[lingtalks] Joan Bresnan: Linguistics Student Association Spring Colloquium, SDSU

[Jean Mark Gawron]

Linguistics Student Association Spring Colloquium
Saturday, April 28 2007
SS 1500, SDSU

Keynote presentation: 11.00 to 12.30

Predicting Syntax --
Evidence from the English dative alternation

Joan Bresnan, Stanford University

Current techniques for modeling human language are widely based on the
simplifying assumption that knowledge of language is characterized by
a static, categorical system of grammar.  This idealization has been
fruitful, but it ultimately underestimates human language capacities.

 From a series of recent corpus and experimental studies of the English
dative alternation (Bresnan et al 2007; Bresnan 2006; Tily et al 2007;
Ford and Bresnan 2006), I will review evidence that (i) English
speakers can make accurate probabilistic predictions of the syntactic
choices of others, (ii) manipulations that raise or lower
probabilities influence syntactic judgments, (iii) these
predictions and judgments co-vary in American and Australian varieties
of English, and (iv) differences in syntactic probability predict
temporal effects during speech production and comprehension.

Taken together, these findings suggest that our concept of linguistic
competence should be expanded.  English speakers have implicit
knowledge of statistical patterns of usage.  This gives them the  
ability to
predict what others are going to say, explains apparent
inconsistencies in their grammaticality judgments, is actively
employed in the course of language production, and varies across
dialects and varieties, just as grammar does.