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When a language offers multiple options for expressing the same meaning, what principles govern a speaker’s choice? Two well-known principles proposed for explaining wideranging speaker preference are Uniform Information Density and Availability-Based Production. Here we test the predictions of these theories in a previously uninvestigated case of speaker choice. Russian has two ways of expressing the comparative: an EXPLICIT option (Ona bystree chem ja/She fast- COMP than me-NOM) and a GENITIVE option (Ona bystree menya/She fast-COMP me-GEN). We lay out several potential predictions of each theory for speaker choice in the Russian comparative construction, including effects of postcomparative word predictability, phrase length, syntactic complexity, and semantic association between the comparative adjective and subsequent noun. In a corpus study, we find that the explicit construction is used preferentially when the postcomparative noun phrase is longer, has a relative clause, and is less semantically associated with the comparative adjective. A follow-up production experiment using visual scene stimuli to elicit comparative sentences replicates the corpus finding that Russian native speakers prefer the explicit form when post-comparative phrases are longer. These findings offer no clear support for the predictions of Uniform Information Density, but are broadly supportive of Availability- Based Production, with the explicit option serving as an unreduced form that eases speakers’ planning of complex or lowavailability utterances. Code for this study is available
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Noun phrases in Kwéyòl Donmnik
Abstract Though Creole nominal systems have been intensely researched, in-context, corpus-based examinations are uncommon, and there are Creole languages whose noun phrases remain understudied. I use a corpus of conversational data and a pattern-building task designed to elicit demonstrative and definite noun phrases, exophoric reference, and co-speech pointing gestures to explore the noun phrase in Kwéyòl Donmnik, an endangered, understudied French lexifier Creole. I focus on noun phrases that are bare, marked by the post-nominal determiners definitela‘the’ or demonstrativesa-la‘this/that’, or accompanied by the pre-nominal indefinite determineryon‘a(n)’. Results pinpoint the readings conveyed by each noun phrase type, identify the word categories of their nouns, and address similarities in usage between definitelaand demonstrativesa-la.
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- PAR ID:
- 10559589
- Publisher / Repository:
- Benjamins
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
- ISSN:
- 0920-9034
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00136.pel
