Title: Priming as a driving force in grammaticalization: on the track of unidirectionality
1Priming as a driving force in grammaticalization
on the track of unidirectionality
- Gerhard Jäger
- University of Bielefeld, gerhard.jaeger_at_uni-biele
feld.de - Anette Rosenbach
- University of Düsseldorf, ar_at_phil-fak.uni-duessel
dorf.de
2Unidirectionality of grammaticalization processes
- controversial issue (see e.g. special issue of
Language Sciences 23 Newmeyer 1998 Lass 2000
Haspelmath 2004) - consensus most grammaticalization processes
cannot be reversed - Why should that be so?
3Possible reasons for unidirectionality
- pro unidirectionality
- Haspelmath (1999)
- maxim of extravagance (Keller 1994) as a driving
force in grammaticalization lack of
degrammaticalization is due to lack of a
counteracting principle of anti-extravagance - contra unidirectionality
- Janda (2001)
- unidirectionality (as a diachronic constraint)
cannot exist in the light of the individual
speaker, because current speakers have no
awareness of a languages history pathways are
therefore always, in principle, reversable for
speakers
4Usage-based account of unidirectionality our
proposal
- psycholinguistic mechanism of priming
5Organization of talk
- Introduction
- Priming
- Two case studies
- Space gt time (Boroditsky 2000)
- Phonological reduction (Shields Balota 1991)
- A usage-based account of directional change
(based on priming) - Conclusion
62. Priming
- tendency of speakers to re-use previously
mentioned/heard linguistic items - phenomenon may be operating on
- discourse-functional level ? parallelism,
repetition (cf. e.g. Tannen 1987) - cognitive/ psycholinguistic level ? priming
- (cf. e.g. Bock 1986 Bock Loebell 1990
Pickering Branigan 1999 Zwitserlood 1996)
7Priming as a psycholinguistic mechanism
- priming pre-activation
- processing of a stimulus linguistic unit
(prime) influences (usually facilitates) the
processing of the same or a similar linguistic
unit (target) - prime identical with target repetition
(direct) priming - prime similar to target associative (indirect)
priming - operates
- on all linguistic levels phonological, semantic,
lexical, morphological, syntactic priming - in language production (e.g. Bock 1986)
- in language comprehension (e.g. Luka Barsalou
2005) - in dialogue (Pickering Garrod)
8Priming examples
- repetition priming
- (a) At what time does your shop close? ? at
six(b) What time does your shop close? - ?six
- (Levelt Kelter 1982)
9Priming examples
- associative priming
- e.g. picture naming task (Flores dArcais
Schreuder 1987) - violin easier to name after semantically related
prime guitar than after unrelated prime chair
primes
doesnt
prime
10Priming examples
- contextual priming
- prime tip of the ...
- target tongue
- (our term specific case of syntactic priming
words with high contextual probability are easier
to process (Howes 1951, Boland 1997, McDonald et
al 2001, inter alia)
113. Case studies
- 3.1 From space to time
- 3.2 Phonological reduction
123. 1 Case study I from space to time
- space-time correspondences in language
from Deutscher (2005134)
13Space gt time
- presumably universal grammaticalization pathway
from space to time - unidirectional
- space gt time
- but not time gt space
- see e.g. Heine et al. (1991)
- Haspelmath (1997)
- Heine Kuteva (2002),
- Hopper Traugott (200385)
14Boroditsky (2000)
- space gt time
- evidence from experimental priming studies
- In how far can spatial expressions prime temporal
expressions, and vice versa?
15Temporal metaphor
- 2 dominant spatial metaphors to sequence events
in time (cf. e.g. Clark 1973)
ego-moving metaphor
We are coming up on Christmas.
time-moving metaphor
Christmas is coming up.
(from Boroditsky 20005)
16Spatial metaphor
ego-moving metaphor
object-moving metaphor
(from Boroditsky 2000 6)
17Boroditsky (2000) experiment 1Can space prime
time?
- primes (spatial scenarios consisting of picture
and a sentence description) - ego-moving spatial e.g. The dark can is in front
of me. - object-moving spatial e.g. The light widget is
in front of the dark widget. - targets ambiguous temporal sentences, e.g.Next
Wednesdays meeting has been moved forward two
days. - results after ego-moving spatial prime 73.3
ego-moving temporal interpretation (i.e. meeting
is on Friday)after object-moving spatial prime
69.2 time-moving temporal interpretation (i.e.
meeting is on Monday) - space can prime time !
18Boroditsky (2000) experiment 2Can time also
prime space?
- 4 primes
- spatial
- ego-moving e.g. The flower is in front of me.
- object-moving e.g. The hat-box is in front of
the Kleenex. - temporal
- ego-moving e.g. On Thursday, Saturday is before
us. - time-moving e.g. Thursday comes before Saturday.
- 2 targets
- ambiguous time questions e.g. Next Wednesdays
meeting has been moved forward two days.) - ambiguous space questions e.g. Which one of
these widgets is ahead ?
19Boroditsky (2000) results from experiment 2
(from Boroditsky 2000 14)
20Boroditsky (2000) results from experiment 2
- time to time yes
- Temporal ego-moving prime ? temporal ego-moving
interpretation - time-moving prime ? time-moving interpretation
- space to space yes
- Spatial ego-moving prime ? spatial ego-moving
interpretation - object-moving prime ? object-moving
interpretation - space to time yes
- Spatial ego-moving prime ? temporal ego-moving
interpretation - Object-moving prime ? time-moving interpretation
- time to space no
- Temporal ego-moving prime ? spatial ego-moving
interpretation - Time-moving prime ? object-moving interpretation
21Boroditsky (200022)
- Apparently, space and time can share structural
relational information on-line, but this sharing
is asymmetric spatial schemas can be used to
think about time, but temporal schemas cannot be
used to think about space.
223.2 Case study II phonological reduction
- Phonological reduction in grammaticalization
- phoneme reduction ahg brenjan gt nhg brennen
- phoneme deletion let us gt lets
23Phonological reduction
- In the process of phonological attrition and
selection , we can identify two tendencies - A quantitative (syntagmatic) reduction forms
become shorter as the phonemes that comprise them
erode. - A qualitative (paradigmatic) reduction the
remaining phonological segments in the form are
drawn from a progressively shrinking set. - Hopper Traugott (2003 154)
24Priming and phonological reduction
- Shields and Balota (1991)
- experimental study of repetition on
- word length
- amplitude
- results
- both repetition and associative priming lead to
shortening - repetition priming also leads to reduced amplitude
25Shields and Balota (1991)
- Typical stimuli
- identical
- Her cat chases our cat under the table.
- related
- Her dog chases our cat under the table.
- unrelated
- Her son chases our cat under the table.
26Shields and Balota (1991)
- method
- subjects
- read sentences in present tense
- had to repeat them by heart in past tense
- cat in our cat was acoustically analyzed
27Shields and Balota (1991) Results
- Duration
- (cat) cat 329 msec
- (dog) cat 340 msec
- (son) cat 350 msec
28Shields and Balota (1991) Results
- Amplitude
- (in comparison to reference vowel)
- (cat) cat -1.62 dB
- (dog) cat -0.11 dB
- (son) cat 0.23 dB
29Shields and Balota (1991) Results
- Amplitude
- difference between repetition (cat cat) and
other two conditions is significant - difference between related (dog cat) and
unrelated (son cat) condition is not significant
30Further evidence
- various studies that show that increased
probability of a word in a context leads to
reduced pronounciation - Jurafsky, Bell, Gregory, Raymond (2000)
- Gahl and Garnsey (2004)
- can be interpreted as phonological reduction
under contextual priming
314. A usage-based account of directional change
32Priming and similarity
- Priming is related to similarity
- If A and B are similar, then A can prime B
- more general if
- A is probable in a context C, and
- A is similar to B,
- Then
- B is primed by context C
33Priming and similarity
- similarity is reflexive (A is similar to A)
- repetition priming
- contextual probability effects
- similarity is not identity
- associative priming
- guitar can prime violin and vice versa
34Priming and similarity
- similarity can be asymmetric
- Want to is more similar to wanna than vice versa
- spatial configurations are more similar to
homomorphic temporal configurations than vice
versa
35Bold hypothesis
- Transitivity
- suppose
- A has high probability in context C, and
- A is similar to B
- then, after sufficiently many repetitions
- Bs probability in context C increases
36Consequences
- suppose
- A is similar to B (in a context C), and
- B is not similar to A (in C)
- then
- the BH (bold hypothesis) predicts that B will
eventually replace A in C
37Implication for unidirectionality
- unidirectional pathways of language change should
be decomposable into atomic steps of asymmetric
similarity - replication in language use via priming
38Predictions (falsifiable)
- asymmetric similarity is defined in terms of
priming ? can be tested by means of
psycholinguistic experiments - frequency effects transitivity depends on
frequency of triggering context ? frequent items
should undergo language change faster