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ROA:467
Title:The effect of feature hierarchies on frequencies of passivization in English.
Authors:Shipra Dingare
Comment:
Length:81
Abstract:Prominence hierarchies along various dimensions have been posited to play
a role in various syntactic phenomena in diverse languages. In this
thesis I examine two particular hierarchies - the hierarchies of person
and definiteness - and explore their effects not on the grammaticality but
on the frequency of passivization in English. It will be demonstrated
that these hierarchies have significant effects on the choice between
active and passive in English, supporting the speculation that their
influence is felt not only in certain phenomena in a few languages, but in
all languages. These effects will be formalized and modeled using the
harmonic alignment technique described in Aissen (1999,2000) and the
stochastic OT framework of Boersma and Hayes (2001).

That a hierarchy of definiteness has effects on syntax has been evidenced
by phenomena in a number of languages, including differential object
marking, split ergativity, and subject and object selection. While the
hierarchy has taken different forms from account to account, it has
generally been motivated either in terms of the greater ease of processing
of elements higher on the hierarchy or the greater likelihood of these
elements to be topical or to represent old information. In the theory of
Aissen (2000), the interaction of the definiteness hierarchy with syntax
is formalized in the OT framework by using the technique of harmonic
alignment to produce constraint subhierarchies in which elements higher on
the definiteness hierarchy are less marked than lower elements as subjects
but more marked as non-subjects. When interpreted in the stochastic OT
framework, these constraints yield systematic predictions for differences
in frequency of passivization given inputs containing agent and patient
arguments of varying definiteness. It is shown here that these frequency
gradation predictions are confirmed by the results of a study of the
frequency of passivization in the Wall Street Journal subcorpus of the
Penn Treebank (Marcus et al 1993).

In the third chapter I turn to the hierarchy of person. As with the
definiteness hierarchy, the hierarchy of person has been shown to have
categorical effects on phenomena in a number of languages, and these
effects have been attributed, among other things, to the greater ease of
processing or to the higher topicality of elements higher on the person
hierarchy. In particular, the hierarchy of person has been shown to have
categorical effects on passivization in languages such as Lummi, where
passive is obligatory when the agent is first person and the patient third
person. In work also presented in Bresnan et al (2001), it is
demonstrated here that these effects of the person hierarchy on the choice
between active and passive are paralleled in English by increases and
decreases in the relative frequency of passivization for these inputs in
the Switchboard subcorpus of the Penn Treebank.

The effects of feature hierarchies on frequencies of passivization in
English as demonstrated here simultaneously support the relevance of
constraints referencing feature hierarchies to all languages as well as
the idea that frequencies, like grammars, are principled, and are a valid
domain for seeking cross-linguistic generalizations.
Type:Paper/tech report
Area/Keywords:Syntax
Article:Version 1