Eva Zehentner

Professor at University of Zurich

University of Zurich
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Switzerland

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Articles (8)

How redundant is language really? Agent-recipient disambiguation across time and space

Redundant marking of grammatical relations seems to be commonplace across languages, and has been shown to benefit learning as well as robust information transmission. At the same time, languages also exhibit trade-offs between strategies such as case marking or word order, suggesting that redundancy may also be dis-preferred in line with a tendency towards communicative efficiency. In the present paper, we assess redundancy  in terms of number of strategies used simultaneously to mark specific relations within individual utterances (syntagmatic redundancy) in light of these competing motivations. Our test case is participant role disambiguation in English and Dutch, specifically the interaction of constituent order, case, prepositional marking, and agreement to distinguish agents and recipients in ditransitive clauses. Using evidence from corpora of Present Day Dutch and English as well as data from Middle English, we find that redundancy is prevalent, albeit within certain limits.   

Year:

2022

Collaborators (4)

Melanie Röthlisberger

University of Zurich

SWITZERLAND

Andreas Baumann

Assistant Professor (tenure track)

Universität Wien

AUSTRIA

Nikolaus Ritt

Universität Wien

AUSTRIA

Marianne Hundt

Full professor

University of Zurich

SWITZERLAND
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