Language Variability and Syntactic Theory

Course Aims

• to argue that intrapersonal variation raises some interesting issues for theoretical syntax and its place in the architecture of the mind
• to tease out some of the basic conceptual issues raised by such variation
• to survey how the phenomenon has been dealt with in generative grammar (and to a certain extent other frameworks)
• to argue for a particular analysis which localizes the mechanism for variation in unin- terpretable/unvalued features
• to justify that analysis through case studies and to investigate the problems and open issues it faces.

Topics

1. What does it mean for something to vary? What does it mean for language to vary? Inter vs Intrapersonal variation. Variation at and between linguistic levels: phonology, morphology, syntax. Tacit assumptions that sideline variation. How perspectives on language influence view of language variation: E-language, I-language, S-language. Implications for modularity and autonomy.
2. Approaches to variation: Variable Rules; Parameters; Multiple and Competing Grammars; Stochastic approaches; What does minimalism have to offer?
3. was/were variability in Buckie. Data, theoretical assumptions, how are feature specifications learned? combinatorial variation, impact of intra- and inter-personal factors. Morphological Learers.
4. Other approaches to was/were variability in Buckie: DM; Probabalistic Impoverishment; Hudson's analysis.
5. verbal -s categorical vs variable paradigms; previous accounts, objections and new approach. impact of inter and intra-personal factors. General implications. Language Change.
6. Open Issues: routinization. Theoretical models. Constructions vs UG.
7. Actuation of language change and loss of linguistic systems.

If you weant to start reading early, a good start would be: Honeybone (2011), Trousdale and Adger (2007) and Adger (2006)

References

1. Adger, David. 2006. Combinatorial variability. Journal of Linguistics 42:503-530.
2. Adger, David. 2007. Variability and modularity: A response to Hudson. Journal of Linguistics 43:695-700.
3. Adger, David. 2012. Constructions are not explanations, lingbuzz 001675.
4. Adger, David. 2013a. Constructions and grammatical explanation. Mind and Language
.
5. Adger, David. 2013b. Variability and grammatical architecture. In Carme Picallo, ed., Linguistic Variation in a Minimalist Framework, OUP, lingBuzz/001176.
6. Adger, David and Smith, Jennifer. 2005. Variation and the Minimalist Program. In Leonie Cornips and Karen Corrigan, eds., Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the Biological and the Social , 149-178, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
7. Adger, David and Smith, Jennifer. 2010. Variation in agreement: A lexical feature-based approach. Lingua 120:1109-1134.
8. Anttila, Arto. 1997. Deriving variation from grammar. In Frans Hinskens, Roeland van Hout, and W. Leo Wetzels, eds., Variation, Change and Phonological Theory, 35-68, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
9. Bender, Emily. 2001. Syntactic variation and linguistic competence. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford, CA.
10. Bresnan, J., Dingare, S., and Manning, C. D. 2001. Soft constraints mirror hard constraints: Voice and person in english and lummi. In Proceedings of the LFG 01 Conference, Stanford: CSLI.
11. Buchstaller, Isabelle, Corrigan, Karen, Homberg, Anders, Honeybone, Patrick, and Maguire, Warren. 2013. T-to-r and the northern subject rule: questionnaire-based spatial, social and structural linguistics. English Language and Linguistics 17:85128.
12. Cheshire, Jenny. 1982. Variation in an English Dialect. Cambridge University Press.
13. Cheshire, Jenny, Adger, David, and Fox, Sue. 2013. Relative who and the actuation problem. Lingua 126:51-77.
14. Fasold, Ralph. 1991. The quiet demise of variable rules. American Speech 66:3-21.
15. Henry, Alison. 1995. Belfast English and Standard English: Dialect Variation and Parameter Setting. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
16. Henry, Alison. 2005. Idiolectal variation and syntactic theory. In Leonie Cornips and Karen Corrigan, eds., Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the Biological and the Social , 109-122, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
17. Honeybone, Patrick. 2011. Variation and linguistic theory. In Warren Maguire and April McMahon, eds., Analysing variation in English, 151-177, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
18. Kroch, Anthony. 1994. Morphosyntactic variation. In K. Beals et. al., ed., Papers from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, 190-201, Chicago Lingistics Society.
19. Kucera, Henry. 1973. Language variability, rule interdependency, and the grammar of Czech. Linguistic Inquiry 4:499-521.
20. Labov, William. 1969. Contraction, deletion and inherent variability of the English copula. Language 48:773-818.
21. Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
22. Manning, Christopher. 2003. Probabalistic syntax. In Jennifer Hay Rens Bod and Stefanie Jannedy, eds., Probabalistic Linguistics, 298-341, Cambrige, MA: MIT Press.
23. Nevins, Andrew and Parrott, Jeffrey K. 2008. Variable rules meet Impoverishment theory. Lingua 120:1135-1159.
24. Pertsova, Katya. 2007. Learning form-meaning mappings in the presence of homonymy. Ph.D. thesis, UCLA.
25. Smith, Durham, Mercedes, and Fortune, Liane. 2007. Community, caregiver and child in the acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect. Language Variation and Change 19:-99.
26. Tortora, Christina and den Dikken, Marcel. 2010. Subject agreement variation: Support for the confgurational approach. Lingua 120:1089-1108.
27. Trousdale, Graeme and Adger, David. 2007. Variation in english syntax: theoretical implications. English Language and Linguistics 11:261-278.
28. Wilson, John and Henry, Alison. 1998. Parameter setting within a socially realistic linguistics. Language in Society 27:1-21.
29. Yang, Charles D. 2002. Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.