Caroline Andrews (Oxford)

"Case production in ergative languages"

Monday February 2 (Week 3), 5:15.

Schwarzman Centre 30.445, Linguistics Large Seminar Room

ABSTRACT: Human language is full of variation in morphological marking and grammatical structures. All of these must be processed by brains with the same cognitive tools and abilities, but there is room for flexibility in the strategies that speakers/comprehenders recruit in order to efficiently process their specific language. Because cross-linguistic psycholinguistics has been an underdeveloped area of the field, there is limited understanding of what variability in processing strategies is possible, even for central language features such as case. This talk compares known production strategies for core case relationships in nominative languages to the production of three different ergative case languages: Shipibo-Konibo, Hindi, and Basque. The three ergative languages do not have a uniform planning profile, indicating that simply the presence of ergative case does not reliably imply a particular production strategy. Instead, the differences in production strategy follow from long-standing formal/descriptive differences between the types of ergativity, providing a first approximation for the right level of 'granularity' of linguistic differences that correspond to processing differences.