Department of Cognitive Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Centre for Language Evolution, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh.
Cogn Sci. 2022 Mar;46(3):e13119. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13119.
Many languages exhibit differential object marking (DOM), where only certain types of grammatical objects are marked with morphological cases. Traditionally, it has been claimed that DOM arises as a way to prevent ambiguity by marking objects that might otherwise be mistaken for subjects (e.g., animate objects). While some recent experimental work supports this account, research on language typology suggests at least one alternative hypothesis. In particular, DOM may instead arise as a way of marking objects that are atypical from the point of view of information structure. According to this account, rather than being marked to avoid ambiguity, objects are marked when they are given (already familiar in the discourse) rather than new. Here, we experimentally investigate this hypothesis using two artificial language learning experiments. We find that information structure impacts participants' object marking, but in an indirect way: atypical information structure leads to a change in word order, which then triggers increased object marking. Interestingly, this staged process of change is compatible with documented cases of DOM emergence. We argue that this process is driven by two cognitive tendencies. First, a tendency to place discourse given information before new information, and second, a tendency to mark noncanonical word order. Taken together, our findings provide corroborating evidence for the role of information structure in the emergence of DOM systems.
许多语言都表现出差异宾语标记（DOM），即只有某些类型的语法宾语会被形态标记所标记。传统上，人们认为 DOM 的出现是为了通过标记可能被误认为主语的宾语（例如，有生命的宾语）来避免歧义。虽然一些最近的实验工作支持了这一说法，但语言类型学的研究表明，至少还有一个替代假说。具体来说，DOM 可能是作为标记信息结构上非典型宾语的一种方式而出现的。根据这一说法，宾语被标记并不是为了避免歧义，而是因为它们是已知的（在语篇中已经出现过）而不是新的。在这里，我们通过两个人工语言学习实验来检验这一假说。我们发现，信息结构会影响参与者的宾语标记，但这种影响是间接的：非典型的信息结构会导致词序的改变，从而引发更多的宾语标记。有趣的是，这种变化的分阶段过程与 DOM 出现的有记载案例是一致的。我们认为，这个过程是由两种认知倾向驱动的。首先，一种将语篇中已知信息放在新信息之前的倾向，其次，一种标记非典型词序的倾向。总之，我们的发现为信息结构在 DOM 系统出现中的作用提供了支持证据。
