., & Fodor, J. D. (1978). The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model. Cognition, 6, 291–326.Google Scholar
Futrell, R., Gibson, E., & Levy, R. P. (2020). Lossy-context surprisal: An information-theoretic model of memory effects in sentence processing. Cognitive Science, 44, 1–54.Google Scholar
Futrell, R., Levy, R. P., & Gibson, E. (2020). Dependency locality as an explanatory principle for word order. Language, 96(2), 371–412.Google Scholar
Futrell, R., Mahowald, K., & Gibson, E. (2015). Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(33), 10336–10341.Google Scholar
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1–76.Google Scholar
Gibson, E., Futrell, R., Piantadosi, S. T., Dautriche, I., Mahowald, K., Bergen, L., & Levy, R. P. (2019). How efficiency shapes human language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(5), 389–407.Google Scholar
Greenberg, J. H. (1963). Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Greenberg, J. H. (Ed.), Universals of language (pp. 73–113). MIT Press,.Google Scholar
Greenberg, J. H. (1966). Language universals, with special reference to feature hierarchies. Mouton.Google Scholar
Greenberg, J. H. (1995). The diachronic typological approach to language. In Shibatani, M. & Bynon, T. (Eds.), Approaches to language typology (pp. 143–166). Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Haig, J. H. (1996). Subjacency and Japanese grammar: A functional account. Studies in Language, 20, 53–92.Google Scholar
Hale, J. (2001). A probabilistic early parser as a psycholinguistic model. In Proceedings of NAACL, 2001 (pp. 1–8). Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, M. (1999). Optimality and diachronic adaptation. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 18, 180–205.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, M. (2001). The European linguistic area: Standard average European. In Haspelmath, M., König, E., Oesterreicher, W., & Raible, W. (Eds.), Language typology and language universals: An international handbook (pp. 1492–1510). Walter de Gruyter,Google Scholar
Haspelmath, M. (2008). Creating economical morphosyntactic patterns in language change. In Good, J. (Ed.), Language universals and language change (pp. 185–214). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, M. (2021). Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries: Form-frequency correspondences and predictability. Journal of Linguistics, 57(3), 605–633.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, M., Dryer, M. S., Gil, D., & Comrie, B. (Eds.). (2005). The world atlas of language structures. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (1983). Word order universals. Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (1994). A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (1999). Processing complexity and filler-gap dependencies. Language, 75, 244–285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (2004). Efficiency and complexity in grammars. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (2007). Processing typology and why psychologists need to know about it. New Ideas in Psychology, 25, 87–107.Google Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (2014). Cross-linguistic variation and efficiency. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (2015). Typological variation and efficient processing. In MacWhinney, B. & O’Grady, W. (Eds.), The handbook of language emergence (pp. 215–236). Wiley-Blackwell,.Google Scholar
Hofmeister, P., Jaeger, T. F., Arnon, I., Sag, I. A., & Snider, N. (2013). The source ambiguity problem: Distinguishing the effects of grammar and processing on acceptability judgments. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28(1–2), 48–87.Google Scholar
Hofmeister, P., & Sag, I. A. (2010). Cognitive constraints and island effects. Language, 86(2), 366–415.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. F., & Norcliffe, E. (2009). The cross-linguistic study of sentence production: State of the art and a call for action. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(4), 866–887.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keenan, E. L., & Comrie, B. (1977). Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 8, 63–99.Google Scholar
Kimball, J. (1973). Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language. Cognition, 2, 15–47.Google Scholar
Kluender, R., & Kutas, M. (1993). Subjacency as a processing phenomenon. Language and Cognitive Processes, 8, 573–633.Google Scholar
Kuno, S. (1973). The structure of the Japanese language. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kwon, N., Gordon, P. C., Lee, Y., Kluender, R., & Polinsky, M. (2010). Cognitive and linguistic factors affecting subject/object asymmetry: An eye-tracking study of prenominal relative clauses in Korean. Language, 86, 546–582.Google Scholar
Lehmann, C. (1984). Der Relativsatz. Gunter Narr Verlag.Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From intention to articulation. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Levy, R. (2008). Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition, 106, 1126–1177.Google Scholar
Lewis, R., & Vasishth, S. (2005). An activation-based model of sentence processing as skilled memory retrieval. Cognitive Science, 29, 375–419.Google Scholar
Liu, H. (2008). Dependency distance as a metric of language comprehension difficulty. Journal of Cognitive Science, 9(2), 159–191.Google Scholar
Lu, B., & Wen, Z. (this volume). Working memory and the language device.Google Scholar
Lu, Q., Xu, C. & Liu, H. (2016). Can chunking reduce syntactic complexity of natural languages? Complexity, 21, 33–41.Google Scholar
MacDonald, M. C. (1999). Distributional information in language comprehension, production and acquisition: Three puzzles and a moral. In MacWhinney, B. (Ed.), The emergence of language. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
MacDonald, M. C. (2013). How language production shapes language form and comprehension. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 226.Google Scholar
Matsumoto, Y. (1997). Noun-modifying constructions in Japanese: A frame semantic approach. Benjamins.Google Scholar
Matthews, S., & Yip, V. (2003). Relative clauses in early bilingual development: Transfer and universals. In Ramat, A. G. (Ed.), Typology and second language acquisition. Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Maxwell, D. N. (1979). Strategies of relativation and NP accessibility. Language, 55, 352–371.Google Scholar
Miller, G. (1956). The magical number seven plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81–97.Google Scholar
Norcliffe, E., Harris, A. C., & Jaeger, T. F. (2015). Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: Early beginnings and recent advances. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30(9), 1009–1032.Google Scholar
O’Grady, W. (2005). Syntactic carpentry: An emergentist approach to syntax. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
O’Grady, W. (2012). Three factors in the design and acquisition of language. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 3, 493–499.Google Scholar
O’Grady, W. (2017). Working memory and language: From phonology to grammar. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38(6), 1340–1343.Google Scholar
O’Grady, W. (this volume). Working memory and natural syntax.Google Scholar
Phillips, C. (2013a). On the nature of island constraints I: Language processing and reductionist accounts. In Sprouse, J. & Hornstein, N. (Eds.) Experimental syntax and island effects (pp. 64–108). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Phillips, C. (2013b). Some arguments and nonarguments for reductionist accounts of syntactic phenomena. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28 (1–2), 156–187.Google Scholar
Primus, B. (1999). Cases and thematic roles: Ergative, accusative and active. Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Prince, A., & Smolensky, P. (1993). Optimality theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Rizzi, L. (1982). Issues in Italian syntax. Dordrecht.Google Scholar
Rizzi, L. (1991). Relativized minimality. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Ross, J.R. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax (Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).Google Scholar
Saah, K. K., & Goodluck, H. (1995). Island effects in parsing and grammar: Evidence from Akan. Linguistic Review, 12, 381–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sprouse, J., & Hornstein, N. (Eds.). (2013). Experimental syntax and island effects. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sprouse, J., Wagers, M. & Phillips, C. (2012a). A test of the relation between working-memory capacity and syntactic island effects. Language, 88(1), 82–123.Google Scholar
Sprouse, J., Wagers, M. & Phillips, C. (2012b). Working-memory capacity and island effects: A reminder of the issues and the facts. Language, 88(2), 401–407.Google Scholar
Stallings, L. M., & MacDonald, M. C. (2011). It’s not just the “heavy NP”: Relative phrase length modulates the production of heavy-NP shift. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 40(3), 177–187.Google Scholar
Tallerman, M. (1998). Understanding syntax. Arnold.Google Scholar
Tomlin, R. S. (1986). Basic word order: Functional principles. Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Trotzke, A., Bader, M. & Frazier, L. (2013). Third factors and the performance interface in language design. Biolinguistics, 7, 1–34.Google Scholar
Ueno, M., & Polinsky, M. (2009). Does headedness affect processing? A new look at the VO-OV contrast. Journal of Linguistics, 45(3), 675–710.Google Scholar
Wasow, T. (2002). Postverbal behavior. CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Wasow, T. (2013). The appeal of the PDC program. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 236.Google Scholar
Yamashita, H. (2002). Scrambled sentences in Japanese: Linguistic properties and motivation for production. Text, 22, 597–633.Google Scholar
Zipf, G. K. (1949). Human behavior and the principle of least effort: An introduction to human ecology. Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×