Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T13:20:25.988Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Comparative alternation in y-adjectives: insights from self-paced reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2019

DEBORAH CHUA Open the ORCID record for DEBORAH CHUA [Opens in a new window]
DEBORAH CHUA*
Affiliation:
National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
*
†Address for correspondence: National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, NIE2-02-11, Singapore 637616. e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Y-adjectives are English adjectives that end in an orthographic <y> and a /i/ sound, for example lazy. Deriving its hypotheses from previous corpus findings and construction-based principles to language study, the experiment here reported validates the benefit a comparative alternation account of y-adjectives will accrue from a consideration of more and -er constructions across disyllabic adjectives that are not y-ones (called the HANDSOME adjectives). Reading times related to the comparative constructions of morphologically complex and simple y-adjectives were collected before and after native speaker exposure to one of three treatments – a dialogue comprising multiple HANDSOME more constructions, a dialogue comprising multiple HANDSOME-er constructions, or a control condition. Processing of y-adjective more constructions was found eased with exposure to HANDSOME more constructions. This exposure moreover overrode an anticipated processing ease for simple y-adjective -er constructions, while an exposure to HANDSOME -er constructions overrode an anticipated processing ease for complex y-adjective more constructions. The findings support the value of a constructional approach to understanding y-adjective comparatives.

Keywords

adjectivecomparativeconstructionexperimentself-paced readingmorphologysuppresspatternschemagrammar
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 373 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Laurie Bauer, Paul Warren, and two anonymous reviewers from Language and Cognition for their comments and suggestions on various versions of this paper. Paul Warren has kindly shared some R codes with me in the course of this research, for which I am grateful. I would also like to thank Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, for supporting this research, and the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, for access to library resources. My thanks extend as well to Xinqing (Aileen) Wang for sharing with me a helpful reference.

References

references

Anderson, S. R. (1992). A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, M. (1976). Word formation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H. (2008). Analysing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H. & Milin, P. (2010). Analyzing reaction times. International Journal of Psychological Research 3(2), 12–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., Walker, S., Christensen, R. H. B., Singmann, H., Dai, B., Scheipl, F., Grothendieck, G., Green, P. & Fox, J. (2018). lme4: linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. R package version 1.1-9. Online <http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4>.Google Scholar
Bauer, L. (1986–1992). The Wellington corpus of written New Zealand English. School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.Google Scholar
Bauer, L., Lieber, R. & Plag, I. (2013). The Oxford reference guide to English morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blevins, J. P. (2006). Word-based morphology. Journal of Linguistics 42(3), 531–573.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology 18(3), 355–387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Booij, G. (2010). Construction morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Boyd, J. K. (2007). Comparatively speaking: a psycholinguistc study of optionality in grammar. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California San Diego.Google Scholar
Brown, D., Chumakina, M., Corbett, G., Popova, G. & Spencer, A. (2012). Defining ‘periphrasis’: key notions. Morphology 22(2), 233–275.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. (2006). From usage to grammar: the mind’s response to repetition. Language 82(4), 711–733.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. (2007). Regular morphology and the lexicon. In Bybee, J. (ed.), Frequency of use and the organization of language (pp. 167–193). New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. & Newman, J. E. (1995). Are stem changes as natural as affixes? Linguistics 33(4), 633–654.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christiansen, M. H. & Chater, N. (2017). Comment: towards an integrated science of language. Nature Human Behaviour 1, 1–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chua, D. (2018). Understanding comparative alternation in y-adjectives: What else might we need? Journal of Linguistics 54(3), 459–491.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chua, D. F. (2016). Comparative alternation in y-adjectives. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington.Google Scholar
Davies, M. (2004–). British National Corpus (BYU-BNC). Online <http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/>.Google Scholar
De Rosario-Martinez, H. (2015). Analyzing interactions of fitted models. Online <https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/phia/vignettes/phia.pdf>.Google Scholar
De Rosario-Martinez, H., Fox, J. & R Core Team (2015). Phia: post-hoc interaction analysis. R package version 0.2-1. Online <https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/phia/index.html>.Google Scholar
Fernández, E. M. & Cairns, H. S. (2011). Fundamentals of psycholinguistics. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gibson, E., Pearlmutter, N., Canseco-Gonzalez, E. & Hickok, G. (1996). Recency preference in the human sentence processing mechanism. Cognition 59(1), 23–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldberg, A. E. (2009). The nature of generalization in language. Cognitive Linguistics 20(1), 93–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, A. E. (2016). Partial productivity of linguistic constructions: dynamic categorization and statistical preemption. Language and Cognition 8(3), 369–390.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hilpert, M. (2008). The English comparative–language structure and language use. English Language and Linguistics 12(3), 395–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hofmeister, P. (2011). Representational complexity and memory retrieval in language comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes 26(3), 376–405.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Holmes, J., Vine, B. & Johnson, G. (1988–1994). The Wellington corpus of spoken New Zealand English. School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R. (1975). Morphological and semantic regularities in the lexicon. Language 51(3), 639–671.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackendoff, R. & Audring, J. (2016). Morphological schemas: theoretical and psycholinguistic issues. Mental Lexicon 11(3), 467–493.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackendoff, R. & Audring, J. (2019). Relational morphology in the parallel architecture. In Audring, J. & Masini, F. (eds), The Oxford handbook of morphological theory (pp. 390–410). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. F. (2009). Centering several variables. Online <https://hlplab.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/centering-several-variables/>.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. F. & Snider, N. E. (2013). Alignment as a consequence of expectation adaptation: syntactic priming is affected by the prime’s prediction error given both prior and recent experience. Cognition 127(1), 57–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Just, M. A., Carpenter, P. A. & Woolley, J. D. (1982). Paradigms and processes in reading comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 111(2), 228–238.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kruisinga, E. (1932). A handbook of present-day English, vol. 3: part ii, English accidence and syntax (5th ed.). Groningen: P. Noordhoff.Google Scholar
Marchman, V. & Bates, E. (1994). Continuity in lexical and morphological development: a test of the critical mass hypothesis. Journal of Child Language 21(2), 339–366.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moers, C., Meyer, A. & Janse, E. (2017). Effects of word frequency and transitional probability on word reading durations of younger and older speakers. Language and Speech 60(2), 289–317.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mondorf, B. (2003). Support for more-support. In Rohdenburg, G. & Mondorf, B. (eds), Determinants of grammatical variation in English (pp. 251–304). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Mondorf, B. (2009). More support for more-support: the role of processing constraints on the choice between synthetic and analytic comparative forms. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J. B. (2001). Exemplar dynamics: word frequency, lenition and contrast. In Bybee, J. & Hopper, P. (eds), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure (pp. 137–157). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Psychology Software Tools (2012). [E-Prime 2.0]. Pittsburgh: Psychology Software Tools, Inc.Google Scholar
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
R Core Team. (2014). The R project for statistical computing. Online <http://www.R-project.org/>..>Google Scholar
School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies (1989–1994). International corpus of English–New Zealand. School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.Google Scholar
Spencer, A. (2013). Sentence negation and periphrasis. In Chumakina, M. & Corbett, G. G. (eds), Periphrasis: the role of syntax and morphology in paradigms (pp. 227–266). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, B. (2005). Language users as creatures of habit: a corpus-based analysis of persistence in spoken English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(1), 113–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vine, E. W. & Warren, P. (2012). Corpus, coursebook and psycholinguistic evidence on use and concept: the case of category ambiguity. In Hoffman, S., Rayson, P. & Leech, G. (eds), English corpus linguistics: looking back, moving forward (pp. 235–247). Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Zipf, G. K. (1929). Relative frequency as a determinant of phonetic change. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 15, 1–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar