FAQ

Looking for Cognitive Foundations of Functional Sequences

Publication date: 21.03.2019

Studies in Polish Linguistics, Special Volume, Special Volume 1 (2019), pp. 53 - 75

https://doi.org/10.4467/23005920SPL.19.006.10986

Authors

,
Franc Lanko Marušič
Center for Cognitive Science of Language and School of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Vipavska 13 SI-5000, Nova Gorica Slovenia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0667-3236 Orcid
All publications →
,
Petra Mišmaš
Center for Cognitive Science of Language and School of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Vipavska 13 SI-5000, Nova Gorica Slovenia
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8659-875X Orcid
All publications →
Rok Žaucer
Center for Cognitive Science of Language and School of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Vipavska 13 SI-5000, Nova Gorica Slovenia
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7771-6937 Orcid
All publications →

Titles

Looking for Cognitive Foundations of Functional Sequences

Abstract

With the multiplication of various functional projections, syntactic structures became very complex entities. Approaches like Cartography (e.g. Cinque and Rizzi 2008) went one step further than most other approaches, proposing that each sentence comprises of a number of universal, strictly ordered functional projections. In the noun phrase, the strictly ordered functional projections are said to be responsible not only for the relative order of numerals, demonstratives and nouns (cf. Cinque 2005), but also for the universal order of various types of adjectives (cf. Hetzron 1978; Sproat and Shih 1991; Cinque 1994; Scott 2002, etc.). Cinque and Rizzi (2008) discuss possible origins of the many hierarchies of functional projections and suggest that they might derive from general cognition. If cognition and its restrictions are behind the hierarchy of functional projections, then the order of projections hosting adjectives should be reflected in various non-linguistic cognitive processes. We designed several experiments to test this hypothesis. Our experiments did not confirm our hypothesis; but as we have also identified problems in the design of our experiments, our results do not warrant a clear rejection of the hypothesis either.

References

Download references

Baldwin Dare A. (1989). Priorities in children’s expectations about object label reference: Form over color. Child Development 60(6), 1291–1306.

Champollion Lucas (2006). A game-theoretic account of adjective ordering restrictions. Ms.,  University  of  Pennsylvania.  [URL:  www.ling.upenn.edu/~champoll/adjective-ordering.pdf; accessed May 20, 2019].

Chomsky Noam (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chomsky Noam (2000). Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In Step by Step: Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik, Roger Martin, David Michaels, Juan Uriagereka, and Samuel Jay Keyser (eds.), 89–155. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cinque Guglielmo (1994). On the evidence for partial N-movement in the Romance DP. In Paths towards Universal Grammar: Studies in Honor of Richard S. Kayne, Guglielmo Cinque, Jan Koster, Jean-Yves Pollock, Luigi Rizzi, and Raffaella Zanuttini (eds.), 85–110. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Cinque Guglielmo (1999). Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Oxford University Press.

Cinque Guglielmo (2005). Deriving Greenberg’s Universal 20 and its exceptions. Linguistic Inquiry 36(3), 315–332. DOI: 10.1162/0024389054396917.

Cinque Guglielmo, Rizzi Luigi (2008). The cartography of syntactic structures. Studies in Linguistics 2, 43–95.

Culbertson  Jennifer,  Adger  David  (2014).  Language  learners  privilege  structured meaning over surface frequency. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111(16), 5842–5847. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1320525111.

De Cat Cecile (2000). Structure building and the acquisition of dislocations in child French. In BUCLD 24: Proceedings of the 24th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, S. Catherine Howell, Sarah A. Fish, and Thea Keith-Lucas (eds.), 242–252. Sommerville: Cascadilla Press.

Diesendruck Gil, Bloom Paul (2003). How specific is the shape bias? Child Development 74/1: 168–178. DOI: 10.1111/1467-8624.00528.

Dixon Robert Malcolm Ward (1982). Where Have All the Adjectives Gone. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Dolenc Tina (2018). Raba pridevnikov pri najmlajših govorcih [Adjective use among the youngest speakers]. Nova Gorica: University of Nova Gorica. BA thesis. [URL http://repozitorij.ung.si/IzpisGradiva.php?id=4018&lang=eng; accessed  May  20, 2019].

Drummond Alex (2011). Ibex Farm. [URL http://spellout.net/ibexfarm; accessed May 20, 2019].

Eichinger Ludwig M. (1991). Woran man sich halten kann: Grammatik und Gedächtnis [What you can hold on to: grammar and memory]. In Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache 17. München: iudicium, 203–220.

Greenberg Joseph (1963). Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Universals of Language, Joseph Greenberg (ed.), 72–113. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hetzron Robert (1978). On the relative order of adjectives. In Language Universals, Hansjakob Seiler (ed.), 165–184. Tübingen: Narr.

Hulk Aafke (2004). The acquisition of the French DP in a bilingual context. In The Acquisition of French in Different Contexts. Focus on Functional Categories, Philippe Prévost and Johanne Paradis (eds.), Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.243–74.

Kotowski Sven, Hartl Holden (2019). How real are adjective order constraints? Multi- ple prenominal adjectives at the grammatical interfaces. Linguistics 57(2), 395–427. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2019-0005.

Marušič Franc, Mišmaš Petra (2018). Povezovanje hierarhije pridevnikov v samostalniški zvezi in kognicije [Relating the hierarchy of adjectives inside the noun phrase and cognition]. In Škrabčevi dnevi 10: zbornik prispevkov s  simpozija  2017, Aleksan- dra Bizjak Končar and Helena Dobrovoljc (eds.),  99–110. Nova Gorica: Univer- sity  of  Nova  Gorica  Press.  [URL   http://www.ung.si/media/storage/cms/attachments/2018/11/29/16/56/02/Skrabcevi_dnevi_10_11k18.pdf; accessed May 20, 2019].

Martin James E. (1969). Semantic determinants of preferred adjective order.  Jour- nal  of  Verbal  Learning  and  Verbal  Behavior  8,  697–704.  DOI:  10.1016/S00225371(69)80032-0.

Pereltsvaig Asya (2007). On the universality of DP: A view from Russian. Studia Linguistica 61, 59–94. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9582.2007.00129.x.

Plesničar Vesna (2017). Adjective ordering restrictions of attribute adjectives in Slovenian. Talk given at 12th  Slavic Linguistics Society Annual Meeting, Ljubljana, September 21–24, 2017.

Radford Andrew (1996). Towards a structure-building model of acquisition. In Generative Perspectives on Language Acquisition, Harald Clashen (ed.), 42–88. Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Ramaglia Francesca (2011). Adjectives at the Syntax-Semantics Interface. München: LINCOM Europa.

Ramchand Gillian C., Svenonius Peter (2014). Deriving the functional hierarchy. Language Sciences 46, 152–174. DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2014.06.013.

Rizzi Luigi (1997). The fine structure of the left periphery. In Elements of Grammar, Liliane Haegeman (ed.), 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Scontras Gregory, Degen Judith, Goodman Noah D. (2017). Subjectivity predicts adjective ordering preferences. Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science 1(1), 53–65. DOI: 10.1162/OPMI_a_00005.

Scott Gary-John (2002). Stacked adjectival modification and the structure of nominal phrases. In The Cartography of Syntactic Structures. Vol. 1., Guglielmo Cinque (ed.), 91–120. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schwartz Bennett L., Krantz John H. (2018). Sensation and Perception. (Second Edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publishing.

Sproat Richard, Shih Chilin (1991). The cross-linguistic distribution of adjective ordering restrictions. In Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language: Essays in Honor of S.-Y. Kuroda. Carol Georgopoulos and Roberta Ishihara (eds.), 565–593. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Svenonius Peter (1994). On the structural location of the attributive adjective. In Proceedings of the 12th  West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Eric Duncan, Donka Farkas, and Philip Spaelti (eds.), 439–454. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Teodorescu Alexandra (2006). Adjective ordering restrictions revisited. In Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon (eds.), 399–407. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Toporišič Jože (2000). Slovenska slovnica [Slovenian Grammar]. 4th  edition. Maribor: Obzorja.

Truswell Robert (2009). Attributive adjectives and nominal templates. Linguistic  In- quiry 40(3), 525–533. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.2009.40.3.525.

Vainikka Anne, Young-Scholten Martha (2011). The Acquisition of German: Introduc- ing Organic Grammar. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Information

Information: Studies in Polish Linguistics, Special Volume, Special Volume 1 (2019), pp. 53 - 75

Article type: Original article

Authors

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0667-3236

Franc Lanko Marušič
Center for Cognitive Science of Language and School of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Vipavska 13 SI-5000, Nova Gorica Slovenia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0667-3236 Orcid
All publications →

Center for Cognitive Science of Language and School of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Vipavska 13 SI-5000, Nova Gorica Slovenia

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8659-875X

Petra Mišmaš
Center for Cognitive Science of Language and School of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Vipavska 13 SI-5000, Nova Gorica Slovenia
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8659-875X Orcid
All publications →

Center for Cognitive Science of Language and School of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Vipavska 13 SI-5000, Nova Gorica Slovenia

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7771-6937

Rok Žaucer
Center for Cognitive Science of Language and School of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Vipavska 13 SI-5000, Nova Gorica Slovenia
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7771-6937 Orcid
All publications →

Center for Cognitive Science of Language and School of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Vipavska 13 SI-5000, Nova Gorica Slovenia

Published at: 21.03.2019

Article status: Open

Licence: CC BY-NC-ND  licence icon

Percentage share of authors:

Franc Lanko Marušič (Author) - 33%
Petra Mišmaš (Author) - 33%
Rok Žaucer (Author) - 34%

Article corrections:

-

Publication languages:

English

View count: 1292

Number of downloads: 929

<p>Looking for Cognitive Foundations of Functional Sequences</p>