Award Abstract # 2019804
Animacy and resumption at the border of cognition and grammar

NSF Org: BCS
Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences
Recipient: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ
Initial Amendment Date: July 22, 2020
Latest Amendment Date: July 22, 2020
Award Number: 2019804
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Wilson De Lima Silva
widelima@nsf.gov
 (703)292-7096
BCS
 Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences
SBE
 Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences
Start Date: August 1, 2020
End Date: June 30, 2025 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $411,058.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $411,058.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2020 = $411,058.00
History of Investigator:
  • Maziar Toosarvandani (Principal Investigator)
    mtoosarv@ucsc.edu
  • Matthew Wagers (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Ivy Sichel (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: University of California-Santa Cruz
1156 HIGH ST
SANTA CRUZ
CA  US  95064-1077
(831)459-5278
Sponsor Congressional District: 19
Primary Place of Performance: University of California-Santa Cruz
1156 High St.
Santa Cruz
CA  US  95064-1077
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
19
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): VXUFPE4MCZH5
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): Linguistics
Primary Program Source: 01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 1311, 9178, 9251, SMET
Program Element Code(s): 131100
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.075

ABSTRACT

Human language is uniquely structured in that it often requires us to link together two expressions at a distance. This is a source of cognitive pressure for language users, because one expression can appear far apart from where it must be interpreted and usually there is no audible or visible cue to the site of interpretation other than absence (a gap). For example, in the question ?Who do you think the bill will help??, ?who? should be interpreted as the object of ?help? even though it is pronounced many words, and several seconds, earlier. In some languages, a resumptive pronoun can optionally be used (as in pseudo-English, ?Who do you think the bill will help them??). The goal of this project is to better understand the source of the optionality, and why some languages have this expressive device, while others do not. Does the use of a pronoun reflect a language user?s dynamic reaction to limited cognitive resources? Or does it reflect conventionalized grammatical processes of particular languages? The project will provide research opportunities and training in experimental methods, fieldwork, and data analysis to undergraduate and graduate students. It will also feed synergistically into a range of public-facing activities that aim to share knowledge about indigenous languages.

This project tests a new hypothesis: namely, that animacy, the property of whether or not an individual is alive, is a key factor in the use of resumptive pronouns. It will compare two genetically unrelated languages that show similarities in the use of these pronouns. The project will test the hypothesis that an optional resumptive pronoun in object position is more acceptable the more animate its referent is. A series of paired experiments combining eye-tracking and judgment studies will be conducted to specifically contrast the particular grammatical resources of a language that encodes a four-way animacy system throughout its grammar and a language with no grammatical animacy distinctions. Through this comparison, animacy as a conceptual category will be distinguished from animacy as a morphosyntactic category. The project will involve acceptability and comprehension studies across languages. For the language that encodes animacy grammatically, two comprehension studies will be used to trace the incremental comprehension of relative clauses involving co-arguments of differing animacies. The result will bring novel evidence to bear on three related issues: the problem of optionality in grammar, the relationship between resumptive pronouns and gaps, and how language users comprehend resumptive pronouns in real time.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Matthew Wagers "Encoding interference in verb-initial languages" Issues in Japanese Psycholinguistics from Comparative Perspectives , v.1 , 2023 Citation Details
Maziar Toosarvandani "Locating animacy in the grammar" North East Linguistic Society (NELS) , v.52 , 2022 Citation Details

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