Joan Bresnan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3842277 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joan Bresnan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joan |
| FAMILY NAME | Bresnan |
| SIGNATURE | BRESNAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 288 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Formal Grammar, Usage Probabilities, and Auxiliary Contraction
This article uses formal and usage-based data and methods to argue for a hybrid model of English tensed auxiliary contraction combining lexical syntax with a dynamic exemplar lexicon. The hybrid model can explain why the contractions involve lexically specific phonetic fusions that have become morphologized and lexically stored, yet remain syntactically independent, and why the probability of contraction itself is a function of the adjacent coocc…
Formal grammar, usage probabilities, and auxiliary contraction
This article uses formal and usage-based data and methods to argue for a hybrid model of English tensed auxiliary contraction combining lexical syntax with a dynamic exemplar lexicon. The hybrid model can explain why the contractions involve lexically specific phonetic fusions that have become morphologized and lexically stored, yet remain syntactically independent, and why the probability of contraction itself is a function of the adjacent coocc…
Linguistics: The Garden and the Bush
I want to thank the ACL for the Lifetime Achievement Award of 2016. I am deeply honored, and I share this honor with the outstanding collaborators and students I have been lucky to have over my lifetime.The title of my talk describes two fields of linguistics, which differ in their approaches to data and analysis and in their fundamental concepts. What I call the garden is traditional linguistics, including generative grammar. In the garden lingu…
Dative and genitive variability in Late Modern English: Exploring cross-constructional variation and change
We present a cross-constructional approach to the history of the genitive alternation and the dative alternation in Late Modern English (AD 1650 to AD 1999), drawing on richly annotated datasets and modern statistical modeling techniques. We identify cross-constructional similarities in the development of the genitive and the dative alternation over time (mainly with regard to the loosening of the animacy constraint), a development which parallel…
Predicting syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and Australian varieties of English
The present study uses probabilistic models of corpus data in a novel way, to measure and compare the syntactic predictive capacities of speakers of different varieties of the same language. The study finds that speakers' knowledge of probabilistic grammatical choices can vary across different varieties of the same language and can be detected psycholinguistically in the individual. In three pairs of experiments, Australians and Americans respond…
Gradient grammar: An effect of animacy on the syntax of give in New Zealand and American English
Is syntactic knowledge probabilistic? Experiments with the English dative alternation
Theoretical linguistics traditionally relies on linguistic intuitions such as grammatical-ity judgments for data. But the massive growth of language technologies has made the spontaneous use of language in natural settings a rich and easily accessible alter-native source of data. Moreover, studies of usage as well as intuitive judgments have shown that linguistic intuitions of grammaticality are deeply flawed, because (1) they seriously underesti…
Spoken syntax: The phonetics of giving a hand in New Zealand English
This article considers the exemplar theories which are independently developing in phonetics and in syntax, and argues that they jointly make some predictions that neither does alone. One of these predictions is explored in the context of two sound changes which occurred in the history of New Zealand English. We show that both of these phonetic changes were affected by phrase-level factors. The raising of /æ/ was more advanced in the word hand wh…
Remarks on description and explanation in grammar: Commentary on Haspelmath
Preview this article: Remarks on description and explanation in grammar: Commentary on Haspelmath, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/sl.28.3.07ais-1.gif
Optimality and Functionality: Objections and Refutations
The Emergence of the Unmarked Pronoun
The Emergence of the Unmarked Pronoun: Chiche!a Pronominals in Optimality Theory
Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Syntax and Semantics in Africa (1997)
Non-configurationality in Australian aboriginal languages
The lexical integrity principle: Evidence from Bantu
Locative Inversion and the Architecture of Universal Grammar
Locative inversion in English and Chicheŵa shows remarkable similarities which can be explained by hypothesizing the same underlying argument structures and principles for mapping argument structure roles into syntactic functions. However, the alignment of roles with syntactic categories reflects a profound typological difference between the two languages: Chicheŵa categorizes locatives in a gender class system; English, in an abstract case-like …
The Thematic Hierarchy and Locative Inversion in UG: A Reply to Schachter’s Comments
Locative Case vs. Locative Gender
Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 53-68
Topic, Pronoun, and Agreement in Chicheŵa
The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations
The editor of this volume, who is also author or coauthor of five of the contributions, has provided an introduction that not only affords an overview of the separate articles but also interrelates the basic issues in linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive studies that are addressed in this volume. The twelve articles are grouped into three sections, as follows: I. Lexical Representation: The Passive in Lexical Theory (J. Bresnan); On the L…
Control and obviation in Warlpiri
Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality
Any adequate psychology of man must provide some way to understand the human capacity for language, the editors of this volume write. It was a belief shared by quite a few among us that developments in linguistics and psychology were leading to similar conclusions by separate routes and that this was an appropriate time to explore the implications of these apparently parallel developments for future, perhaps joint, work. This volume represents a …
Stress and Syntax: A Reply
The Ordering Hypothesis of Bresnan 1971a projects the stress contours of simple S's onto complex syntactic structures by permitting stress rules to apply systematically within the transformational derivation. This hypothesis, a principle governing the application of stress rules, is distinct from the stress rules themselves. Berman and Szamosi 1972 fail to observe this distinction in their attempt to demonstrate the futility of any principle like…
Sentence Stress and Syntactic Transformations
If the Nuclear Stress Rule of English is ordered within the transformational cycle after all the syntactic transformations, many apparent exceptions to Chomsky & Halle 1968 are predictable, for the stress patterns of certain syntactically complex constructions reflect those of the simple sentences embedded within them in deep structure. This preservation of basic stress pattern through the syntactic derivation provides a new method for determinin…
Topic, Pronoun, and Agreement in Chicheŵa
Locative Inversion and the Architecture of Universal Grammar
Locative inversion in English and Chicheŵa shows remarkable similarities which can be explained by hypothesizing the same underlying argument structures and principles for mapping argument structure roles into syntactic functions. However, the alignment of roles with syntactic categories reflects a profound typological difference between the two languages: Chicheŵa categorizes locatives in a gender class system; English, in an abstract case-like …
Gradient grammar: An effect of animacy on the syntax of give in New Zealand and American English
The lexical integrity principle: Evidence from Bantu
Sentence Stress and Syntactic Transformations
If the Nuclear Stress Rule of English is ordered within the transformational cycle after all the syntactic transformations, many apparent exceptions to Chomsky & Halle 1968 are predictable, for the stress patterns of certain syntactically complex constructions reflect those of the simple sentences embedded within them in deep structure. This preservation of basic stress pattern through the syntactic derivation provides a new method for determinin…
Predicting syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and Australian varieties of English
The present study uses probabilistic models of corpus data in a novel way, to measure and compare the syntactic predictive capacities of speakers of different varieties of the same language. The study finds that speakers' knowledge of probabilistic grammatical choices can vary across different varieties of the same language and can be detected psycholinguistically in the individual. In three pairs of experiments, Australians and Americans respond…
Non-configurationality in Australian aboriginal languages
Optimality and Functionality: Objections and Refutations
Control and obviation in Warlpiri
Sentence Stress and Syntactic Transformations
If the Nuclear Stress Rule of English is ordered within the transformational cycle after all the syntactic transformations, many apparent exceptions to Chomsky & Halle 1968 are predictable, for the stress patterns of certain syntactically complex constructions reflect those of the simple sentences embedded within them in deep structure. This preservation of basic stress pattern through the syntactic derivation provides a new method for determinin…
Stress and Syntax: A Reply
The Ordering Hypothesis of Bresnan 1971a projects the stress contours of simple S's onto complex syntactic structures by permitting stress rules to apply systematically within the transformational derivation. This hypothesis, a principle governing the application of stress rules, is distinct from the stress rules themselves. Berman and Szamosi 1972 fail to observe this distinction in their attempt to demonstrate the futility of any principle like…
Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality
Any adequate psychology of man must provide some way to understand the human capacity for language, the editors of this volume write. It was a belief shared by quite a few among us that developments in linguistics and psychology were leading to similar conclusions by separate routes and that this was an appropriate time to explore the implications of these apparently parallel developments for future, perhaps joint, work. This volume represents a …
Control and obviation in Warlpiri
The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations
The editor of this volume, who is also author or coauthor of five of the contributions, has provided an introduction that not only affords an overview of the separate articles but also interrelates the basic issues in linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive studies that are addressed in this volume. The twelve articles are grouped into three sections, as follows: I. Lexical Representation: The Passive in Lexical Theory (J. Bresnan); On the L…
Topic, Pronoun, and Agreement in Chicheŵa
Locative Case vs. Locative Gender
Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 53-68
The Thematic Hierarchy and Locative Inversion in UG: A Reply to Schachter’s Comments
Locative Inversion and the Architecture of Universal Grammar
Locative inversion in English and Chicheŵa shows remarkable similarities which can be explained by hypothesizing the same underlying argument structures and principles for mapping argument structure roles into syntactic functions. However, the alignment of roles with syntactic categories reflects a profound typological difference between the two languages: Chicheŵa categorizes locatives in a gender class system; English, in an abstract case-like …
The lexical integrity principle: Evidence from Bantu
Non-configurationality in Australian aboriginal languages
The Emergence of the Unmarked Pronoun: Chiche!a Pronominals in Optimality Theory
Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Syntax and Semantics in Africa (1997)
The Emergence of the Unmarked Pronoun
Optimality and Functionality: Objections and Refutations
Remarks on description and explanation in grammar: Commentary on Haspelmath
Preview this article: Remarks on description and explanation in grammar: Commentary on Haspelmath, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/sl.28.3.07ais-1.gif
Spoken syntax: The phonetics of giving a hand in New Zealand English
This article considers the exemplar theories which are independently developing in phonetics and in syntax, and argues that they jointly make some predictions that neither does alone. One of these predictions is explored in the context of two sound changes which occurred in the history of New Zealand English. We show that both of these phonetic changes were affected by phrase-level factors. The raising of /æ/ was more advanced in the word hand wh…
Is syntactic knowledge probabilistic? Experiments with the English dative alternation
Theoretical linguistics traditionally relies on linguistic intuitions such as grammatical-ity judgments for data. But the massive growth of language technologies has made the spontaneous use of language in natural settings a rich and easily accessible alter-native source of data. Moreover, studies of usage as well as intuitive judgments have shown that linguistic intuitions of grammaticality are deeply flawed, because (1) they seriously underesti…
Gradient grammar: An effect of animacy on the syntax of give in New Zealand and American English
Predicting syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and Australian varieties of English
The present study uses probabilistic models of corpus data in a novel way, to measure and compare the syntactic predictive capacities of speakers of different varieties of the same language. The study finds that speakers' knowledge of probabilistic grammatical choices can vary across different varieties of the same language and can be detected psycholinguistically in the individual. In three pairs of experiments, Australians and Americans respond…
Dative and genitive variability in Late Modern English: Exploring cross-constructional variation and change
We present a cross-constructional approach to the history of the genitive alternation and the dative alternation in Late Modern English (AD 1650 to AD 1999), drawing on richly annotated datasets and modern statistical modeling techniques. We identify cross-constructional similarities in the development of the genitive and the dative alternation over time (mainly with regard to the loosening of the animacy constraint), a development which parallel…
Linguistics: The Garden and the Bush
I want to thank the ACL for the Lifetime Achievement Award of 2016. I am deeply honored, and I share this honor with the outstanding collaborators and students I have been lucky to have over my lifetime.The title of my talk describes two fields of linguistics, which differ in their approaches to data and analysis and in their fundamental concepts. What I call the garden is traditional linguistics, including generative grammar. In the garden lingu…
Formal Grammar, Usage Probabilities, and Auxiliary Contraction
This article uses formal and usage-based data and methods to argue for a hybrid model of English tensed auxiliary contraction combining lexical syntax with a dynamic exemplar lexicon. The hybrid model can explain why the contractions involve lexically specific phonetic fusions that have become morphologized and lexically stored, yet remain syntactically independent, and why the probability of contraction itself is a function of the adjacent coocc…
Formal grammar, usage probabilities, and auxiliary contraction
This article uses formal and usage-based data and methods to argue for a hybrid model of English tensed auxiliary contraction combining lexical syntax with a dynamic exemplar lexicon. The hybrid model can explain why the contractions involve lexically specific phonetic fusions that have become morphologized and lexically stored, yet remain syntactically independent, and why the probability of contraction itself is a function of the adjacent coocc…
Linguistics (21 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (16 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (10 works) · Syntax (9 works) · Grammar (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Natural language processing (7 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (7 works)