Abstract
How do speakers know when they can use language creatively and when they cannot? Prior research indicates that higher frequency verbs are more resistant to overgeneralization than lower frequency verbs with similar meaning and argument structure constraints. This result has been interpreted as evidence for conservatism via entrenchment, which proposes that people prefer to use verbs in ways they have heard before, with the strength of dispreference for novel uses increasing with overall verb frequency. This paper investigates whether verb frequency is actually always relevant in judging the acceptability of novel sentences or whether it only matters when there is a readily available alternative way to express the intended message with the chosen verb, as is predicted by statistical preemption. Two experiments are reported in which participants rated novel uses of high and low frequency verbs in argument structure constructions in which those verbs do not normally appear. Separate norming studies were used to divide the sentences into those with and without an agreed-upon preferred alternative phrasing which would compete with the novel use for acceptability. Experiment 2 controls for construction type: all target stimuli are instances of the caused-motion construction. In both experiments, we replicate the stronger dispreference for a novel use with a high frequency verb relative to its lower frequency counterpart, but only for those sentences for which there exists a competing alternative phrasing. When there is no consensus about a preferred way to phrase a sentence, verb frequency is not a predictive factor in sentences’ ratings. We interpret this to mean that while speakers prefer familiar formulations to novel ones, they are willing to extend verbs creatively if there is no readily available alternative way to express the intended meaning.
Online Appendix
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Jessica Hao and Laura K. Suttle for their assistance with paraphrase coding, and Ewa Dąbrowska, John Newman, and two anonymous reviewers of an earlier version of this paper for helpful and constructive feedback. Laura K. Suttle also provided valuable statistical help. We are also grateful for funding from the Einstein Foundation in Berlin to AEG.
References
Allopenna, P. D., J. S.Magnuson & M. K.Tanenhaus.1998. Tracking the time course of spoken word recognition using eye movements: Evidence for continuous mapping models. Journal of Memory and Language38. 419–439.10.1006/jmla.1997.2558Search in Google Scholar
Ambridge, B. & S.Brandt.2013. Lisa filled water into the cup : The roles of entrenchment, preemption and verb semantics in German speakers’ L2 acquisition of English locatives. ZAA6(3). 245–263.Search in Google Scholar
Ambridge, B., J. M.Pine, C. F.Rowland, & C. R.Young.2008. The effect of verb semantic class and verb frequency (entrenchment) on children’s and adults’ graded judgments of argument-structure overgeneralization errors. Cognition106. 87–129.10.1016/j.cognition.2006.12.015Search in Google Scholar
Ambridge, B., J. M.Pine & C. F.Rowland2012a. Semantics versus statistics in the retreat from locative overgeneralization errors. Cognition123(2). 260–79.10.1016/j.cognition.2012.01.002Search in Google Scholar
Ambridge, B., J. M.Pine, C. F.Rowland & F.Chang.2012b. The roles of verb semantics, entrenchment and morphophonology in the retreat from dative argument structure overgeneralization errors. Language88(1). 45–81.Search in Google Scholar
Amridge, B., J. M.Pine, C. F.Rowland, D.Freudenthal & F.Chang.2014. Avoiding dative overgeneralisation errors: Semantics, statistics or both?Language and Cognitive Processes29(2). 218–243.Search in Google Scholar
ArnoldJ. E., T.Wasow, A.Losongco & R.Ginstrom.2000. Heaviness vs. newness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering. Language76. 28–55.10.1353/lan.2000.0045Search in Google Scholar
Aronoff, M.1976. Word formation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Baker, C. L.1979. Syntactic theory and the projection problem. Linguistic Inquiry10(4). 533–581.Search in Google Scholar
Barr, D. J., R.Levy, C.Scheepers & H. J.Tily.2013. Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language68. 255–278.10.1016/j.jml.2012.11.001Search in Google Scholar
Bates, E. & B.MacWhinney.1987. Competition, variation, and language learning. In B.MacWhinney (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition, 157–193. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Search in Google Scholar
Bley-Vroman, R. & H. R.Joo.2001. The acquisition and interpretation of English locative constructions by native speakers of Korean. Studies in Second Language Acquisition23(2). 207–219.10.1017/S0272263101002042Search in Google Scholar
Bornstein, R. F. & P. R.D’Agostino.1992. Stimulus recognition and the mere exposure effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology63. 545–545.10.1037/0022-3514.63.4.545Search in Google Scholar
Bowerman, M.1988. The “no negative evidence” problem: How do children avoid constructing an overly general grammar? In J. A.Hawkins (ed.), Explaining language universals, 73–101. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Bowerman, M.1996. Argument structure and learnability: Is a solution in sight? In J.Johnson, M. L.Juge & J. L.Moxley (eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 16–19, 1996. General Session and Parasession on The Role of Learnability in Grammatical Theory, 454–468. Berkeley Linguistics Society.10.3765/bls.v22i1.1322Search in Google Scholar
Boyd, J. K. & Adele E.Goldberg.2011. Learning what not to say: The role of statistical preemption and categorization in a-adjective production. Language87(1). 55–83.10.1353/lan.2011.0012Search in Google Scholar
Boyd, J. K., F.Ackerman & M.Kutas.2012. Adult learners use both entrenchment and preemption to infer grammatical constraints. IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL), 2012, 1–2.Search in Google Scholar
Braine, M. D.1971. On two types of models of the internalization of grammars. In Dan I.Slobin (ed.), The ontogenesis of grammar: A theoretical symposium. New York, NY: Academic Press.Search in Google Scholar
Braine, M. D. S. & P. J.Brooks.1995. Verb argument structure and the problem of avoiding an overgeneral grammar. In M.Tomasello & W. E.Merriman (eds.), Beyond names for things: Young children’s acquisition of verbs, 353–376. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Search in Google Scholar
Bresnan, J., A.Cueni, T.Nikitina & R. H.Baayen.2007. Predicting the dative alternation. In G.Boume, I.Kraemer & J.Zwarts (eds.), Cognitive foundations of interpretation, 69–94. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Science.Search in Google Scholar
Brooks, P. & M.Tomasello.1999. How children constrain their argument structure constructions. Language75. 720–738.10.2307/417731Search in Google Scholar
Brooks, P. J. & O.Zizak.2002. Does preemption help children learn verb transitivity?Journal of Child Language29. 759–781.10.1017/S0305000902005287Search in Google Scholar
Brooks, P. J., M, Tomasello, K.Dodson & L. B.Lewis.1999. Young children’s overgeneralizations with fixed transitivity verbs. Child Development70(6). 1325–1337.10.1111/1467-8624.00097Search in Google Scholar
Brown, R. & C.Hanlon.1970. Derivational complexity and order of acquisition in child speech. In J. R.Hayes (ed.), Cognition and the development of language. New York, NY: Wiley.Search in Google Scholar
Chouinard, M. M. & E. V.Clark.2003. Adult reformulations of child errors as negative evidence. Journal of Child Language30(3). 637–669.10.1017/S0305000903005701Search in Google Scholar
Clark, E.1987. The principle of contrast: A constraint on language acquisition. In B.MacWhinney (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition, 1–33. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Search in Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. & H. H.Clark.1979. When nouns surface as verbs. Language55(4). 767–811.10.2307/412745Search in Google Scholar
Collins, P.1995. The indirect object construction in English: An informational approach. Linguistics33. 35–49.10.1515/ling.1995.33.1.35Search in Google Scholar
Davies, M.2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 400+ million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://www.americancorpus.org.Search in Google Scholar
DeLong, K., M.Troyer & M.Kutas.2014. Pre-Processing in sentence comprehension: Sensitivity to likely upcoming meaning and structure. Language and Linguistics Compass8(12). 631–645. doi:10.1111/lnc3.12093.Search in Google Scholar
Di Sciullo, A. M. & E.Williams.1987. On the definition of word. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Elman, J. L.2004. An alternative view of the mental lexicon. Trends in Cognitive Sciences8(7). 301–306.10.1016/j.tics.2004.05.003Search in Google Scholar
Erteschik-Shir, N.1979. Discourse constraints on dative movement. In T.Givón (ed.), Syntax and semantics 12: Discourse and syntax, 441–467. New York, NY: Academic Press.10.1163/9789004368897_019Search in Google Scholar
Foraker, S., T.Regier, N.Khetarpal, A.Perfors, & J. B.Tenenbaum.2007. Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus: The case of anaphoric one. In D. S.McNamara & J. G.Trafton (eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Cognitive Science Society, 275–80. New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Search in Google Scholar
Gennari, S. P. & M. C.Macdonald.2008. Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses. Journal of Memory and Language58(4). 161–187.10.1016/j.jml.2007.07.004Search in Google Scholar
Gibson, E., L.Bergen & S. T.Piantadosi.2013. Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences110(20). 8051–8056.10.1073/pnas.1216438110Search in Google Scholar
Glenberg, A. M. & V.Gallese.2012. Action-based language: A theory of language acquisition, comprehension, and production. Cortex48, 905–922.10.1016/j.cortex.2011.04.010Search in Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E.1993. Another look at some learnability paradoxes. In E. V.Clark (ed.), The Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Child Language Research Forum, 60–75. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.Search in Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E.1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E.2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268511.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E.2011. Corpus evidence of the viability of statistical preemption. Cognitive Linguistics22, 131–153.Search in Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E., D. M.Casenhiser & N.Sethuraman.2005. The role of prediction in construction-learning. Journal of Child Language32(2). 407–426.10.1017/S0305000904006798Search in Google Scholar
Green, G. M.1974. Semantics and syntactic regularity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Gropen, J., S.Pinker, M.Hollander, R.Goldberg & R.Wilson.1989. The learnability and acquisition of the dative alternation in English. Language65(2). 203–257.10.2307/415332Search in Google Scholar
Gropen, J., P.Steven, M.Hollander & R.Goldberg.1991. Syntax and semantics in the aquisition of locative verbs. Journal of Child Language18(1). 115–151.10.1017/S0305000900013325Search in Google Scholar
Hovav, M. R. & B.Levin.2008. The English dative alternation: The case for verb sensitivity. Journal of Linguistics44, 129–167.Search in Google Scholar
Jaeger, T.Florian & Neal E.Snider.2013. Alignment as a consequence of expectation adaptation: Syntactic priming is affected by the prime’s prediction error given both prior and recent experience. Cognition127(1). 57–83.10.1016/j.cognition.2012.10.013Search in Google Scholar
Johnson, M. A. & Adele E.Goldberg.2013. Evidence for automatic accessing of constructional meaning: Jabberwocky sentences prime associated verbs. Language and Cognitive Processes28(10). 1439–1452.10.1080/01690965.2012.717632Search in Google Scholar
Johnson, Matt A., Nicholas B.Turk-Browne & Adele E.Goldberg.2013. Prediction plays a key role in language development as well as processing. Behavioral and Brain Sciences36(4). 360–361.10.1017/S0140525X12002609Search in Google Scholar
Kamide, Y., G.Altmann & S. L.Haywood.2003. The time-course of prediction in incremental sentence processing: Evidence from anticipatory eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language49(1). 133–156.10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00023-8Search in Google Scholar
King, J. W. & M.Kutas.1995. A brain potential whose latency indexes the length and frequency of words. CRL Newsletter10(2). 1–9.Search in Google Scholar
Kiparsky, P.1982. Lexical morphology and phonology. In S.Yang (ed), Linguistics in the Morning Calm: Selected Papers from SICOL-1981, 3–91. Seoul: Hanshin.Search in Google Scholar
Kutas, M. & S. A.Hillyard.1984. Brain potentials during reading reflect word expectancy and semantic association. Nature307. 161–163.10.1038/307161a0Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George.1970. Irregularity in syntax. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart &Winston.Search in Google Scholar
Levin, Beth.1993. English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary investigation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Levy, R., E.Fedorenko, M.Breen & E.Gibson.2012. The processing of extraposed structures in English. Cognition122(1). 12–36.10.1016/j.cognition.2011.07.012Search in Google Scholar
Lew-Williams, C. & A.Fernald.2007. Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science18(3). 193–198.10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01871.xSearch in Google Scholar
Marcotte, J.2005. Causative alternation errors as event-driven construction paradigm completions. In E. V.Clark & B. F.Kelly (eds.), Constructions in Acquisition. Stanford, CA:Center for the Study of Language and Information.Search in Google Scholar
Marcus, G. F.1993. Negative evidence in language acquisition. Cognition46. 53–85.10.1016/0010-0277(93)90022-NSearch in Google Scholar
Oehrle, R. T.1976. The grammatical status of the English dative alternation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W.1973. Linguistic structure and speech shadowing at very short latencies. Nature244(5417). 522–523.10.1038/244522a0Search in Google Scholar
Pickering, M. J. & S.Garrod.2004. Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences27(2). 169–225.10.1017/S0140525X04000056Search in Google Scholar
Pickering, M. J. & S.Garrod.2007. Do people use language production to make predictions during comprehension?Trends in Cognitive Sciences11(3). 105–110.10.1016/j.tics.2006.12.002Search in Google Scholar
Pickering, M. J. & S.Garrod.2013. An integrated theory of language production and comprehension. Behavioral and Brain Sciences36(4). 329–347.10.1017/S0140525X12001495Search in Google Scholar
Pinker, S.1981. Comments. In C. L.Baker & J. J.McCarthy (eds.), The logical problem of language acquisition, 53–63. Cambridge, MA: MIT PressSearch in Google Scholar
Pinker, S.1989. Learnability and cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Rainer, F.1988. Towards a theory of blocking: The case of Italian and German quality nouns. In Geert E.Booij & JaapVan Marle (eds.), Yearbook of morphology1, 155–185. Dordrecht: Foris.10.1515/9783112329528-010Search in Google Scholar
Robenalt, C. & Adele E.Goldberg. To appear. L2 learners do not take competing alternative expressions into account the way L1 learners do. Language Learning.Search in Google Scholar
Saxton, M., B.Kulcsar, G.Marshall, & M.Rupra.1998. Longer-term effects of corrective input: An experimental approach. Journal of Child Language25. 701–721.10.1017/S0305000998003559Search in Google Scholar
Stephens, Greg J., Lauren J.Silbert & UriHasson. 2010. Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences107(32). 14425–14430.10.1073/pnas.1008662107Search in Google Scholar
Tanenhaus, M. K., M. J.Spivey-Knowlton, K. M.Eberhard & J. C.Sedivy.1995. Integration of visual and linguistic Information in spoken language comprehension. Science268(5217). 1632–1634.10.1126/science.7777863Search in Google Scholar
Theakston, A. L.2004. The role of entrenchment in children’s and adults’ performance on grammaticality judgment tasks. Cognitive Development19. 15–34.10.1016/j.cogdev.2003.08.001Search in Google Scholar
Thompson, S. A.1995. The iconicity of “dative shift” in English: Considerations from information flow in discourse. In M. E.Landsberg (ed.), Syntactic iconicity and linguistic freezes: The human dimension, 155–75. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110882926.155Search in Google Scholar
Tomasello, M.2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Traxler, M. J., D. J.Foss, R. E.Seely, B.Kaup & R. K.Morris.2000. Priming in sentence processing: Intralexical spreading activation, schemas, and situation models. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research29(6). 581–594.Search in Google Scholar
Wasow, T.2002. Postverbal behavior. Stanford, CA: Center for Study of Language and Information.Search in Google Scholar
©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
