Gradience in Morphosyntactic Features *

نویسنده

  • Greville G. Corbett
چکیده

As Einstein nicely put it: ‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.’ It would be good to have a simple typology of the morphosyntactic features. And if Zwicky (1986: 988-989) is right in suggesting that there is a fixed list of available features and values, then a simple typology is an attainable goal. However, when we examine how features and their values can be established for given languages, gradience appears to be a major challenge. One common response to this challenge is to propose additional feature values; as we shall see, this response would rule out a simple typology. I argue that this approach fails: additional values cannot account for gradience. This means that we can still work towards the ideal of a simple typology. Thus for this paper, gradience looms large as a possible obstacle to a different goal. Gradience is an obstacle, which might suggest that we were heading for the ‘simpler’ situation, the one that fails to recognize the true complexity of the problem. I will show that this apparent obstacle is not directly relevant, allowing us still to work towards a typology which is indeed ‘as simple as possible’.

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Identification of High-Frequency Morphosyntactic Structures in Persian-Speaking Children Aged 4-6 Years: A Qualitative Research

Background: Syntax has a high importance among linguistic parameters and the prevalence of syntax deficits is relatively high in children with language disorders. As such, independent examination of syntax in language development is of paramount importance. In this regard, Iranian language pathologists are faced with the lack of standardized tests. The present study aimed to determine the most ...

متن کامل

Modelling Syntactic Gradience with Loose Constraint-based Parsing

The grammaticality of a sentence has conventionally been treated in a binary way: either a sentence is grammatical or not. A growing body of work, however, focuses on studying intermediate levels of acceptability, sometimes referred to as gradience. To date, the bulk of this work has concerned itself with the exploration of human assessments of syntactic gradience. This dissertation explores th...

متن کامل

Modelling Syntactic Gradience with Loose Constraint-based Parsing G Modélisation de la gradience syntaxique par analyse relâchée à base de contraintes

The grammaticality of a sentence has conventionally been treated in a binary way: either a sentence is grammatical or not. A growing body of work, however, focuses on studying intermediate levels of acceptability, sometimes referred to as gradience. To date, the bulk of this work has concerned itself with the exploration of human assessments of syntactic gradience. This dissertation explores th...

متن کامل

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Explicit and Implicit Form-Focused Instruction on Explicit and Implicit Knowledge of EFL Learners

Although explicit and implicit knowledge of language learners are essential to theoretical and pedagogical debates in second language acquisition (SLA), little research has addressed the effects of instructional interventions on the two knowledge types (R. Ellis, 2005).This study examined the relative effectiveness of explicit and implicit types of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisit...

متن کامل

The role of memory in superiority violation gradience

This paper examines how grammatical and memory constraints explain gradience in superiority violation acceptability. A computational model encoding both categories of constraints is compared to experimental evidence. By formalizing memory capacity as beam-search in the parser, the model predicts gradience evident in human data. To predict attachment behavior, the parser must be sensitive to the...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2009