|
The Changing English Language Psycholinguistic Perspectives
Edited by Marianne Hundt, Sandra Mollin & Simone E. Pfenninger
Studies in English Language Series Cambridge: University Press, 2017 Hardcover. xix+410 p. ISBN 978-1107086869. £95
Reviewed by Laure Gardelle Université Grenoble Alpes
This volume is meant as an integrated exchange between psycholinguists and historical linguists, in order to assess the use of psycholinguistic findings for the study of language change. The focus is on English. Existing research has pointed out potential similarities between the acquisition of L1 by children and diachronic evolutions, but the aim here is a more systematic approach. Each section is therefore subdivided into two chapters: the first one gives a psycholinguistic approach to a phenomenon, while its twin chapter explores the same notion in a historical linguistics perspective. The two chapters are the result of a true cooperation between the authors, and establish not only the relationships between the two disciplines, but also the potential limitations of bringing them together – for instance, psycholinguists focus on individuals, when historical linguists consider the language used by the community as a whole. Still, the editors consider that there must be room for fruitful cooperation: psycholinguists study individuals in order to propose more general models of the cognitive processes at work, and conversely, a community is a sum of individual speakers. The volume is divided into seven sections, each exploring one concept: frequency (frequency effects), salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity (and vagueness) and language acquisition. About frequency effects, Harald Baayen et al. claim that straightforward frequency counts are not enough to measure evolutions, as there might be contextual effects such as priming or anti-priming. For better results, they advocate discrimination-based statistics, which establish weights for the connections between words. Focusing on names, they conclude that with time and experience, speakers acquire new names, but also collocational knowledge about those names. This increased knowledge comes at a cognitive cost, but allows for greater accuracy. Surprisingly perhaps, these conclusions are not based on a study of individual speakers, but on the overall data of the COHA corpus over a sixty-year span. Martin Hilpert’s study of diachronic corpora confirms that basic frequency counts in a diachronic corpus are not enough to describe language change. He offers a very useful review of the range of methods used by historical linguists to assess frequency. First, text frequency enables researchers to draw conclusions about language processing. For instance, as for want of decreased dramatically in the course of the 20th century, the phrase for want of a better term is more likely to be analysed as a chunk today than it used to be. For such phrases, frequency has conserving effects: the ‘old’ meanings of for (cause) and want (need) remain in the language through the chunk. In addition to text frequency, the author considers relative frequency (frequency of one linguistic unit relative to another), type frequency (‘the number of different variants in which [a linguistic unit] appears in a given corpus’, useful for instance to assess the productivity of an affix or of a construction [57]), dispersion and burstiness (whether a word is distributed evenly in different parts of a corpus, and whether this is predictable), as well as behavioral profile frequency. Regarding salience (‘the property of a stimulus to stand out from the rest’ [71]) in grammar, Nick C. Ellis, focusing on language learning, shows that frequent usage of a form may lead to phonological erosion, which decreases its degree of salience. This may lead to change of usage, which in turn affects the acquisition of the form (low-salience cues are ‘poorly learned’, in L1 but also in L2 [85]). Elizabeth Traugott agrees that low salience is a factor that makes morphosyntactic change possible. But she proposes to further refine the notion of salience, which is rather ‘evasive’ [94], by distinguishing it from that of (prosodic) prominence. For instance, a topic which is highly salient in discourse is often marked by a personal pronoun or a zero form, and is therefore not prominent. Conversely, contrastive stress provides prominence, but may be used to introduce new, therefore non-salient, referents. She then applies these notions to grammaticalization. Prior to grammaticalization, there may be gradual adjustments in pragmatic implicatures, but these are hardly noticeable. It is only once a pattern has become socially salient that it can be subject to prescription. Furthermore, a grammaticalized form is not discourse prominent, but only ancillary. Therefore, grammaticalization of lexical items requires that they lose their potential for being discourse prominent. Next, Nick C. Ellis considers chunking in language acquisition and usage. Not only do adults know about lexical items, they also have statistical knowledge about the chunks in which they occur most frequently; this is the result of ‘associative learning through usage’ [130]). The more frequent the chunks are, the stronger the associations are as well, which in turn further increases their frequency of use. This process also has effects on language change, more specifically on grammaticalization: with repetition, a string of units may come to be processed as a chunk, which may lead to a gradual loss of identity of the components, and possibly to a reduction in form. John L. Bybee & Carol Lynn Moder confirm that repetition of sequences may lead to conventionalization, especially if the chunk takes on a useful new meaning or pragmatic function, and that high frequency may also lead to a loss of compositionality, which is a prerequisite for grammaticalization. But they also point out the shortcomings of any psychological analysis of language change which would consider change to be guided by a goal of optimal efficiency. For historical linguists, language change occurs unintentionally. This is exemplified by the phrase beg the question, which first does lose compositionality over time, but which in the 1960s gets reanalysed as compositional, with the question reinterpreted as a cataphoric noun phrase. The authors conclude that ‘neither frequency nor chunking necessarily disrupts analyzability and compositionality; the pathway of development depends entirely upon the context’ [170]. Priming is another concept considered in the light of language change. It is a well-known fact that in language processing, speakers are more likely to repeat structures that have been recently used (by others or by themselves) than to use new ones, as they remain activated in the brain for a short while (a few milliseconds), and in some experiments, up to over a week. Martin J. Pickering & Simon Garrod, focusing on cross-speaker priming, show that adults may even be primed into using ungrammatical structures. To them, priming may therefore be substantial to language change as well, through routinization (conversation, for example, is extremely repetitive). Christian Mair is more cautious, regarding individual alignment in the course of an interactive conversation and evolutions over decades at community level as being on two fundamentally different scales. But he accepts that priming might be at work in a phenomenon such as the propagation of the form wanna for want to. The propagation may have been favoured by repetition of wanna itself, but also by analogy with the well-established form gonna (and possibly analogy with contracted negation particles). Rather than just ‘priming’, which refers to short-term effects, he suggests a chain such as the following: very short-term (automatic) priming → medium-termed (attentional) priming → long-term effects of implicit learning [209]. As regards analogy, Heike Behrens suggests that it is at play both in language acquisition (for instance to acquire categories, which grow out of a process of abstraction, or to acquire argument structure) and in language change, when categories extend. Both domains exhibit a similar tendency towards regularization, and analogical pattern mapping is favoured by frequency and recency. For most historical linguists, conversely, analogy is too unpredictable to have any explanatory power. Yet Hendrik de Smet & Olga Fischer suggest that analogy (in a broad sense of the word) played a role in the grammaticalisation of have to and the degree modifier as good as. For have to, they identify a structural analogy with the development of to-infinitival complement clauses (gradually preferred to that-clauses) in existential have constructions, and with constructions such as have [object] [for] to do and have need to [verb]. As for as good as, it benefited from analogy with all but: the extension of one of them to a particular context lent support to similar developments in the other construction. This notion of ‘supporting construction’ is here transferred from psycholinguistic studies on language acquisition to language change. About ambiguity, Claudia Felser shows that in language acquisition, speakers often make do with vagueness, so that they often accept ‘good-enough processing’ (retaining an incorrect interpretation even when its incorrectness has become apparent, because it is not fully erased from memory [280]). From there, she suggests that misanalysis, which operates within the constraints of grammar, may be a factor of evolution in two cases: noun-to-adjective conversion, and constituent boundary shift (e.g. development of be going to). David Denison views pragmatic vagueness as a more powerful factor than true ambiguity, because it allows for new readings. He gives further examples of that influence, such as word-class changes (e.g. fun converted from a noun to an adjective, allowing for uses in the comparative: funner), or the development of phrasal verbs from prepositional verbs (e.g. run over). Errors in acquisition (of L1) are the last area of interest: do they lead to language change? Elena V. M. Lieven concludes from a number of studies that while children make errors, especially through over-generalization or innovation, most are overcome very early, before they start school. Acquisition errors are therefore very unlikely to trigger language change. Preadolescents and adolescents are the youngest sources of change. María José López-Couso agrees that the imperfect learning involved in language acquisition cannot cause language change. There may be partially similar underlying processes, though, which makes the comparison potentially useful. Some domains, especially morphology and syntax, exhibit strong similarities (e.g. failure for high-frequency irregular formations in morphology to become regular, emergence of the epistemic values of modals out of the deontic values, same order of appearance of the different meanings of the present perfect, development of existential there out of locative there, emergence of grammaticalized be going to out of a meaning of motion). But other domains, such as sound change, show very different pathways of development, and even when there are similarities, not all the processes are the same. For instance, pragmatic inferencing plays a major role in diachronic grammaticalization, whereas cognitive complexity is a more relevant driving force in the acquisition of grammaticalized meanings by children. In sum, the volume makes very stimulating reading as an exploration of whether language (L1) acquisition and language change may be underlain by similar cognitive processes. The conclusion to be drawn from the various chapters is that the two types of approaches may not be more fully integrated; as noted by Behrens [237], language change is concerned with the evolving preferences of a language community, whereas first-language acquisition is about how individuals approximate their language to the way it is used in their environment. But while the overall feeling is one of caution, especially on the part of historical linguists, and sometimes of divergence, the twin chapters show real attempts at dialogue and occasional bridges, calling for further exploration.
Cercles © 2018 All rights are reserved and no reproduction from this site for whatever purpose is permitted without the permission of the copyright owner. Please contact us before using any material on this website.
|
|
|
