Soft Constraints Mirror Hard Constraints: Voice and Person in English and Lummi

The same categorical phenomena which are attributed to hard grammatical constraints in some languages continue to show up as statistical preferences in other languages, motivating a grammatical model that can account for soft constraints. The effects of a hierarchy of person (1st, 2nd > 3rd) on grammar are categorical in some languages, most famously in languages with inverse systems, but also in languages with person restrictions on passivization. In Lummi, for example, the person of the subject argument cannot be lower than the person of a nonsubject argument. If this would happen in the active, passivization is obligatory; if it would happen in the passive, the active is obligatory (Jelinek and Demers 1983). These facts follow from the theory of harmonic alignment in OT: constraints favoring the harmonic association of prominent person (1st, 2nd) with prominent syntactic function (subject) are hypothesized to be present as subhierarchies of the grammars of all languages, but to vary in their effects across languages depending on their interactions with other constraints (Aissen 1999). There is a statistical reflection of these hierarchies in English. The same disharmonic person/argument associations which are avoided categorically in languages like Lummi by making passives either impossible or obligatory, are avoided in the SWITCHBOARD corpus of spoken English by either depressing or elevating the frequency of passives relative to actives. The English data can be grammatically analyzed within the stochastic OT framework (Boersma 1998, Boersma and Hayes 2001) in a way which provides a principled and unifying explanation for their relation to the crosslinguistic categorical person effects studied by Aissen (1999). 1 Categorical Effects of Person on Voice The effects of the person hierarchy (1) on grammar are categorical in some languages, most famously in languages with inverse systems, but also in languages with person restrictions on passivization. In Lummi (Straits Salish, British Columbia), for example, the person of the subject argument cannot be lower than the person of a nonsubject argument. If this would happen in the active, passivization is obligatory; if it would happen in the passive, the active is obligatory (Jelinek and Demers 1983, 1994).2 (1) Person hierarchy: 1st, 2nd 3rd (grammatical persons ‘local’ to speech act outrank others)

[1]  The de-transitive clauses in Bella Coola: Passive vs. Inverse , 1994 .

[2]  P. Jacobs.  The inverse in Squamish , 1994 .

[3]  M. Shibatani.  PASSIVES AND RELATED CONSTRUCTIONS: A PROTOTYPE ANALYSIS , 1985 .

[4]  Beatrice Santorini,et al.  Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Treebank , 1993, CL.

[5]  Richard A. Demers,et al.  Predicates and pronominal arguments in Straits Salish , 1994 .

[6]  Scott Delancey,et al.  An Interpretation of Split Ergativity and Related Patterns , 1981 .

[7]  Frans Plank,et al.  Ergativity : towards a theory of grammatical relations , 1979 .

[8]  Eloise Jelinek,et al.  The Agent Hierarchy and Voice in Some Coast Salish Languages , 1983, International Journal of American Linguistics.

[9]  Shipra Dingare,et al.  The Effect of Feature Hierarchies on Frequencies of Passivization in English , 2001 .

[10]  Michele Emanatian.  The Nootka passive revisited , 1988 .

[11]  Betty J. Birner,et al.  Information status and noncanonical word order in English , 1998 .

[12]  Desmond C. Derbyshire,et al.  Passive and Voice , 1988 .

[13]  M. Kinkade,et al.  The Languages of Native North America , 2000 .

[14]  Jan Svartvik.  On voice in the English verb , 1985 .

[15]  Joseph H. Greenberg,et al.  Language Universals: With Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies , 1966 .

[16]  John J. Godfrey,et al.  SWITCHBOARD: telephone speech corpus for research and development , 1992, [Proceedings] ICASSP-92: 1992 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[17]  Andrew Garrett,et al.  The Origin of NP Split Ergativity. , 1990 .

[18]  Judith Aissen,et al.  Markedness and Subject Choice in Optimality Theory , 1999 .

[19]  P. Boersma,et al.  Empirical Tests of the Gradual Learning Algorithm , 2001, Linguistic Inquiry.

[20]  P. Smolensky,et al.  Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar , 2004 .

[21]  David R. Dowty.  Thematic proto-roles and argument selection , 1991 .

[22]  Joan L. Bybee,et al.  Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure , 2001 .

[23]  T. Givón,et al.  On Understanding Grammar , 1979 .

[24]  Charles James Nice Bailey.  Variation and linguistic theory , 1973 .

[25]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Learning a grammar in Functional Phonology , 2000 .

[26]  Dominique Estival,et al.  Formal and Functional aspects of the development from passive to ergative systems , 1988 .

[27]  S. Thompson.  The Passive in English: A Discourse Perspective , 1987 .

[28]  J. Bresnan.  Lexical-Functional Syntax , 2000 .

[29]  Christopher D. Manning.  Ergativity : Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations , 2000 .

[30]  Tessa C. Warren,et al.  The influence of referential processing on sentence complexity , 2002, Cognition.