Inhaltszusammenfassung

In a whole range of variation phenomena, language users base their choices on the cognitive accessibility of their linguistic devices, thereby reducing the processing effort. ‘Support strategies’ are defined as the use of linguistic variants which mitigate such processing effort. They apply to contexts of variation and/or change in which language users have a choice between several grammatically correct and functionally overlapping variants. Here, a wide array of processing principles come in...In a whole range of variation phenomena, language users base their choices on the cognitive accessibility of their linguistic devices, thereby reducing the processing effort. ‘Support strategies’ are defined as the use of linguistic variants which mitigate such processing effort. They apply to contexts of variation and/or change in which language users have a choice between several grammatically correct and functionally overlapping variants. Here, a wide array of processing principles come into play, such as Rohdenburg’s (1996) Complexity Principle (more explicit grammatical alternatives tend to be preferred in cognitively more complex environments, where ‘more complex’ implies, for instance, discontinuity, passivisation, length, subordination, deletion) or Hawkins’ (2004) Domain Minimization Principle, where the selection of a particular variant may minimize the distance between dependents and heads of phrases) or Jaeger’s (2010) Uniform Information Density Principle (the more probable a word is in its context, the less information it carries in that context” (see Jaeger 2010: 24). The papers in this special issue provide empirical analyses which shed light on the underlying motivation for a whole range of apparently unrelated, heterogeneous and idiosyncratic preferences of language users on different levels of linguistic analysis. The contributors investigate strategies that are employed in language to aid processing by taking the cognitive accessibility of their linguistic devices into account.» weiterlesen» einklappen

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DFG Fachgebiet:
Sprachwissenschaften

DDC Sachgruppe:
Englisch