Case in Language Production

Abstract

Speech production involves the transformation of a to-be-expressed idea, or message, into lexical and grammatical content. Given the generally recognised separation of functional and positional processes, it has been argued that case assignment is within the domain of functional processes (or within Dell's syntactic stage). This article focuses on case assignment, which is achieved during the grammatical encoding stage of utterance planning. Early proposals for sentence production models were highly influenced by the distribution and characteristics of naturally occurring speech errors. More recent revisions of these models have been further influenced by experimental investigations into structural and word order alternations using a method called syntactic priming. This article first lays out in gross terms the general views of the stages necessary for sentence production. It then discusses the evidence that has supported the various stages of the production models and how they directly or indirectly inform us about the processes responsible for case assignment in sentence production. This includes evidence for and against (radical or weak) incrementality and evidence for lexical guidance (or verb primacy) in functional assignment.

Bidirectional structural priming across alternations: Evidence from the generation of dative and benefactive alternation structures in German

“…Bock, 1995;Ferreira & Slevc, 2007;Melinger, Pechmann, & Pappert, 2009). Psycholinguistic investigations of sentence production are mainly concerned with the level of formulation, which is commonly subdivided into two stages: one coined functional and the other one positional (Garrett, 1975).…”

Beyond Agreement: How Syntactic Features Are Assigned in Real Time

“…Consequently, in the currently popular two-stage models of sentence production, both theta-role assignment and Case assignment happen at the level of grammatical encoding (e.g. Nicol 1993;Melinger et al 2008). A point of empirical debate is whether Case assignment happens within the functional (responsible for assigning grammatical functions) or positional (responsible for structural organization) encoding, which is closely tied with the issue of choice between lexically or syntactically driven production.…”

“…a noun is retrieved because the syntactic slot requires it). Furthermore, Case assignment is distinguished from Case realization which presumably happens as part of the morphophonological encoding (Melinger et al 2008). Another issue that often arises with respect to online Case assignment process is its interaction with the issue of incrementality: lexically-driven models of Case assignment were argued to be more compatible with strict incrementality than syntactically-based models (Kempen, Hoenkamp 1987;Levelt 1989).…”

Word-external properties in a typology of Modern English: a comparison with German

“…It activates alternative cooccurrence frames online (see e.g. Tanenhaus & Carlson 1989;Melinger et al 2009) and these alternatives are ultimately what lead to temporary ambiguities and garden paths in a verb-early language like English (section 2). But what exactly happens online with verb-preposition and particle verb constructions (count on my son and take up a new hobby), and with highly polysemous verbs (run, break, put on)?…”