Leivada Evelina, Papadopoulou Elena, Pavlou Natalia
Department of English Studies, University of CyprusNicosia, Cyprus.
Cyprus Acquisition TeamNicosia, Cyprus.
Front Psychol. 2017 Jul 25;8:1260. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01260. eCollection 2017.
Findings from the field of experimental linguistics have shown that a native speaker may judge a variant that is part of her grammar as unacceptable, but still use it productively in spontaneous speech. The process of eliciting acceptability judgments from speakers of non-standard languages is sometimes clouded by factors akin to prescriptive notions of grammatical correctness. It has been argued that standardization enhances the ability to make clear-cut judgments, while non-standardization may result to grammatical hybridity, often manifested in the form of functionally equivalent variants in the repertoire of a single speaker. Recognizing the importance of working with corpora of spontaneous speech, this work investigates patterns of variation in the spontaneous production of five neurotypical, adult speakers of a non-standard variety in terms of three variants, each targeting one level of linguistic analysis: syntax, morphology, and phonology. The results reveal the existence of functionally equivalent variants across speakers and levels of analysis. We first discuss these findings in relation to the notions of competing, mixed, and fused grammars, and then we flesh out the implications that different values of the same variant carry for parametric approaches to Universal Grammar. We observe that intraspeaker realizations of different values of the same variant within the same syntactic environment are incompatible with the 'triggering-a-single-value' approach of parametric models, but we argue that they are compatible with the concept of Universal Grammar itself. Since the analysis of these variants is ultimately a way of investigating the status of Universal Grammar primitives, we conclude that claims about the alleged unfalsifiability of (the contents of) Universal Grammar are unfounded.
实验语言学领域的研究结果表明，以某种语言为母语的人可能会判定属于其语法一部分的某个变体不可接受，但在自然口语中却仍能有效地使用它。从使用非标准语言的人那里获取可接受性判断的过程，有时会因类似于语法正确性规定性概念的因素而变得模糊不清。有人认为，标准化提高了做出明确判断的能力，而非标准化可能导致语法混合，这通常表现为单个说话者语言库中功能等效变体的形式。认识到使用自然口语语料库的重要性，这项研究考察了五位神经典型的成年非标准变体使用者在自然语言产出中关于三个变体的变异模式，每个变体针对一个语言分析层面：句法、形态和音系。结果揭示了不同说话者和分析层面上功能等效变体的存在。我们首先结合竞争语法、混合语法和融合语法的概念来讨论这些发现，然后详细阐述同一变体的不同取值对普遍语法参数化方法的影响。我们观察到，在相同句法环境中同一变体不同取值的说话者内部实现方式与参数模型的“触发单一取值”方法不兼容，但我们认为它们与普遍语法本身的概念是兼容的。由于对这些变体的分析最终是研究普遍语法原语地位的一种方式，我们得出结论，关于普遍语法（内容）所谓不可证伪性的说法是没有根据的。
