Anaphora and the Case for Emergentism

Abstract

IntroductionThis essay focuses on two questions of fundamental importance to cognitive science.i. Why does language have the particular properties that it does?ii. How is language acquired in response to the particular types of experience that children receive in the first years of life?In a sense, the answer to both questions is obvious. Human language is the way it is, and children learn it so successfully, because it is a good fit for the brain. Everyone believes this, and the point is frequently made in one form or another by scholars whose views otherwise differ (e.g., Chomsky 2007, Christiansen & Chater 2008, to take just two examples). But what features of the human brain create and mediate the fit? The list of possible contributors, summarized by Chomsky ( 2005), is practically self-evident: (i) inborn principles of grammar, if there are any; (ii) a capacity for extracting regularities from experience; and (iii) the influence of perception, processing, economy, and cognition (the so-called 'third factor').The first factor has been the central concern of work on classic Universal Grammar (UG), as developed by Chomsky (1981) and many others. Within much of cognitive science, though, increasing attention has been devoted to the second factor, as evidenced by the growth of research focused on statistical learning (e.g.,

Processing Determinism

“…formed, independent of the processing routines that are used in the course of speech and comprehension. I reject this idea in favor of the view that processing routines do the work traditionally assigned to grammatical rules (e.g., O'Grady, 2005O'Grady, , 2015 and must therefore be the locus for the study of development. The example of English reflexive pronouns helps illustrate this point.…”

“…I outline the essentials of my approach in the next section with the help of a brief case study of English reflexive pronouns, drawing on the much more detailed exposition offered in O'Grady (). I then go on to present three additional case studies that further illustrate the advantages of a processing‐based theory of development.…”

The Case for an Emergentist Approach

“…What is stored in the mind of the user, as Bybee (2010), Croft (2001), Goldberg (1995), Langacker (1987Langacker ( , 1991 and Tomasello (2009) argue, is a network of related linguistic constructions that emerge from interaction between people and exposure to data. The development of these constructions proceeds on the basis of general cognitive mechanisms, rather than mechanisms that are modality-specific to language, and is constrained by the processing capacity of the brain (Hawkins 2004(Hawkins , 2014O"Grady 2008O"Grady , 2012O"Grady , 2015.…”

“…To demonstrate the insights attainable through an emergentist approach, in this section we examine the wh-extraction construction in Afrikaans in more detail (for emergentist alternatives to the analysis of other constructions, also see O"Grady 2008O"Grady , 2015. Whextraction has enjoyed much attention in generative theorising over the years.…”

“…Grammatical categories are not held to exist in advance as a priori categories in language-use data, but are constructed by the language user to the extent that they become useful in extracting schemas, or generalisations, from the data (Croft 2001;Hopper 1998). At the same time, emergentism takes the processing constraints imposed by the general architecture of the human brain very seriously, and sees a reciprocal relationship between language and the brain, such that language also assumes the shape it does because that is the form in which the brain is able to process it (O"Grady, Lee and Kwak 2009;O"Grady 2015), as represented by the Performance-Grammar correspondence thesis of Hawkins (2004Hawkins ( , 2014, for instance. Bybee (2010: 6) identifies one of the key questions in the debate between nativism and emergentism: "are the processes that give us linguistic structure specific to language or are they processes that also apply to other cognitive domains?"…”