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Experimental evidence for minimal structure
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Lingua 119 (2009) 1373–1379 www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua
Editorial
Experimental evidence for minimal structure
Abstract This Special Issue presents a collection of papers dealing with approaches to minimality in diverse areas of language and on the basis of a variety of structures. Theories on minimal phrase-structure building, emergence of the unmarked, or underspecified lexical representations are investigated by means of experimental findings revealed in psycho- and neurolinguistic studies. The main objective is to investigate how principles of minimal structure are reflected in language comprehension and production. Thus, this Special Issue aims at establishing a link between theoretical claims and recent experimental findings. # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Minimal structure; Language processing
This Special Issue represents a collection of research papers exploring minimality in language through psycho- and neurolinguistic experimentation. Among the notions of minimality that can be found in the literature, two perspectives are of particular interest to the theme of this Special Issue. On the one hand, the language faculty is considered to be a knowledge system that adheres to conditions of minimality, and as a consequence an adequate description should include simple structures and as few operations as possible. The most recent instantiation of this is found in the Minimalist Program, a research program that seeks to formulate a unified theory of the language faculty that operates on the basis of a small number of interacting principles (cf. e.g. Chomsky, 1993, 1995). However, this knowledge about one’s native language (‘‘competence’’) reflects the knowledge system of an ideal speaker–hearer, yet it cannot be observed directly. On the other hand, language is used by a speaker–hearer (‘‘performance’’), and through its application, language becomes observable. Even though such language behavior occurs under ‘‘noisy’’ conditions and is thus prone to errors and interference from, for instance, memory limitations or inattentiveness of the speaker–hearer, it provides us with a window to investigate the principles that drive the language faculty. However by approaching language through performance, it is also necessary to have a concept of the language processing system (the parser) which operates under restricted temporal and cognitive resources. In this respect, performance is affected by a principle of ‘‘least effort’’ which ‘‘provides us with a research strategy for inferring how the parser is designed. [. . .] If successful, the least effort assumption constitutes the ultimate generalization over observed instances. Every choice the parser makes would have the same origin: the pressure to parse quickly. [. . .] These [strategies] simply dissolve into the general laziness tendency’’ (Fodor, 1998:292). Bringing these two notions of minimality together is not trivial, because they are autonomous, yet intertwined in significant ways. The independence of competence, as knowledge about language, and performance, as observed language behavior is evident through mismatches between what is known about a given language and how it is used. For example, sporadic slips of the tongue reflect performance errors, and multiple center-embedded structures may be well-formed from the point of view of competence, but at the same time elicit performance failures. Yet it is also apparent that competence and performance are closely tied together. We may turn to language performance in order to 0024-3841/$ – see front matter # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2008.06.004
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find out more about competence and to provide evidence for a particular characterization of linguistic competence. At the same time, competence is essential for successful performance. In this vein, the contributions to the Special Issue discuss performance data to shed light on the underlying knowledge representation and they seek to determine which kind of (minimal) information the parser needs for successful interpretation. The aim of this line of research is to identify the relevant operations and structures that are needed for an adequate characterization of the language faculty and to determine how they interact with each other. This implies that redundancy of form and function is avoided and simplicity is promoted for reasons of knowledge representation, but also due to processing limitations. Hence, minimality and economy arise not only from the theory-internal desire to limit the number of symbols and mechanisms, but also from the general assumption that resources are limited. Even though minimality is a notion that is most prominent within the domain of syntax (cf. e.g. Chomsky, 1993, 1998; Haider, 1992; Rizzi, 1990), striving for simple representations and small numbers of operations has played a role at other levels as well, albeit using different terminologies. The idea of minimality has for instance been framed with reference to underspecification, where no superfluous features are specified (cf. e.g. for phonology Kiparsky, 1982; Lahiri and Reetz, 2002; Steriade, 1995; for morphology Wunderlich and Fabri, 1995), or with reference to unmarkedness, indicating simplicity, but also naturalness or regularity of certain symbols and derivations (cf. Jakobson, 1932, 1939; McCarthy and Prince, 1994; but see Haspelmath, 2006 for a critique and an overview of different notions of markedness). From a processing perspective, it is implied that minimal structures consume fewer processing resources, are processed faster, or provide the default interpretation in case ambiguity arises. It is also evident that the various accounts of ‘‘minimal parsing’’ adopt different models of linguistic representation. Some accounts pursue parsing strategies based on phrase-structural descriptions of minimality, where minimality correlates with the smallest amount of structure, as for instance formulated in Minimal Attachment (Frazier, 1978, 1987) or Simplicity (Gorrell, 1995). Other accounts focus on the distance between elements that enter into a dependency with each other and argue that memory resources represent the decisive factor in language processing (Gibson, 1998) or that the combination of linguistic units is the guiding factor, where less structural complexity correlates with efficiency (Hawkins, 2004). In the following, we present diverse notions of minimality in different linguistic domains, by discussing the findings of the contributions to this Special Issue, which have been selected from a workshop on minimality in psycho- and neurolinguistic research held at the 29th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) in Siegen, Germany in 2007. The contributions derive from different fields of experimental linguistics and are based on varying linguistic frameworks on minimality. They illustrate that distinct experimental techniques may inform different research objectives and show that using psycho- and neurolinguistic measures in language research is a fruitful endeavor to further our understanding of the language faculty. Processing evidence for minimality is provided from self-paced reading tasks (Ha¨ussler and Bader), grammaticality judgements (Bader and Schmid, Garraffa, Katsika), priming tasks (Scharinger), event-related brain potentials (Bornkessel–Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, Knaus and Domahs, Roehm and Haider), ultra-sound imaging (Buchwald), corpus studies (de Lange, Vasic´ and Avrutin, Ha¨ussler and Bader), aphasiology (Buchwald, Garraffa, Grillo), and language acquisition (de Lange, Vasic´ and Avrutin). The individual results of each study and their commonalities with respect to minimality will be introduced according to the linguistic field they are dedicated to. Thus, minimality will be discussed in the linguistic areas phonology, syntax, semantics, and discourse/information structure, as well as at the interfaces. In phonological representation, one traditional concept of minimality is expressed by the notion of unmarkedness (e.g. Jakobson, 1932, 1939), indicating that some language units are for instance more natural, less complex, or less specific. These properties are seen to account for the observation that unmarked structures are easier to articulate, occur earlier in language acquisition, and are less error prone in language deficits (Jakobson, 1941). In more recent theoretical accounts like Optimality Theory (e.g. Prince and Smolensky, 2004), the markedness or unmarkedness of linguistic units is captured by means of constraint rankings, where in the evaluation of the optimal output different dimensions of unmarkedness are in conflict. ‘‘Optimality Theory [. . .] offers an approach to linguistic theory that aims to combine an empirically adequate theory of markedness with a precise formal sense of what it means to be ‘unmarked’’’ (McCarthy and Prince, 1994:333). Accordingly, the conflict between and ranking of certain unmarkedness requirements yields least marked output forms (cf. McCarthy and Prince, 1994; Prince and Smolensky, 2004). Contributions focusing on minimality by postulating the emergence of unmarked phonological structures are presented by Buchwald and Knaus and Domahs both discussing their data in terms of Optimality Theory. Buchwald (‘‘Minimizing and optimizing structure in phonology: Evidence from aphasia’’) investigated data obtained from an
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aphasic patient, who avoided consonant clusters by either inserting a reduced syllable (e.g. clone ! [k3lon]) or by omitting a segment (e.g. cute ! [kut]). One of the most crucial questions addressed is whether both strategies are governed by the attempt to minimize structural complexity. It is shown that different phonological representations lead to different processes in language impairment, however both strategies can be best described in terms of promotion of markedness constraints leading to less marked optimal output forms compared to the target forms. Knaus and Domahs (‘‘Experimental evidence for optimal and minimal metrical structures in German word prosody’’) suggest an OT-analysis explaining data obtained from ERP-studies on prosodic structure. The analysis aims at finding optimal prosodic structures of German trisyllabic words with varying syllable structures that fulfil both minimality and exhaustivity requirements in prosodic structure building. Along a set of prosodic well-formedness constraints, it is demonstrated what kind of structures can be considered least marked. This is supported by experimental findings that reveal that over-applications of unmarked structures are tolerated in speech perception. Another conception of minimality that is strongly related to unmarkedness is the notion of underspecification (e.g. Kiparsky, 1982; Steriade, 1995). Similar to the notion of (un)markedness, this concept was first formulated for the featural description of sound units but adopted to other linguistic domains as well. According to this type of economy principle, it is assumed that linguistic representations consist of a minimal set of specifications leaving aside specifications of redundant features that in the derivation of surface forms are inserted by means of redundancy rules (e.g. Steriade, 1995). In accounts of underspecified representations of phonemes, only unpredictable features are underlyingly represented. One framework utilizing underspecification, which is addressed in the Special Issue, is the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL) of Lahiri and Reetz (2002). In FUL underspecification of certain phonological features like the place feature CORONAL leads to the acceptability of variation in speech production and perception. In particular, it is suggested that the feature CORONAL is inserted via redundancy rules in all representations that lack the features LABIAL and DORSAL. Scharinger’s contribution (‘‘Minimal representations of alternating vowels’’) deals with the featural representation of umlauting stem vowels in German words. The author argues against full specification of segments that surface with different place features in specific morphological contexts (e.g. StockSg. [Rt k] – Sto¨ckePl. [Rtœk3] ‘stick – sticks’). He suggests an account of how alternating and nonalternating stem vowels can be captured within the framework of FUL to avoid redundant lexical information, where the feature DORSAL is derived in certain contexts, while the feature CORONAL is inserted by default. Results from psycholinguistic experimentation provide evidence for underspecified lexical entries in certain contexts showing that in speech perception a more specific phoneme is tolerated in the context of an underspecified lexical entry. A variety of issues relating to the level of syntactic representation are addressed in the present Special Issue. Generally, under the assumption that the language faculty complies with economy considerations, no superfluous steps are postulated in derivations and only essential structural units are introduced in representations. As a consequence, derivations with shorter links are preferred and movement operations must target the closest available landing site (Chomsky, 1993, 1998). Similarly, locality conditions are a central notion in the account of Relativized Minimality (Rizzi, 1990), such that core structural relations must be satisfied in the smallest, most minimal configuration possible. This approach is investigated by both Grillo and Garraffa in connection with intervention effects associated with morpho-syntactic feature sets. In these two contributions, local relations (as opposed to non-local relations) are considered to form minimal structures. Grillo (‘‘Generalized Minimality: Feature impoverishment and comprehension deficits in agrammatism’’) presents the framework of Generalized Minimality to account for a wide variety of comprehension deficits observed in patients with agrammatic Broca’s aphasia, a language impairment that is generally described as syntactic in nature. His analysis comprises different kinds of wh-, NP- and verbmovements. Within this framework, the comprehension problems of patients with Broca’s aphasia are hypothesized to arise from the interaction of underspecified morpho-syntactic feature representations and locality constraints. More specifically, the morpho-syntactic impoverishment targets features at the left periphery (i.e. higher nodes in the phrasestructural representation, such as quantificational or topic feature clusters) and the (proper) application of locality constraints – defined over sets of features – then results in the blocking of chain formation due to an intervening feature set and hence in aberrant interpretation in agrammatic patients with Broca’s aphasia. Garraffa (‘‘Minimal structures in aphasia: a study on agreement and movement in a non-fluent aphasic speaker’’) investigated subject–verb agreement relations in different phrase-structural configurations, i.e. with or without movement. She presents grammaticality judgements from a speaker of Italian who also exhibits agrammatic Broca’s aphasia. The speaker shows good error detection of subject–verb agreement mismatches in structures with preverbal subjects, but aberrant judgements for structures with postverbal subjects, which is further modulated by distinct number attraction
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configurations. The data suggest that the language deficit is selective and targets non-local configurations. Overall, structures with intervening elements (in particular, prepositional modifiers) are more susceptible to agreement mismatches, supporting the view that minimality is characterized as a locality effect on syntactic configurations. Another proposal with respect to syntactic minimality is that right-branching structures are preferred during incremental phrase-structure building (Haider, 1992; Phillips, 2003). This aspect of minimality is addressed in the contribution by Bader and Schmid (‘‘Minimality in verb-cluster formation’’) who examined complex verb clusters in German intraposed infinitival constructions (e.g. Es ist gut, dass der Roman zu lesen versucht wurde. ‘it is good that the novel to read tried was’ = ‘It is good that somebody tried to read the novel.’). The self-paced reading data suggest that verb cluster formation is preferred over embedding of successive verbs. The authors take this as evidence that clusters represent minimal structures and further satisfy the right-branching constraint. These minimality conditions are, however, in competition with argument-structural operations, since verb clustering involves argument structure unification, which results in a general increase in processing complexity. An eminent test case for the investigation of syntactic minimality is ambiguity resolution. Ambiguity figures most prominently in the research on minimality and processing, because it provides a window into (incremental) parsing decisions and sheds light on what kinds of structures may be considered minimal. This trend is reflected in the contributions to this Special Issue by Katsika, Roehm and Haider, but also by Ha¨ussler and Bader and Bornkessel– Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky which are discussed further below. In the general research on ambiguity resolution, an overarching assumption is that language processing follows Occam’s razor, i.e. when more than one possible interpretation is available, preference is given to the interpretation that requires the fewest assumptions. This is for instance directly expressed in the Principle of Parsimony (Crain and Steedman, 1985), which states that an interpretation that carries fewer unsupported implicatures will be favoured over one that carries more. In cases where structural ambiguity arises, minimality correlates with the smallest amount of structure, as for instance formulated in Minimal Attachment (Frazier, 1978, 1987). Following this tradition, Katsika (‘‘Exploring the minimal structure in prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities: Evidence from Greek’’) performed two acceptability judgement studies (offline and online) on Greek prepositional phrase attachment in ambiguous V-NP-PP constructions. Overall, Katsika found a general preference for high attachment of the PPs to VP-nodes, which is in principle consistent with the Minimal Attachment account. However, there is also evidence that depending on the definiteness features of the NPs in the PPs and the lexical choice of the preposition, low attachment can be observed. In this respect, Katsika discusses factors in parsing preferences that have not been reported so far and suggests that minimality requirements from different information sources ultimately determine the optimal attachment site. Another investigation of structural ambiguity is presented by Roehm and Haider (‘‘Small is beautiful: the processing of the left periphery in German’’). Utilizing electrophysiological measures, particle verbs and prefix verbs in German V2-sentences were contrasted with respect to the interpretation of each type of verb form as either an infinitive verb of a fronted VP or as a finite verb of a matrix sentence (e.g. Den Katalog abbestellen {*sie/ko¨nnten sie} bestimmt. ‘The catalogueObj. unsubscribe {theySubj./could they}Subj. surely.’ vs. Den Antrag bearbeiten {sie/sollten sie} dennoch. ‘The applicationObj. handle {they Subj./should they Subj}. anyhow.’). The latter type represents the simpler structure and was hence expected to be preferred over the former one on the basis of a purely structural analysis, although such a structure would yield an ungrammatical sentence in the case of particle verbs due to their morphosyntactic specification. Accordingly, this contribution investigated how minimality requirements of structure building interact with morpho-syntactic information and well-formedness, and Roehm and Haider found that the parser incrementally builds up minimal phrase-structure, which at the same time is cross-checked with locally available information about finiteness morphology. It should be further noted that in addition to structure-based motivations for efficient parsing, theories have evolved that attempt to correlate syntactic parsing advantages with the frequency of occurrence of a particular structure. These frequency-based accounts claim that the more often a particular structure occurs in language production, the easier it is processed during language comprehension (MacDonald, 1999; Mitchell et al., 1995; Seidenberg and MacDonald, 1999; Vosse and Kempen, 2000). However up until now, researchers have been arguing over whether structure or frequency represent the driving force that guides processing decisions. In the present issue, Ha¨ussler and Bader argue against a purely frequency-based explanation (but suggest that lexical frequency may partially influence parsing decisions), but see also Roehm and Haider. That the frequency of certain forms in a paradigm may explain the availability of structural reductions in certain registers and child speech is discussed by De Lange, Vasic´ and Avrutin (‘‘Reading between the (head)lines: A processing account of article omissions in newspaper headlines and child
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speech’’) who investigate the regularities underlying article omission. They present converging findings from a corpus analysis of newspaper headlines in Dutch and Italian as well as production data from first language acquisition in these two languages and provide an information theoretical account of the omission patterns (cf. e.g. Moscoso del Prado Martin et al., 2004). They suggest that the higher degree of article omission observed in Dutch is closely tied to the higher relative entropy (i.e. information load) associated with the Dutch article paradigm. Hence, the availability of structure reduction, as exemplified by article omission, and its cross-linguistic variation is explained as a reflection of efficient parsing at the interface. The idea of minimality is most drastically reduced to a Minimal Everything principle by Inoue and Fodor (1995). This view has recently been adopted in the extended Argument Dependency Model (eADM; Bornkessel and Schlesewsky, 2006) where minimality is considered to affect structure building and argument linking alike. In their contribution to this Special Issue, Bornkessel–Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky (‘‘Minimality as vacuous distinctness: Evidence from cross-linguistic sentence comprehension’’) move one step further and suggest that minimality is an instance of an even more general constraint (‘‘Distinctness’’) that requires constituents to be maximally distinct from each other. Reviewing a series of cross-linguistic studies using event-related brain potential measurements, the authors investigate differences in the interpretation of arguments in ambiguous and non-ambiguous object-initial constructions. Overall, their findings substantiate the claim that the processing system prefers a minimal interpretation, i.e. a phrase-structure is built up by the expectation of a minimal number of arguments. Accordingly, an intransitive event yields the most minimal (and most distinct) interpretation, and the experimental data demonstrate that syntactic structures consisting of a subject and a predicate allowing for an intransitive interpretation are preferred over more complex ones. In contrast, in structures where distinctness cannot be preserved locally, a less minimal structure may be licensed (e.g. two arguments that are not distinct from one another – on the basis of prominence features such as thematic role, case, animacy – are linked with two separate events). However, transitivity not only affects structure building, but may also be viewed with respect to complexity at the level of discourse representation, which is amplified as new discourse referents are introduced. In addition, form and function of a referential expression interact, which gave rise to the formulation of hierarchies of accessibility that also operate on the least effort assumption (cf. e.g. Ariel, 1990; Grosz et al., 1985), and discourse-pragmatic principles such as the role of focus and topic information or the given-new distinction are guided by general economy considerations as well (cf. e.g. Burkhardt, 2006; Crain and Steedman, 1985; Grice, 1989). In the present volume, discourse complexity is addressed by Ha¨ussler and Bader (‘‘The assembly and disassembly of determiner phrases: Minimality is needed, but not sufficient’’) who investigated the construction of DPs utilizing a self-paced reading task. They capitalized on the fact that the German definite article may also function as a demonstrative pronoun and contrasted sequences consisting of a determiner (DET) and a bare plural noun (N), which hence are ambiguous between a singleDP reading ([DET N]) and a two-DP reading ([DET][N]). From the perspective of syntactic minimality, their data demonstrate that a single-DP reading is preferred, i.e. intransitive structures are formed more readily and are thus considered to be the most minimal representations during incremental processing. This finding could also be interpreted with respect to the discourse-semantic (or information structural) representation, such that the construction of fewer discourse referents is favoured. In addition, the authors tested the influence of implicit prosodic information on DP-formation via a focus particle (vor allem (‘above all’)) and via an intrinsically focused demonstrative determiner (diejenigen (‘those’)) and showed that reanalysis towards a two-DP interpretation was facilitated in those cases where it was supported by prosodic information. This finding provides evidence for an interaction of minimality requirements from distinct linguistic domains. Considering the interplay of information from different linguistic domains, it has been suggested that a minimal amount of (syntactic) structure should be implicated for operations at the interfaces (Culicover and Jackendoff, 2005). Moreover, it has been proposed that cross-modular operations are less economical, yielding an advantage for fewer cross-modular operations (Reuland, 2001). Many of the contributions to the Special Issue that have been presented above address minimality at the interfaces and the interaction between knowledge from different linguistic domains. For instance, Bader and Schmid argue that verb cluster formation and the right-branching constraint are in competition with minimal argument-structural requirements, because verb clustering takes place at the expense of argument structure unification. This suggests that syntactic minimality takes precedence over semantic minimality when complex infinitival constructions are computed. Bornkessel–Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky drastically limit the interpretive power of syntax and instead appeal to principles of argument linking and prominence. The interaction of structural and morphosyntactic constraints is furthermore addressed by Roehm and Haider through the window of
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verb-initial sentences, as well as by Grillo and Garraffa who showed that locality configurations are affected by intervening morpho-syntactic information. In addition, a number of papers report that syntactic operations are influenced by prominence relations, such as animacy and definiteness features of a DP (Bader and Schmid, Bornkessel–Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, Katsika). Overall, the contributions to the present Special Issue address novel aspects of language processing investigating phenomena and languages that have to a large extent – if at all – only rarely been considered in psycho- and neurolinguistic research. Following from these contributions, the Special Issue on ‘‘Experimental evidence for minimal structure’’ identifies distinct forms of minimal structures and operations in the research programs of the contributors. A converging result is that all data discussed generally support the view that simpler operations and representations are preferred to more complex ones, which may even license structure reduction (Buchwald; De Lange, Vasic´, and Avrutin), variation in speech perception (Knaus and Domahs; Scharinger), or the acceptability of ungrammatical structure (Roehm and Haider). In this respect, the language faculty adheres to a general notion of laziness – or efficiency for that matter – across linguistic domains. Furthermore, a crucial observation refers to conflicts arising from the need to satisfy competing minimality requirements. In sentence processing, minimality generally leads to conflicts between syntactic and compositional simplicity (e.g. Bader and Schmid). With respect to language processing on the word level, we observe similar conflicting forces in the course of the mapping from form to meaning (e.g. the ambiguity of surface forms due to the underspecification of certain features, see Scharinger). The data indicate that these competing forces may even allow for certain forms of optionality in the language system. The aim of this ongoing research should therefore be to find out how the representation of structure and the specificity of forms are minimized, while at the same time their distinctiveness is maintained. Whether minimality can ultimately be reduced to an independent principle (as e.g. foreshadowed in Bornkessel–Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky) remains subject to future research. Acknowledgements As guest editors, we would like to thank the contributors to this Special Issue for their efforts as well as the participants of the workshop ‘‘Experimental evidence for minimal structure’’ at the 29th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society for stimulating discussions. We are especially grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their assistance and invigorating comments on the individual contributions, as well as to the editors of Lingua, Johan Rooryck, Neil Smith and Diane Blakemore, for their support for the Special Issue and their suggestions for this editorial. References Ariel, M., 1990. Accessing Noun Phrase Anaphors. Routledge, London/New York. Bornkessel, I.D., Schlesewsky, M., 2006. The extended Argument Dependency Model: a neurocognitive approach to sentence comprehension across languages. Psychological Review 113 (4), 787–821. Burkhardt, P., 2006. Inferential bridging relations reveal distinct neural mechanisms: evidence from event-related brain potentials. Brain and Language 98 (2), 159–168. Chomsky, N., 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In: Hale, K., Keyser, S.J. (Eds.), The View from Building, vol. 20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 1–52. Chomsky, N., 1995. The Minimalist Program. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Chomsky, N., 1998. Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework, MIT Working papers in linguistics, vol. 15, Cambridge, MA. Crain, S., Steedman, M., 1985. On not being led up the garden path: the use of context by the psychological syntax processor. In: Dowty, D.R., Karttunen, L., Zwicky, A. (Eds.), Natural Language Parsing: Psychological, Computational and Theoretical Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 320–358. Culicover, P.W., Jackendoff, R., 2005. Simpler Syntax. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Fodor, J.D., 1998. Learning to parse. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 27 (2), 285–319. Frazier, L., 1978. On comprehending sentences: syntactic parsing strategies. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Frazier, L., 1987. Theories of sentence processing. In: Garfield, J.L. (Ed.), Modularity in Knowledge Representation and Natural-Language Understanding. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 291–307. Gibson, E., 1998. Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68 (1), 1–76. Gorrell, P., 1995. Syntax and Parsing. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Grice, P., 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Grosz, B.J., Joshi, A.K., Weinstein, S., 1985. Centering: a framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics 21 (2), 203–225.
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Haider, H., 1992. Branching and discharge. Arbeitspapiere des SFB 340, 23, University of Stuttgart. Haspelmath, M., 2006. Against markedness. Journal of Linguistics 42, 25–70. Hawkins, J.A., 2004. Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Inoue, A., Fodor, J.D., 1995. Information-paced parsing of Japanese. In: Mazuka, R., Nagai, N. (Eds.), Japanese Sentence Processing. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 9–63. Jakobson, R., 1932/1971. Zur Struktur des russischen Verbums. In: Charisteria Gvilelmo Mathesio qvinqvagenario a discipvlis et Circvli Lingvistici Pragensis sodalibvs oblata, Prague, pp. 74–84. Jakobson, R., 1939/1971. Signe zero. In Me´lange de linguistique offerts a` Charles Bally, Gene`ve. Jakobson, R., 1941–1968. Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals. Mouton, The Hague. Kiparsky, P., 1982. Lexical phonology and morphology. In: Yang, I.S. (Ed.), Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Hanshin, Seoul, pp. 3–91. Lahiri, A., Reetz, H., 2002. Underspecified recognition. In: Gussenhoven, C., Warner, N. (Eds.), Laboratory Phonology VII. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 637–677. MacDonald, M.C., 1999. Distributional information in language comprehension, production, and acquisition: three puzzles and a moral. In: MacWhinney, B. (Ed.), The Emergence of Language. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 177–196. McCarthy, J.J., Prince, A.S., 1994. The emergence of the unmarked: optimality in prosodic morphology. In: Gonza´lez, Merce´ (Ed.), Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society, vol. 24. Graduate Linguistic Student Association, Amherst, pp. 333–379. Mitchell, D.C., Cuetos, F., Corley, M.M.B., Brysbaert, M., 1995. Exposure-based models of human parsing: evidence for the use of coarse-grained (nonlexical) statistical records. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 24 (6), 469–488. Moscoso del Prado Martin, F., Kostic¸, A., Baayen, R.H., 2004. Putting the bits together: an information theoretical perspective on morphological processing. Cognition 94 (1), 1–18. Phillips, C., 2003. Linear order and constituency. Linguistic Inquiry 34, 37–90. Prince, A., Smolensky, P., 2004. Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Blackwell, Malden, MA, Oxford, UK. Reuland, E., 2001. Primitives of binding. Linguistic Inquiry 32, 439–492. Rizzi, L., 1990. Relativized Minimality. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Seidenberg, M.S., MacDonald, M.C., 1999. A probabilistic constraints approach to language acquisition and processing. Cognitive Science 23 (4), 569–588. Steriade, D., 1995. Underspecification and markedness. In: Goldsmith, J. (Ed.), The Handbook of Phonological Theory. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 114–174. Vosse, T., Kempen, G., 2000. Syntactic structure assembly in human parsing: a computational model based on competitive inhibition and a lexicalist grammar. Cognition 75, 105–143. Wunderlich, D., Fabri, R., 1995. Minimalist morphology: an approach to inflection. Zeitschrift fu¨r Sprachwissenschaft 14, 236–294.
Petra Burkhardt* Ulrike Domahs1 Institute of Germanic Linguistics, University of Marburg, Wilhelm-Roepke-Strasse 6a, 35032 Marburg, Germany *Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 6421 2824645; fax: +49 6421 2824558 E-mail addresses: [email protected] (P. Burkhardt) [email protected] (U. Domahs) 1
Tel.: +49 6421 2824536.
17 June 2008 18 June 2008 Available online 7 September 2008
Lingua 119 (2009) 1373–1379 www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua
Editorial
Experimental evidence for minimal structure
Abstract This Special Issue presents a collection of papers dealing with approaches to minimality in diverse areas of language and on the basis of a variety of structures. Theories on minimal phrase-structure building, emergence of the unmarked, or underspecified lexical representations are investigated by means of experimental findings revealed in psycho- and neurolinguistic studies. The main objective is to investigate how principles of minimal structure are reflected in language comprehension and production. Thus, this Special Issue aims at establishing a link between theoretical claims and recent experimental findings. # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Minimal structure; Language processing
This Special Issue represents a collection of research papers exploring minimality in language through psycho- and neurolinguistic experimentation. Among the notions of minimality that can be found in the literature, two perspectives are of particular interest to the theme of this Special Issue. On the one hand, the language faculty is considered to be a knowledge system that adheres to conditions of minimality, and as a consequence an adequate description should include simple structures and as few operations as possible. The most recent instantiation of this is found in the Minimalist Program, a research program that seeks to formulate a unified theory of the language faculty that operates on the basis of a small number of interacting principles (cf. e.g. Chomsky, 1993, 1995). However, this knowledge about one’s native language (‘‘competence’’) reflects the knowledge system of an ideal speaker–hearer, yet it cannot be observed directly. On the other hand, language is used by a speaker–hearer (‘‘performance’’), and through its application, language becomes observable. Even though such language behavior occurs under ‘‘noisy’’ conditions and is thus prone to errors and interference from, for instance, memory limitations or inattentiveness of the speaker–hearer, it provides us with a window to investigate the principles that drive the language faculty. However by approaching language through performance, it is also necessary to have a concept of the language processing system (the parser) which operates under restricted temporal and cognitive resources. In this respect, performance is affected by a principle of ‘‘least effort’’ which ‘‘provides us with a research strategy for inferring how the parser is designed. [. . .] If successful, the least effort assumption constitutes the ultimate generalization over observed instances. Every choice the parser makes would have the same origin: the pressure to parse quickly. [. . .] These [strategies] simply dissolve into the general laziness tendency’’ (Fodor, 1998:292). Bringing these two notions of minimality together is not trivial, because they are autonomous, yet intertwined in significant ways. The independence of competence, as knowledge about language, and performance, as observed language behavior is evident through mismatches between what is known about a given language and how it is used. For example, sporadic slips of the tongue reflect performance errors, and multiple center-embedded structures may be well-formed from the point of view of competence, but at the same time elicit performance failures. Yet it is also apparent that competence and performance are closely tied together. We may turn to language performance in order to 0024-3841/$ – see front matter # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2008.06.004
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find out more about competence and to provide evidence for a particular characterization of linguistic competence. At the same time, competence is essential for successful performance. In this vein, the contributions to the Special Issue discuss performance data to shed light on the underlying knowledge representation and they seek to determine which kind of (minimal) information the parser needs for successful interpretation. The aim of this line of research is to identify the relevant operations and structures that are needed for an adequate characterization of the language faculty and to determine how they interact with each other. This implies that redundancy of form and function is avoided and simplicity is promoted for reasons of knowledge representation, but also due to processing limitations. Hence, minimality and economy arise not only from the theory-internal desire to limit the number of symbols and mechanisms, but also from the general assumption that resources are limited. Even though minimality is a notion that is most prominent within the domain of syntax (cf. e.g. Chomsky, 1993, 1998; Haider, 1992; Rizzi, 1990), striving for simple representations and small numbers of operations has played a role at other levels as well, albeit using different terminologies. The idea of minimality has for instance been framed with reference to underspecification, where no superfluous features are specified (cf. e.g. for phonology Kiparsky, 1982; Lahiri and Reetz, 2002; Steriade, 1995; for morphology Wunderlich and Fabri, 1995), or with reference to unmarkedness, indicating simplicity, but also naturalness or regularity of certain symbols and derivations (cf. Jakobson, 1932, 1939; McCarthy and Prince, 1994; but see Haspelmath, 2006 for a critique and an overview of different notions of markedness). From a processing perspective, it is implied that minimal structures consume fewer processing resources, are processed faster, or provide the default interpretation in case ambiguity arises. It is also evident that the various accounts of ‘‘minimal parsing’’ adopt different models of linguistic representation. Some accounts pursue parsing strategies based on phrase-structural descriptions of minimality, where minimality correlates with the smallest amount of structure, as for instance formulated in Minimal Attachment (Frazier, 1978, 1987) or Simplicity (Gorrell, 1995). Other accounts focus on the distance between elements that enter into a dependency with each other and argue that memory resources represent the decisive factor in language processing (Gibson, 1998) or that the combination of linguistic units is the guiding factor, where less structural complexity correlates with efficiency (Hawkins, 2004). In the following, we present diverse notions of minimality in different linguistic domains, by discussing the findings of the contributions to this Special Issue, which have been selected from a workshop on minimality in psycho- and neurolinguistic research held at the 29th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) in Siegen, Germany in 2007. The contributions derive from different fields of experimental linguistics and are based on varying linguistic frameworks on minimality. They illustrate that distinct experimental techniques may inform different research objectives and show that using psycho- and neurolinguistic measures in language research is a fruitful endeavor to further our understanding of the language faculty. Processing evidence for minimality is provided from self-paced reading tasks (Ha¨ussler and Bader), grammaticality judgements (Bader and Schmid, Garraffa, Katsika), priming tasks (Scharinger), event-related brain potentials (Bornkessel–Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, Knaus and Domahs, Roehm and Haider), ultra-sound imaging (Buchwald), corpus studies (de Lange, Vasic´ and Avrutin, Ha¨ussler and Bader), aphasiology (Buchwald, Garraffa, Grillo), and language acquisition (de Lange, Vasic´ and Avrutin). The individual results of each study and their commonalities with respect to minimality will be introduced according to the linguistic field they are dedicated to. Thus, minimality will be discussed in the linguistic areas phonology, syntax, semantics, and discourse/information structure, as well as at the interfaces. In phonological representation, one traditional concept of minimality is expressed by the notion of unmarkedness (e.g. Jakobson, 1932, 1939), indicating that some language units are for instance more natural, less complex, or less specific. These properties are seen to account for the observation that unmarked structures are easier to articulate, occur earlier in language acquisition, and are less error prone in language deficits (Jakobson, 1941). In more recent theoretical accounts like Optimality Theory (e.g. Prince and Smolensky, 2004), the markedness or unmarkedness of linguistic units is captured by means of constraint rankings, where in the evaluation of the optimal output different dimensions of unmarkedness are in conflict. ‘‘Optimality Theory [. . .] offers an approach to linguistic theory that aims to combine an empirically adequate theory of markedness with a precise formal sense of what it means to be ‘unmarked’’’ (McCarthy and Prince, 1994:333). Accordingly, the conflict between and ranking of certain unmarkedness requirements yields least marked output forms (cf. McCarthy and Prince, 1994; Prince and Smolensky, 2004). Contributions focusing on minimality by postulating the emergence of unmarked phonological structures are presented by Buchwald and Knaus and Domahs both discussing their data in terms of Optimality Theory. Buchwald (‘‘Minimizing and optimizing structure in phonology: Evidence from aphasia’’) investigated data obtained from an
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aphasic patient, who avoided consonant clusters by either inserting a reduced syllable (e.g. clone ! [k3lon]) or by omitting a segment (e.g. cute ! [kut]). One of the most crucial questions addressed is whether both strategies are governed by the attempt to minimize structural complexity. It is shown that different phonological representations lead to different processes in language impairment, however both strategies can be best described in terms of promotion of markedness constraints leading to less marked optimal output forms compared to the target forms. Knaus and Domahs (‘‘Experimental evidence for optimal and minimal metrical structures in German word prosody’’) suggest an OT-analysis explaining data obtained from ERP-studies on prosodic structure. The analysis aims at finding optimal prosodic structures of German trisyllabic words with varying syllable structures that fulfil both minimality and exhaustivity requirements in prosodic structure building. Along a set of prosodic well-formedness constraints, it is demonstrated what kind of structures can be considered least marked. This is supported by experimental findings that reveal that over-applications of unmarked structures are tolerated in speech perception. Another conception of minimality that is strongly related to unmarkedness is the notion of underspecification (e.g. Kiparsky, 1982; Steriade, 1995). Similar to the notion of (un)markedness, this concept was first formulated for the featural description of sound units but adopted to other linguistic domains as well. According to this type of economy principle, it is assumed that linguistic representations consist of a minimal set of specifications leaving aside specifications of redundant features that in the derivation of surface forms are inserted by means of redundancy rules (e.g. Steriade, 1995). In accounts of underspecified representations of phonemes, only unpredictable features are underlyingly represented. One framework utilizing underspecification, which is addressed in the Special Issue, is the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL) of Lahiri and Reetz (2002). In FUL underspecification of certain phonological features like the place feature CORONAL leads to the acceptability of variation in speech production and perception. In particular, it is suggested that the feature CORONAL is inserted via redundancy rules in all representations that lack the features LABIAL and DORSAL. Scharinger’s contribution (‘‘Minimal representations of alternating vowels’’) deals with the featural representation of umlauting stem vowels in German words. The author argues against full specification of segments that surface with different place features in specific morphological contexts (e.g. StockSg. [Rt k] – Sto¨ckePl. [Rtœk3] ‘stick – sticks’). He suggests an account of how alternating and nonalternating stem vowels can be captured within the framework of FUL to avoid redundant lexical information, where the feature DORSAL is derived in certain contexts, while the feature CORONAL is inserted by default. Results from psycholinguistic experimentation provide evidence for underspecified lexical entries in certain contexts showing that in speech perception a more specific phoneme is tolerated in the context of an underspecified lexical entry. A variety of issues relating to the level of syntactic representation are addressed in the present Special Issue. Generally, under the assumption that the language faculty complies with economy considerations, no superfluous steps are postulated in derivations and only essential structural units are introduced in representations. As a consequence, derivations with shorter links are preferred and movement operations must target the closest available landing site (Chomsky, 1993, 1998). Similarly, locality conditions are a central notion in the account of Relativized Minimality (Rizzi, 1990), such that core structural relations must be satisfied in the smallest, most minimal configuration possible. This approach is investigated by both Grillo and Garraffa in connection with intervention effects associated with morpho-syntactic feature sets. In these two contributions, local relations (as opposed to non-local relations) are considered to form minimal structures. Grillo (‘‘Generalized Minimality: Feature impoverishment and comprehension deficits in agrammatism’’) presents the framework of Generalized Minimality to account for a wide variety of comprehension deficits observed in patients with agrammatic Broca’s aphasia, a language impairment that is generally described as syntactic in nature. His analysis comprises different kinds of wh-, NP- and verbmovements. Within this framework, the comprehension problems of patients with Broca’s aphasia are hypothesized to arise from the interaction of underspecified morpho-syntactic feature representations and locality constraints. More specifically, the morpho-syntactic impoverishment targets features at the left periphery (i.e. higher nodes in the phrasestructural representation, such as quantificational or topic feature clusters) and the (proper) application of locality constraints – defined over sets of features – then results in the blocking of chain formation due to an intervening feature set and hence in aberrant interpretation in agrammatic patients with Broca’s aphasia. Garraffa (‘‘Minimal structures in aphasia: a study on agreement and movement in a non-fluent aphasic speaker’’) investigated subject–verb agreement relations in different phrase-structural configurations, i.e. with or without movement. She presents grammaticality judgements from a speaker of Italian who also exhibits agrammatic Broca’s aphasia. The speaker shows good error detection of subject–verb agreement mismatches in structures with preverbal subjects, but aberrant judgements for structures with postverbal subjects, which is further modulated by distinct number attraction
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configurations. The data suggest that the language deficit is selective and targets non-local configurations. Overall, structures with intervening elements (in particular, prepositional modifiers) are more susceptible to agreement mismatches, supporting the view that minimality is characterized as a locality effect on syntactic configurations. Another proposal with respect to syntactic minimality is that right-branching structures are preferred during incremental phrase-structure building (Haider, 1992; Phillips, 2003). This aspect of minimality is addressed in the contribution by Bader and Schmid (‘‘Minimality in verb-cluster formation’’) who examined complex verb clusters in German intraposed infinitival constructions (e.g. Es ist gut, dass der Roman zu lesen versucht wurde. ‘it is good that the novel to read tried was’ = ‘It is good that somebody tried to read the novel.’). The self-paced reading data suggest that verb cluster formation is preferred over embedding of successive verbs. The authors take this as evidence that clusters represent minimal structures and further satisfy the right-branching constraint. These minimality conditions are, however, in competition with argument-structural operations, since verb clustering involves argument structure unification, which results in a general increase in processing complexity. An eminent test case for the investigation of syntactic minimality is ambiguity resolution. Ambiguity figures most prominently in the research on minimality and processing, because it provides a window into (incremental) parsing decisions and sheds light on what kinds of structures may be considered minimal. This trend is reflected in the contributions to this Special Issue by Katsika, Roehm and Haider, but also by Ha¨ussler and Bader and Bornkessel– Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky which are discussed further below. In the general research on ambiguity resolution, an overarching assumption is that language processing follows Occam’s razor, i.e. when more than one possible interpretation is available, preference is given to the interpretation that requires the fewest assumptions. This is for instance directly expressed in the Principle of Parsimony (Crain and Steedman, 1985), which states that an interpretation that carries fewer unsupported implicatures will be favoured over one that carries more. In cases where structural ambiguity arises, minimality correlates with the smallest amount of structure, as for instance formulated in Minimal Attachment (Frazier, 1978, 1987). Following this tradition, Katsika (‘‘Exploring the minimal structure in prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities: Evidence from Greek’’) performed two acceptability judgement studies (offline and online) on Greek prepositional phrase attachment in ambiguous V-NP-PP constructions. Overall, Katsika found a general preference for high attachment of the PPs to VP-nodes, which is in principle consistent with the Minimal Attachment account. However, there is also evidence that depending on the definiteness features of the NPs in the PPs and the lexical choice of the preposition, low attachment can be observed. In this respect, Katsika discusses factors in parsing preferences that have not been reported so far and suggests that minimality requirements from different information sources ultimately determine the optimal attachment site. Another investigation of structural ambiguity is presented by Roehm and Haider (‘‘Small is beautiful: the processing of the left periphery in German’’). Utilizing electrophysiological measures, particle verbs and prefix verbs in German V2-sentences were contrasted with respect to the interpretation of each type of verb form as either an infinitive verb of a fronted VP or as a finite verb of a matrix sentence (e.g. Den Katalog abbestellen {*sie/ko¨nnten sie} bestimmt. ‘The catalogueObj. unsubscribe {theySubj./could they}Subj. surely.’ vs. Den Antrag bearbeiten {sie/sollten sie} dennoch. ‘The applicationObj. handle {they Subj./should they Subj}. anyhow.’). The latter type represents the simpler structure and was hence expected to be preferred over the former one on the basis of a purely structural analysis, although such a structure would yield an ungrammatical sentence in the case of particle verbs due to their morphosyntactic specification. Accordingly, this contribution investigated how minimality requirements of structure building interact with morpho-syntactic information and well-formedness, and Roehm and Haider found that the parser incrementally builds up minimal phrase-structure, which at the same time is cross-checked with locally available information about finiteness morphology. It should be further noted that in addition to structure-based motivations for efficient parsing, theories have evolved that attempt to correlate syntactic parsing advantages with the frequency of occurrence of a particular structure. These frequency-based accounts claim that the more often a particular structure occurs in language production, the easier it is processed during language comprehension (MacDonald, 1999; Mitchell et al., 1995; Seidenberg and MacDonald, 1999; Vosse and Kempen, 2000). However up until now, researchers have been arguing over whether structure or frequency represent the driving force that guides processing decisions. In the present issue, Ha¨ussler and Bader argue against a purely frequency-based explanation (but suggest that lexical frequency may partially influence parsing decisions), but see also Roehm and Haider. That the frequency of certain forms in a paradigm may explain the availability of structural reductions in certain registers and child speech is discussed by De Lange, Vasic´ and Avrutin (‘‘Reading between the (head)lines: A processing account of article omissions in newspaper headlines and child
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speech’’) who investigate the regularities underlying article omission. They present converging findings from a corpus analysis of newspaper headlines in Dutch and Italian as well as production data from first language acquisition in these two languages and provide an information theoretical account of the omission patterns (cf. e.g. Moscoso del Prado Martin et al., 2004). They suggest that the higher degree of article omission observed in Dutch is closely tied to the higher relative entropy (i.e. information load) associated with the Dutch article paradigm. Hence, the availability of structure reduction, as exemplified by article omission, and its cross-linguistic variation is explained as a reflection of efficient parsing at the interface. The idea of minimality is most drastically reduced to a Minimal Everything principle by Inoue and Fodor (1995). This view has recently been adopted in the extended Argument Dependency Model (eADM; Bornkessel and Schlesewsky, 2006) where minimality is considered to affect structure building and argument linking alike. In their contribution to this Special Issue, Bornkessel–Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky (‘‘Minimality as vacuous distinctness: Evidence from cross-linguistic sentence comprehension’’) move one step further and suggest that minimality is an instance of an even more general constraint (‘‘Distinctness’’) that requires constituents to be maximally distinct from each other. Reviewing a series of cross-linguistic studies using event-related brain potential measurements, the authors investigate differences in the interpretation of arguments in ambiguous and non-ambiguous object-initial constructions. Overall, their findings substantiate the claim that the processing system prefers a minimal interpretation, i.e. a phrase-structure is built up by the expectation of a minimal number of arguments. Accordingly, an intransitive event yields the most minimal (and most distinct) interpretation, and the experimental data demonstrate that syntactic structures consisting of a subject and a predicate allowing for an intransitive interpretation are preferred over more complex ones. In contrast, in structures where distinctness cannot be preserved locally, a less minimal structure may be licensed (e.g. two arguments that are not distinct from one another – on the basis of prominence features such as thematic role, case, animacy – are linked with two separate events). However, transitivity not only affects structure building, but may also be viewed with respect to complexity at the level of discourse representation, which is amplified as new discourse referents are introduced. In addition, form and function of a referential expression interact, which gave rise to the formulation of hierarchies of accessibility that also operate on the least effort assumption (cf. e.g. Ariel, 1990; Grosz et al., 1985), and discourse-pragmatic principles such as the role of focus and topic information or the given-new distinction are guided by general economy considerations as well (cf. e.g. Burkhardt, 2006; Crain and Steedman, 1985; Grice, 1989). In the present volume, discourse complexity is addressed by Ha¨ussler and Bader (‘‘The assembly and disassembly of determiner phrases: Minimality is needed, but not sufficient’’) who investigated the construction of DPs utilizing a self-paced reading task. They capitalized on the fact that the German definite article may also function as a demonstrative pronoun and contrasted sequences consisting of a determiner (DET) and a bare plural noun (N), which hence are ambiguous between a singleDP reading ([DET N]) and a two-DP reading ([DET][N]). From the perspective of syntactic minimality, their data demonstrate that a single-DP reading is preferred, i.e. intransitive structures are formed more readily and are thus considered to be the most minimal representations during incremental processing. This finding could also be interpreted with respect to the discourse-semantic (or information structural) representation, such that the construction of fewer discourse referents is favoured. In addition, the authors tested the influence of implicit prosodic information on DP-formation via a focus particle (vor allem (‘above all’)) and via an intrinsically focused demonstrative determiner (diejenigen (‘those’)) and showed that reanalysis towards a two-DP interpretation was facilitated in those cases where it was supported by prosodic information. This finding provides evidence for an interaction of minimality requirements from distinct linguistic domains. Considering the interplay of information from different linguistic domains, it has been suggested that a minimal amount of (syntactic) structure should be implicated for operations at the interfaces (Culicover and Jackendoff, 2005). Moreover, it has been proposed that cross-modular operations are less economical, yielding an advantage for fewer cross-modular operations (Reuland, 2001). Many of the contributions to the Special Issue that have been presented above address minimality at the interfaces and the interaction between knowledge from different linguistic domains. For instance, Bader and Schmid argue that verb cluster formation and the right-branching constraint are in competition with minimal argument-structural requirements, because verb clustering takes place at the expense of argument structure unification. This suggests that syntactic minimality takes precedence over semantic minimality when complex infinitival constructions are computed. Bornkessel–Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky drastically limit the interpretive power of syntax and instead appeal to principles of argument linking and prominence. The interaction of structural and morphosyntactic constraints is furthermore addressed by Roehm and Haider through the window of
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verb-initial sentences, as well as by Grillo and Garraffa who showed that locality configurations are affected by intervening morpho-syntactic information. In addition, a number of papers report that syntactic operations are influenced by prominence relations, such as animacy and definiteness features of a DP (Bader and Schmid, Bornkessel–Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, Katsika). Overall, the contributions to the present Special Issue address novel aspects of language processing investigating phenomena and languages that have to a large extent – if at all – only rarely been considered in psycho- and neurolinguistic research. Following from these contributions, the Special Issue on ‘‘Experimental evidence for minimal structure’’ identifies distinct forms of minimal structures and operations in the research programs of the contributors. A converging result is that all data discussed generally support the view that simpler operations and representations are preferred to more complex ones, which may even license structure reduction (Buchwald; De Lange, Vasic´, and Avrutin), variation in speech perception (Knaus and Domahs; Scharinger), or the acceptability of ungrammatical structure (Roehm and Haider). In this respect, the language faculty adheres to a general notion of laziness – or efficiency for that matter – across linguistic domains. Furthermore, a crucial observation refers to conflicts arising from the need to satisfy competing minimality requirements. In sentence processing, minimality generally leads to conflicts between syntactic and compositional simplicity (e.g. Bader and Schmid). With respect to language processing on the word level, we observe similar conflicting forces in the course of the mapping from form to meaning (e.g. the ambiguity of surface forms due to the underspecification of certain features, see Scharinger). The data indicate that these competing forces may even allow for certain forms of optionality in the language system. The aim of this ongoing research should therefore be to find out how the representation of structure and the specificity of forms are minimized, while at the same time their distinctiveness is maintained. Whether minimality can ultimately be reduced to an independent principle (as e.g. foreshadowed in Bornkessel–Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky) remains subject to future research. Acknowledgements As guest editors, we would like to thank the contributors to this Special Issue for their efforts as well as the participants of the workshop ‘‘Experimental evidence for minimal structure’’ at the 29th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society for stimulating discussions. We are especially grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their assistance and invigorating comments on the individual contributions, as well as to the editors of Lingua, Johan Rooryck, Neil Smith and Diane Blakemore, for their support for the Special Issue and their suggestions for this editorial. References Ariel, M., 1990. Accessing Noun Phrase Anaphors. Routledge, London/New York. Bornkessel, I.D., Schlesewsky, M., 2006. The extended Argument Dependency Model: a neurocognitive approach to sentence comprehension across languages. Psychological Review 113 (4), 787–821. Burkhardt, P., 2006. 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Petra Burkhardt* Ulrike Domahs1 Institute of Germanic Linguistics, University of Marburg, Wilhelm-Roepke-Strasse 6a, 35032 Marburg, Germany *Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 6421 2824645; fax: +49 6421 2824558 E-mail addresses: [email protected] (P. Burkhardt) [email protected] (U. Domahs) 1
Tel.: +49 6421 2824536.
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