Animacy and grammatical variation—Findings from English genitive variation

Rosenbach, Anette

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2007.02.002

Cited by 97 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Collective possessors (as in the monthly meeting of the North School Committee; CENZE, 1897_n_B North Otago Times) also disfavour the s-genitive (OR: .24). The ranking of these constraints thus roughly conforms to Rosenbach's (2008) animacy hierarchy, though in our dataset temporal possessors do not appear to have a significant effect.…”

Section: Genitivessupporting

confidence: 54%

Animacy in early New Zealand English

Hundt

Szmrecsanyi

2012

EWW

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The literature suggests that animacy effects in present-day spoken New Zealand English (NZE) differ from animacy effects in other varieties of English. We seek to determine if such differences have a history in earlier NZE writing or not. We revisit two grammatical phenomena -progressives and genitives -that are well known to be sensitive to animacy effects, and we study these phenomena in corpora sampling 19th-and early 20th-century written NZE; for reference purposes, we also study parallel samples of 19th-and early 20th-century British English and American English. We indeed find significant regional differences between early New Zealand writing and the other varieties in terms of the effect that animacy has on the frequency and probabilities of grammatical phenomena.Keywords: animacy, progressive, genitive alternation, regional variation, British, American and New Zealand English IntroductionAnimacy matters. Cross-linguistically, animacy effects in grammar are common (for example, Dahl and Fraurud 1996). In English, gradient degrees of NP animacy constrain the choice of various grammatical constructions, such as genitives (see e.g. Hinrichs and Szmrecsanyi 2007), datives (e.g. Bresnan and Hay 2008), or relativizers (e.g. Jaeger 2006). Animacy also plays a role in the later stages of the grammaticalisation of constructions such as the progressive in general and the progressive passive in particular: progressives with inanimate subjects increased before the construction's text frequency soared in the 20th century (Hundt 2004a), * We would like to thank the participants of the workshop on areal and regional variation in English historical corpora at the Helsinki Corpus Festival (28 September -2 October 2011). We are also grateful to Edgar W. Schneider and the anonymous reviewer of EWW for their helpful comments and constructive criticism on previous versions of this paper, which allowed us to further develop our ideas and fine-tune the interpretation of the data.

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Section: Genitivessupporting

confidence: 54%

Animacy in early New Zealand English

Hundt

Szmrecsanyi

2012

EWW

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“…Thus, independent of the structural roles of the event participants in a sentence, the semantic bias on the part of the verb can influence pronoun resolution (Crinean & Garnham, 2006;Fukumura & Van Gompel, 2010;Garnham, Traxler, Oakhill, & Gernsbacher, 1996;Garvey & Caramazza, 1974;Garvey, Caramazza, & Yates, 1975;Greene & McKoon, 1995;Koornneef & Van Berkum, 2006;Stewart, Pickering, & Sanford, 2000). In addition, Fukumura and Van Gompel (2011) showed that animate entities, which have been shown to be more accessible than inanimate entities (Bock & Warren, 1985;Branigan, Pickering, & Tanaka, 2008;PratSala & Branigan, 2000;Rosenbach, 2008), are more likely to be interpreted as the referents of ambiguous pronouns.…”

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confidence: 99%

Informativity renders a referent more accessible: Evidence from eyetracking

Karimi

Ferreira

2015

Psychon Bull Rev

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The amount of information attached to a noun phrase (henceforth, NP) has been shown to enhance accessibility and increase pronominal reference in language production. However, both the effect of information quantity on the comprehension of ambiguous pronouns and the time course of any informativity effect have been left unexplored. In two eyetracking experiments, we investigated how additional information on the part of NP referents influenced the resolution of following ambiguous pronouns. The results of the first experiment revealed an informativity effect, with more looks to the informationally richer referent than to the competitor. However, the effect of additional information emerged late in time when the referent was the object of the verb. The second experiment replicated the results of the first and also showed that, consistent with the online results, an ambiguous pronoun is interpreted as referring to the informationally richer NP in an offline, explicit pronoun resolution task. The results lend support to theories of language processing that assume that explicit information increases the accessibility of the associated concept, in contrast to approaches that assume that accessibility is associated with givenness.Keywords NP position . NP length . Informativity . Pronoun resolution . Time courseIn our daily encounters with language, we are regularly faced with ambiguities that must be resolved for successful communication to take place. One ubiquitous source of linguistic ambiguity is a referring expression (such as a pronoun) that can potentially refer to more than one previously mentioned entity. For example, in Example 1 the pronoun Bheĉ ould refer to both the Bwizard^and the Bknight. ( 1) The wizard disagreed with the knight. He came up with a good idea to solve the problem.Numerous psycholinguistic studies have attempted to identify the factors that guide the processing and resolution of ambiguous pronouns (e.g

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confidence: 90%

“…Aissen & Bresnan 2002;Rosenbach 2002Rosenbach , 2008O'Connor et al 2013). In other words, English does not have two distinct constructions for animate and inanimate possessors respectively -in fact, the s-genitive can be used with both.…”

Section: Animacy Splits In Possessionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…9 Ideally, we would like to use a more fine-grained categorization of animacy, as it is well-known that certain non-human noun classes such as collective, temporal or locative nouns behave differently from other inanimate possessors in English (cf. Rosenbach 2008Rosenbach , 2014. The number of tokens for such nonhuman possessors in the corpus however were too small, so these noun classes were all collapsed within the [-animate] category.…”

Section: Comparing Genitive Variation In English and Afrikaans: Contrmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Constraints in contact: Animacy in English and Afrikaans genitive variation – a cross-linguistic perspective

Rosenbach¹

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper builds on the observation that the animacy effects we find in English genitive variation are part of a larger cross-linguistic pattern as reflected in possession splits based on animacy (Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001Stolz et al. 2008), which are an expression of harmonic alignment in the domain of possession (Aissen & Bresnan 2002;Rosenbach 2008). Focussing on English and Afrikaans, a contrastive corpus analysis of genitive variation reveals similar forms of animacy splits in these two languages, though they differ in the strength of the animacy constraint, with the Afrikaans prenominal possessive (the se-genitive) occurring more freely with inanimate possessors than the English s-genitive. In a follow-up experimental study it is then shown that the weaker animacy constraint in Afrikaans carries over to the L2 English of Afrikaans speakers in South Africa. This study emphasizes the importance of a cross-linguistic perspective when looking at genitive variation in English and its varieties (1) to recognize that Englishes form part of a typological continuum of possession splits, and (2) to enable us to identify the possible transfer of constraint strengths from one language to another one in a situation where these languages are in contact, as in the case of English and Afrikaans in South Africa.

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Animacy and grammatical variation—Findings from English genitive variation

Cited by 97 publications

References 29 publications

Animacy in early New Zealand English

Animacy in early New Zealand English

Informativity renders a referent more accessible: Evidence from eyetracking

Constraints in contact: Animacy in English and Afrikaans genitive variation – a cross-linguistic perspective

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