Efficiency in shaping grammars

Hawkins (1994, 1999, 2004, 2014a) proposes a performance-grammar correspondence hypothesis, claiming that grammars can be shaped by processing systems with reference to the degree of preference in communication. Given that Hawkins’s proposal mainly highlights the role of efficiency in language comprehension, this paper demonstrates that parsing principles can also be employed to account for language production. Based on an analysis of the production mechanism behind multiple occurrences of the Chinese reflexive ziji ‘self’ in a single clause, it shows that the notion of intersubjectivity can sometimes play a significant role in sentence planning, in the sense that the Chinese reflexive assists speakers to produce an utterance in line with the principle of efficiency, which will in turn help hearers compute the intended meaning by identifying potential referents.

Coding efficiency in nominal inflection: expectedness and type frequency effects

Since (Zipf, George Kingsley. 1935. The psychobiology of language: An introduction to dynamic philology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Zipf, George Kingsley. 1949. Human behavior and the principle of least effort. Journal of Consulting Psychology 13(3)), it has been known that more frequent lexical items tend to be shorter than less frequent ones, and this association between the length of an expression and its frequency has been applied to various grammatical patterns (syntactic, morphological, and phonological) and related to predictability or expectedness in the typological literature. However, the exact interactions of frequency and expectedness, their effect on shortening, and the mechanisms involved, are still not well understood. This paper proposes the Form-Expectedness Correspondence Hypothesis (fech), taking into account not only the frequency of expressions but their overall structure and distribution, and explores the fech in the domain of nominal inflection from a quantitative perspective.

Construction Grammar as Cognitive Structuralism: the interaction of constructional networks and processing in the diachronic evolution of English comparative correlatives

Following the Uniformitarian Principle, the Performance–Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis (PGCH; Hawkins 2004) predicts a directionality in language change: if the same content can be expressed by two competing structures and one of these is easier to process (see Hawkins 1999, 2004), then the simpler structure will be preferred in performance. Consequently, it will be used more often with a greater range of different lexical items, which increases its type frequency and ultimately leads to it being more cognitively entrenched than its alternative (see Hawkins 2004: 6). As an analysis of the diachronic evolution of the family of English comparative correlative constructions (the more iconiccause–before–effectC1C2 constructionthe more you eat, the fatter you getvs the less iconiceffect–before–causeC2C1 constructionyou get the fatter, the more you eat) shows, however, the PGCH only played a secondary role in the genesis of this set of constructions. In this article, I will present a usage-based constructionist approach that allows researchers to reinterpret the classical Structuralist notion of gaps in the system as gaps in the mental constructional network. This type of Cognitive Structuralist analysis accounts for the presence of the less iconic C2C1 structure (and the absence of the more iconic C1C2 structure) in OE, the genesis of C1C2 structures at the end of the OE period as well as the processing effects predicted by the PGCH once both the C1C2 and the C2C1 constructions were in competition during the ME period.