Levshina Natalia
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Linguist Vanguard. 2021 Apr 21;7(Suppl3):20190087. doi: 10.1515/lingvan-2019-0087. eCollection 2021 May 1.
The use of differential case marking of A and P has been explained in terms of efficiency (economy) and markedness. The present study tests predictions based on these accounts, using conditional probabilities of a particular feature given the syntactic role (cue availability), and conditional probabilities of a particular syntactic role given the feature in question (cue reliability). Cue availability serves as a measure of markedness, whereas cue reliability is central for the efficiency account. Similar to reverse engineering, we determine which of the probabilistic measures could have been responsible for the recurrent cross-linguistic patterns described in the literature. The probabilities are estimated from spontaneous informal dialogues in English and Russian (Indo-European), Lao (Tai-Kadai), N||ng (Tuu) and Ruuli (Bantu). The analyses, which involve a series of mixed-effects Poisson models, clearly demonstrate that cue reliability matches the observed cross-linguistic patterns better than cue availability. Thus, the results support the efficiency account of differential marking.
对A和P采用不同的格标记，已从效率（经济性）和标记性的角度进行了解释。本研究基于这些解释来检验预测，使用给定句法角色时某一特定特征的条件概率（线索可用性），以及给定相关特征时某一特定句法角色的条件概率（线索可靠性）。线索可用性作为标记性的一种度量，而线索可靠性对于效率解释至关重要。与逆向工程类似，我们确定哪些概率度量可能导致了文献中所描述的反复出现的跨语言模式。这些概率是根据英语和俄语（印欧语系）、老挝语（台 - 卡岱语系）、恩嫩语（图语）和鲁利语（班图语系）的自发非正式对话估计得出的。这些分析涉及一系列混合效应泊松模型，清楚地表明线索可靠性比线索可用性更能与观察到的跨语言模式相匹配。因此，结果支持了对不同标记的效率解释。
