Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Home
  • Home
Hostname: page-component-78dcdb465f-w78fb Total loading time: 0.307 Render date: 2021-04-19T07:15:53.875Z Has data issue: true Feature Flags: { "shouldUseShareProductTool": true, "shouldUseHypothesis": true, "isUnsiloEnabled": true, "metricsAbstractViews": false, "figures": false, "newCiteModal": false, "newCitedByModal": true }
EnglishFrançais
Language Variation and Change Language Variation and Change

Article contents

Discourse motivations for pronominal and zero objects across registers in Vera'a

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2018

Stefan Schnell  and
Danielle Barth
Stefan Schnell
Affiliation:
The University of Melbourne and Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
Danielle Barth
Affiliation:
Australian National University and Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
Get access
Rights & Permissions[Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The choice between pronominal and zero form for objects in the Oceanic language Vera'a is investigated quantitatively in texts from two registers with discourse topics of three different ontological class memberships. Discourse topicality is found to predict best the choice between pronoun and zero, outranking the factors of ontological class membership, antecedent form, and antecedent function. Contrary to current models of referent tracking, antecedent distance does not show any effect at all. It is concluded that (a) discourse structure and activation are not universally the most significant factors in referential choice and (b) ontological class and discourse topicality can be teased apart through appropriate text sampling, and it is the latter that is most significant. This bears important implications for the grammaticalization of object agreement and the typology of differential object marking.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 51 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below.
If you should have access and can't see this content please contact technical support.

References

Aissen, Judith. (2003). Differential object marking: Iconicity versus economy. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 21(3):435–483.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Akaike, Hirotogu. (1973). Information theory and an extension of the maximum likelihood principle. In Petrov, B. N. & Cáski, F. (eds.), Second International Symposium on Information Theory. Budapest: Akademiai Kaidó. 267–281.Google Scholar
Anderson, Stephen. (1992). A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ariel, Mira. (1988). Referring and accessibility. Journal of Linguistics 24(1):65–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ariel, Mira. (1990). Accessing noun-phrase antecedents. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ariel, Mira. (2000). The development of person agreement markers: From pronouns to higher accessibility markers. In Barlow, M. & Kemmer, S. (eds.), Usage-based models of language. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 197–260.Google Scholar
Ariel, Mira. (2008). Pragmatics and grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barth, Danielle, & Kapatsinski, Vsevolod. (2017). A multimodal inference approach to categorical variant choice: Construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 13(2):1–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Maechler, Martin, Bolker, Ben & Walker, Steve. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1):1–48. doi:10.18637/jss.v067.i01.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, & Conrad, Susan. (2009). Register, genre, and style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bickel, Balthasar. (2003). Referential density in discourse and syntactic typology. Language 79:708–736.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bickel, Balthasar, & Nichols, Joanna. (2007). Inflectional morphology. In Shopen, T. (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description. Vol. 3. Grammatical categories and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 169–240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burnham, Kenneth P., & Anderson, David R. (2002). Model selection and multimodel inference: A practical information-theoretic approach. 2nd ed. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Cameron, Richard, & Flores-Ferrán, Nydia. (2004). Perseveration of subject expression across regional dialects of Spanish. Spanish in Context 1:41–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chafe, Wallace. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In Li, C. N. (ed.), Subjects and topics. New York: Academic Press. 25–56.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace. (1994). Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Chung, Sandra. (1984). Identifiability and null objects in Chamorro. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkley Linguistic Society 10:116–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clancy, Patricia M. (1980). Referential choice in English and Japanese discourse. In Chafe, W. (ed.), The Pear stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production. Norwood: ABLEX Publishing. 127–202.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology. 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard, Haspelmath, Martin, & Bickel, Balthasar. (2015). The Leipzig glossing rules: Conventions for interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses. Leipzig: Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.Google Scholar
Corbett, Greville C. (2003). Agreement: Canonical instances and the extent of the phenomenon. In Booij, G., DeCesaris, J., Ralli, A., & Scalise, S. (eds.), Topics in morphology: Selected papers from the Third Mediterranean Morphology Meeting (Barcelona, Sep 20–22, 2001). Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra. 109–128.Google Scholar
Dalrymple, Mary, & Nikolaeva, Irina. (2011). Objects and information structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dowty, David. (1982). Grammatical relations and Montague grammar. In Jackson, P. & Pullum, G. K. (eds.), The nature of syntactic representation. Reidel: Dordrecht. 79–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DuBois, John W. (1987). The discourse basis of ergativity. Language 63:805–855. doi: 10.2307/415719.Google Scholar
Genetti, Carol, & Crain, Laura D. (2003). Beyond preferred argument structure: Sentences, pronouns and given referents in Nepali. In Du Bois, J. W., Kumpf, L. E., & Ashby, William J. (eds.), Preferred argument structure: Grammar as architecture for function. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 197–223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy. (1976). Topic, pronoun, and grammatical agreement. In Li, C. N. (ed.), Subjects and topics. New York: Academic Press. 149–188.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. (1983a). Topic continuity in discourse: An introduction. In Givón, T. (ed.), Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-language study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy. (ed.) (1983b). Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-language study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy. (ed.) (1998). The functional approach to language. In Tomasello, M. (ed.), The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to language structure. Hillsdale: Erlbaum. 38–62.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. (2013). Argument indexing: A conceptual framework for the syntactic status of bound person forms. In Bakker, D. & Haspelmath, M. (eds.), Language across boundaries: Studies in memory of Anna Siewierska. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 197–226.Google Scholar
Hothorn, Torsten, Buehlmann, Peter, Dudoit, Sandrine, Molinaro, Annette, & Van Der Laan, Mark. (2006). Survival ensembles. Biostatistcs 7(3):355–373.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hothorn, Torsten, & Zeileis, Achim. (2015). partykit: A modular toolkit for recursive partytioning in R. Journal of Machine Learning Research 16:3905–3909.Google Scholar
Huang, C.-T. James. (1984). On the distribution and reference of empty pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 15:531–574.Google Scholar
Huang, Yan. (1994). The syntax and pragmatics of anaphora: A study with special reference to Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huang, Yan. (2000). Anaphora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Iemmolo, Giorgio. (2010). Topicality and differential object marking: Evidence from Romance and beyond. Studies in Language 34:239–272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iemmolo, Giorgio, & Klumpp, Gerson. (2014). Introduction. In Iemmolo, G. & Klumpp, G. (eds.), Differential object marking: Theoretical and empirical issues. Special issue, Journal of Linguistics 52(2):271–279.Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred. (2008). Basic notion of information structure. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 55(3–4):243–276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuznetsova, Alexandra. (2014). lmerTest: Tests in linear mixed effects models. Version 2.0-20. Package for R. Available at: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lmerTest/index.html. Accessed January 15, 2015.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. (1994). Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lichtenberk, František. (1996). Patterns of anaphora in To'aba'ita narrative discourse. In Fox, B. (ed.), Patterns of anaphora. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 381–411.Google Scholar
Malau, Catriona. (2016). A grammar of Vurës, Vanuatu. Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meyerhoff, Miriam. (2002). Formal and cultural constraints on optional objects in Bislama. Language Variation and Change 14:323–346.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neeleman, Ad, & Szendröi, Kriszta. (2007). Radical pro drop and the morphology of pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 38(4):671–714.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nichols, Joanna. (1985). The grammatical marking of theme in literary Russian. In Flier, M. S. & Brecht, R. D. (eds.), Issues in Russian morphosyntax. Columbus: Slavica Publishers. 170–186.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana. (1980). The notion of the plural in Puerto Rican Spanish: Competing constraints on /s/ deletion. In Labov, W. (ed.), Locating language in time and space. New York: Academic Press. 55–67.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen. (1981). Towards a new taxonomy of given and new. In Cole, P. (ed.), Radical pragmatics. New York: Academic Press. 223–255.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen. (1992). The ZPG letter: Subjects, definiteness, and information status. In Thomson, S. A. & Mann, W. C. (eds.), Discourse description: Diverse linguistic analyses of a fund raising text. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 295–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team. (2015). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at: https://www.R-project.org/. Accessed July 20, 2015.Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. (1986). Null objects in Italian and the theory of pro. Linguistic Inquiry 17:501–557.Google Scholar
Scherre, Maria M. P., & Naro, Anthony J. (1991). Marking in discourse: “Birds of a feather”. Language Variation and Change 3(1):23–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schnell, Stefan. (2011). A grammar of Vera'a. Kiel: Kiel University.Google Scholar
Schnell, Stefan. (in press). Whence subject-verb agreement? Investigating the role of topicality, accessibility, and frequency in Vera'a texts. Linguistics 56(4).Google Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A. (2006). Two kinds of differential object marking in Portuguese and Spanish. In Amaral, P. & Carvalho, A. M. (eds.), Portuguese-Spanish interfaces: Diachrony, synchrony, and contact. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 238–260.Google Scholar
Schwenter, Scott A. (2014). Null objects across South America. In Face, T. L. & Klee, C. A. (eds.), Selected proceedings of the 8th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Somerville: Cascadila Proceedings Project. 23–36.Google Scholar
Siewierska, Anna. (2004). Person. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strobl, Carolin, Boulesteix, Anne-Laure, Kneib, Thomas, Augustin, Thomas, & Zeileis, Achim. (2008). Conditional variable importance for random forests. BMC Bioinfomatics 9:307. Available at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/9/307. Accessed November 12, 2012.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Strobl, Carolin, Boulesteix, Anne-Laure, Zeileis, Achim, & Hothorn, Torsten. (2007). Bias in random forest variable importance measures: Illustrations, sources and a solution. BMC Bioinformatics 8:25. Available at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/8/25. Accessed November 12, 2012.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Strobl, Carolin, Malley, James, & Tutz, Gerhard. (2009). An introduction to recursive partitioning: Rationale, application, and characteristics of classification and regression trees, bagging, and random forests. Psychological Methods 14(4):323–348.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tagliamonte, Sali A., & Baayen, R. Harald. (2012). Models, forests, and trees of York English: Was/were variation as a case study for statistical practice. Language Variation and Change 24(2):135–178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, R. & Travis, Catherine E. (2013). Prosody, priming and particular constructions: The patterning of English first-person singular subject expression in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 63:19–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Travis, Catherine E. (2007). Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change 19:101–135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Full text views

Full text views reflects PDF downloads, PDFs sent to Google Drive, Dropbox and Kindle and HTML full text views.

Total number of HTML views: 38
Total number of PDF views: 208 *
View data table for this chart

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between 22nd May 2018 - 19th April 2021. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

8
Cited by

Send article to Kindle

To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle.

Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Discourse motivations for pronominal and zero objects across registers in Vera'a
Available formats
×

Send article to Dropbox

To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox.

Discourse motivations for pronominal and zero objects across registers in Vera'a
Available formats
×

Send article to Google Drive

To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive.

Discourse motivations for pronominal and zero objects across registers in Vera'a
Available formats
×
×

Reply to: Submit a response

Your details

Conflicting interests

Do you have any conflicting interests? *