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Project C3 - Variation of the morphosyntactic reference

PI: Prof. Dr. U. Dohmas & Prof. Dr. C. Spieß
Ph.D. student: Niklas Grüninger

Research Context

The aim of the C3 project is to investigate how the form-meaning mapping of morphosyntactic markers can vary in language processing. One example of such variation is the interpretation of the anaphoric 3rd person possessive pronouns. In German, the 3rd person singular possessive pronoun in principle agrees with the genus of the possessor: (der Bruder - sein Buch, die Schwester - ihr Buch). However, there are repeated cases in which the possessive pronoun sein refers to feminines (e.g., die Sache geht seinen Weg; Duden, 2016, p. 275), which can be interpreted as a gender underspecification of sein. Results from corpus analyses suggest that gender-insensitive sein occurs primarily with inanimata (Fleischer 2022). In addition to animacy, also other factors play a role (Binanzer et al. 2021), such as the discrepancy between grammatical and semantic gender in gender-neutral expressions (die Lehrkraft; Schütze, dissertation), gender stereotypes (Molinario et al. 2016), or the conceptual field of referents in the lexicon (Köpcke & Zubin 2017).

The dissertation will experimentally investigate the variability in the relationship between form and meaning in gender processing, but also in other areas of morphosyntax. Electroencephalography (EEG) will be used to study the implicit processing of gender congruency deviations as a function of unambiguous and neutral gender references. This is a time-dependent method whose response latencies indicate at which processing steps incongruence is detected: at the morphosyntactic level (early components) or at the semantic level (later components). Another experimental approach is eye-tracking, in which the interpretation of presented utterances can be studied via eye movements and the detection of morphosyntactic deviations via pupil dilation.

Current dissertation project

Working title: Variation in the Plural Paradigm of Alemannic Verbs: The Dental Suffix

Hypothesis and Objectives

The objectives of this dissertation are derived from the overarching hypothesis that the dental suffix, which gives rise to variation in the Alemannic (uniform) plural paradigm, does not solely function as an areally restricted morphological plural marker. Instead, it fulfills additional functions, including phonological regulation and pragmatic differentiation between sentence types and verb moods, as well as the marking of speaker-related evaluations.

  1. The primary objective of this dissertation is to test this hypothesis and to identify the potential functional distribution of the dental suffix.
  2. Building on this, the dissertation aims to determine the linguistic factors that govern the occurrence of the dental suffix, to identify functional differences across linguistic contexts, and to work out the resulting implications for different mental representations.
  3. A further objective is to investigate the consequences of a functionally variable verbal paradigm for the language acquisition of dialect-speaking children. Specifically, the study examines how children use the dental suffix in natural language, how its developmental trajectory unfolds over the course of verbal acquisition, and how rule-based systems are acquired.

Methods

To address the various objectives concerning the system of variation and the acquisition of the dental suffix, the dissertation builds on a corpus-based analysis. The first methodological pillar consists of data from the LAVA project (DFG project Language Acquisition across Varieties in the Alemannic Area), which were collected in the context of bilectal language acquisition in children aged two to eight years in Alemannic-speaking regions of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The targeted elicitation tasks on the verbal plural paradigm included in the LAVA data make it possible both to identify age-related regularities and developmental milestones in the acquisition of the verbal paradigm and the dental suffix, and to detect areal-specific tendencies in the acquisition of the dental suffix through cross-national comparisons.

The second basis of the corpus analysis consists of spontaneous parent-child interaction data from the Longitudinalkorpus Eltern-Kind-Interaktion (LEKI; Pfeiffer & Anna 2021). The audiovisual conversational data comprise approximately 130 hours of recordings collected over a period of three years and include repeated recordings of several families. This data structure allows both the extraction of a baseline of normative dental suffix use from adult speech and the modeling of a continuous developmental trajectory in child language acquisition. To complement the analyses of functional distribution and the linguistic factors underlying variation, additional free recordings and interviews with adult speakers of Alemannic are planned. For the statistical analysis of the data, the project combines generalized additive models and Bayesian models with approaches from naive and linear discriminative learning (Chuang & Baayen 2021; Plag et al. 2024), in order to model the relative weighting of different factors contributing to the potential functional distribution of the dental suffix.

State of Research

The current state of research on the areal distribution of the dental suffix and the verbal paradigm across Alemannic varieties is primarily informed by the work of Tobias Streck (2019) and Oliver Schallert (2023). Morphological language change affecting the dental suffix, as well as other morphological change processes and their regularities, are addressed in Stefan Rabanus’ Morphologisches Minimum (2008). A wide range of phonological and morphological Alemannic phenomena, regularities, and restrictions have been extensively described by Damaris Nübling (1993, 1995, 2004). Finally, the theoretical link between morphology and phonology is established with reference to Paul Kiparsky’s Lexical Morphology and Phonology (1982).

  • Chuang, Yu-Ying und Harald Baayen (2021): Discriminative Learning and the Lexicon: NDL and LDL. In:  Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Kiparsky, Paul (1982): Lexical Morphology and Phonology. 
  • Nübling, Damaris (1993): Synthesetendenzen im Alemannischen: Die Klitisierung von Artikel und Personalpronomen. In: Schupp, Volker (Hrsg.): Alemannisch in der Regio. Beiträge zur 10. Arbeitstagung alemannischer Dialektologen in Freiburg/Breisgau 1990. Göppingen. 97–112.
  • Nübling, Damaris (1995): Kurzverben in germanischen Sprachen: Unterschiedliche Wege – gleiche Ziele. In: Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 62/2, 127–154.
  • Nübling, Damaris und Renate Schrambke (2004): Silben- versus akzentsprachliche Züge in germanischen Sprachen und im Alemannischen. In: Glaser, Elvira, Peter Ott und Rudolf Schwarzenbach (Hrsg.): Alemannisch im Sprachvergleich. Beiträge zur 14. Arbeitstagung für alemannische Dialektologie in Männedorf (Zürich) vom 16.–18.9.2002. 281–320.
  • Pfeiffer, Martin und Marina Anna (2021): Longitudinalkorpus Eltern-Kind-Interaktion (LEKI). Universität Potsdam. 
  • Plag, Ingo, Frank Domahs und Maria Heitmeier (2024): Morpho-phonology is not independent of semantics: The case of German nominal number marking.
  • Rabanus, Stefan (2008): Morphologisches Minimum: Distinktionen und Synkretismen im Minimalsatz hochdeutscher Dialekte. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
  • Schallert, Oliver (2023): Morphologie des Vorarlberger Alemannischen: eine Übersicht. In: Montfort 75/1, 101–121.
  • Streck, Tobias (2019): Alemannisch in Deutschland. In: Herrgen, Joachim und Jürgen Erich Schmidt (Hrsg.): Sprache und Raum: Ein internationales Handbuch der Sprachvariation. Band 4: Deutsch. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 206–245.

Links to Other Projects

The project is closely related to projects C1 and C2, which focus on regiolect boundaries and morphological language change. In addition, there are strong connections to the B projects, which likewise address issues of language acquisition.

References

Binanzer, A., Gamper, J., & Wecker, V. (2021). Prototypen – Schemata – Konstruktionen: Untersuchungen zur deutschen Morphologie und Syntax, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.

Fleischer, J. (2022): „Qualität hat seinen Preis“: Genus-insensitives ‚sein‘ im Gegenwartsdeutschen. Linguistische Berichte 271. 251–288. 

Köpcke, K.-M. & Zubin, D. (2017). Genusvariation: Was offenbart sie über die innere Dynamik des Systems?. In Konopka, M. & Wöllstein, A. (Hrgg.). Grammatische Variation: Empirische Zugänge und theoretische Modellierung (pp. 203-228). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.

Molinaro, N., Su, J. J. & M. Carreiras (2016): Stereotypes override grammar: Social knowledge in sentence comprehension. Brain and Language 155. 36–43.

Schütze, C. (in Vorbereitung). Dissertation, GRK 2700.