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Article In: Journal of Historical Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Argument marking reflects audience design effects

Evidence from diachrony and typology

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Abstract
This paper contrasts typological and diachronic evidence on argument marking with theoretical proposals made in psycholinguistic research about the ways various types of audience design strategies affect production, with a focus on ambiguity avoidance in argument roles. The aim is to find convergent evidence from psycholinguistics as well as from typological and diachronic research. This evidence suggests that argument marking in functional constructions is shaped by generic audience design effects, while cross-linguistic and diachronic support for utterance-specific audience design is very scarce. Diachronically utterance-specific audience design tends to be abandoned in favor of functionally related generic audience design strategies. The paper reconciles earlier claims about ambiguity avoidance affecting argument marking and the view of ambiguity avoidance as having no effect on argument marking. It is suggested that ambiguity avoidance is a strong pressure in argument marking. I show that a high ambiguity potential of role identification of various constructions correlates positively with the degree of non-differential argument marking; and, vice versa, differential marking is more likely in constructions that provide reliable cues for role identification.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Synchronic evidence for ambiguity avoidance in bivalent functional constructions
    • 2.1Transitive constructions
    • 2.2Ditransitive constructions
    • 2.3Intransitive monovalent constructions
    • 2.4Comparative constructions
    • 2.5Locational bivalent constructions
    • 2.6Summarizing the synchronic evidence
  • 3.Diachronic evidence for ambiguity avoidance and automatization effects
    • 3.1Diachronic evidence for ambiguity avoidance from synchronic variation
    • 3.2Diachronic evidence for ambiguity avoidance from instability of DOM systems
    • 3.3Diachronic evidence on ambiguity avoidance from historical sources
    • 3.4Diachronic-typological evidence
  • 4.The diachronic and typological evidence for ambiguity avoidance in the psycholinguistic context
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (101)
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