How redundant is language really? Agent-recipient disambiguation across time and space
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22130596 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dirk Pijpops (0000-0002-3820-8099, University of Liège), Eva Zehentner (0000-0003-3911-4147, University of Zurich) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2022-11-25 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Glossa a journal of general linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2397-1835 • E-ISSN: 2397-1835 |
| Publisher | Open Library of the Humanities (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.16995/glossa.8763 |
| OpenAlex | W4307951688 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 81 |
Redundant marking of grammatical relations seems to be commonplace across languages, and has been shown to benefit learning as well as robust information transmission. At the same time, languages also exhibit trade-offs between strategies such as case marking or word order, suggesting that redundancy may also be dis-preferred in line with a tendency towards communicative efficiency. In the present paper, we assess redundancy in terms of number of strategies used simultaneously to mark specific relations within individual utterances (syntagmatic redundancy) in light of these competing motivations. Our test case is participant role disambiguation in English and Dutch, specifically the interaction of constituent order, case, prepositional marking, and agreement to distinguish agents and recipients in ditransitive clauses. Using evidence from corpora of Present Day Dutch and English as well as data from Middle English, we find that redundancy is prevalent, albeit within certain limits
Linguistics · Natural language processing · Syntagmatic analysis · Word order · Computer Science · Language and cultural evolution · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence
Processing Instruction
Language, Usage and Cognition
The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity
The Development of African American English
The Dynamics of the Linguistic System
Prototypical Transitivity
The Grammar Network
How Efficiency Shapes Human Language
Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation
Data Analysis
Degeneracy and complexity in biological systems
The Measurement of Observer Agreement for Categorical Data
Studies in Ditransitive Constructions
Modern Icelandic Syntax
Production efficiency can cause grammatical change
Redundancy can benefit learning
Word order in zero-marking languages
A Coefficient of Agreement for Nominal Scales
Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable
Linguistic Assessment Criteria for Explaining Language Change
Ditransitive Constructions
Cognitive indigenization effects in the English dative alternation
Cognitive complexity and increased grammatical explicitness in English
Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst
Verb disposition in argument structure alternations
Verbal cluster order and processing complexity
Morphological case and word order in Old English
On the interplay of object animacy and verb type during sentence comprehension in German
Language Is a Complex Adaptive System
The Role of Diminutives in the Acquisition of Russian Gender
The Role of Prominence Information in the Real-Time Comprehension of Transitive Constructions
Gradient grammar
The anomaly of the verb 'give' explained by its high (formal and semantic) transitivity
The International Corpus of English (ICE) Project
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2025 (3) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |