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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1501

Part of Plenary lectures (Other abstracts in this session)

Linguistic and sociolinguistic variation from the perspective of the Parallel Architecture

Authors: Jackendoff, Ray
Submitted by: Jackendoff, Ray (Tufts Univ, United States of America)

This talk works out how the Parallel Architecture (RJ, Foundations of Language, Oxford, 2002) might incorporate some lexical and grammatical issues of concern to sociolinguistics, thereby achieving a more comprehensive theory of language as a whole.

The Parallel Architecture (PA) is a conception of the language faculty in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are independent generative systems, linked by interface principles.  A full sentence has all three structures plus links between them.  A central question of PA is what a speaker must learn and store in the lexicon, and how lexical items are combined into a full utterance.  Taking this question seriously leads to the view that the lexicon contains not only words, but idioms, collocations, meaningful constructions (e.g. Bill belched his way out of the restaurant), and productive morphological affixes. Moreover, it develops that there is no formal distinction between words and rules; rules amount tostored structural schemas containing variables which must be satisfied in the course of combining them with other pieces of structure (a position shared with Construction Grammar).

This talk develops accounts of three sociolinguistic factors from the perspective of the PA.

- Register differences: The sociolinguistic register for a word is easily coded as a feature within its lexical entry.  But since the PA also encodesrules as lexical entries, it becomes possible to use the very same features to uniformly mark grammatical constructions and even phonotactics for register, and to check the overall consistency of an utterance for register.

- Bilingual language mixing: A bilingual speaker’s lexicon must code words for which language they belong to. Again, the PA lexicon can extend this marking to rules of grammar, both syntactic and phonological.  It is then possible to treat borrowing and code-switching as use of a lexical entry (a word or a grammatical construction) with a language feature that does not match the rest of the utterance it is embedded in.

- Linguistic variation: Whether grammatically or socially conditioned, variationis usually treated in terms of the probabilities that variant forms will be uttered. Such accounts do not usually address how speakers actually produce variants with the particular probabilities they do.  With certain assumptions about the structure of memory and the nature of memory retrieval, the PA’s conception of the lexicon/grammar lends itself to a treatment in which probabilistic variation is produced through competition in the brain among multiple lexical items (again, words or constructions or rules) as realizations of the same (or similar) meanings.

Leonie Cornips (Maastricht University/Meertens Institute) and Shana Poplack (University of Ottowa) will respond to this target paper.

The responses will be followed by an open discussion.