Recycling utterances: A speaker's guide to sentence processing

Dabrowska, Ewa (2014) Recycling utterances: A speaker's guide to sentence processing. Cognitive Linguistics, 25 (4). pp. 617-653. ISSN 0936-5907

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cog-2014-0057

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing consensus that speakers store large numbers of preconstructed phrases and low-level patterns, even when these can be derived from more abstract constructions, and that ordinary language use relies heavily on such relatively concrete, lexically specific units rather than abstract rules or schemas that apply “across the board”. One of the advantages of such an approach is that it provides a straightforward explanation of how grammar can be learned from the input; and in fact, previous work (e.g. Dąbrowska and Lieven 2005) has demonstrated that the utterances children produce can be derived by superimposing and juxtaposing lexically specific units derived directly from utterances that they had previously experienced. This paper argues that such a “recycling” account can also explain adults' ability to produce complex fluent speech in real time, and explores the implications of such a view for theories of language representation and processing.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: language production; lexically specific units; formulas; productivity; usage-based model; traceback; frequency; syntactic complexity
Subjects: Q100 Linguistics
Department: Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Social Sciences
Depositing User: Paul Burns
Date Deposited: 18 Dec 2014 11:33
Last Modified: 17 Dec 2023 16:18
URI: https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/18510

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