Wednesday 17 October from 13:00 to 14:00
in Room 122, Old Humanities Building (OH122)
In this talk, I argue that argument and particle realisation is pragmatically-driven rather than morpho-syntactically driven. Often, in theoretical linguistics, it has been assumed that arguments and particles in SOV, agglutinative languages can be 'arbitrarily' omitted or dropped. The process behind choice making – (i) whether to realise an argument or particle and if to choose to do so (ii) which one to choose – has been largely overlooked in syntactic literature.
Wasow (2002), Philips (2003), Hawkins (1994, 2004, 2014) among many others aimed to show that efficient structure building plays a crucial role in understanding human languages. Yet, often these claims are only considered within processing literature rather than in mainstream syntactic literature.
This is because it is not easily tenable to incorporate resource-sensitive nature of syntactic behaviours within a Chomskian linguistic framework which assumes native speakers’ access to 'limitless' linguistic creativity.
Based on processing-driven frameworks - Dynamic Syntax (DS, Cann et al 2005) and my recent proposal on Pragmatic Syntax (Kiaer 2014), I aim to show how natural language structures are built to maximise efficiency, expressivity and empathy (3Emodel). I argue that the choices surrounding argument and particle realisations are driven by the above principles to make the utterance socio-pragmatically adequate. I shall include data in this talk from SOV order, agglutinative languages such as Korean, Japanese and Turkish.