Anaphoric one and its implications

Abstract

The nominal anaphoric element one has figured prominently in discussions of linguistic nativism because of an important argument advanced by C. L. Baker (1978). His argument has been frequently cited within the cognitive and linguistic sciences, and has provided the topic for a chain of experimental and computational psycholinguistics papers. Baker's crucial grammaticality facts, though much repeated in the literature, have not been critically investigated. A corpus investigation shows that his claims are not true: one does not take only phrasal antecedents, but can also take nouns on their own, including semantically relational nouns, and can take various of-PP dependents of its own. We give a semantic analysis of anaphoric one that allows it to exhibit this kind of freedom, and we exhibit frequency evidence that goes a long way toward explaining why linguists have been inclined to regard phrases like the one of physics or three ones as ungrammatical when in fact (as corpus evidence shows) they are merely dispreferred relative to available grammatical alternatives. The main implication for the acquisition literature is that one of the most celebrated arguments from poverty of the stimulus is shown to be without force.*

Generalizing beyond the input: The functions of the constructions matter

“…Statistical preemption is the process whereby speakers learn to avoid using a verb in a particular construction, CxB, if the verb is consistently witnessed in a competing construction, CxA, instead (cf. Ambridge et al, 2014;Boyd & Goldberg, 2011;Brooks & Tomasello, 1999;Goldberg, 2006Goldberg, , 2011Payne, Pullum, Scholz, & Berlage, 2013;Perfors et al, 2010;Poser, 1992;Robenalt & Goldberg, in press). When two constructions have identical functions, hearing a verb in one construction is tantamount to not hearing it in the other construction.…”

Gender mismatches under nominal ellipsis

“…The difficult question of how the appropriate antecedent is determined in any given context is one for the pragmatics of anaphora resolution to resolve (see e.g. Günther 2012, Miller and Pullum 2013, and Payne et al 2013). …”

English partitives in Functional Discourse Grammar: types and constraints

“…Payne et al 2013). This means that in most cases it is not difficult to decide which form we are dealing with: in (83) we find instances of pronoun one, in (84) we are clearly dealing with the determiner one.…”