Priming as a driving force in grammaticalization:

on the track of unidirectionality

Gerhard Jäger University of Bielefeld,

gerhard.jaeger@uni-bielefeld.de

Anette Rosenbach University of Düsseldorf,

ar@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de

Unidirectionality of grammaticalization

processes

• controversial issue (see e.g. special issue of Language Sciences 23; Newmeyer 1998; Lass 2000; Haspelmath 2004)

• consensus: most grammaticalization processes cannot be reversed

• Why should that be so?

Possible reasons for unidirectionality

pro unidirectionality:• Haspelmath (1999)

– maxim of extravagance (Keller 1994) as a driving force in grammaticalization; lack of degrammaticalization is due to lack of a counteracting principle of ‚anti-extravagance‘

contra unidirectionality:• Janda (2001)

– unidirectionality (as a diachronic constraint) cannot exist in the light of the individual speaker, because current speakers have no awareness of a language‘s history – pathways are therefore always, in principle, reversable for speakers

Usage-based account of unidirectionality – our

proposal

• psycholinguistic mechanism of ‚priming‘

Organization of talk

1. Introduction

2. Priming

3. Two case studies1. Space > time (Boroditsky 2000)

2. Phonological reduction (Shields & Balota 1991)

4. A usage-based account of directional change (based on priming)

5. Conclusion

2. Priming• tendency of speakers to re-use previously

mentioned/heard linguistic items • phenomenon may be operating on:

– discourse-functional level ‚parallelism, ‚repetition‘ (cf. e.g. Tannen 1987)

– cognitive/ psycholinguistic level ‚priming‘

(cf. e.g. Bock 1986; Bock & Loebell 1990; Pickering & Branigan 1999; Zwitserlood 1996)

Priming as a psycholinguistic

mechanism• priming = pre-activation

– processing of a stimulus linguistic unit (‚prime‘) influences (usually facilitates) the processing of the same or a similar linguistic unit (‚target‘)

• prime identical with target: repetition (‚direct‘) priming• prime similar to target: associative (‚indirect‘) priming

• operates – on all linguistic levels: phonological, semantic, lexical,

morphological, syntactic priming– in language production (e.g. Bock 1986)– in language comprehension (e.g. Luka & Barsalou 2005)– in dialogue (Pickering & Garrod)

Priming: examples repetition priming

(a) At what time does your shop close? at six

(b) What time does your shop close?

six

(Levelt & Kelter 1982)

Priming: examplesassociative priming: e.g. picture naming task (Flores d‘Arcais & Schreuder 1987)

• violin easier to name after semantically related prime guitar than after unrelated prime chair

primes doesn‘t

prime

Priming: examples ‚contextual priming‘*

prime: tip of the ...

target: tongue

(*our term; specific case of syntactic priming: words with high contextual probability are easier to process (Howes 1951, Boland 1997, McDonald et al 2001, inter alia)

3. Case studies

3.1 From space to time3.2 Phonological reduction

3. 1 Case study I: from space to time

space-time correspondences in language:

space time

from London to Paris from Monday to Friday

in England in January, in time of war

at the door at noon

The king rode before the army

before the battle started

They are a mile behind us They are an hour behind us

from Deutscher (2005:134)

Space > time

• presumably universal grammaticalization pathway from space to time

• unidirectional: – space > time– but not: time > space

see e.g. Heine et al. (1991) Haspelmath (1997)

Heine & Kuteva (2002), Hopper & Traugott (2003:85)

Boroditsky (2000)

space > time:

evidence from experimental priming studies:

In how far can spatial expressions prime temporal

expressions, and vice versa?

Temporal metaphor

(from Boroditsky 2000:5)

We are coming up on Christmas.

Christmas is coming up.

time-moving metaphor

• 2 dominant spatial metaphors to sequence events in time (cf. e.g. Clark 1973)

ego-moving metaphor

Spatial metaphor

(from Boroditsky 2000: 6)

ego-moving metaphor

object-moving metaphor

Boroditsky (2000): experiment 1Can space prime time?

• primes (spatial scenarios consisting of picture and a sentence description):

– ego-moving spatial: e.g. The dark can is in front of me.– object-moving spatial: e.g. The light widget is in front of the dark

widget.• targets: ambiguous temporal sentences, e.g.

Next Wednesday‘s meeting has been moved forward two days.• results:

after ego-moving spatial prime: 73.3% ego-moving temporal interpretation (i.e. meeting is on Friday)after object-moving spatial prime: 69.2% time-moving temporal interpretation (i.e. meeting is on Monday)

space can prime time !

Boroditsky (2000): experiment 2Can time also prime space?

• 4 primes – spatial:

• ego-moving: e.g. The flower is in front of me.• object-moving: e.g. The hat-box is in front of the Kleenex.

– temporal:• ego-moving: e.g. On Thursday, Saturday is before us.• time-moving: e.g. Thursday comes before Saturday.

• 2 targets:– ambiguous time questions: e.g. Next Wednesday‘s meeting has

been moved forward two days.)– ambiguous space questions: e.g. Which one of these widgets is

ahead ?

Boroditsky (2000): results from experiment 2

(from Boroditsky 2000: 14)

Boroditsky (2000:22)

„Apparently, space and time can share structural relational information on-line, but this sharing is asymmetric; spatial schemas can be used to think about time, but temporal schemas cannot be used to think about space.“

3.2 Case study II: phonological reduction

Phonological reduction in grammaticalization

• phoneme reductionahg brenjan > nhg brennen

• phoneme deletionlet us > lets

Phonological reduction

„In the process of phonological attrition and selection […], we can identify two tendencies:

• A quantitative („syntagmatic“) reduction: forms become shorter as the phonemes that comprise them erode.

• A qualitative („paradigmatic“) reduction: the remaining phonological segments in the form are drawn from a progressively shrinking set.“

Hopper & Traugott (2003: 154)

Priming and phonological reduction

• Shields and Balota (1991):– experimental study of repetition on

• word length• amplitude

– results:• both repetition and associative priming lead to

shortening• repetition priming also leads to reduced

amplitude

Shields and Balota (1991)

Typical stimuli:– identical

(1) Her cat chases our cat under the table.

– related

(2) Her dog chases our cat under the table.

– unrelated

(3) Her son chases our cat under the table.

Shields and Balota (1991)

method:• subjects

– read sentences in present tense– had to repeat them by heart in past

tense

• cat in „our cat“ was acoustically analyzed

Shields and Balota (1991): Results

Duration:• (cat) … cat: 329 msec• (dog) … cat: 340 msec• (son) … cat: 350 msec

Shields and Balota (1991): Results

Amplitude:(in comparison to reference

vowel)

• (cat) … cat: -1.62 dB• (dog) … cat: -0.11 dB• (son) … cat: 0.23 dB

Shields and Balota (1991): Results

Amplitude:• difference between repetition (cat

– cat) and other two conditions is significant

• difference between related (dog – cat) and unrelated (son – cat) condition is not significant

Further evidence

• various studies that show that increased probability of a word in a context leads to reduced pronounciation:– Jurafsky, Bell, Gregory, Raymond (2000)– Gahl and Garnsey (2004)

• can be interpreted as phonological reduction under contextual priming

4. A usage-based account of directional change

(based on priming)

Priming and similarity

• Priming is related to similarity:– If A and B are similar, then A can

prime B– more general: if

•A is probable in a context C, and•A is similar to B,

– Then•B is primed by context C

Priming and similarity

• similarity is reflexive (A is similar to A)– repetition priming– contextual probability effects

• similarity is not identity– associative priming– guitar can prime violin and vice versa

Priming and similarity

• similarity can be asymmetric– Want to is more similar to wanna than

vice versa– spatial configurations are more

similar to homomorphic temporal configurations than vice versa

– …

Bold hypothesis

• Transitivity– suppose

•A has high probability in context C, and•A is similar to B

– then, after sufficiently many repetitions•B‘s probability in context C increases

Consequences

• suppose– A is similar to B (in a context C), and– B is not similar to A (in C)

• then– the BH (bold hypothesis) predicts that

B will eventually replace A in C

Implication for unidirectionality

• unidirectional pathways of language change should be decomposable into atomic steps of

asymmetric similarity

• replication in language use via priming

Predictions (falsifiable)

• „asymmetric similarity“ is defined in terms of priming can be tested by means of psycholinguistic experiments

• frequency effects: „transitivity“ depends on frequency of triggering context frequent items should undergo language change faster