Seminar on
Complexity and Explanation in Grammatical Theory[1]
Ling 820 — Seminar in Syntax
Spring '08, MW 1130 - 0118 Derby Hall 0047 (#12543-3)
Instructor: Peter Culicover
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~culicove
The idea that complexity plays a role in explaining
why language is the way it is has a long history in linguistics. The
relationship between complexity and explanation will be the focus of this
seminar. Complexity is often suspected of being responsible for aspects of
typological variation (e.g. universals, quasi-universals, implicational
universals, asymmetries and gaps), constraints on rules of grammar, language
change, the course of language development, and language processing. In order
to make such an approach to explanation work, it is necessary to formulate a
notion of complexity with some precision. Doing so then allows us to ask
whether it is possible to attain a genuine explanation of some phenomenon, and
whether the same notion of complexity is applicable to a range of different
cases.
This seminar will survey the potential
role of grammatical complexity in explaining why languages have certain
properties and not others. The goal will be to understand what factors
contribute to grammatical complexity and how complexity might explain why
certain aspects of language are universal or almost universal, why certain
aspects are relatively rare, and why many logical possibilities do not occur at
all.
The research that relates to this issue comes
from many areas, including grammatical theory, language processing, language
acquisition, computation, and typology. It will be very exciting to try to
determine to what extent it is possible to tie these things together in order
to understand how things work.
One theme will be the role of complexity
in accounting for universals, variation and change. Our goal will be to
understand what the factors are that might contribute to grammatical complexity
and how complexity may explain why certain aspects of language are universal,
why certain aspects are relatively rare, and why many logical possibilities do
not occur at all.
Another theme will be linguistic
constructions. Intuitively, specialized constructions are more complex than
fully regular constructions (which sometimes are characterized in terms of
rules). Where do they come from, and what happens to them over time? We will
consider the extent to which the properties of constructions can be accounted
for in terms of general principles, how they are acquired, their status
vis-à-vis rules, how they change over time, their status in a formal grammar,
and how their complexity can be measured.
A third theme will be the role of
complexity in accounting for the unacceptability of otherwise well-formed
expressions of a language. There is a long history of research along these
lines for center-embedding and similar cases that are intuitively difficult to
process. We will see to what extent such an approach can be extended to novel
cases.
Anyone who is interested in exploring
explanations for grammatical phenomena from any of these perspectives will be
very welcome. Students who are doing research on grammatical description, the
architecture of the grammar, grammatical processing, contact or grammatical change
are encouraged to participate in this seminar and explore the questions that we
will be addressing with respect to their own work. Students who are working in
phonology may also want to consider participating, to the extent that they see
the opportunity to relate some of the issues that we will be looking at to
their own work.
Students will be expected to actively participate in
the discussion and research carried out in the seminar. As explained below,
students will be required to facilitate discussions and post questions on the
readings in advance. Students will either initiate a research project that
deals with some aspect of complexity and explanation in grammatical theory, or
for students already working on a related topic, related these issues to their
own research (and vice versa).
Contrary to the generic course description, the
prerequisite for this seminar is Ling 602.01, not Ling 602.02, or
permission of the instructor.
We’ll use Carmen to post questions and provoke
discussion. Most of the readings will reside on Carmen, as well, in order to
guarantee uniform access to them.
Requirements
I would like for us to have a seminar in which
everyone participates in a lively and constructive discussion of the readings.
Thus, I plan on taking a page from Mike White and Erhard Hinrichs
playbook, who took a page from Eric Fosler-Lussier's
playbook, as follows. Everyone will be required to post at least one
question to the discussion list on Carmen by 8 p.m. the evening before the
assigned readings will be discussed. Participants are also encouraged to share
their (initial) thoughts and views of the papers in their posts, and to ask
questions where things are not clear. As always, if something is not clear to
someone, it is probably not clear to lost of other people, so highlighting
these issues is a great service.
(An idea taken from the White-Hinrichs
seminar.) Each session will have a discussion facilitator. The
facilitator should read over the posted questions and choose a subset for
discussion. In class, the facilitator should start the session with a fifteen
minute summary of the day's readings, including the highlights and lowlights.
Following the opening summary, the facilitator is responsible for managing the
discussion, and ensuring that as many viewpoints are heard as possible. Students
will be required to facilitate at least one session, and two if the number of
participants allows. Auditors are expected to facilitate one session.
As noted above, students (other than auditors) will be
required to carry out a term project on complexity and explanation or a related
topic integrating their own research. A one-page sketch of the proposed
research will be required by the end of the fifth week, followed by a two-page
extended abstract in the eighth week, a presentation during finals week, and a
final report by the day the final exam would be held (if we were having one).
The topics and (likely) readings we expect to cover
are listed below. This list may be refined as the course progresses. The actual
readings will be a subset of those listed, as I work through the list and try
to figure out which pieces are most representative and useful. The actual
schedule will be a version of the ordering provided here.
All of the readings except Goldberg 2005 are available
in pdf format on the course page in Carmen.
Topic: Mainstream
generative grammar and Simpler Syntax
It will be useful to have an overview on
contemporary syntactic theory, in order to see what pieces might and might not
contribute to accounting for complexity and explanation.
Readings
Culicover, Peter W., and Ray
Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler Syntax. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Chapters 1,
2 and 3.
Culicover, Peter W., and Ray
Jackendoff. 2006. The simpler syntax hypothesis. Trends in Cognitive Sciences
10(9).413-418.
Topic: Universals
There is some very interesting work that
tries to explain typological universals in terms of processing complexity.
Reading this work will help us see the relationship between complexity and
explanation, and will provide a candidate measure of complexity that we can
carry forward with us as we read further.
Readings
Hawkins, John A. 1994. A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. (Selected chapters.)
Hawkins, John A. 2001. Why
are categories adjacent? Journal of Linguistics 37.1-34.
Hawkins, John A. 2004.
Complexity and Efficiency in Grammars. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
(Selected chapters.)
Topic: Typology
There are more papers linking complexity
and the distribution of linguistic properties (one paper is from a book about
to be published on the topic).
Readings
Van Everbroeck,
Ezra. 2003. Language type frequency and learnability from a connectionist
perspective. Linguistic Typology 7.1-50.
Miestamo, Matti.
2006. On the
Feasibility of Complexity Metrics. Finest Linguistics. Proceedings of the
Annual Finnish and Estonian Conference of Linguistics. Tallinn, May 6-7, 2004,
ed. by Krista Kerge, and Maria-Maren
Sepper, 11-26. Tallinn, Tallinn University Press.
Miestamo, Matti.
2007. Implicational
Hierarchies and Grammatical Complexity. Under review for: David Gil,
Geoffrey Sampson, and Peter Trudgill, ed., Language
Complexity as a Variable Concept. Oxford: Oxford University Press, April 12,
2007. http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~matmies/hierarchies_web.pdf.
Miestamo, Matti.
2008. Grammatical
complexity in cross-linguistic perspective. Language Complexity: Typology,
contact, change, ed. by Matti Miestamo,
Kaius Sinnemäki, and Fred Karlsson. Dordrecht, John Benjamins.
Topic: Processing
Much of the work on complexity
presupposes that complexity is tied to (real-time) processing. Gibson does a particularly
good job of supporting this view of complexity on experimental grounds, and
showing how it can explain judgments of relative acceptability made by native
speakers.
Readings
Gibson, Edward. 1998. Linguistic
Complexity: Locality of Syntactic Dependencies. Cognition 68.1-76.
Grodner, Daniel J., and Edward A.
F. Gibson. 2005. Consequences
of the Serial Nature of Linguistic Input for Sentential Complexity.
Cognitive Science 29.261–291.
Gibson, Edward. 2000. The
dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity.
In Y.Miyashita, A. Marantz,
& W. O’Neil (Eds.), Image, language, brain (pp. 95-126). Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Abney, Steven, and Mark
Johnson. 1991. Memory Requirements and Local Ambiguities for Parsing.
Strategies. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 20(3).233-250.
Konieczny, Lars. 2000. Locality and parsing complexity.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 29.627-645.
Topic: Complexity and
islands
Extending the idea that complexity
explains unacceptability, some have taken the view that some or all of the
so-called ‘extraction islands’ do not fall under grammaticality (contrary to
mainstream syntactic theory) but are the consequence of complexity, which
yields judgments of unacceptability. Kluender has
done some interesting imaging work to support this view. Others, in particular
Keller and Featherstone, have provided evidence that complexity is a constant
across languages, while acceptability (and the threshold as to when something
is unacceptable), varies across languages.
Readings
Kluender, Robert. 2004. Are Subject
Islands Subject to a Processing Account? Proceedings of WCCFL 23, ed. by B. Schmeiser, V. Chand, A. Kelleher,
and A. Rodriguez, 101-125. Somerville, MA:, Cascadilla
Press.
Kluender, Robert. 1998. On the
distinction between strong and weak islands: a processing perspective.
The Limits of Syntax, ed. by Peter W. Culicover, and Louise McNally, 241-279.
New York, Academic Press.
Featherston, Sam. 2005. Universals and
grammaticality: Wh-constraints in German and English. Linguistics 43(4).
Featherston, Sam. 200x. That-trace in
German.
Arnon, Inbal,
Neal Snider, Philip Hofmeister, T. Florian Jaeger, and Ivan A. Sag. in press. Cross-linguistic
Variation in a Processing Account: The Case ofMultiple
Wh-questions. BLS 32.
Keller, Frank. 2000. Gradience in Grammar: Experimental and Computational
Aspects of Degrees of Grammaticality. Unpublished doctoral dissertation.
Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh.
Alexopolou, Theodora, and Frank Keller. 2003. Linguistic
Complexity, Locality and Resumption. Proceedings of the Twenty-Second West
Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. by G. Garding,
and M. Tsujimura, 15-28. Somerville, MA:, Cascadilla Press.
Topic: Constructions in
grammar
Returning now to grammatical theory, in
order to get the story of complexity right it is necessary to work out what it
is that we are talking about. If the grammatical description doesn’t break
things down right, it is going to be hard to account for complexity and thereby
explain things. We’ll look at some work that argues that constructions
are part of the native speaker’s knowledge of language, and therefore should be
in the grammatical description. If this is right, then it will be necessary to
account for how to measure the contribution of constructions to complexity.
Readings
Goldberg, Adele E. 1995.
Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago,
University of Chicago Press. (selections)
Goldberg, Adele E. 2005.
Constructions at Work: Constructionist Approaches in Context.
(selections)
Goldberg, Adele E, and Ray
Jackendoff. 2004. The English Resultative as a Family of Constructions.
Language.
Michaelis, Laura A. Construction
Grammar. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition, ed. by
Keith Brown. Oxford, Elsevier.
Sag, Ivan A. 1997. English
relative clause constructions. Journal of Linguistics 33(2).431-484.
Culicover, Peter
W. 1999. Syntactic Nuts. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. (Chapter 3.)
Culicover, Peter W. Under
review. The rise and fall of constructions and the history of do-support.
The Ohio State University and Eberhard-Karls Universität
Tübingen.
Topic: Defining
Complexity
With the background that we’ve worked
through, now let’s focus on the complexity metric itself and see where we are.
Readings
Hawkins, John A. 1999.
Processing complexity and filler gap dependencies across grammars. Language
75.244-285.
Culicover, Peter
W., and Andrzej Nowak. 2002. Markedness, antisymmetry
and the complexity of constructions. Language Variation Yearbook, Vol. 2, ed.
by Pierre Pica, and Johan Rooryk, 5-30. Amsterdam,
John Benjamins.
Culicover, Peter W. (2008). Beyond Simpler Syntax:
Complexity and explaining islands. Ms. in preparation.
Juola, Patrick. 2008. Assessing Linguistic Complexity.
Language Complexity: Typology, contact, change, ed. by Matti
Miestamo, Kaius Sinnemäki, and Fred Karlsson.
Dordrecht, John Benjamins.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2006. Against markedness. Journal of
Linguistics 42.25-70.
Jackendoff, Ray. 1975.
Morphological and Semantic Regularities in the Lexicon. Language 51.639-671.
Culicover, Peter W. (2008).
Constructional complexity. The Ohio State University and Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen. Ms. in
preparation.
Policy on
Academic Misconduct
As with any class at this
university, students are required to follow the Ohio State Code of Student Conduct.
In particular, note that students are not allowed to, among other things,
submit plagiarized (copied but unacknowledged) work for credit. If any
violation occurs, the instructor is required to report the violation to the
Council on Academic Misconduct.
Students with
Disabilities
Students who need an
accommodation based on the impact of a disability should contact me to arrange
an appointment as soon as possible to discuss the course format, to anticipate
needs, and to explore potential accommodations. I rely on the Office of
Disability Services for assistance in verifying the need for accommodations and
developing accommodation strategies. Students who have not previously contacted
the Office for Disability Services are encouraged to do so (292-3307; http://www.ods.ohio-state.edu).
Disclaimer
This syllabus is subject to
change. All important changes will be made in writing (email), with ample time
for adjustment.
[1] For design and organization ideas I have borrowed liberally from the
excellent description of the seminar taught in Winter 2008 by Mike White and
Erhard Hinrichs, so no one should be surprised by
suddenly familiar design, ideas and wordings.