Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage

This volume examines the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules in language usage. Speakers and addressees need to contend with these rules when expressing themselves and when trying to comprehend messages. For example, there are on-going competitions between the speaker's interests and the addressee's needs, or between constraints imposed by grammar and those imposed by online processing. These competitions influence a wide variety of systems, including case marking, agreement and word order, politeness forms, lexical choices, and the position of relative clauses. Chapters in the book analyse grammar and usage in adult language as well as first and second language acquisition, and the motivations that drive historical change. Several of the chapters seek explanations for the competitions involved, based on earlier accounts including the Competition Model, Natural Morphology, the functional-typological tradition, and Optimality Theory. The book will be of interest to linguists from a wide variety of backgrounds, particularly those interested in psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, philosophy of language, and language acquisition, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

1 - Introduction
2 - Resolving alignment conflicts: A competing motivations approach
3 - Animate object fronting in Dutch: A production study
4 - Patterns in competing motivations and the interaction of principles
5 - Why move? How weight and discourse factors combine to predict relative clause extraposition in English
6 - A statistical model of competing motivations affecting relative clause extraposition in German
7 - Competition in argument interpretation: Evidence from the neurobiology of language
8 - Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence structure
9 - Competing constraints in children's omission of subjects? The interaction of verb finiteness and referent accessibility
10 - Competing cues in early syntactic development
11 - Conflicting vs. converging vs. interdependent motivations in morphology
12 - On system pressure competing with economic motivation
13 - Apparently competing motivations in morphosyntactic variation
14 - Formal vs. functional motivations for the structure of self-repair in German
15 - Six competing motives for repetition
16 - Motivating competitions
17 - Competing motivation models and diachrony: What evidence for what motivation?
18 - Where do motivations compete?
19 - Politeness distinctions in personal pronouns: A case study of competing motivations
20 - Or-constructions: Monosemy vs. polysemy
21 - Sentence grammar vs. thetical grammar: Two competing domains
22 - 22. Conclusions: Competition across time

Brian MacWhinney is Professor of Psychology, Computational Linguistics, and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He has developed a model of first and second language acquisition, processing, and disorders called the Competition Model, which describes how language learning emerges from forces operating on lexically-based patterns across divergent timeframes. It has been tested through cross-linguistic experimentation, neuroimaging, online language learning, and analysis of the CHILDES and TalkBank corpora. His recent publications include The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk (3rd ed; Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000) and, co-edited with Roberta Klatzky and Marlene Behrmann, Embodiment, Ego-Space, and Action (Psychology Press 2008). Andrej Malchukov is a Senior Researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute for Linguistic Research (Russian Academy of Sciences) and is currently affiliated to the University of Mainz as a Visiting Professor. In addition to descriptive work on Siberian languages, his main research interests lie in the domain of language typology. His publications include the edited volumes The Oxford Handbook of Case (with Andrew Spencer; OUP 2009), Studies in Ditransitive Constructions: A Comparative Handbook (with Bernard Comrie and Martin Haspelmath; Mouton de Gruyter 2010) and Impersonal Constructions: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (with Anna Siewierska; John Benjamins 2011). Edith Moravcsik is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she has taught for over 30 years. Her publications include the textbooks An Introduction to Syntax and An Introduction to Syntactic Theory (both Continuum 2006), and Introducing Language Typology (CUP 2013) and the edited volumes Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics (with Michael Darnell, Frederick Newmeyer, Michael Noonan, and Kathleen Wheatley; John Benjamins 1999) and Formulaic Language (with Roberta Corrigan, Hamid Ouali, and Kathleen Wheatley). She has also published a number of articles on language typology and universals, Hungarian grammar, and conflict resolution.