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ALT 8 The Dynamics of Probabilistic Eighth Biennial Conference of the Association for Grammar: Implications for Linguistic Typology Typology University of California, Berkeley July 2326, 2009 Joan Bresnan Dynamics of Grammar:

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SLIDE 1

The Dynamics of Probabilistic Grammar: Implications for Typology

Joan Bresnan

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.1/48

ALT 8

Eighth Biennial Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology University of California, Berkeley July 23–26, 2009

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.2/48

Dynamics of Grammar

How is (probabilistic) grammar dynamic?

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.3/48

Dynamics of Grammar

Incrementality in production. “the syntactic structure of an utterance reects in part the order in which information becomes available during the syntactic stages of processing” (Prat-Sala & Branigan 2000) Bock 1982; De Smedt & Kempen 1987; Kempen & Hoenkamp 1987; Levelt 1989

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.4/48

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SLIDE 2

Incremental production

Example from Ferreira 1996: You are formulating a message: something happened – the giving of toys to some children by a person named Sheila

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Incremental production

You formulate your message incrementally: Sheila gave Which do you choose? the children or toys?

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Incremental production

Sheila gave Sheila gave toys Sheila gave toys to Sheila gave toys to the children

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Incremental production

Sheila gave Sheila gave the children Sheila gave the children toys

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.8/48

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SLIDE 3

Incremental production

Which do you choose? the children or toys? Select the item with highest activation at the time the postverbal position is to be lled.

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.9/48

Incremental production

Activation is increased by

  • discourse accessibility (Bock & Irwin 1980,

Prat-Sala & Branigan 2000)

  • animacy (Bock, Loebell, & Morey 1992)
  • effects of prior processing (Bock 1986; Pickering,

Branigan, and McLean 2002)

  • ...

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.10/48

Incremental production

Victor Ferreira (1996) “Is it better to give than to donate? Syntactic exibility in language production” JML 35: 724–55 Experimental participants formulated sentences faster with give than with donate. Incremental theories (in contrast to competition theories) predict this, because the availability of alternative ways to ll the postverbal slot facilitates formulation with whichever argument is more activated.

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.11/48

Incremental production

Bresnan, Cueni, Nikitina, & Baayen 2007: discourse given not given animate inanimate denite indenite pronoun non-pronoun less complex more complex structural persistence

V NPrec NPthm V NPthm PPrec

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SLIDE 4

Incremental production

...the children ... Sheila gave them some toys. ...the toys ... Sheila gave them to some children. Sheila gave the children toys.

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.13/48

Incremental production

Similar ndings (though quantitatively different) for

  • dative alternation
  • active/passive voice alternation
  • genitive alternation (the woman’s shadow, the

shadow of the woman)

Bock & Irwin 1980, Weiner & Labov 1981, Thompson 1990, Hawkins 1994, Collins 1995, Bresnan et al. 2007, Bock et al. 1992, Prat-Sala & Branigan 2000, Estival & Myhill 1988, Rosenbach 2003, 2005, O’Connor, Anttila, Fong & Maling 2004, Hinrichs & Szmrecsányi 2007, Tagliamonte & Jarmasz 2008, Shih et al. 2009, . . .

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Dynamics of Grammar

How is (probabilistic) grammar dynamic?

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.15/48

Dynamics of Grammar

Incrementality of comprehension. Many studies:

Boston, Hale, Kliegl, Patil, & Vasishth 2008; Demberg & Keller 2008; Levy 2008, Gibson 1998; Grodner & Gibson 2005; Altmann & Kamide 1999; Kamide, Altmann, & Haywood 2003; Rayner, Warren, Juhasz, & Liversedge 2004; Rayner 1998

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SLIDE 5

Incremental comprehension

Behavioral indices of comprehension difculty (e.g. eye-tracking) sensitive to:

  • probabilistic expectation of a syntactic category

given the preceding sentence fragment

  • the number and position of syntactic constituents

in the sentence

  • expectation of semantic referents
  • semantic plausibility of words in their context
  • ...

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.17/48

Incremental comprehension

Coupling comprehension with production: Ford & Bresnan (2009) Word recognition during reading as a function of corpus model probabilities for the dative construction

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.18/48

Incremental comprehension

Corpus model classication accuracy, spoken English: constructions baseline accuracy study dative 79% 94% * genitive 59% 89% ** *Bresnan, Cueni, Niktina, Baayen 2007 **Shih, Grafmiller, Futrell, Bresnan 2009

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.19/48

Incremental comprehension

Speaker: I’m in college, and I’m only twenty-one but I had a speech class last semester, and there was a girl in my class who did a speech on home care of the elderly. And I was so surprised to hear how many people, you know, the older people, are like, fastened to their beds so they can’t get out just because, you know, they wander the halls. And they get the wrong medicine, just because, you know, the aides or whoever

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SLIDE 6

Incremental comprehension

Speaker: I’m in college, and I’m only twenty-one but I had a speech class last semester, and there was a girl in my class who did a speech on home care of the elderly. And I was so surprised to hear how many people, you know, the older people, are like, fastened to their beds so they can’t get out just because, you know, they wander the halls. And they get the wrong medicine, just because, you know, the aides or whoever just ____ ___ _____ ________ __ ____ ____ ______

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Incremental comprehension

Dependent variable = the decision latencies on the preposition to: give the wrong medicine to them Predictor = the conditional probabilities of a prepositional to dative given only the verb, theme, and previous contextual information (from the Bresnan et al 2007 dataset) note: recipient is irrelevant

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Incremental comprehension

Prediction: faster decision times for the word to in more probable structures

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.22/48

corpus conditional log odds mean log RT

6.0 6.2 6.4 !4 !2 2

  • z

!4 !2 2

us

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.23/48

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SLIDE 7

Incremental comprehension

Kuperman & Bresnan conducted a pilot study on the Dundee Corpus (Pynte & Kennedy 2006): the eye-movements of 10 experimental participants recorded during their reading of editorials of the British newspaper The Independent.

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.24/48

Incremental comprehension

  • We extracted all instances of verbdative NP from

Dundee.

  • We measured the probability of verbdative NPthm

and verbdative NPrec in two other corpora of British journalistic texts (Grimm and Bresnan 2009). Prediction: faster reading times for the verb if that verb is followed by a noun phrase with a more probable thematic role (parafoveal on foveal effects)

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Dynamics of Grammar

How is (probabilistic) grammar dynamic?

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.27/48

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SLIDE 8

Continuous change

Continuous historical change: Prepositional (to) dative:

  • increasing with verb give in spoken New Zealand

English since 1900’s (Bresnan and Hay 2008)

  • decreasing from 1960’s and 1990’s in U.S. and

U.K. (Grimm and Bresnan 2007)

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Continuous change

Saxon (’s) genitive:

  • increasing from 1960’s and 1990’s in U.S. and

U.K. (Hinrichs and Szmrecsányi 2007)

  • increasing in spoken Toronto English in younger

speakers (Tagliamonte and Jarmasz 2008)

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.29/48

Continuous change

Hawkins (2007) “Processing typology and why psychologists need to know about it,” New Ideas in Psychology 25: 87–107

...patterns and preferences found in performance in languages with several structures of a given type (e.g. preferences among alternative word orders) are the same patterns and preferences one nds across languages in the xed conventions of grammars that permit less variation (i.e. in xed word orders)

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Continuous change

‘Soft constraints mirror hard constraints’ Animacy alignment in spoken English dative constructions (Bresnan, Cueni, Nikitina, and Baayen 2007): after controlling for possible confounds, inanimate recipients are over five times more likely to occur in dative PPs than animates

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SLIDE 9

Continuous change

Hard constraints on the word order of animates/inanimates in the grammar of dative/applicative syntax:

  • Shona and Sesotho (Hawkinson and Hyman 1974,

Morolong and Hyman 1977)

  • Spoken Eastern Armenian (Polinsky 1996)
  • Mayali, Gunwinjguan (Evans 1997)

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.32/48

Continuous change

In spoken U.S. English genitive constructions: over 83% of the animate possessors take the prenominal s-genitive (Shih et al. 2009) In spoken Toronto English genitive constructions:

  • ver 90% of the human possessors take the

prenominal s-genitive (Tagliamonte and Jarmasz 2008)

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Continuous change

Hard constraints on the word order of animates/inanimates in the grammar of possessives:

  • Saweru, a Papuan language of New Guinea (M.

Donohue p.c., reported by Rosenbach 2005: 635–6)

  • German and Slavic (Koptjevskaya-Tamm 2002,

Rosenbach 2008)

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Dynamics of Grammar

How is (probabilistic) grammar dynamic?

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.35/48

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SLIDE 10

Continuity in development

de Marneffe, Grimm, Arnon, Kirby, & Bresnan. 2009. “A statistical model of the grammatical choices in child production of dative sentences” (submitted) extracted spontaneous productions of dative constructions by seven children and their caregivers (CHILDES)

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Continuity in development

Child-directed speech: predictors of dative syntax in descending order of importance— pronoun non-pronoun less complex more complex structural persistence discourse given not given

V NPrec NPthm V NPthm PPrec

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.37/48

Continuity in development

If patterns of syntactic alternation are learned from the input, significant factors in any model of child production should reflect a subset of the most informative predictors in the input.

—McElvain & Bresnan in progress

a pilot study ...

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.38/48

Continuity in development

Children’s speech: predictors of dative syntax in descending order of importance: pronoun non-pronoun less complex more complex structural persistence discourse given not given (n.s.)

V NPrec NPthm V NPthm PPrec

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SLIDE 11

Continuity in development

To attain the adult-to-adult patterns of spontaneous production, children must learn the effects of givenness, animacy, and the other information sources

  • n syntactic choices.

Children must eventually learn the adult-like patterns

  • f dative alternation from the statistical distributions

in the input.

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Implications for Grammar

No traditional or formal theory of grammar captures the probabilistic structures arising from the dynamic grammatical properties of incrementality, continuity, and the like.

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Implications for Grammar

The architecture of some theories of formal grammar is designed to allow incremental left-to-right processing without excessive derivational complexity.

  • dependency grammar
  • lexical-functional grammar
  • dynamic syntax (Cann, Kempson & Marten 2005)

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Implications for Grammar

LEXICAL-FUNCTIONAL GRAMMARS—a dual model encoding both constituent structure and dependency structure in parallel (Igor Mel’ cuk 1988) A hybrid of Wanner & Kaplan’s (1978) Augmented Transition Networks—used for computational psycholinguistic modeling of relative clause comprehension—and Bresnan’s (1978) “psychologically realistic” transformational grammars, which ofoaded a huge amount of grammatical encoding to the lexicon.

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.43/48

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SLIDE 12

Implications for Grammar

The declarative, non-procedural design of LFG made it easily embeddable in more realistic theories of the dynamics of sentence production (Ford 1982, 1983), comprehension (Ford, Bresnan, and Kaplan 1982), and language development (Pinker 1984). The same architecture has made it easily embeddable into a variety of computational optimization-based and exemplar-based models.

OT: Bresnan 2000, Kuhn 2003; stochastic OT: Bresnan, Deo & Sharma 2007, Bresnan & Nikitina 2009; data-oriented parsing: Bod & Kaplan 2003, Bod 2006

Dynamics of Grammar: Implications for Typology – p.44/48

Implications for Grammar

Statistical corpus models concisely represent the implicit knowledge of the language user— —a functional relation between an output (the probability of choosing a syntactic variant) and an input (the pooled linguistic experience of syntactic alternations encountered in spoken and written discourse) dened by weighing and combining the multiple information sources that are known or theorized to be inuential.

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Implications for Grammar

Every such model embeds a (usually tacit and informal) theory of linguistic knowledge representations: ‘phrase’, ‘stem’, ‘S/A/O’, ‘dependent clause’, ... These models extend traditional and formal grammars to a broader range of probabilistic evidence.

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Implications for Typology

  • Incrementality: Speakers instantaneously weigh

and combine multiple information sources when speaking, understanding, and learning language.

  • Variability: These multiple information sources

are dimensions of crosslinguistic variation.

  • Continuity: The linguistic behavior from which

grammar is inferred is at bottom based on probabilities and preferences, not categorical rules.

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SLIDE 13

Implications for Typology

“...we are the only species with a communication system which is fundamentally variable at all levels” “While there are signicant recurrent patterns in

  • rganization, these are better explained as stable

engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition.” —Evans and Levinson 2009

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