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Why are categories adjacent?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2001

JOHN A. HAWKINS
JOHN A. HAWKINS
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Abstract

This paper presents patterns of adjacency in performance data and in cross-linguistic grammatical conventions. It is argued that a common principle of processing efficiency explains both: the more syntactic and semantic relations whose processing domains are minimized, and the greater the minimization preference in the processing of each relation, the more adjacency we find. The preferences of performance are quite systematic and it is suggested that they are ultimately motivated by reductions in simultaneous processing demands in working memory. The correlations with patterns of grammatical variation exist because grammars have conventionalized the adjacency preferences of performance.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 2001 , pp. 1 - 34
Copyright
© 2001 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The paper has also benefited greatly from three anonymous JL referees, and from discussions with the following individuals (none of whom is hereby alleged to agree with me): Elaine Andersen, Bernard Comrie, Ed Keenan, Barbara Lohse, Maryellen MacDonald, Fritz Newmeyer, Maria Polinsky, Günter Rohdenburg, Despoina Theodorou, Robert Thornton, Jean-Roger Vergnaud and Tom Wasow. The assistance of Stephen Matthews and of Kaoru Horie with data collection and hypothesis testing (in Hungarian and Japanese, respectively) is also gratefully acknowledged.