ClauSeInTEL · Clausal Selection: Integrating Theoretical with Experimental Linguistics
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2015-09-01 → 2017-08-31
- EU contribution
- €183,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
Clausal Selection: Integrating Theoretical with Experimental Linguistics
Natural human languages make available different clause types (most commonly, declarative, interrogative, and imperative) that may function as complements to predicates (verb, noun, and adjective). Predicates combine with their clausal dependents in predictable ways, and native speakers arrive at this knowledge without explicit instruction, solely by being exposed to an appropriate linguistic environment. For linguistic theory, the crucial question is how this “instinctive” knowledge is represented in whatever grammatical capacity makes language use possible. The standard view that selectional information is stored in the lexical specification of the predicate (the selector) has recently been called into question and challenged by the development of a new idea: predicates and their complements (selectee) are embedded inside structural hierarchies of grammatical elements (“functional categories” encoding notions such as modality, tense, aspect, definiteness, etc.); it is the interaction between these functional categories that establishes the corresponding predicate-complement dependencies. In other words, this approach says that it is basically the grammatical properties of the construction that determines the relation between the predicate and its complement, reducing selectional requirements to grammatical ones. The objective of this research project was to take a newly developed, and promising, theoretical approach to clausal complementation, and extend it to new complement types, and in doing so, determine how best to develop and extend the approach. The targeted breakthrough towards accomplishing this goal was to bring together cutting-edge theoretical research with experimental methods. To this end, the project ensured the robustness of the empirical data that was used to build the theoretical approach by incorporating behavioural linguistic experiments.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The nature of the relationship between a verb and its grammatical dependents is an ancient questionin linguistics, tracing back to Aristotelian notions of the subject-predicate relation. A major debate in current theoreticallinguistics is how to model this, and the standard view (that the relevant information is stored as part of thegrammatical specification of the verb) has been challenged by the development of a new idea: that both the verband its noun-dependents are embedded inside syntactic hierarchies of fundamentally grammatical elements (socalled“functional categories” encoding notions such as tense, aspect, definiteness and numerosity) and that it is theinteraction between the functional category structures that embed the verb and the noun that is responsible for establishingthe dependency. This viewpoint has allowed a new and empirically successful understanding of the relationshipbetween a verb and its dependents, capturing how definiteness and grammatical number interact with aspectualcategories across different languages. However, this new approach has never been applied to the other majorgrammatical dependency that verbs set up: clausal complementation. That is, the parallel relation between averb and its clausal, as opposed to nominal, dependents. This project investigates, using interdisciplinary methods,whether these new theoretical ideas can be applied to this empirical domain, comparing two languages (Greek andEnglish) whose clausal syntax is quite different. The objective is to both test the theoretical model in a new empiricalarea, leading to new findings about how clausal embedding works syntactically, and to determine how best todevelop and extend the model to domains that it was not designed for. The action requires extended training in experimentalmethods and design (both behavioural and neurolinguistic), statistical analysis, development of systematictheoretical models, as well as interaction with a non-academic partner
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON · LONDONCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/656044
- http://web.archive.org/web/20200811005941/https://sites.google.com/site/clauseintel/
Data: CORDIS, © European Union