Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T23:55:23.507Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Word-external properties in a typology of Modern English: a comparison with German

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2018

JOHN A. HAWKINS
JOHN A. HAWKINS*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of California Davis, Kerr Hall, One Shields Avenue, Davis CA 95616, USAjhawkins@ucdavis.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A large number of grammatical and lexical changes occurred in Middle and Early Modern English leading to the type of language we witness today. Other West Germanic languages were more conservative. This article focuses on some of the major contrasts between Modern English and German and proposes a new unifying generalization for them, going beyond Sapir's (1921) ‘drift’ and the comparative typology of Hawkins (1986, 1995). The contrasts involve a systematic expansion in word-external properties in English, whereby individual words carry less syntactic and semantic information in their grammatical and lexical representations and have become more reliant on neighboring words for the assignment of linguistic properties. Defining drift in this way captures more of the observed contrasts and subsumes counterexamples to earlier unifying generalizations. It also has implications for theories of real-time language processing and for the interface between linguistic typology and psycholinguistics.

Keywords

English–German contrastshistorical driftmulti-word verbstypologyword-external properties
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 701 - 727
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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.)

Footnotes

This article has benefited considerably from the comments made by two anonymous ELL reviewers and by ELL editor Bernd Kortmann. I am grateful to them for the time they invested in giving their feedback, which has greatly improved the article. I also received invaluable feedback from several people who gave me comments on an earlier version (in alphabetical order): Peter Culicover, Fernanda Ferreira, Luna Filipović, Florian Jaeger, Ed Keenan, Ekkehard König, Fritz Newmeyer, William O'Grady, Tamara Swaab and Tom Wasow. I thank them all. Useful feedback was also received from presentations to the Cognetwork Group at UC Berkeley and to the UC Davis Psycholinguistics Group in Fall 2016, and from students in advanced interdisciplinary seminars on linguistics-psycholinguistics-computational linguistics held at UC Davis in Spring 2016 and 2017. All remaining errors and shortcomings are very much my own.

References

Berg, Thomas. 2014. Boundary permeability: A parameter for linguistic typology. Linguistic Typology 18 (3), 489–531.Google Scholar
Bhat, D. N. S. 1991. Grammatical relations: The evidence against their necessity and universality. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bornkessel, Ina. 2002. The argument dependency model: A neurocognitive approach to incremental interpretation (MPI Series in Cognitive Neuroscience 28). Leipzig: Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.Google Scholar
Bornkessel, Ina & Shlesewsky, Matthias. 2006. The extended argument dependency model: A neurocognitive approach to sentence comprehension across languages. Psychological Review 113 (4), 787–821.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. & Traugott, Elizabeth C.. 2005. Lexicalization and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Broschart, Jürgen. 1997. Why Tongan does it differently: Categorial distinctions in a language without nouns and verbs. Linguistic Typology 1, 123–65.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2006. From usage to grammar: The mind's response to repetition. Language 86, 168–213.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Claridge, Claudia. 2000. Multi-word verbs in Early Modern English: A corpus-based approach. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. 1989. Language universals and linguistic typology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Culicover, Peter W. & Jackendoff, Ray. 2005. Simpler syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Denison, David. 1981. Aspects of the history of English group-verbs. With particular attention to the syntax of the Ormulum. PhD dissertation, Oxford University.Google Scholar
Dryer, Matthew S. 1992. The Greenbergian word order correlations. Language 68, 81–138.Google Scholar
Durrell, Martin. 2011. Hammer's German grammar and usage, 5th revised edition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, Peter. 1999. Grundriss der deutschen Grammatik, 2 vols. Stuttgart: Metzler.Google Scholar
Emonds, Joseph E. & Faarlund, Jan-Terje. 2014. English: The language of the Vikings. Olomouc: Palacký University.Google Scholar
Fan, Xianlong. 2008. A changing target language: Trends in American English as viewed from the EFL perspective of China. English Today 96, 34–41.Google Scholar
Ferreira, Fernanda. 2003. The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences. Cognitive Psychology 47, 164–203.Google Scholar
Ferreira, Fernanda, Foucart, Alice & Engelhardt, Paul E.. 2013. Language processing in the visual world: Effects of preview, visual complexity, and prediction. Journal of Memory and Language 69, 165–82.Google Scholar
Frazier, Lyn. 1979. On comprehending sentences: Syntactic parsing strategies. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Frazier, Lyn. 1985. Syntactic complexity. In Dowty, David, Karttunen, Laurie & Zwicky, Arnold (eds.), Natural language parsing, 129–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Futrell, Richard, Mahowald, Kyle & Gibson, Edward. 2015. Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112 (33), 10336–41.Google Scholar
Gibson, Edward. 1998. Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68, 1–76.Google Scholar
Gibson, Edward. 2000. The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In Miyashita, Yasushi, Marantz, Alec and O'Neil, Wayne (eds.), Image, language, brain, 95–112. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gildea, Daniel & Temperley, David. 2010. Do grammars minimize dependency length? Cognitive Science 34 (2), 286–310.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar
Gonnerman, Laura M. & Hayes, C. R.. 2005. The professor chewed the students . . . out: Effects of dependency, length, and adjacency on word order preferences in sentences with verb particle constructions. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 785–90. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Hale, John. 2001. A probabilistic early parser as a psycholinguistic model. In Proceedings of the Second Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Language Technologies, 1–8. Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1983. Word order universals. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1986. A comparative typology of English and German: Unifying the contrasts. London Croom Helm, and Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1995. Argument-predicate structure in grammar and performance: A comparison of English and German. In Rauch, Irmengard & Carr, Gerald F. (eds.), Insights in Germanic linguistics, vol. I: Methodology in transition, 127–44. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1999. Processing complexity and filler-gap dependencies. Language 75, 244–85.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 2000. The relative order of prepositional phrases in English: Going beyond manner-place-time. Language Variation and Change 11, 231–66.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 2001. Why are categories adjacent? Journal of Linguistics 37, 1–34.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 2003. Why are zero-marked phrases close to their heads? In Rohdenburg, Günter & Mondorf, Britta (eds.), Determinants of grammatical variation in English, 175–204. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 2004. Efficiency and complexity in grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 2012. The drift of English towards invariable word order from a typological and Germanic perspective. In Nevalainen, Terttu & Traugott, Elizabeth C. (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of English, 622–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 2014. Cross-linguistic variation and efficiency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hays, David G. 1964. Dependency theory: A formalism and some observations. Language 40, 511–25.Google Scholar
Hengeveld, Kees, Rijkhoff, Jan & Siewierska, Anna. 2004. Parts-of-speech systems and word order. Journal of Linguistics 40, 527–70.Google Scholar
Hiltunen, Turo. 1983. The decline of the prefixes and the beginnings of the English phrasal verb: The evidence from some Old and Early Middle English texts (Annales Universitatis Turkuensis, series B, vol.160). Turku: Universitatis Turkuensis.Google Scholar
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2014. Asymmetries in the prosodic phrasing of function words: Another look at the suffixing preference. Language 90 (4), 927–60.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul & Thompson, Sandra A.. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56, 251–99.Google Scholar
Keenan, Edward L. 1979. On surface form and logical form. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 8, 163–203.Google Scholar
Kempen, Gerard, Olsthoorn, Nomi & Sprenger, Simone. 2012. Grammatical workspace sharing during language production and language comprehension: Evidence from grammatical multitasking. Language and Cognitive Processes 27, 345–80.Google Scholar
König, Ekkehard & Gast, Volker. 2012. Understanding English-German contrasts, 2nd edition. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd & Meyer, Paul-Georg. 1992. Is English grammar more explicit than German grammar after all? In Mair & Markus (eds.), 155–66.Google Scholar
Leisi, Ernst. 1967. Das Heutige Englisch: Wesenszüge und Probleme. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer.Google Scholar
Leisi, Ernst. 1975. Der Wortinhalt: Seine Struktur im Deutschen und Englischen, 5th edition. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer.Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M. 1989. Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Levin, Beth. 1993. English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary investigation. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Levy, Roger. 2008. Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition 106 (2), 1126–77.Google Scholar
Lightfoot, David W. 1979. Principles of diachronic syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lohse, Barbara, Hawkins, John A. & Wasow, Thomas. 2004. Domain minimization in English verb-particle constructions. Language 80, 238–61.Google Scholar
MacDonald, Maryellen C. 2013. How language production shapes language form and comprehension. Frontiers in Psychology 4, 236.Google Scholar
MacDonald, Maryellen C., Pearlmutter, Neil J. & Seidenberg, Mark S.. 1994. The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review 101, 676–703.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian, Malchukov, Andrej & Moravcsik, Edith (eds.). 2014. Competing motivations in grammar and usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mair, Christian & Markus, Manfred (eds.). 1992. New departures in contrastive linguistics – Neue Ansätze in der Kontrastiven Linguistik. Innsbruck: University of Innsbruck.Google Scholar
Majid, Asifa, Gullberg, Marianne, Staden, Mirjam Van, & Bowerman, Melissa. 2007. How similar are semantic categories in closely related languages? A comparison of cutting and breaking in four Germanic languages. Cognitive Linguistics 18 (2), 179–94.Google Scholar
Marblestone, Karen L. 2007. Semantic and syntactic effects on double prepositional phrase ordering across the lifespan. PhD dissertation, University of Southern California.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, William D. & Tyler, Lorraine K.. 1980. The temporal structure of spoken language understanding. Cognition 8, 1–71.Google Scholar
McDaniel, Dana, McKee, Cecile, Cowart, Wayne & Garrett, Merrill F.. 2015. The role of the language production system in shaping grammars. Language 91 (2), 415–41.Google Scholar
Melinger, Alissa, Pechmann, Thomas & Pappert, Sandra. 2009. Case in language production. In Malchukov, Andrej & Spencer, Andrew (eds.), Oxford handbook of case, 384–401. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Patson, Nikole D. & Ferreira, Fernanda. 2009. Conceptual plural formation is used to guide early parsing decisions: Evidence from garden-path sentences with reciprocal verbs. Journal of Memory and Language 60, 464–86.Google Scholar
Perlmutter, David. 1970. The two verbs begin. In Jacobs, Roderick A. & Rosenbaum, Peter S. (eds.), Readings in English transformational grammar. Waltham, MA: Ginn and Company.Google Scholar
Plank, Frans. 1984. Verbs and objects in semantic agreement: Minor differences between English and German that might suggest a major one. Journal of Semantics 3, 305–60.Google Scholar
Postal, Paul. 1974. On raising. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Primus, Beatrice. 1999. Cases and thematic roles: Ergative, accusative and active. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 1974. Sekundäre Subjektivierungen im Englischen und Deutschen. Bielefeld: Cornelson-Velhagen und Klasing.Google Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 1990. Aspekte einer vergleichenden Typologie des Englischen und Deutschen: Kritische Anmerkungen zu einem Buch von John A. Hawkins. In Gnutzmann, Claus (ed.), Kontrastive Linguistik, 133–52. Frankfurt: Lang.Google Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 1992. Bemerkungen zu infiniten Konstruktionen im Englischen und Deutschen. In Mair & Markus (eds.), 187–207.Google Scholar
Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt Brace.Google Scholar
Shetreet, Einat, Linzen, Tal & Friedman, Naama. 2016. Against all odds: Exhaustive activation in lexical access of verb complementation options. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 31 (9), 1206–14.Google Scholar
Swinney, David A. 1979. Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 18 (6), 645–59.Google Scholar
Tanenhaus, Michael K. & Carlson, Gregory N.. 1989. Lexical structure and language comprehension. In Marslen-Wilson, William (ed.), Lexical representation and process, 529–61. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tesnière, Lucien. 1959. Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C. & Trousdale, Graham. 2013. Constructionalization and constructional changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Traxler, Matthew. 2011. Introduction to psycholinguistics: Understanding language science. Chichester: John Wiley and SonsGoogle Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 2016. Contact-related processes of change in the early history of English. In Kytö, Merja & Pahta, Päivi (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of English historical linguistics, 318–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Warner, Anthony R. 1983. Review article of D. W. Lightfoot (1979) Principles of diachronic syntax. Journal of Linguistics 19, 187–209.Google Scholar
Wasow, Thomas. 1997. Remarks on grammatical weight. Language Variation and Change 9, 81–105.Google Scholar
Wasow, Thomas. 2002. Postverbal behavior. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Wittenberg, Eva, Jackendoff, Ray, Kuperberg, Gina, Paczynski, Martin, Snedeker, Jesse & Wiese, Heike. 2014. The processing and representation of light verb constructions. In Bachrach, Asaf, Roy, Isabelle & Stockall, Linnaea (eds.), Structuring the argument: Multidisciplinary research on verb argument structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wittenberg, Eva, Paczynski, Martin, Wiese, Heike, Jackendoff, Ray & Kuperberg, Gina. 2014. Light verbs make heavy work: An ERP study of processing an argument structure mismatch. Journal of Memory and Language 73, 31–42.Google Scholar
Wittenberg, Eva & Pinango, Maria Mercedes. 2011. Processing light verb constructions. The Mental Lexicon 6, 393–413.Google Scholar